The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination

Download The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804775621
Total Pages : 513 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination by : Leonid Livak

Download or read book The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination written by Leonid Livak and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.

Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination

Download Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317110943
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination by : Eva Johanna Holmberg

Download or read book Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination written by Eva Johanna Holmberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on travel writings, religious history and popular literature, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination explores the encounter between English travellers and the Jews. While literary and religious traditions created an image of Jews as untrustworthy, even sinister, travellers came to know them in their many and diverse communities with rich traditions and intriguing life-styles. The Jew of the imagination encountered the Jew of town and village, in southern Europe, North Africa and the Levant. Coming from an England riven by religious disputes and often by political unrest, travellers brought their own questions about identity, national character, religious belief and the quality of human relations to their encounter with 'the scattered nation'.

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination

Download The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804770552
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (75 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination by : Leonid Livak

Download or read book The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination written by Leonid Livak and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.

The Social Scientific Study of Jewry

Download The Social Scientific Study of Jewry PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199380325
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Social Scientific Study of Jewry by : Uzi Rebhun

Download or read book The Social Scientific Study of Jewry written by Uzi Rebhun and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-13 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuing its distinguished tradition of focusing on central political, sociological, and cultural issues of Jewish life in the last century, this latest volume in the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry series focuses on how Jewry has been studied in the social science disciplines. Its symposium consists of essays that discuss sources, approaches, and debates in the complementary fields of demography, sociology, economics, and geography. The social sciences are central for the understanding of contemporary Jewish life and have engendered much controversy over the past few decades. To a large extent, the multitude of approaches toward Jewish social science research reflects the nature of population studies in general, and that of religions and ethnic groups in particular. Yet the variation in methodology, definitions, and measures of demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural patterns is even more salient in the study of Jews. Different data sets have different definitions for what is "Jewish" or "who is a Jew." In addition, Jews as a group are characterized by high rates of migration, including repeated migration, which makes it difficult to track any given Jewish population. Finally, the question of identification is complicated by the fact that in most places, especially outside of Israel, it is not clear whether "being Jewish" is primarily a religious or an ethnic matter - or both, or neither. This volume also features an essay on American Jewry and North African Jewry; review essays on rebuilding after the Holocaust, Nazi war crimes trials, and Jewish historiography; and reviews of new titles in Jewish studies.

Embodied Differences

Download Embodied Differences PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Academic Studies PRess
ISBN 13 : 1644694875
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (446 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Embodied Differences by : Henrietta Mondry

Download or read book Embodied Differences written by Henrietta Mondry and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew’s body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women’s writing, broadening the scope to examining the role of objects, museum displays and the politics of heritage food, the book argues that materiality can embody fictional constructions that should be approached on a culture-specific basis.

Russian Montparnasse

Download Russian Montparnasse PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137508019
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (375 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Russian Montparnasse by : Maria Rubins

Download or read book Russian Montparnasse written by Maria Rubins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reassesses the role of Russian Montparnasse writers in the articulation of transnational modernism generated by exile. Examining their production from a comparative perspective, it demonstrates that their response to urban modernity transcended the Russian master narrative and resonated with broader aesthetic trends in interwar Europe.

Vladimir Nabokov in Context

Download Vladimir Nabokov in Context PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108608094
Total Pages : 660 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (86 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Vladimir Nabokov in Context by : David M. Bethea

Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov in Context written by David M. Bethea and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vladimir Nabokov, bilingual writer of dazzling masterpieces, is a phenomenon that both resists and requires contextualization. This book challenges the myth of Nabokov as a sole genius who worked in isolation from his surroundings, as it seeks to anchor his work firmly within the historical, cultural, intellectual and political contexts of the turbulent twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov in Context maps the ever-changing sites, people, cultures and ideologies of his itinerant life which shaped the production and reception of his work. Concise and lively essays by leading scholars reveal a complex relationship of mutual influence between Nabokov's work and his environment. Appealing to a wide community of literary scholars this timely companion to Nabokov's writing offers new insights and approaches to one of the most important, and yet most elusive writers of modern literature.

