Three and a Half Lessons of Jewish-Russian History

Iam deeply grateful to the editors of Mosaic for publishing my long essay on today’s Russian Jewry and the three responses to it.

It was a special treat to read—and reflect upon—Konstanty Gebert’s emotional and thought-provoking comment. There’s so much I would like to discuss with him, and I hope for the opportunity to do so in person during an upcoming visit to Poland in April-May of this year when I will speak at Polin and visit the former camps in eastern Poland. To paraphrase, freely and liberally, one of the last essays by the late Shimon Markish, son of the murdered Yiddish Soviet poet and playwright Peretz Markish and brother of the Russian-Israeli writer David Markish: in the soul of almost every Russian Jew there dwells a Polish ancestor. The span of Jewish history in the Russian lands is much briefer than in Poland, and the lessons of Jewish-Polish history continue to illuminate us today even as they haunt us in their devastating finality.

To Leon Aron I say spasibo and “Godspeed” as in his work he continues to offer us one sober warning after the other. This time, it’s a double warning, a double lesson. Jewish leaders in Russia and other post-Soviet states should look to the past as they eagerly assume positions of power or walk too closely to their countries’ political rulers. And there’s more: the need, even as we celebrate the great advances of post-Soviet Jewish communities, to remain vigilant.