(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)February 8, 2010

(MAHWAH, NJ) – On February 8, 2010 the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the History Club of Ramapo College hosted a talk by Professor Elissa Bemporad of Queens College of the City University of New York on “Nazi Germany and Anti-Semitic Poland.” She explored the extent to which the knowledge of what was happening to Jews in those two countries shaped Soviet Jewish identity in the late 1930s.

Namely, at the same time as the Jews of Russia and the other territories comprising the Soviet Union for the first time in their history were legally emancipated and living under a regime that made serious efforts to combat anti-Semitism, their co-religionists in Poland and Germany were being denied or stripped of their rights. Using the Belarusian capital of Minsk as her prime example, she pointed to the active participation of Jews in the city’s cultural life.

This did not mean, as Bemporad made clear, that Jews of Minsk, or anywhere else in the Soviet Union were free to practice their religion: [like the members of other religious communities] they were not. Moreover, in the economic realm, the abolition of free enterprise eliminated the terrain of the independent Jewish artisan, shopkeeper and trader. On the other hand, until the Stalinization and purges of the 1930s, a vibrant Yiddish school system existed and Yiddish was even one of Minsk’s official languages.

To bolster her argument Bemporad read excerpts of articles and poems from the Yiddish-language Oktiaber. They made it evident that Jews were knowledgeable and concerned about the plight of their fellow Jews in both nearby Poland and Germany. These heartfelt and well-informed texts also gave proof to Bemporad’s contention that even in the face of political and religious oppression Soviet Jews were able to carve out a space in which a vibrant discourse among Jews about crucial existential issues was still possible. In effect, Professor Bemporad was able to dispel the frequent stereotype that the Jews of the Soviet Union were living under a state of siege. Political and religious oppression notwithstanding, the Jews of the Soviet Union were not living in Poland or Nazi Germany, where the active persecution of Jews had become government policy.

Elissa Bemporad is Assistant Professor of History at Queens College of the City University of New York. She holds an M.A. in Slavic studies from the Faculty of Humanities at Bologna University, an M.A. in Modern Jewish Studies from the Graduate School of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a PhD from the Department of History at Stanford University. Before coming to Queens College, Dr. Bemporad taught at Stanford University, Hunter College, and The New School. Her book “Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in a Jewish Metropolis, Minsk 1917-1939,” is forthcoming.

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