Nikolai Gogol

Download Nikolai Gogol PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1487537875
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (875 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Nikolai Gogol by : Yuliya Ilchuk

Download or read book Nikolai Gogol written by Yuliya Ilchuk and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the great writers of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine before he was lionized and canonized in Russia. The ambiguities within his subversive, ironic works are matched by those that surround the debate over his national identity. This book presents a completely new assessment of the problem: rather than adopting the predominant "either/or" perspective – wherein Gogol is seen as either Ukrainian or Russian – it shows how his cultural identity was a product of negotiation with imperial and national cultural codes and values. By examining Gogol’s ambivalent self-fashioning, language performance, and textual practices, this book shows how Gogol played with both imperial and local sources of identity and turned his hybridity into a project of subtle cultural resistance. Ilchuk provides a comprehensive account of assimilation and hybridization of Ukrainians in the Russian empire, arguing that Russia’s imperial culture has depended on Ukraine and the participation of Ukrainian intellectuals in its development. Ilchuk also introduces innovative computer-assisted methods of textual analysis to demonstrate the palimpsest-like quality of Gogol’s texts and national identity.

For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being

Download For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199978182
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (999 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being by : Alison K. Smith

Download or read book For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being written by Alison K. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every subject of the Russian Empire had an official, legal place in society marked by his or her social estate, or soslovie. These sosloviia (noble, peasant, merchant, and many others) were usually inherited, and defined the rights, opportunities, and duties of those who possessed them. They were also usually associated with membership in a specific geographically defined society in a particular town or village. Moreover, although laws increasingly insisted that every subject of the empire possess a soslovie "for the common good and their own well-being," they also allowed individuals to change their soslovie by following a particular bureaucratic procedure. The process of changing soslovie brought together three sets of actors: the individuals who wished to change their opportunities or duties, or who at times had change forced upon them; local societies, which wished to control who belonged to them; and the central, imperial state, which wished above all to ensure that every one of its subjects had a place, and therefore a status. This book looks at the many ways that soslovie could affect individual lives and have meaning, then traces the legislation and administration of soslovie from the early eighteenth through to the early twentieth century. This period saw a shift from soslovie as above all a means of extracting duties or taxes, to an understanding of soslovie as instead a means of providing services and ensuring security. The book ends with an examination of the way that a change in soslovie could affect not just an individual's biography, but the future of his or her entire family. The result is a new image of soslovie as both a general and a very specific identity, and as one that had persistent meaning, for the Imperial statue, for local authorities, or for individual subjects, even through 1917.

The Infrahuman

Download The Infrahuman PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 1438470673
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Infrahuman by : Noam Pines

Download or read book The Infrahuman written by Noam Pines and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that Jewish writers used depictions of Jews as animals to question prevalent notions of Jewish identity. The Infrahuman explores a little-known aspect in major works of Jewish literature from the period preceding World War II, in which Jewish writers in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish employed figures of animals in pejorative depictions of Jews and Jewish identity. Such depictions are disturbing because they sometimes rival common anti-Semitic stereotypes, and have often been explained away as symptoms of Jewish self-hatred. In this book, Noam Pines shows how animality emerged in Jewish literature not as a biological or conceptual category, but as a theological figure of exclusion from a state of humanity and Christianity alike. By framing the human-animal question in theological terms rather than in racial-biological terms, writers such as Heinrich Heine, S. Y. Abramovitsh, Hayim Nachman Bialik, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Franz Kafka, S. Y. Agnon, and Paul Celan subjected the pejorative designations of Jewish identity to literary elaboration and to philosophical negotiation. “A work of stunning originality. Noam Pines revisits texts across the expanse of European and modern Jewish culture, excavating a preoccupation with Jewish animality that is no less illuminating than it is unsettling.” — Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History “In this scrupulous and subtle book, Noam Pines shines new light on how animality, a well-worn theological figure of exclusion, can be seen afresh as a leitmotif of the intimate dialogue Jewish writers conducted with European literary traditions. With an exceptionally sure touch, Pines tracks this motif from Zionist literature through the postwar responses to Kafka’s legacy. The Infrahuman is a profound and highly commendable achievement.” — Vivian Liska, author of When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature and German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy “The Infrahuman starts readers on an important journey from a place where we construct identities out of the cultural material that we would invent if that material had not already been provided: dichotomies (animal/human, Christian/Jew), other forms, images, things. Pines’s powerful readings of Heine, Abramovitsh, Bialik, Greenberg, Kafka, Agnon, and Celan may not teach us how to remember other alternatives, but they do call us to be attentive to the identificatory incapacities that have helped us forget how to live.” — David Metzger, coeditor of Chasing Esther: Jewish Expressions of Cultural Difference

