Gennady Estraikh
Biographic Data
| ID | 959852 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gennady Estraikh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gennady |
| FAMILY NAME | Estraikh |
| SIGNATURE | ESTRAIKH G |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7885-7851 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 41 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A Yiddish take on Leon Trotsky
Historically, the New York Forverts was the world’s highest-circulating Yiddish newspaper, whose publications echoed in the English-language press. A socialist but non-party affiliated daily, in 1917, it boasted around 10 times as many readers as the New York Call, an organ of the Socialist Party of America. Among the Forverts staff writers were well-known socialists, including former or active members of the Jewish Labour Bund. Abraham Cahan, th…
A response to the August 1939 Soviet-German treaty
A Review of Sovetskiy tsadik. Rasskazy o Rybnitskom rebe
This collection of articles describes and analyses the story of the formation of a Jewish spiritual leader’s cult, unique for the Soviet Union. Adherents of Chaim Zanvil Abramowitz (1902–1995), better known as the Ribnitzer Rebbe, effectively established a separate group within Hasidism. Like the majority of Hasidic rebbes, Abramowitz received a “title” associated with the geographical place, where he had received recognition from his followers. …
A mirage of a Jewish republic in Russia
Embracing and Renouncing Soviet-Style Communism
Becoming a Cold Warrior
The History of Birobidzhan
Gennady Estraikh’s book is the first to explore 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 ent…
Jews in the Soviet Union: A History
Offers an analysis of Soviet Jewish society after the death of Joseph Stalin At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twenti…
Jews in the Soviet Union: A History
At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Underst…
Holocaust Memory in Ultraorthodox Society in Israel
Although the Yiddish language and Yiddish intellectual history are among my main fields of interest, I rarely deal with topics associated with the Ultraorthodox Jewish groups that today make up a decisive majority of Yiddish-speakers. Still, occasionally I read their publications and I find myself in a reality dissimilar to the one in which I live, and even the one my grandfather, a pious shochet in my Ukrainian hometown, had lived. In Michal Sha…
Soviet Publications of Holocaust Diaries in the 1960s
A strict ban on organized Jewish activities apart from those of a limited number of religious bodies, coupled with the state monopoly on all publishing, simplified the Soviet Union’s control over Holocaust-related publication. The appearance of any such work was an idiosyncratic event, associated with concurrent political and cultural contexts and official agendas. The relatively liberal climate of the first post-Stalinist decade raised the possi…
Crimea in the Jewish Imagination
The Rise of Ilya Yegudin
As opposed to the close attention accorded to various aspects of Jewish emigration from the USSR, there has been remarkably little scholarly analysis of Jews who felt comfortable, congenial, and secure in Soviet society. In reality, thousands of Jews belonged to the elite of a local, regional, or national level, or even played some roles at all the levels. In Crimea, the collective farm chairman Ilya Yegudin was the most visible representative in…
The Soviet Narrative of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Soviet ideological overseers did not consider the Warsaw Ghetto uprising an utterly taboo topic. However, on their general scale of notable events of the Second World War, the uprising belonged to the category of relatively minor episodes, worth mentioning mainly in the context of ‘more important’ themes, such as the presence of former Nazis in state institutions of West Germany or the collaboration of some Jews, most notably Zionists, with the N…
From the Great Terror to the Terror in 1941
The article focuses on the repressions against Minsk Yiddish writers in 1936-41 and analyzes them in context of, first, the status of Yiddish in Soviet Belorussia and, second, the general policy of purges under the Stalinist regime. The majority of the arrests and executions took place during the final months of 1937. However, also in 1941, on the eve of the Soviet-German phase of World War II, several Yiddish authors had been detained by the sec…
Birobidzhan in Khrushchev’s Thaw
The present article looks into the little-researched period in the nine-decade long history of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR), which is still present atavistically in the administrative-territorial structure of contemporary Russia. The region in the Siberian Far East, better known by the name of its main town, Birobidzhan, never turned into what it was supposed to be, namely the centre of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, while be…
