White Piano in a Shtetl: Material Culture and Ethnic Identity in the Post-Soviet Jewish Urban Community

The revival of Jewish culture in post-Soviet Moscow manifested itself in tremendous interest in Yiddish music among both Jewish and non-Jewish artists and viewers. Large-scale in their scope and original in their unorthodox interpretations, performances of Yiddish music filled the largest concert halls of Moscow in the early 2000s. What do the production, content, and reception of these shows teach us about post-Soviet Jewish identity? This article examines works by Efim Alexandrov and Alexander Tsaliuk, contemporary Russian artists who chose to devote their careers to the revival of Yiddish music in post-Soviet Russia.