Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union

relationship between Israeli Hebrew and Jewish diaspora cultures. Many bearers of the interwoven secular Hebraist and Labor Zionist projects in Israeli culture understood and appreciated that their new Israeli culture was rooted in East European Jewish modernity — and thus Yiddish culture (unlike other diaspora Jewish cultures like that of new Mizrahi Jewish immigrants) could not simply be rejected. Throughout the book, Rojanski develops this argument through archival work into the production process of Israeli Yiddish culture in its various forms. Thus, she shows that highbrow and quality Yiddish theater did not meet with an active campaign of suppression, as we might expect from the “negationist” account. Actually, highbrow Yiddish theater drew substantial approbation and support from government circles and from the dominant elements in Israel’s Hebrew cultural sphere, because it could tap into a surprisingly deep reservoir of positive feelings toward East European Jewry; modern Yiddish culture’s achievements; the necessity of creative commemoration of the murdered Jewish communities of Eastern Europe; and the idea that the new Israeli culture had to engage less in a forgetting of diaspora culture than in its Aufhebung. Analytically, Rojanski’s insistence late in chapter 5 that Yiddish culture in Israel should be read in the framework less of Deleuze and Guattari on minor literature/writing from the margins, and more in terms of a late flowering of an essentially transnational (if now demographically crippled) cultural sphere, is important. Also important is her insistence on thinking about how the exigencies and limits of the audience for different forms of Yiddish culture in Israel proved more determinative than state policy in selecting for and against various Yiddish cultural endeavors — a Bourdeiusian analysis that Yiddish studies is sometimes too populistminded to take up. Rachel Rojanski’s Yiddish in Israel will be essential reading for students of Israeli history and, perhaps more apposite in these pages, for students of modern Yiddish culture in all its locations and forms.