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This chapter highlights how the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union initiated a new period in the history of the Jews in the area. Poland was now a fully sovereign country, and Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova also became independent states. Post-imperial Russia faced the task of creating a new form of national identity. This was to prove more difficult than in other post-imperial states since, unlike Britain and France, the tsarist empire and its successor, the Soviet Union, had not so much been the ruler of a colonial empire as an empire itself. All of these countries now embarked, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, on the difficult task of creating liberal democratic states with market economies. For the Jews of the area, the new political situation allowed both the creation and development of Jewish institutions and the fostering of Jewish cultural life in much freer conditions, but also facilitated emigration to Israel, North America, and western Europe on a much larger scale.

This chapter focuses on the expansion of the Jewish press, the development of a lively Jewish art and music scene, and the strengthening of the interfaith movement. It discloses the creation of a wide variety of journals of differing Zionist, literary, and religious orientations that marked an important change in contemporary French Jewish life. It also investigates the journals that served as a vehicle to discuss new developments in the Jewish associational and cultural life of the day and provided a forum to discuss diverse aspects of Jewish culture and history. The chapter discusses the prominence of Jewish artists in the international Ecole de Paris as another important development in Jewish cultural life during the 1920s. It also describes French Jews that formed musical societies and choruses to perform Jewish music, from traditional religious compositions to Yiddish folk songs, in public settings.

This chapter looks at the experience of survivors in displaced persons (DP) camps as a cultural anomaly, when Yiddish language and literature formed the basis for cultural continuity in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Jews in the DP camps produced a number of Yiddish publications whose aim was to renew Jewish cultural life. But even as the camp setting fostered the use of Yiddish as a lingua franca, survivors recognized that the role of the language and its culture was changing. Despite the efforts of Yiddishist writers and cultural activists to sustain it, Yiddish stood at a critical juncture: the debate over the adoption of a common language to unify Jewish civilization was not new, but in the DP camps it set the stage for the future development of Jewish culture. The chapter then explores the Yiddish DP camp publications to interpret the choices and loyalties that shaped the language practices of the time and the policies the intelligentsia of the camps articulated. It looks, first, at factors internal to the DP camps and, second, at external factors influencing language use, especially political and Zionist organizations and agencies.

This chapter examines Konrad Zieliński's Żydzi Lubelszczyzny 1914-1918 (Jews of the Lublin Region 1914-1918). Zieliński focuses on the period of the First World War and its influence on the Jews living in the region of Lublin at the time, more specifically in the area under Austro-Hungarian occupation. In writing about various developments, such as the shaping of Jewish political and cultural life, he draws on earlier materials dating to the end of the nineteenth century, when, in large towns such as Lublin, Chełm, and Zamość, the seeds of the Jewish political parties were sown. The revolution of 1905 proved to be of great importance for the region of Lublin because, to the surprise of both Poles and Jews, it demonstrated that the latter were capable of engaging in mass socio-political movements and often displayed great national awareness. But the decisive period for the shaping of Jewish identity in the provincial towns of the region of Lublin was the First World War, when news of Zionism, socialism, and communism reached such places as Markuszów, Biłgoraj, Hrubieszów, and Tomaszów Lubelski.

This chapter examines the work of the restitution agency called the Sous-Commission des livres, the arm of the Commission de récupération artistique that handled the restitution of the estimated ten million books that the Germans had looted in France during the war. Like the larger organization of which it was a part, the leaders of the book restitution authority were imbued with a republican spirit; indeed, the hundreds of reports archived in their files at the Archives nationales testify that they made no explicit distinction between “Jewish books” and “non-Jewish books,” and certainly no distinction whatsoever between Jewish book owners and non-Jewish book owners. Nevertheless, largely because of the practical issues involved in the restitution of books, these French authorities wound up doing much that would ultimately help Jewish libraries rebuild after the war in ways that would prove beneficial for rebuilding French Jewish cultural life.