Keyner iz nit fargesn

Miriam Schulz

This study provides a Benjaminian reading of Soviet Yiddish cultural and intellectual history from the 1920s to the 1980s and retrieves the legacy of Soviet Yiddish antifascist thought and activism as a constitutive element throughout its existence. The interconnected ideas of antifascism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism are introduced as important reading keys for Soviet Yiddish culture, for its ideas of ‘Jewishness’ and for its varied responses to the Holocaust and its memory – as represented in works of literature, film, theater and monuments. In attempting to ‘decolonize’ this antifascism and Holocaust memory in dialogue with postcolonial studies and critical race theory, this study makes sense of the Soviet and Yiddish cultural ecosystems with the help of Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘cultural hybridity’ and posits not persecution and antisemitism...