Becoming Soviet Jews

Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project did not destroy continuities with prerevolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk. In contrast to the traditional characterization of the Jewish response to the Soviet regime as anticommunist, Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Minsk Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older social and religious norms of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, participation in the Bund, synagogue worship, circumcision, and kosher slaughter.