Now back in print in a new edition
A Century ofAmbivalence
The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to thePresent
Second, Expanded Edition
Zvi Gitelman

Arichly illustrated survey of the Jewish historical experience in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet era.

"Anyone with even apassing interest in the history of Russian Jewry will want to own this splendid...book." -- Janet Hadda, Los Angeles Times

..". a badly neededhistorical perspective on Soviet Jewry.... Gitelman] is evenhanded in his treatmentof various periods and themes, as well as in his overall evaluation of the SovietJewish experience.... A Century of Ambivalence is illuminated by an extraordinarycollection of photographs that vividly reflect the hopes, triumphs and agonies ofRussian Jewish life." -- David E. Fishman, Hadassah Magazine

"Wonderful pictures of famous personalities, unknown villagers, small hamlets, markets and communal structures combine with the text to create anuplifting book] for a broad and general audience." -- Alexander Orbach, SlavicReview

"Gitelman's text provides an important commentary andcareful historic explanation.... His portrayal of the promise and disillusionment, hope and despair, intellectual restlessness succeeded by swift repression enlargesthe reader's understanding of the dynamic forces behind some of the most importantmovements in contemporary Jewish life." -- Jane S. Gerber, Bergen JewishNews

..". a lucid and reasonably objective popular history thatexpertly threads its way through the dizzying reversals of the Russian Jewishexperience." -- Village Voice

A century ago the Russian Empirecontained the largest Jewish community in the world, numbering about five millionpeople. Today, the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union has dwindled to halfa million, but remains probably the world's third largest Jewish community. In theintervening century the Jews of that area have been at the center of some of themost dramatic events of modern history -- two world wars, revolutions, pogroms, political liberation, repression, and the collapse of the USSR. They have gonethrough tumultuous upward and downward economic and social mobility and experiencedgreat enthusiasms and profound disappointments. In startling photographs from thearchives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and with a lively and lucidnarrative, A Century of Ambivalence traces the historical experience of Jews inRussia from a period of creativity and repression in the second half of the 19thcentury through the paradoxes posed by the post-Soviet era. This redesigned edition, which includes more than 200 photographs and two substantial new chapters on thefate of Jews and Judaism in the former Soviet Union, is ideal for general readersand classroom use.

Zvi Gitelman is Professor of Political Scienceand Director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at theUniversity of Michigan. He is author of Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: TheJewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917--1930 and editor of Bitter Legacy: Confronting theHolocaust in the USSR (Indiana University Press).

Published inassociation with YIVO Institute for JewishResearch

Contents
Introduction
Creativity versusRepression: The Jews in Russia, 1881--1917
Revolution and the Ambiguitiesof Liberation
Reaching for Utopia: Building Socialism and a New JewishCulture
The Holocaust
The Black Years and the Gray, 1948--1967
Soviet Jews, 1967--1987: To Reform, Conform, orLeave?
The "Other" Jews of the Former USSR: Georgian, Central Asian, andMountain Jews
The Post-Soviet Era: Winding Down or Starting UpAgain?
The Paradoxes of Post-Soviet Jewry