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Soviet Union


One Woman Army One Woman Army
Monday, June 27, 2011 by Daniel Johnson | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Andrei Sakharov, the great nuclear physicist and human-rights campaigner, had been dead for two years by the time I came to his Moscow apartment in the early summer of 1991. Elena Bonner, his widow, was there, still defiantly at war with the faceless foe that had slaughtered her family, exiled her and her husband, slandered her Jewish name, and lied about it all.
The Russian Wave The Russian Wave
Thursday, May 26, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, some one million Jews have come to Israel from the former Soviet Union (FSU), enlarging the country's population by 25 percent and forming the largest concentration in the world of Russian Jews.  They have left their mark in almost every walk of life. And yet, as a group, they are still something of a mystery.
The Odessa File The Odessa File
Friday, March 4, 2011 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Undoubtedly the most searing image of the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea is Sergei Eisenstein's reconstruction of a bloody massacre on its famed "Potemkin Steps" in his epic silent film, Battleship Potemkin (1925).
Was Lenin Jewish? Was Lenin Jewish?
Monday, October 25, 2010 by Ruth R. Wisse | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

The Bolshevik Revolution undertook to change history. In line with that aim, its leaders set out to control the writing of history. The scholar Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, who was born and studied in the Soviet Union, learned the hard way that history is shaped by how information is managed and made available. Confronting the challenge head-on, he has published a book, Lenin's Jewish Question, about the ancestry of the man who masterminded the 1917 Revolution and became the iron-fisted dictator of the early Soviet state. 
Let My People Go Let My People Go
Thursday, October 14, 2010 by Joshua Muravchik | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

The Soviet experiment was among the most momentous and catastrophic episodes in human history, and yet its passing went almost unnoticed. Considering that Soviet Communism was a manmade system that cost some 20 million lives directly, and perhaps another 100 million through wars and imitative experiments elsewhere, the attention paid to the events of 1989 and what led up to them has been remarkably sparse.
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Editors' Picks
Russia's Jewish Composers Matt Kelly, UVA Today. For a brief period prior to the Revolution, Jews were among the rising stars of Russian classical music. But they soon discovered that while Russian culture liked Jewish music, it didn't like Jews.
Trotsky the Jew Richard Pipes, Tablet. Can the Russian revolutionary be treated as an "eminent Jewish figure"? A new book attempts to do just that—and glides over the more savage features of Trotsky's thought and behavior in the process.
Where's Wallenberg? Arthur Max, Associated Press. New evidence suggests that Moscow may be withholding information helpful in solving the 66-year-old puzzle of the fate of the great hero of the Holocaust.
Neglecting the Lithuanian Holocaust Timothy Snyder, New York Review of Books. Fixated on Soviet crimes against it, Vilnius is shirking its responsibility to acknowledge the scale of the Nazi genocide on its soil—carried out with the complicity and assistance of Lithuanians.
The Undocumented Nathan Guttman, Forward. Several groups of Jews, including Israelis and Russian speakers from the former Soviet Union, are living in the U.S. without proper papers.
On Torah and Judaism James L. Kugel, YouTube. Interviewed in Moscow, the eminent scholar talks about his life, his career, and the tension between what he does as a student of the Bible and how he lives as a Jew. (Video)
Sharansky on Bonner Gal Beckerman, Forward. Andrei Sakharov was "the spirit" of Soviet dissident movement; his wife Elena Bonner, an ardent supporter of Israel who died on June 18, was "the energy and the warmth."
Sleeping with the Gestapo Dorothy Gallagher, New York Times. The sexual adventures of a beautiful young American led her from the embrace of Nazis to the embrace of Soviet Communists; as for the Jews, she said to a friend, "We sort of don't like [them] anyway."
Identity à la Carte Ruth Ellen Gruber, Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A generation after the fall of Communism, Jews in Central Europe feel comfortable where they live; though concerned about anti-Semitism, they do not wish to move to Israel.
Russia's Jewish Spring Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post. The opening of a Jewish-studies department at St. Petersburg State University marks a quiet triumph for Jewish academic, cultural, and religious life in Russia.