Making History Jewish

Download Making History Jewish PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004431977
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (44 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Making History Jewish by : Paweł Maciejko

Download or read book Making History Jewish written by Paweł Maciejko and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the different ways that intellectuals, scholars and institutions have sought to make history Jewish. While practitioners of Jewish history often assume that “the Jews” are a well-defined ethno-national unit with a distinct, continuous history, this volume questions many of the assumptions that underlie and ultimately help construct Jewish history. Starting with a number of articles on the Jews of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland and Hungary, continuing with several studies of Jewish encounters with the advent of nationalism and antisemitism, and concluding with a set of essays on Jewish history and politics in twentieth-century eastern Europe, pre-state Palestine and North America, the volume discusses the different methodological, research and narrative strategies involved in transforming past events into part of the larger canon of Jewish history.

Chekhov Becomes Chekhov

Download Chekhov Becomes Chekhov PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1639362657
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (393 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Chekhov Becomes Chekhov by : Bob Blaisdell

Download or read book Chekhov Becomes Chekhov written by Bob Blaisdell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory portrait of Chekhov during the most extraordinary artistic surge of his life. In 1886, a twenty-six-year-old Anton Chekhov was publishing short stories, humor pieces, and articles at an astonishing rate, and was still a practicing physician. Yet as he honed his craft and continued to draw inspiration from the vivid characters in his own life, he found himself—to his surprise and ocassional embarassment—admired by a growing legion of fans, including Tolstoy himself. He had not yet succumbed to the ravages of tuberculosis. He was a lively, frank, and funny correspondant and a dedicated mentor. And as Bob Blaisdell discovers, his vivid articles, stories, and plays from this period—when read in conjunction with his correspondence—become a psychological and emotional secret diary. When Chekhov struggled with his increasingly fraught engagement, young couples are continually making their raucous way in and out of relationships on the page. When he was overtaxed by his medical duties, his doctor characters explode or implode. Chekhov’s talented but drunken older brothers and Chekhov’s domineering father became transmuted into characters, yet their emergence from their families serfdom is roiling beneath the surface. Chekhov could crystalize the human foiibles of the people he knew into some of the most memorable figures in literature and drama. In Chekhov Becomes Chekhov, Blaisdell astutely examines the psychological portraits of Chekhov's distinct, carefully observed characters and how they reflect back on their creator during a period when there seemed to be nothing between his imagination and the paper he was writing upon.

Confessions of the Shtetl

Download Confessions of the Shtetl PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503600246
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (36 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Confessions of the Shtetl by : Ellie R. Schainker

Download or read book Confessions of the Shtetl written by Ellie R. Schainker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism. Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.

ROOT CAUSES OF WESTERN ANTI-ISLAMIC ANTAGONISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY AND THE SECULAR

Download ROOT CAUSES OF WESTERN ANTI-ISLAMIC ANTAGONISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY AND THE SECULAR PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cinius Yayınları
ISBN 13 : 6258330975
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (583 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis ROOT CAUSES OF WESTERN ANTI-ISLAMIC ANTAGONISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY AND THE SECULAR by : ÖMER KEMAL ŞAHİN

