In Search of Self

This book presents the thoughts and aspirations of those Jewish intellectuals who in the seventies initiated a dramatic turning point in the history of Soviet Jewry – the exodus of 250,000 Jews from the Soviet Union. The essays reveal the diversity behind the Jewish movement of renewal in the Soviet Union. Different sections cover the actual struggle to emigrate from various areas of the Soviet Union; the problems of cultural and self-identity faced by the Soviet Jewish intellectual both before and after emigration; debates on the role of the Soviet Jewish immigrant in the Jewish State; and the future of Jewish culture in the USSR. These analyses also suggest some of the deep-rooted reasons behind the current dropout problem.