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.
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