God Himself Was Our Neighbor: Recent Episodes
Daniel Blokh
“Not sleeping, you wait for me by our child’s cradle/And because of this, I know nothing will happen to me.” These lyrics from Temnaya Noch, the most famous Soviet song about World War 2, were written by a Russian Jew. In fact, much of the popular literature, music, and film dealing with the trauma of war was made by Jews, even though their ethnic identity was hidden from the public and Jews were slandered and repressed by Soviet leadership. Beneath Mark Bernes’ heartfelt war ballads, Yuri Norstein’s explorations of collective suffering in animated short films, and David Samoylov’s somber poems about lost youth, there lies the particular sadness of a people which had confronted its own extinction. The Soviet-Jewish war experience remains a mostly untold story. In America, many Jews associate the war exclusively with the Holocaust, while in Russia, many people grow up learning a story of the war that downplays both Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and the contribution of Soviet Jews to the war effort (militarily and culturally). My podcast aims to disrupt these oversimplified perceptions by revisiting the narrative of Soviet Jews in the war, a story in whichsuffering is wedded to action, fear to bravery, tragedy to eventual triumph. Across 6 episodes, I weave together interviews with scholars, literary excerpts, and accounts of my own family’s experiences, showcasing the contributions of Jews to Soviet society and culture.This project is created as part of COJECO Arts Against Anti-semitism Initiative and is made possible with PATH funding through the Mayor’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
Where did Jews belong - in the Eastern Bloc or in the capitalist west? As this question became a central point of contention in the Cold War, advocates of Soviet Jewish emigration to the West promoted their cause by portraying Jewish life in the Soviet Union as dominated by suffering and oppression. This episode looks at the full complexity of Soviet Jewish life and history which such narratives failed to convey. Music by Isaac Pross.
With Khrushchev’s de-Stalinizing campaign, Jewish themes gradually re-emerged in Soviet art, becoming central to struggles over the new limits of cultural censorship. In this episode, I look at the success and failure of various artists’ attempts to re-connect the Jewishness with the Soviet cause. Music by Isaac Pross.
WW2 left more than 20 million Red Army soldiers and 6 million Jews dead. Everyone had something to mourn. But the post-war state outlawed pessimistic art, and especially art which mentioned the Holocaust. In this episode, I explore how the memory of Jewish persecution led to the criminalization of Jewishness in the post-war Soviet Union. Music by Isaac Pross.
Before WW2, Jews were more assimilated into Soviet society than ever before. After WW2, they became the targets of official anti-Semitic campaigns as well as everyday prejudice. In this episode, we will explore how the 1940s made Jews and non-Jews alike begin to feel that Jews were somehow different from the rest of the Soviet public. Music by Isaac Pross.
In 1926, Vertov released a film that got him fired from his film studio. It was an experimental film celebrating communist internationalism and Soviet diversity - values that had been praised just years earlier, but became taboo under Stalin. In this episode, I explore the transformation of the communist movement from a boundless and borderless project to an autonomous and isolated state, and what this transition meant for Soviet Jews. Music by Isaac Pross.
When Lenin climbed atop a train car in April 1917 and called upon the Bolshevik Party to seize control from the provisional government, many of those who supported his platform were Jews. In this episode, I look at Eastern European Jews' complex experience of the revolution and examine why so many of them were drawn to the socialist cause. Music by Isaac Pross.