The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), established in the early phase of the Soviet-Nazi war as a propaganda unit, gradually developed links with foreign Jewish organizations and began to act as a body taking responsibility for Soviet Jewish citizens’ interests. The turning point in the JAFC's destiny was the 1943 trip of its top representatives, Solomon Mikhoels and Itsik Fefer, to the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Britain. The success o…
Translating Sholem Aleichem
Three Cities of Yiddish
The missing years
From September 1939 to June 1941, Bialystok was a Soviet city that housed a group of Yiddish literati, notably refugees from German-occupied areas of Poland. This article describes the process of selecting among them people who professionally and ideologically fit criteria for integration into the Soviet Writers' Union. Special attention is paid to interactions between the refugee writers and their Soviet counterparts. Loyal Soviet citizens prior…
The Stalin Constitution on Trial in the Yiddish Daily Newspaper Forverts, 1936–1937
Die 1936 in der Sowjetunion mit großem propagandistischen Pomp verabschiedete, sog. »Stalinsche« Verfassung fand ein lebhaftes, kontroverses Echo in der jüdisch-amerikanischen Presse. Abraham Cahan , der Redakteur der jiddischsprachigen sozialistischen Tageszeitung Forverts (dt. ›Vorwärts‹), rief seine Leserschaft zu einer offenen Diskussion über die Vorzüge und Nachteile des neuen sowjetischen Grundgesetzes auf. In den Jahren 1936–1937 erschiene…
Soviet Jews in World War II
This volume discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic Waräóîas the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945, was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is among the first books to combine the study of Russian…
The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union
Twenty-first century Yiddishism
This book, a by-product of the author's doctoral thesis, will raise or has already raised the brows of many people. Jeffrey Shandler will no doubt be surprised to learn that ‘Yiddishland’ is his ‘l
Changing ideologies of artisanal “productivisation”
The Society for the Promotion of Artisanal and Agricultural Work among the Jews in Russia (ORT) was established in St Petersburg in 1880. In its post‐1921 form, as the World ORT Union, the organisation, with its headquarters in London, still operates in scores of countries throughout the world. This article analyses the ideological changes in ORT's craftsmen‐related programmes during the first decades of its history: from the initial careful atte…
The era of Sovetish Heymland
La fin de l'Union Sovietique a marque le terme d'une etape de l'histoire de la culture yiddish, l'ere du Sovetish Heymland. Ce journal a paru de 1961 a 1991. Le reveil des publications yiddish date de la periode post-stalinienne. Sovetish Heymland etait publie sous les auspices de l'Union des Ecrivains Sovietiques, recevait des subventions de l'Etat. Ce fut un moyen aux yeux de Kroutchev d'empecher un veritable renouveau de la culture yiddish apr…
Jacob Lestschinsky
ArgumentJacob Lestschinsky (1876-1966) emerged as the leading social scientist in pre-1917 circles of Yiddishist Marxist nationalists, most notably the Territorialists, who sought to create Jewish statehood outside Palestine. Lestschinsky played a central role in Jewish institutions formed in Ukraine in 1918-1920. A convinced anti-Bolshevik, he lived in Germany, then in Poland, America, and eventually in Israel. He combined two careers: a popular…
The missing years
From September 1939 to June 1941, Bialystok was a Soviet city that housed a group of Yiddish literati, notably refugees from German-occupied areas of Poland. This article describes the process of selecting among them people who professionally and ideologically fit criteria for integration into the Soviet Writers' Union. Special attention is paid to interactions between the refugee writers and their Soviet counterparts. Loyal Soviet citizens prior…
The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union
Jewish Street’ or Jewish Cul‐de‐sac? From Sovetish Heymland to Di Yidishe Gas
The Rise of Ilya Yegudin
As opposed to the close attention accorded to various aspects of Jewish emigration from the USSR, there has been remarkably little scholarly analysis of Jews who felt comfortable, congenial, and secure in Soviet society. In reality, thousands of Jews belonged to the elite of a local, regional, or national level, or even played some roles at all the levels. In Crimea, the collective farm chairman Ilya Yegudin was the most visible representative in…
The Soviet Narrative of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Soviet ideological overseers did not consider the Warsaw Ghetto uprising an utterly taboo topic. However, on their general scale of notable events of the Second World War, the uprising belonged to the category of relatively minor episodes, worth mentioning mainly in the context of ‘more important’ themes, such as the presence of former Nazis in state institutions of West Germany or the collaboration of some Jews, most notably Zionists, with the N…
