Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture 1800s to the Present

[christa kling]

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

Academic Studies Press is pleased to announce Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture 1800s to the Present by Henrietta Mondry is now available. 

ISBN 978-1-934843-39-0 
Binding: cloth
Pages: 300 
Illustrations: 13 
Publication Date: November 2009

Bibliographic information: 1. Jews in popular culture -- Russia (Federation) 2. Human body in popular culture -- Russia (Federation)  3. Body image -- Social aspects -- Russia (Federation)  4. Russian literature -- History and criticism  5. Russia (Federation) -- Intellectual life 6. Russia (Federation) -- Ethnic relations I. Title

Series: Borderlines: Russian and East European-Jewish Studies

Summary: Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture, 1880s to the Present explores the construction of the Jew’s physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts from the 1880s to the present. With the rise of the dominance of biological and racialist discourse in the 1880s, the depiction of Jewish characters in Russian literary and cultural productions underwent a significant change, as these cultural practices recast the Jew not only as an archetypal “exotic” and religious or class Other (as in Romanticism and realist writing), but as a biological Other whose acts, deeds, and thoughts were determined by racial differences. This Jew allegedly had physical and psychological characteristics that were genetically determined and that could not be changed by education, acculturation, conversion to Christianity, or change of social status. This stereotype has become a stable
 archetype that continues to operate in contemporary Russian society and culture. 

Author: Henrietta Mondry is Professor and Director of the Russian Program at University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her recent books include Populist Writers and the Jews: In the Footsteps of 'Two Hundred Years Together, St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2005 (in Russian); and Pure, Strong and Sexless: Russian Peasant Woman's Body and Gleb Uspensky, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements						         6
A Note on Transliteration						7
List of Illustrations						9
Introduction							11

1. Russian Anthropological and Biological Sciences and the 
   “Jewish Race,” 1860s-1930				         29
2. Stereotypes of Pathology: The Medicalization of the Jewish Body 
   by Anton Chekhov, 1880s					         41
3. Carnal Jews of the Fin-de-Siècle: Vasily Rozanov,  the Jewish 
   Body and Incest					         64
4. 	Ilya Ehrenburg and His Pecaresque Jewish Bodies of the 1920s	88
5.	Criminal Bodies and Love of The Yellow Metal: the Jewish 
         Male and Stalinist Culture, 1930s-1950s			        124

6. 	Sadists’ Bodies of the Anti-Zionist Campaign Era: 1960s-1970s  147

7. 	Glasnost and the Uncensored Sexed Body of the Jew	        168

8. 	The Repatriated Body: A Russian Jewish Woman Writer in Israel
Or the Corporeal Fantasy of Dina Rubina, 1990s to the Present	        188

9. 	The Jewish Patient: Alexander Goldstein and the Postmodern 
Russian Jewish Body in Israel, 2000s				208

10. 	The “Real” Jewish Bodies of Oligarchs: Important Jewish 
Personalities and Post-Soviet Corporophobia			232

11. 	The Post-Soviet Assault on the Jew’s Body: The New Racial 
Science							244

Conclusion							271

Bibliography							277

Index of Names							293

Index of Subjects							298
			



      

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