Between 1917 and 1921, as revolution convulsed Russia, Jewish
intellectuals and writers across the crumbling empire threw themselves
into the pursuit of a "Jewish renaissance." At the heart of their
program lay a radically new vision of Jewish culture predicated not on
religion but on art and secular individuality, national in scope yet
cosmopolitan in content, framed by a fierce devotion to Hebrew or
Yiddish yet obsessed with importing and participating in the shared
culture of Europe and the world. These cultural warriors sought to
recast themselves and other Jews not only as a modern nation but as a
nation of moderns.
Kenneth Moss offers the first comprehensive look at this
fascinating moment in Jewish and Russian history. He examines what
these numerous would-be cultural revolutionaries, such as El Lissitzky
and Haim Nahman Bialik, meant by a new Jewish culture, and details
their fierce disagreements but also their shared assumptions about what
culture was and why it was so important. In close readings of Hebrew,
Yiddish, and Russian texts, he traces how they sought to realize their
ideals in practice as writers, artists, and thinkers in the burgeoning
cultural centers of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. And he reveals what
happened to them and their ideals as the Bolsheviks consolidated their
hold over cultural life.
Here is a brilliant, revisionist argument about the nature of
cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and
socialism as ideological systems, and culture itself, the axis around
which the encounter between Jews and European modernity has pivoted
over the past century.
