Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1: Mercury's Sandals: The Jews and Other Nomads 4 CHAPTER 2: Swann's Nose: The Jews and Other Moderns 40 CHAPTER 3: Babel's First Love: The Jews and the Russian Revolution 105 CHAPTER 4: Hodl's Choice: The Jews and Three Promised Lands 204 Notes 373 Index 413
Yuri Slezkine has written an extraordinary book with continual surprises. A landmark work. -- Ronald Suny, University of Chicago I can think of few works that match the conceptual range, polemical sharpness, and sheer elan of The Jewish Century. An extraordinary book: analytically acute, lyrical, witty, and disturbing all at once. -- Benjamin Nathans, author of "Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia" Yuri Slezkine's book is at the same time very personal and very erudite. A blend of political and cultural history at its best, it is a splendid work, beautifully written. A true accomplishment by a master historian. -- Jan T. Gross, author of "Neighbors" Once every few decades, a book forces a reevaluation of basic assumptions in a field. Yuri Slezkine's passionate and brilliant tour de force not only challenges received wisdom about Russian and Soviet Jews, but just as provocatively overturns the uniqueness that many ascribe to Jewish history altogether. The Jewish Century is a work sure to spark heated debate not only about the Jews, but also about what it means to be modern. -- David Biale, editor, "Cultures of the Jews: A New History" The Jewish Century is an extraordinarily stimulating and ambitious piece of work that invites debate and controversy. Slezkine's account is subtle, beautifully written, and very moving; it combines humor, irony, and understated passion. -- Tim McDaniel, author of "The Agony of the Russian Idea" (Princeton) This is a strong, well-documented, passionately argued, original, and bold essay on history, or the ideology of history, in what I called "a Jewish century" (see my Language in Time of Revolution). One wants to argue with the author on many pages of the manuscript, but it is such a powerful, sweeping statement that it must be left whole and intact, as a central position in future arguments on modernity, the twentieth century, and the history of the Jews. -- Benjamin Harshav, Yale University
Yuri Slezkine is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of "Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North" and coeditor of "In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War" (Princeton).
One of the most innovative and intellectually stimulating books in Jewish studies in years... [An] idiosyncratic, fascinating and at times marvelously infuriating study of the evolution of Jewish cultural and political sensibility in the 20th century... Nearly every page of Slezkine's exegesis presents fascinating arguments or facts. Publishers Weekly Jews are not unique, [Yuri Slezkine] maintains in his fascinating new study, and it is only European provincialism that makes them seem that way... Slezkin"s interpretation of Jewish history ... is wonderfully antiparochial not only vis-a-vis the Jews but vis-a-vis America, which, he reminds us, not everyone saw as a promised land and which large portions of the huddled masses struggled to avoid. -- Daniel Lazare The Nation To come across a daring, original, sweeping work of history in this age of narrow specialization is not just a welcome event; it is almost a sensation. -- Walter Laqueur Los Angeles Times If Osama Bin Laden ever reads this book, he will be spinning in his cave. -- Gene Sosin The New Leader For Slezkine, Jews, urban, mobile, literate, flexible, have been role models of adaptability in a changing modern landscape. -- Joel Yanofsky National Post Brilliant... The Jewish Century is history on a majestic scale... [It] is fresh, compelling and frequently startling... The clarity of analysis is extraordinary, and the relatively simple conceptual tools Slezkine provides are unexpectedly powerful. -- Noah Efron Jerusalem Report This book is witty, sardonic and clever, written with zest and brilliant imagination and presents us with remarkable images of our recent past. -- John Levi Australian Jewish News Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century defies standard categorization, and this makes it a masterly work of history. -- Marc Dollinger Journal of American History [T]his is a brilliant book--it is extremely well written... Slezkine's book joins a very small number of first-rate studies of the modernization of the "Jews" seen through the lens of eastern rather than western history... Buy the book; read the book; use the book in Russian history and Jewish culture classes. der L. Gilman," Slavic Review The Jewish Century revives, with intellectual sophistication and stylistic verve, an old perception of the Jew's centrality to modernity. -- Hillel Halkin Commentary Yuri Slezkine's work... is a serious scholarly study of East European Jewry in the modern age, but dressed up in an eccentric and nonconventional style... [An] immensely entertaining and diputatious book... It is a work which will simultaneously inform, irritate, and entertain any reader with an interest in Russian, the Soviet, or modern Jewish history. -- John D. Klier Russian Review Reading Yuri Slezkine's scholarly arguments ... may make for difficult reading but it also provides intriguing ventures into highly original thinking. Jewish Book World This brilliant essay may significantly alter how we think about twentieth-century history... The part that the Jews played in Soviet Russia, or, perhaps better, the part that Soviet Russia played in the cultural imagination of the Jews, lies at the heart of the book. -- Angus Walker Central Europe
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