The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia

Description

Gennady Estraikh's book explores the birth, growth, demise and afterlife of the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR). The History of Birobidzhan looks at how the shtetl was widely used in Soviet propaganda as a perfect solution to the 'Jewish question', arguing that in reality, while being demographically and culturally insignificant, the JAR played a key, and essentially detrimental, role in determining Jewish rights and entitlements in the Soviet world. Estraikh brings together a broad range of Russian and Yiddish sources, including archival materials, newspaper articles, travelogues, memoirs, belles-letters, and scholarly publications, as he describes and analyses the project and its realization not in isolation, but rather in the context of developments in both domestic and international life. As well as offering an assessment of the Birobidzhan project in the contexts of Soviet and Jewish history, the book also focuses on the contemporary 'Jewish' role of the region which now has only a few thousand Jewish occupants amongst its residents.

Gennady Estraikh is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, USA where he directs the Eugene Shvidler Project of Comprehensive History of Jews in the Soviet Union. In 1988-91, he worked in Moscow as Managing Editor of the Yiddish literary monthly Sovetish Heymland. In 1991-2002, he lived in Oxford, where he received his doctoral degree and worked at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies, UK. In 2000-2010 he co-edited the East European Jewish Affairs journal. He has written and edited several books and is a recipient of the American National Jewish Book Award for his co-authored work, 1929: Mapping the Jewish World (2013).