Page date:1 Nov. 2003
Sascha L. Goluboff. 2003. Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
The
prevalence of anti-Semitism in Russia is well known, but the issue of race within
the Jewish community has rarely been discussed explicitly. Combining ethnography
with archival research, Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue documents
the changing face of the historically dominant Russian Jewish community in the
mid-1990s. Sascha Goluboff focuses on a Moscow synagogue, now comprising individuals
from radically different cultures and backgrounds, as a nexus from which to
explore issues of identity creation and negotiation. Following the rapid rise
of this transnational congregation--headed by a Western rabbi and consisting
of Jews from Georgia and the mountains of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, along with
Bukharan Jews from Central Asia--she evaluates the process that created this
diverse gathering and offers an intimate sense of individual interactions in
the context of the synagogue's congregation.
Challenging earlier research claims that Russian and Jewish identities are
mutually exclusive, Goluboff illustrates how post-Soviet Jews use Russian and
Jewish ethnic labels and racial categories to describe themselves. Jews at the
synagogue were constantly engaged in often contradictory but always culturally
meaningful processes of identity formation. Ambivalent about emerging class
distinctions, Georgian, Russian, Mountain, and Bukharan Jews evaluated one another
based on each group's supposed success or failure in the new market economy.
Goluboff argues that post-Soviet Jewry is based on perceived racial, class,
and ethnic differences as they emerge within discourses of belonging to the
Jewish people and the new Russian nation.
Sascha L. Goluboff teaches cultural anthropology at Washington and Lee University.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Fistfights at Morning Services
2. Georgian Meatballs and Russian Kolbasa
3. Renovating the Small Hall
4. The Savage in the Jew
5. The Madman and His Mission to Unite the Sephardim
Conclusion
Notes
Personae
Glossary
ISBN 0-8122-1838-8 | $19.95s | £14.00