The Jews of the Soviet Union: From Nationalism to Communism and Back

1. The Evsekstiia and the Struggle Against Judaism
2. The Sovietization of Jewish Women

Readings:

“Resolution of the Council of People’s Commissar’s of the Uprooting of the Anti-Semitic Movement,” Lenin on the Jewish Question, pp. 141-142; “Karl Yankl”, Isaac babel; “Yevsektsiia: The Liquidation of Jewish Bourgeois Institutions,” in The Jew in the Modern World; “Documents: Illegal Zionist Organizations in Ukraine, 1924-1925,” in Jews in Eastern Europe, 1996, pp. 46-66; poems by Izi Kharik and Itsik Fefer, The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (C).

1. World War II and the Holocaust
2. The Case of Belarus

Readings:

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, Selections on Minsk; Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassily Grossman, The Black Book (selections on Minsk); Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate; Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust (Selections on the partisans in Belarus).

1. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Black Book
2. Soviet Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Struggle for Emigration

Readings:

“V. S. Abakoumov’s Report on the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee” 1948, in War, Holocaust and Stalinism, pp. 451-470; “Official Announcement of the Doctor’s Plot,” and “Official Announcement of the Doctor’s Release (1953) from Benjamin Pinkus (ed.), The Soviet Government and the Jews; “Aleksandr Isbakh as Zionist and Cosmopolitan” (1949); Krokodil “Moshe Adolfovich Dayan,” and “The Need for a Jewish State,” in Rubin (ed.), The Unredeemed: Anti-Semitism in The Soviet Union; Letters from Soviet Jews to the Jewish AntiFascist Committee.

For the Sources and Methods section of the course, I was considering a discussion of the work of Jewish historian Israel Sosis in the Society of Marxist Historians in Minsk, dated 1929 (this is an original archival document); and selections from Iudaizm bez prikas, by Trofim Kichko. Both are in Russian (and Kichko in Ukrainian) only.