Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I greatly appreciate the assistance and support I have been given from numerous friends, colleagues, and organizations during the writing of this book. I have benefited enormously from all my colleagues at Indiana University in the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, the History Department, and the Russian and East European Institute. In particular, I am grateful to Matthias Lehmann, Ben Eklof, and Dov-Ber Kerler for their thoughtful comments on significant portions of this book. I welcome the opportunity to share ideas regularly with Steve Weitzman, Shaul Magid, Mark Roseman, and Dror Wahrman. I am privileged to hold a chair established in honor of Alvin Rosenfeld, a friend and colleague who has done much to promote Jewish public culture in our day. My graduate students, Jolanta Mickute and Nicole McGrath, gave an early draft of this manuscript a close read, and Larisa Privalskaya and Ryan Kilgore stepped in at the last minute to serve as research assistants. I have presented aspects of this book at numerous scholarly conferences and workshops over the last few years. These opportunities to interact with scholarsinrelatedfieldshavehelpedmeformulatemyideas.Ithereforethank the participants of the “Revolution of 1905: A Turning Point for the Jews?” conference at Hebrew University; the “Jews and Russian Revolutions” conference at Stanford University, the “Translation and Yiddish Culture” conference at the University of California, Berkeley, the “Yiddish Theater Revisited” conference at the University of Washington, and the “Klutznick Symposium on the Jews of Eastern Europe” at Creighton University. I also thank the Midwest Russian History Workshop, the Indiana University Modern European History Workshop, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and the Association for Jewish Studies. Brian Horowitz, John Efron, Jeremy Dauber, and Marci Shore have provided particularly useful comments, as has the anonymous reviewer for Indiana University Press. I would also like to acknowledge with sadness the passing of John Klier and Jonathan Frankel, both of whom have influenced and supported my own work as well as the entire field of Eastern European Jewish history. Janet Rabinowitch has been supportive of this book since I began writing it. I am fortunate to have such an expert editor working with me and viii Acknowledgments greatly appreciate all that she and the staff of Indiana University Press have done. Kate Babbitt’s attention to detail and thorough copyediting have made my prose more clear. Scott Taylor of IU Graphic Services prepared the map, and Jesse Cohen of theYIVO Institute for Jewish Research assisted me in selecting photographs. Several organizations provided much-appreciated financial support toward this project. I was fortunate to receive an ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship, a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a grant-in-aid of international travel from the REEI-Mellon Endowment at Indiana University, and research fellowships from the College Arts & Humanities Institute and the Research and University Graduate School at Indiana University. Portions of this book were previously published in other forms. Much of chapter 9 appeared as “The Historical and Ethnographic Construction of Russian Jewry,” Ab Imperio no. 4 (2003): 165–184. Segments of other chapters have been published as “ . . . Even Beyond Pinsk: Yizker Bikher [Memorial Books] and Jewish Cultural Life in the Shtetl,” Studies in Jewish Civilization 16 (2005) 175–189; and “Jewish Cultural Associations in the Aftermath of 1905,” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, ed. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). I thank these publishers for permission to republish these materials. Finally, I would like to thank my family. My father, my brother Daniel, and my uncle Louis Greenspan each read the manuscript and provided useful comments. I thank my wife Rebecca and my daughters Naomi and Leah for their love and support. I dedicate this book to Rebecca and, with apologies that Jewish history just doesn’t have many princesses, to Naomi and Leah. ...