Download or read book ROOT CAUSES OF WESTERN ANTI-ISLAMIC ANTAGONISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY AND THE SECULAR written by ÖMER KEMAL ŞAHİN and published by Cinius Yayınları. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This research seeks to examine the root causes of Western anti-Islamic antagonism in the three main realms of the West, i.e. Judaism, Christianity and the secular. To achieve this goal, it first focuses on the Jewish and Christian scriptures and perceptions in chronological order. Their respective manifestations in history are introduced encompassing the Medīna period, age of Islamic conquests, Middle Ages, Early Modern Period and Contemporary Period. Since the literature hardly conceptualises “Jewish” or “Christian” anti-Islamism as such, relevant knowledge was extracted from the present literature and put into a coherent narrative. The findings indicate that Jewish and Christian scriptures, particularly the passages about Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael and contents concerning eschatology, make anti-Islamic interpretations possible. Jewish anti-Islamic antagonism is observed to primarily stem from the ethnocentric self-perception and eschatological agenda of Judaism, whereas Christian antiIslamic antagonism from the ontological instability and eschatological scenarios of Christianity. In the subsequent chapter, the research examines the secular antagonism towards Islam and Muslims. The secular is approached in a theoretical framework of three levels that are paradigm, people and society. According to findings, secular antiIslamism appears to originate from the ideals of the secular to imagine a people, society and world order free of religion. The final chapter consists of evaluation of the findings and concrete suggestions to tackle the problem of Western anti-Islamism. Root Causes of Anti-Islamic Antagonism argues for a deep-rooted approach to anti-Islamism studies and suggests that it is a scholarly necessity to focus on these three main realms in the West to understand the anti-Islamic phenomena properly.

Reinventing Tradition

Download Reinventing Tradition PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Academic Studies PRess
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (871 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Reinventing Tradition by : Klavdia Smola

Download or read book Reinventing Tradition written by Klavdia Smola and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was the Jewish tradition reinvented in Russian-Jewish literature after a long period of assimilation, the Holocaust, and decades of Communism? The process of reinventing the tradition began in the counter-culture of Jewish dissidents, in the midst of the late-Soviet underground of the 1960-1970s, and it continues to the present day. In this period, Jewish literature addresses the reader of the ‘post-human’ epoch, when the knowledge about traditional Jewry and Judaism is received not from the family members or the collective environment, but rather from books, paintings, museums and popular culture. Klavdia Smola explores how contemporary Russian-Jewish literature turns to the traditions of Jewish writing, from biblical Judaism to early-Soviet (anti-)Zionist novels, and how it ‘re-writes’ Haskalah satire, Hassidic Midrash or Yiddish travelogues.

Reframing Russian Modernism

Download Reframing Russian Modernism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN 13 : 0299320405
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (993 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Reframing Russian Modernism by : Irina Shevelenko

Download or read book Reframing Russian Modernism written by Irina Shevelenko and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a multifaceted portrait of modernist culture in Russia, an array of distinguished scholars shows how artists and writers in the early twentieth century engaged with politics, science, and religion. At a time when many Russian social institutions looked to the past, modernist arts powerfully amplified a gamut of new ideas about individual and collective transformation. Expanding upon prior studies that focus more specifically on literary manifestations of the movement, Reframing Russian Modernism features original research that ranges broadly, from political aesthetics to Darwinism to yoga. These unique complementary perspectives counter reductionism of any kind, integrating the study of Russian modernism into the larger body of humanistic scholarship devoted to modernity.

Drawing the Iron Curtain

Download Drawing the Iron Curtain PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813577039
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Drawing the Iron Curtain by : Maya Balakirsky Katz

Download or read book Drawing the Iron Curtain written by Maya Balakirsky Katz and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the American imagination, the Soviet Union was a drab cultural wasteland, a place where playful creative work and individualism was heavily regulated and censored. Yet despite state control, some cultural industries flourished in the Soviet era, including animation. Drawing the Iron Curtain tells the story of the golden age of Soviet animation and the Jewish artists who enabled it to thrive. Art historian Maya Balakirsky Katz reveals how the state-run animation studio Soyuzmultfilm brought together Jewish creative personnel from every corner of the Soviet Union and served as an unlikely haven for dissidents who were banned from working in other industries. Surveying a wide range of Soviet animation produced between 1919 and 1989, from cutting-edge art films like Tale of Tales to cartoons featuring “Soviet Mickey Mouse” Cheburashka, she finds that these works played a key role in articulating a cosmopolitan sensibility and a multicultural vision for the Soviet Union. Furthermore, she considers how Jewish filmmakers used animation to depict distinctive elements of their heritage and ethnic identity, whether producing films about the Holocaust or using fellow Jews as models for character drawings. Providing a copiously illustrated introduction to many of Soyuzmultfilm’s key artistic achievements, while revealing the tumultuous social and political conditions in which these films were produced, Drawing the Iron Curtain has something to offer animation fans and students of Cold War history alike.