Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture

Book excerpt: Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture gives voice to the activists empowered by the state to create a Soviet Jewish national culture. These activists were striving for a national revolution to create a new culture for Jews to identify as Jews on new, secular, Soviet terms. This book explores the ways in which Jews were part of, not apart from, both the Soviet system and Jewish history. Soviet Jewish culture worked within contemporary Jewish national and cultural trends and simultaneously participated in the larger project of propagating the Soviet state and ideology. Soviet Jewish activists were not nationalists or Soviets, but both at once. David Shneer addresses some of the painful truths about Jews' own implication and imbrication in the Soviet system and inserts their role in twentieth-century Jewish culture into the narrative of Jewish history.