The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), established in the early phase of the Soviet-Nazi war as a propaganda unit, gradually developed links with foreign Jewish organizations and began to act as a body taking responsibility for Soviet Jewish citizens’ interests. The turning point in the JAFC's destiny was the 1943 trip of its top representatives, Solomon Mikhoels and Itsik Fefer, to the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Britain. The success o…
Changing ideologies of artisanal “productivisation”
The Society for the Promotion of Artisanal and Agricultural Work among the Jews in Russia (ORT) was established in St Petersburg in 1880. In its post‐1921 form, as the World ORT Union, the organisation, with its headquarters in London, still operates in scores of countries throughout the world. This article analyses the ideological changes in ORT's craftsmen‐related programmes during the first decades of its history: from the initial careful atte…
Utopias and Cities of Kalman Zingman, an Uprooted Yiddishist Dreamer
Literature versus territory
(2003). Literature versus territory: Soviet Jewish cultural life in the 1950s. East European Jewish Affairs: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 30-48
The Kharkiv Yiddish literary world, 1920s‐mid‐1930s
From Yehupets Jargonists to Kiev modernists
A l'epoque de la Revolution bolchevique et de la guerre civile qui a suivi, Kiev donnait le ton a la litterature yiddish. Pour illustration, 40 pour cent de tous les titres en yiddish furent publies dans cette ville entre 1917 et 1921. Parce qu'il y a eu fort peu de recherche erudite sur la vie litteraire juive a Kiev, cet article tente de reconstruire l'environnement culturel qui a place cette ville sur la carte de la litterature yiddish, en s'a…
Aron Vergelis
Les autorites sovietiques avaient decide qu'Aron Vegelis etait le meilleur candidat au poste d'editeur du mensuel yiddish moscovite Sovietish Heymland. En fait, Vergelis possedait toutes les caracteristiques du candidat parfait. Il etait l'homo sovieticus ideal sans passe pre-revolutionnaire ou experience de l'immigration. Vergelis a entame ensuite sa propre perestroika. Le monde yiddish a connu des metamorphoses ideologiques. Le nom de Vergelis …
Yiddish language conference aborted
Apres un bref resume des principaux evenements concernant l'histoire du developpement de la culture juive en Union Sovietique dans les deux decades suivant la Revolution de 1917, l'article retrace les grands themes abordes lors de la conference sur la langue Yiddish le 9 fevrier 1937
Pyrrhic victories of Soviet Yiddish language planners
Entre 1926 et 1929, on constate deja en URSS un recul du nombre de gens pour qui le Yiddish est la langue maternelle. C'est le debut d'une transition radicale du Yiddish vers la russification de ce langage. Le regime sovietique a cherche a deposseder le Yiddish de ses capacites creatives. Meme si quelques activistes ont tente de sauver les institutions dans lesquelles il devait vivre, leurs efforts ont ete vains. En 1934, le parti communiste a re…
Languages of ‘Yehupets’ students∗
Languages of ‘Yehupets’ students∗
Pyrrhic victories of Soviet Yiddish language planners
Entre 1926 et 1929, on constate deja en URSS un recul du nombre de gens pour qui le Yiddish est la langue maternelle. C'est le debut d'une transition radicale du Yiddish vers la russification de ce langage. Le regime sovietique a cherche a deposseder le Yiddish de ses capacites creatives. Meme si quelques activistes ont tente de sauver les institutions dans lesquelles il devait vivre, leurs efforts ont ete vains. En 1934, le parti communiste a re…
Yiddish language conference aborted
Apres un bref resume des principaux evenements concernant l'histoire du developpement de la culture juive en Union Sovietique dans les deux decades suivant la Revolution de 1917, l'article retrace les grands themes abordes lors de la conference sur la langue Yiddish le 9 fevrier 1937
The era of Sovetish Heymland
La fin de l'Union Sovietique a marque le terme d'une etape de l'histoire de la culture yiddish, l'ere du Sovetish Heymland. Ce journal a paru de 1961 a 1991. Le reveil des publications yiddish date de la periode post-stalinienne. Sovetish Heymland etait publie sous les auspices de l'Union des Ecrivains Sovietiques, recevait des subventions de l'Etat. Ce fut un moyen aux yeux de Kroutchev d'empecher un veritable renouveau de la culture yiddish apr…
Jewish Street’ or Jewish Cul‐de‐sac? From Sovetish Heymland to Di Yidishe Gas
Aron Vergelis
Les autorites sovietiques avaient decide qu'Aron Vegelis etait le meilleur candidat au poste d'editeur du mensuel yiddish moscovite Sovietish Heymland. En fait, Vergelis possedait toutes les caracteristiques du candidat parfait. Il etait l'homo sovieticus ideal sans passe pre-revolutionnaire ou experience de l'immigration. Vergelis a entame ensuite sa propre perestroika. Le monde yiddish a connu des metamorphoses ideologiques. Le nom de Vergelis …
Soviet Yiddish
