Taro Tsurumi – författare

The overwhelming majority of Jews who laid the foundations of the Israeli state during the first half of the twentieth century came from the Polish lands and the Russian Empire. This is a fact widely known, yet its implications for the history of Israel and the Middle East and, reciprocally, for the history of what was once the demographic heartland of the Jewish diaspora remain surprisingly ill-understood.Through fine-grained analyses of people, texts, movements, and worldviews in motion, the scholars assembled in From Europe's East to the Middle East-hailing from Europe, Israel, Japan, and the United States-rediscover a single transnational Jewish history of surprising connections, ideological cacophony, and entangled fates. Against the view of Israel as an outpost of the West, whether as a beacon of democracy or a creation of colonialism, this volume reveals how profoundly Zionism and Israel were shaped by the assumptions of Polish nationalism, Russian radicalism, and Soviet Communism; the unique ethos of the East European intelligentsia; and the political legacies of civil and national strife in the East European "shatter-zone." Against the view that Zionism effected a complete break from the diaspora that had birthed it, the book sheds new light on the East European sources of phenomena as diverse as Zionist military culture, kibbutz socialism, and ultra-Orthodox education for girls. Finally, it reshapes our understanding of East European Jewish life, from the Tsarist Empire, to independent Poland, to the late Soviet Union. Looking past siloed histories of both Zionism and its opponents in Eastern Europe, the authors reconstruct Zionism's transnational character, charting unexpected continuities across East European and Israeli Jewish life, and revealing how Jews in Eastern Europe grew ever more entangled with the changing realities of Jewish society in Palestine.

According to Benedict Anderson, the rapid expansion of print media during the late-1700s popularised national history and standardised national languages, thus helping create nation-states and national identities at the expense of the old empires. Publishing in Tsarist Russia challenges this theory and, by examining the history of Russian publishing through a transnational lens, reveals how the popular press played an important and complex Imperial role, while providing a “soft infrastructure” which the subjects could access to change Imperial order. As this volume convincingly argues, this is because the Russian language at this time was a lingua franca; it crossed borders and boundaries, reaching speakers of varying nationalities. Russian publications, then, were able to effectively operate within the structure of Imperialism but as a public space, they went beyond the control of the Tsar and ethnic Russians. This exciting international team of scholars provide a much-needed, fresh take on the history of Russian publishing and contribute significantly to our understanding of print media, language and empire from the 18th to 20th centuries. Publishing in Tsarist Russia is therefore a vital resource for scholars of Russian history, comparative nationalism, and publishing studies.