David Shneer

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Department of History

Im Zeichen des Visual Turn werden Bilder als wichtiges Instrument von Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichtspolitiken reflektiert. Dank ihrer momentanen globalen Verbreitung gewinnen sie in den Medien selbst den Status historischer Ereignisse, werden zu »Bildakten« (Bredekamp) und erzwingen als Fakten einen historisierenden Umgang. Aby Warburgs und Ser...

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be pers...

Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850–1917. By Vassili Schedrin . Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. xi, 292 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Tables. $49.99, hard bound. - Volume 76 Issue 4 - David Shneer

My essay examines Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the Netherlands between the two world wars with a focus on Amsterdam, the Jewish center of the country. The Netherlands was never a major recipient of migrants of any kind, let alone Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Despite seeing the Netherlands primarily as a transit site, enough Yiddish-speaker...

During World War II, the first media outlets to publish photographs of the Nazi mass murder of Jews and others were Soviet newspapers and magazines. The problem with Soviet photographs was that the Soviet media were considered unreliable from a Western standpoint, because unlike in the West, which perceived a clear ideological differentiation of ar...

This article takes as its starting point the idea that as all disciplinary boundaries are constructs, the Introduction to Jewish Studies course is a useful place to begin thinking about moving beyond a multidisciplinary menu to an interdisciplinary way of thinking. Jewish Studies is a microcosm of the diversity within the humanities and social scie...

In the West, Auschwitz and its gas chambers became a metonym of genocide, but genocide takes place less often in purpose-built death centers than in mundane sites of daily existence, like “killing fields” in Cambodia or by the sides of roads in Rwanda. So too with the Holocaust. In the Soviet Union, the Holocaust was more mundane, integrated into d...

It was a seminar on Yiddish and Hebrew literature early in my graduate career, sometime in the mid-1990s. Chana Kronfeld’s classes usually took place in the lovely living room or dining room of her home, really more of a classic Victorian salon, the space in which my best graduate learning happened at Berkeley. Chana’s salon was my intellectual hom...

From 1990 until 2008, about 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union migrated to Germany. At the same time, Germany re-unified and took its place at the centre of the new Europe. In a global world, in which people maintain multiple homes, languages, identities and means of communication across thousands of miles, these migrants challenged German J...

In 2009 Natan Sharansky, formerly an iconic Soviet refusenik and now an Israeli politician, was named chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the wing of the Israeli government historically charged with fostering Jewish immigration to Israel, traditionally known as aliya. Sharansky, however, immediately reformulated the central mission of the Jew...

Zionism and the Roads Not Taken is a well-researched intellectual history of Zionism without a state of Israel, of Jewish nationalism without the presumption of political sovereignty. Pianko focuses on three important thinkers of the interwar period, who have been lost to the canonical intellectual history of Zionism that goes from Herzl and Nordau...

Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually inves...

CaronDavid. My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. x, 267 pp. - Volume 34 Issue 1 - David Shneer

Under the Red Banner: Yiddish Culture in the Communist Countries in the Postwar Era. Ed. Grözinger Elvira and Ruta Magdalena . Kultur Jüdische . Studien zur Geistesgeschichte, Religion, und Literatur, no. 20. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008. 268 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. €46.00, hard bound. - Volume 69 Issue 1 - David Shnee...

On 5 October 2007, the New York Times profiled a French priest named Father Patrick Debois, who has spent the last ten years of his life searching the countryside of Ukraine for the burial sites of Jews murdered by Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.1 The story was noteworthy not because it was about the Holocaust, since the Holocaus...

In the Jewish tradition, reading of the Torah follows a calendar cycle, with a specific portion assigned each week. These weekly portions, read aloud in synagogues around the world, have been subject to interpretation and commentary for centuries. Following on this ancient tradition, Torah Queeries brings together some of the world's leading rabbis...

FeingoldHenry. “Silent No More”: Saving the Jews of Russia, The American Jewish Effort, 1967–1989. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007. xv, 400 pp. - Volume 32 Issue 2 - David Shneer

Who knew that American Jewish culture was so queer? In this provocative and well-informed cultural study, Warren Hoffman shows how some quintessential icons of American Jewish culture are best understood through the lens of sexuality. The title of the book, The Passing Game, nicely articulates Hoffman’s core question—how Jews and queers and Jewish...

Argument In the 1920s the Soviet Union invested a group of talented, mostly socialist, occasionally Communist, Jewish writers and thinkers to use the power of the state to remake Jewish culture and identity. The Communist state had inherited a multiethnic empire from its tsarist predecessors and supported the creation of secular cultures for each e...

The law of unintended consequences defines Anna Shternshis' fascinating new book, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the new Soviet government enacted policies to eliminate perceived injustices from the tsarist regime and to turn its multiethnic empire into a Soviet nation. Soviet...

While queers and Jews have always been part of the cultural landscape, queer Jews have tended to be rather ambivalent about being both queer and Jewish. However, in recent years this connection is being promoted in a more proactive fashion. This paper highlights three examples of queer Jews whose cultural performances rely on being both queer and J...

Эссе Дэвида Шнира открывается ссылкой на статью одного из ведущих идишистских писателей довоенного поколения – Давида Бергельсона “Три центра” (1926 г.). Подобно Ю. Слёзкину сегодня, Бергельсон делил мир на три идеологические еврейские “культурные зоны”: США, где еврейству грозила полная ассимиляция; Польша, где традиционный еврейский образ жизни о...

For many contemporary Jews, Israel no longer serves as the Promised Land, the center of the Jewish universe and the place of final destination. In New Jews, Caryn Aviv and David Shneer provocatively argue that there is a new generation of Jews who don't consider themselves to be eternally wandering, forever outsiders within their communities and se...

Book History 6 (2003) 197-226 In May 1921 the leading body of Soviet Jewish cultural activists, the Central Bureau of the Jewish Section of the Communist Party (Evsektsiia), reported a rather bizarre crime—the midnight theft of reams of paper that had been earmarked for producing state-sponsored Yiddish books. The evidence included the obvious mass...

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 21.4 (2003) 153-156 If today conservatives lament the high divorce rate of Americans in 2002, what would they have thought of Jews living in tsarist Russia, who divorced at rates higher than today's American rates? ChaeRan Freeze, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Brandeis Universi...

В 1920-е гг. Советский Союз был единственным в мире государством, официально спонсировавшим издательства, писательские союзы, суды, городские советы и школы на идиш. Советский Союз также поддерживал социалистически настроенных еврейских деятелей, стремившихся к созданию новой еврейской культуры для нового типа еврея. Эту группу автор статьи, Дэвид...

Cet article raconte l'histoire de la creation d'un etablissement philologique yiddish en Union sovietique dans les annees 1920 qui montre la force de la centralisation autant que ses limites. Un institut a Minsk, un autre a Kiev, creation du journal philologique professionel Di Yidishe Shprakh (La langue yiddish) qui a reussi a codifier et a etendr...