Russian Idea--Jewish Presence: Essays on Russian-Jewish Intellectual Life - Paperback

by Brian Horowitz (Author)

In Russian Idea--Jewish Presence, Professor Brian Horowitz follows the career tracks of Jewish intellectuals who, having fallen in love with Russian culture, were unceremoniously repulsed. Horowitz relays the paradoxes of a synthetic Jewish and Russian self-consciousness in order to correct critics who have always considered Russians and Jews as polar opposites, enemies, and incompatible. In fact, the best Russian-Jewish intellectuals--Semyon Dubnov, Maxim Vinaver, Mikhail Gershenzon, and a number of Zionist writers and thinkers--were actually inspired by Russian culture and attempted to develop a sui generis Jewish creativity in three languages on Russian soil.

Author Biography

Brian Horowitz (PhD University of California, Berkeley) is the Sizeler Family Chair Professor in Jewish Studies at Tulane University. He is the author of such books as Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia (2009) and Empire Jews (2009). He has won numerous awards, including a fellowship at the Frankel Center at the University of Michigan, an Alexander Von Humboldt grant, a Fulbright, an IREX grant, and a Yad Hanadiv grant to study with Ezra Mendelsohn and the late Jonathan Frankel at the Hebrew University.