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The thesis of this paper is that governments of some otherwise enlightened states are increasingly fearful of acknowledging the restraints imposed on them by existing international law. They are also reluctant to enter into new commitments by way of international conventions that would expand the reach of international law. The paper asks whether these fears are based on a true understanding of international law or on some distorted view of it. It will draw comparisons and some contrasts between Australia and the United States in their reactions to a number of recent events as well as to some enduring situations of contemporary relevance. Had time (and the limits of my research) permitted, one might also have examined public attitudes toward international law in China, Japan, and Russia in this context, where similar fears appear to be entertained. France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, also enlightened states, appear by contrast to belong to a group more dedicated to international law. As Robert Kagan has recently remarked, the experience of two world wars at close quarters, and the formation of the European Union, have made the European countries more dedicated to process, where the United States is more interested in results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on issues regarding the 1855-1894 censorship of the Russian press and the Jewish Question. Among the periodicals affected by the censorship are the "Rassvet," the first Russian-language Jewish newspaper in 1860, and "Slowo," Polished-language periodical. These periodicals were the principal vehicle for developing and transmitting public opinion on the Jewish Question. Moreover, editors of these publications were forced to acknowledge a government stipulation that no articles devoted to Jewish emancipation could be published without specific permission from the capital.

The article focuses on the reaction of African Americans in the U.S. on the persecution of the Jews in Russia during the early 1900s. It offers information on the sufferings of the Jews under tsarist antisemitism in Russia. It describes the efforts of Afro-American communities to ease the plight of the Jews through demonstrations and protests demanding better treatment for Russian Jews. It explains the significance of the rallies and demonstrations that paved a way in ameliorating the condition of the persecuted race or the Jews.

Using recently uncovered writings by Leon Pinske, the proto-Zionist thinker, the current article challenges the generally accepted understanding of Pinsker's intellectual development as moving "from assimilation to nationalism."In particular, the article reevaluates the idea that in his pamphlet "Autoemancipation!" Pinsker proposed territorial nationalism as an ideological substitute for Jewish citric emancipation in the Diaspora, particularly in the Russian empire. Rather, Pinsker held that the establishment of a national Jewish territory would, by its very existence, pave the way for the enhanced emancipation of those Jews who continued to live outside the territorial homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses upon the oral prose genre known in Russian as bylichka (pl., bylichki) or mythological story (mifologicheskii rasskaz). The term identifies a story about a supernatural event that really happened; whether told using a first- or third-person perspective, bylichki imply a certain immediacy of experience. In Soviet Russia, researchers claimed that people told these stories for aesthetic purposes, but did not believe them. Conversely, other researchers in Russia and the West have tended to emphasize the relation of narrative content to belief systems. We agree that bylichki are inextricably connected to belief, but emphasize that the content and artistry of these stories are also linked to immediate social settings. Based on three decades of fieldwork in Russian villages (1978-2009), we examine the ways and reasons these stories unfold in specific conversational contexts, considering how narrators interpret past experience, claim particular social roles in the present, and offer vital cultural information (including prescriptions for future action). As narrators negotiate differentials in cultural knowledge among their interlocutors, they shape the content, form, and performance of their personal experiences, creating oral memoirs that instruct others as they construct the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A striking feature of contemporary Russian cinema and popular history is its obsession with a military unit's near or total annihilation in combat. Contrary to expectations, however, the carnage is marked as a good, even desired result. Victory in death is no oxymoron in Russian culture but a pronounced feature of its representation of the military, linked to Christian and other historical roots. This article not only demonstrates the widespread appeal of this template. It also seeks to explain why it has recently become so pronounced, how it operates as a positive ending and how it is tied to ongoing debates in Russia over the legacy of World War II, which often center on its unprecedented human costs, to real-life events, particularly in Chechnya, and to a resurgent Russian national identity—one distinctly bloody but quite resilient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the late 1880s to the early 1900s, Jewish socialists in the United States shipped thousands of Yiddish newspapers, journals, and pamphlets to the Russian Empire. The literature was used to spread revolutionary ideas and secular knowledge among a relatively small but growing number of Russian Jews drawn into the nascent Jewish workers' movement. This article examines which publications were sent, how they were smuggled into and circulated within Russia, and their influence on the Jewish workers' movement. In doing so, the article argues in favor of a transnational framework for understanding relations between Jews in the United States and Russia, one that recognizes the influence of America on developments in Russia as well as the reverse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dramatic post-Soviet transformations have profoundly affected school education in Russia. History courses were deeply involved in this painful process. They experienced a revolutionary shift in emphasis from class struggle to nationalism and ethnocentrism. Textbooks were rewritten several times over the course of fifteen to twenty years. One of the problems faced by their authors was how to create a balanced presentation of the numerous ethnic groups that constituted the former Soviet Union in textbooks where the dominant majority was represented by ethnic Russians. In this article I demonstrate that an aspiration to depict Russia as a homogeneous civilization led to the biased representation of certain non- Russian ethnic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The myth of the Great Patriotic War, including the role of the USSR in the origins of World War II, continues to be a key element in the national identity of the Russian people. Previously, Soviet authorities mandated a narrative depicting the Soviet Union sincerely and unambiguously working for peace and against Nazi expansionism in the prewar years. This interpretation criticized the Western Powers for their alleged complicity in Hitler's aggression. After the collapse of the USSR, several competing views have appeared. The Putin and Medvedev administrations, as well as the popular "national-patriotic" school, maintain much of the former Soviet interpretation. Other Russian historians, many of them politically liberal, indict Stalin for mishandling the prewar crisis or even for promoting the onset of war for imperialistic or revolutionary purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russian historiography has known rapid changes in Russia and in Western countries during the last two decades. This evolution stemmed, first, from the historical events that occurred in the course of Soviet and Russian history since Gorbachev's policy of glasnost' (openness) and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991; second, from the reappraisals that these events generated among practicing historians in Russia and the West; and third, to a lesser extent, from various research approaches in the humanities and the social sciences. This essay presents some reflections on the forms and content that these reappraisals brought about in historical writing, and on the new trends in the historians' views on past historiography. The constituent elements and prospects of one of these trends, the emergence of a process of internationalization of Russian historiography, are examined and evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to introduce Russian-language Israeli literature, specifically focusing on the works of one of its best-known representatives, Dina Rubina. The article traces the three most prominent themes in her works: the theater, the autobiography, and the cultural synthesis between post-Soviet and Israeli Jewish cultures accompanied by the complex linguistic relationships between Russian and Hebrew. Drawing on the Bakhtinian theories of the carnivalesque and of the humor associated with the lower bodily stratum, as well as on the topos of teatrum mundi and the legacy of Russian drama, the article examines Rubina's commentary on Israeli society and culture. Her focus on the ridiculous and the absurd, on the permutations of masks and identities in Israel, and on the multifaceted immigrant experience is essential for understanding her writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Workers' Film & Photo League movement of the 1930s gave rise to local groups of film activists across the United States. San Francisco's Film & Photo League coalesced in 1933, documenting California labor struggles and social conditions during the Depression, as well as acting as a distribution network for censored Soviet films and American newsreels. The San Francisco Film & Photo League production Century of Progress (1934) is discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the unique interaction of Zionists and Russia's elite writers and poets in the creation of the journal "Sborniki safrut." In the revolutionary years 1917-19, a genuine interpenetration of Jewish and Russian culture occurred; writers and thinkers found common ground on the basis of utopian urges, demands for political justice, literary collaboration, and a rethinking of Christian-Jewish relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Jewish national awakening among Soviet and East European Jewry and the first signs of official Soviet policy on the Jewish Question. The period May-December 1948 is a relatively brief period in Israeli-Soviet relations, which is of utmost importance because it reflects the dilemmas and inconsistencies of Soviet policy toward Israel and Jewish issues. Jewish national awakening in the Soviet Union resulted from the integration of two main factors: The profound shock caused by the Holocaust and the Soviet government's rather liberal, albeit fleeting, policy toward the national problem.