This is the first comprehensive study of Yiddish in the former Soviet Union. A chronicle of orthographic and other reforms - from the state of the language in pre-Revolutionary Russia, through active language-planning in the 1920s and 1930s, repression, and subsequent developments up to the 1980s - is recreated from contemporary publications and archival materials. Later chapters draw on the author's own experience as a Yiddish writer and lexicog…
From Shtetl to the city of the Sun calling at the schools of communism
From Yehupets Jargonists to Kiev modernists
A l'epoque de la Revolution bolchevique et de la guerre civile qui a suivi, Kiev donnait le ton a la litterature yiddish. Pour illustration, 40 pour cent de tous les titres en yiddish furent publies dans cette ville entre 1917 et 1921. Parce qu'il y a eu fort peu de recherche erudite sur la vie litteraire juive a Kiev, cet article tente de reconstruire l'environnement culturel qui a place cette ville sur la carte de la litterature yiddish, en s'a…
The Kharkiv Yiddish literary world, 1920s‐mid‐1930s
Yiddish Vilna
Literature versus territory
(2003). Literature versus territory: Soviet Jewish cultural life in the 1950s. East European Jewish Affairs: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 30-48
The Soviet Shtetl in the 1920s
Utopias and Cities of Kalman Zingman, an Uprooted Yiddishist Dreamer
At the edge of Soviet state control
In August 1956, Nikita Khrushchev took part in a meeting with a delegation of Canadian communists. Discussing the wave of repression against Jewish intellectuals during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Soviet leader mentioned that he had supported Stalin's decision not to give the Crimea to Jews because it would have created a springboard for attacks on the Soviet Union. Apart from being paranoid about the Soviet Jews' loyalty to the young sta…
Vilna on the Spree
Yiddish-speakers, or Ostjuden (Eastern [European] Jews), who built a visible minority in the-turn-of-the-twentieth-century Berlin, usually migrated to the Kaiserreich capital from the then German territory of Posen (Poznan) as well as from Russian and Austro-Hungarian Poland. In Berlin, they would settle in the proletarian East of the city, most notably in the Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter), the slum quarter »a few blocks northeast of Alexanderpl…
Jacob Lestschinsky
ArgumentJacob Lestschinsky (1876-1966) emerged as the leading social scientist in pre-1917 circles of Yiddishist Marxist nationalists, most notably the Territorialists, who sought to create Jewish statehood outside Palestine. Lestschinsky played a central role in Jewish institutions formed in Ukraine in 1918-1920. A convinced anti-Bolshevik, he lived in Germany, then in Poland, America, and eventually in Israel. He combined two careers: a popular…
Rashid Kaplanov (1949–2007)
Changing ideologies of artisanal “productivisation”
The Society for the Promotion of Artisanal and Agricultural Work among the Jews in Russia (ORT) was established in St Petersburg in 1880. In its post‐1921 form, as the World ORT Union, the organisation, with its headquarters in London, still operates in scores of countries throughout the world. This article analyses the ideological changes in ORT's craftsmen‐related programmes during the first decades of its history: from the initial careful atte…
The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union
Twenty-first century Yiddishism
This book, a by-product of the author's doctoral thesis, will raise or has already raised the brows of many people. Jeffrey Shandler will no doubt be surprised to learn that ‘Yiddishland’ is his ‘l
The Stalin Constitution on Trial in the Yiddish Daily Newspaper Forverts, 1936–1937
Die 1936 in der Sowjetunion mit großem propagandistischen Pomp verabschiedete, sog. »Stalinsche« Verfassung fand ein lebhaftes, kontroverses Echo in der jüdisch-amerikanischen Presse. Abraham Cahan , der Redakteur der jiddischsprachigen sozialistischen Tageszeitung Forverts (dt. ›Vorwärts‹), rief seine Leserschaft zu einer offenen Diskussion über die Vorzüge und Nachteile des neuen sowjetischen Grundgesetzes auf. In den Jahren 1936–1937 erschiene…
Soviet Jews in World War II
This volume discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic Waräóîas the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945, was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is among the first books to combine the study of Russian…
The missing years
From September 1939 to June 1941, Bialystok was a Soviet city that housed a group of Yiddish literati, notably refugees from German-occupied areas of Poland. This article describes the process of selecting among them people who professionally and ideologically fit criteria for integration into the Soviet Writers' Union. Special attention is paid to interactions between the refugee writers and their Soviet counterparts. Loyal Soviet citizens prior…
Translating Sholem Aleichem
History (31 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (26 works) · History (25 works) · Judaism (25 works) · Political science (25 works) · Archaeology (21 works) · Soviet and Russian History (20 works) · Ancient history (18 works) · Yiddish (16 works) · Art (15 works)