Brian Horowitz - Böcker

Vladimir Jabotinsky is well remembered as a militant leader and father of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement, but he was also a Russian-Jewish intellectual, talented fiction writer, journalist, playwright, and translator of poetry into Russian and Hebrew. His autobiography, Sippur yamai, Story of My Life—written in Hebrew and published in Tel Aviv in 1936—gives a more nuanced picture of Jabotinsky than his popular image, but it was never published in English. In Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Story of My Life, editors Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis present this much-needed translation for the first time, based on a rough draft of an English version that was discovered in Jabotinsky’s archive at the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv. Jabotinsky’s volume mixes true events with myth as he offers a portrait of himself from his birth in 1880 until just after the outbreak of World War I. He describes his personal development during childhood and early adult years in Odessa, Rome, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Istanbul, during Russia’s Silver Age, a period known for spiritual searching, but also political violence, radicalism, and pogroms. He tells of his escape to Rome as a youth, his return to Odessa, and his eventual adoption of Zionism. He also depicts struggles with rivals and colleagues in both politics and journalism. The editors introduce the full text of the autobiography by discussing Jabotinsky’s life, legacy, and writings in depth.As Jabotinsky is gaining a reputation for the quality of his fictional and semi-fictional writing in the field of Israel studies, this autobiography will help reading groups and students of Zionism, Jewish history, and political studies to gain a more complete picture of this famous leader.

The book argues that Jews were not a people apart but were culturally integrated in Russian society. In their diasporic cultural creations Russia’s Jews employed the general themes of artists under tsars and Soviets, but they modified these themes to fit their own needs. The result was a hybrid, Russian-Jewish culture, unique and dynamic. Few today consider that Jewish Eastern Europe, the “old world”, was in fact a power incubator of modern Jewish consciousness. Brian Horowitz, a well-known scholar of Russian Jewry, presents essays on Jewish education (the heder), historiography, literature and Jewish philosophy that intersect with contemporary interests on the big questions of Jewish life. The book lets us grasp the meaning of secular Judaism and gives models from the past in order to stimulate ideas for the present.

In Russian Idea—Jewish Presence, Professor Brian Horowitz follows the career tracks of Jewish intellectuals who, having fallen in love with Russian culture, were unceremoniously repulsed. Horowitz relays the paradoxes of a synthetic Jewish and Russian self-consciousness in order to correct critics who have always considered Russians and Jews as polar opposites, enemies, and incompatible. In fact, the best Russian-Jewish intellectuals—Semyon Dubnov, Maxim Vinaver, Mikhail Gershenzon, and a number of Zionist writers and thinkers—were actually inspired by Russian culture and attempted to develop a sui generis Jewish creativity in three languages on Russian soil.

Historiography formed an unusually important component of the popular culture and heritage of east European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a period of social, economic, and political upheaval, and for the emerging class of educated Jews the writing and reading of Jewish history provided not only intellectual but also emotional and moral sustenance. Facing an insecure future became easier with an understanding of the past, and of the Jewish place in that past.This volume is devoted to the development of Jewish historiography in the three east European centres—Congress Poland, the Russian empire, and Galicia—that together contained the majority of world Jewry at that time. Drawing widely on the multilingual body of scholarly and popular literature that emerged in that turbulent environment, the contributors to this volume attempt to go beyond the established paradigms in the study of Jewish historiography, and specifically to examine the relationship between the writing of Jewish history and of non-Jewish history in eastern Europe. In doing so they expose the tension between the study of the Jewish past in a communal setting and in a wider, regional, setting that located Jews firmly in the non-Jewish political, economic, and cultural environment. They also explore the relationship between ‘history’—seen as the popular understanding of the past—and ‘scholarly history’—interpretation of the past through the academic study of the sources, which lays claim to objectivity and authority. The development of Jewish historical scholarship grew out of the new intellectual climate of the Haskalah, which encouraged novel modes of thinking about self and others and promoted critical enquiry and new approaches to traditional sources. At the same time, however, in response to what the traditionalists perceived as secular research, an Orthodox historiography also emerged, driven not only by scholarly curiosity but also by the need to provide a powerful counterweight in the struggle against modernity. In fact, east European Jewish historiography has undergone many methodological, thematic, and ideological transformations over the last two centuries. Even today, east European Jewish historiography revisits many of the questions of importance to scholars and audiences since its emergence: how Jews lived, both within the narrow Jewish world and in contact with the wider society; the limits of Jewish insularity and integration; expressions of persecution and anti-Jewish violence; and also Jewish contributions to the societies and states of eastern Europe. Many challenges still remain: questions of the purpose of the research, its ideological colouring, and its relevance for contemporary Jewish communities.The fruit of research in many disciplines and from different methodological points of view, this volume has much to offer scholars of modern Jewry trying to understand how east European Jews saw themselves as they struggled with the concepts of modernity and national identity and how their history continues to be studied and discussed by an international community of scholars.

In Russian Idea—Jewish Presence, Professor Brian Horowitz follows the career tracks of Jewish intellectuals who, having fallen in love with Russian culture, were unceremoniously repulsed. Horowitz relays the paradoxes of a synthetic Jewish and Russian self-consciousness in order to correct critics who have always considered Russians and Jews as polar opposites, enemies, and incompatible. In fact, the best Russian-Jewish intellectuals—Semyon Dubnov, Maxim Vinaver, Mikhail Gershenzon, and a number of Zionist writers and thinkers—were actually inspired by Russian culture and attempted to develop a sui generis Jewish creativity in three languages on Russian soil.

Translated for the first time in English, Lev Levanda's brilliant coming-of-age story of Russian Jewish students on the cusp of modernity in their struggle against religious chauvinism and an oppressive government.Despite being Russia's best Jewish writer of the nineteenth century, Lev Levanda (1835–1888) is barely known in the English-speaking world, with some of his most famous works, like the 1873 novel Seething Times, having yet to be published in their entirety. Another such work is An Amateur Performance (Reminiscences of a Student in the 1850s), which appears here in English for the first time, translated with elegance by Hugh McLean and edited by Brian Horowitz and Conor Daly. A classic in Russian-Jewish literature from 1882, An Amateur Performance describes the rush by Jews to government schools, secular education, and the lights of enlightenment, while also revealing the struggles of these Jewish students on the cusp of modernity, including keen observations on their lack of preparation, their confusion over the new ideas, and their confrontation with the repressive power of the Russian government. In short, it’s a brilliant sociological study of Russian Jewry in the 1850s as remembered by a writer who fought for progress and Jewish integration.