Khaldei, "Raising the Red Flag over the Reichstag."

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes

It is never not depressing: Any tale from the Soviet Union has to be depressing, whether it is conceived of as grotesque folly or simple tragedy, and if Jews are involved, all the more so. Jews are implicated in the creation of the Soviet Union, as its ardent supporters, and, inevitably, as victims of its apparatus of repression.

Socialist Realism  Nailya Alexander Gallery.  Photographers and photographs from the 1930's-1950's artistic movement which glorified the achievements of the new Soviet state and idealized the socialist lifestyle.  SAVE

SAVE "Through Soviet Jewish Eyes"

Elena Bonner.

One Woman Army

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.

No Human Rights for Jews?  Elena Bonner,  Sakharov Center.  Speaking in May 2009 to the Freedom Forum in Oslo, the indomitable Elena Bonner denounced the blatant anti-Semitism of her fellow human-rights activists.  SAVE

Sharansky on Bonner  Gal Beckerman,  Forward.  Andrei Sakharov was "the spirit" of Soviet dissident movement; Elena Bonner, an ardent supporter of Israel who died on June 18, was "the energy and the warmth."  SAVE

SAVE "One Woman Army"

Arriving from Moscow.

The Russian Wave

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.

Looking Back  Maya Kaganskaya,  Eretz Acheret.  A member of the earlier, 1970s generation of Soviet Jewish activists testifies: Israel did not absorb me; I absorbed and took it into myself.  SAVE

The “Russians”: A Guide  Dan Shapira,  Eretz Acheret.  Different among themselves, different from Israelis, the one million immigrants from the FSU have slowly, haltingly, but naturally become another broad band of color in the Israeli mosaic.  SAVE

SAVE "The Russian Wave"

Massacre on Potemkin Steps, Eisenstein.

The Odessa File

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).

The Jews of Odessa  Steven J. Zipperstein,  Stanford University Press.  An indispensable cultural history, from the founding of the city to 1881.  SAVE

SAVE "The Odessa File"

Lenin, 1917.

Was Lenin Jewish?

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. 

SAVE "Was Lenin Jewish?"