This article discusses Jews' adoption of surnames in Russia in 1804 during the reign of Nicholas I. In an effort to minimize the self-sufficiency of the Jewish community and link Jews to the broader polity, a statute attempted to reorganize the place of Jews in Russian society. The adoption of hereditary surnames facilitated the mediation of civil disputes, the control of property, and the management of Jews in existing social categories. As the surnames helped officials ascribe legal status to Jews, they also played a decisive role in regulating their place in the social domain. The adoption of surnames signaled the beginning of a gradual transformation of Russian Jewry into a legal people.

The article describes the attitude of Jews in Great Britain toward political and social change in Russia from the February Revolution of 1848 through the Bolshevik control of power to the end of the Civil War in March 1921. It also relates the waves of Jewish immigration to Great Britain from the Russian Empire and the special relationship of Jews in Great Britain with Russia, which is traced back to their close family ties. It also highlights the Jewish political community from 1917 to 1921 and their responses to the revolution.

The article focuses on the factors and the degree of support to the Russian Zionist Movement from 1901 to 1903 including the social, economic and religious factors. Accordingly, the Russian Zionist Movement was the main component of the Zionist Federation for it has the largest membership of the whole Zionist Movement and constitutes a larger contribution than the other parallel movements. However, the movement lacks the needed adequate support due to the social, economic and religious factors that differently recognized various groups in Russian Jewry. In this regard, a quasi-model of the distribution within the country where Zionist Leagues were formed were constructed to know the groups in the Jewish society that supported the movement.

The article offers a comparison on the 19th century governmental policies involving the Jewish in Germany and Russia. The German government integrated the Jews as German Jews into their community as individuals but the formation of a Jewish corporate entity was abolished. They created reforms on the Jews by direct governmental intervention in their lives. The Russian government through the leadership of Catherine the Great strived to incorporate the Jews into the Russian society by changing the official terminology from Jew to Hebrew, incorporation of the Jews into legal estates and attempted to change the Jews into farmers.

Analyzes the foreign relations between Russia and Israel during the administration of Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Development in the trade and cultural exchange; Creation of economic and cultural ties; Examination of the political relations; Impact of the leadership of Yeltsin on the development of foreign relations.

The article focuses on some demographic characteristics of the Jewish population in Russia during the second half of the 19th century. The author discusses the determinants of Jewish population growth rate including the estimates of the life expectancy and data on nuptiality patterns. They have also mentioned the use of techniques based on the theory of stable populations to determine the respective role of natality and mortality in the growth of the Jewish population. Some estimations concerning fertility levels as well as data relative to nuptiality is presented in order to compare the seeming importance of the different factors affecting the population growth rates.

The article profiles Vasilii Rozanov, a Russian intellectual who rejected Western materialism and radicalism and Christianity at the turn of the 19th century. He completed his studies in the faculties of history and philosophy and became a high schoolteacher of history and geography. He was taken on as a regular contributor to the semi-official daily "Novoe Vremia." It was stated that there is no area in Rozanov's writings and in his personal behavior where contradiction is more clearly manifested than in his attitudes towards Jews and Judaism.