Russia Jews

Doubly Chosen provides the first detailed study of a unique cultural and religious phenomenon in post-Stalinist Russia-the conversion of thousands of Russian Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox Christianity, first in the 1960s and later in the 1980s. These time periods correspond to the decades before and after the great exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt contends that the choice of baptism into the Church was an act of moral courage in the face of Soviet persecution, motivated by solidarity with the values espoused by Russian Christian dissidents and intellectuals. Oddly, as Kornblatt shows, these converts to Russian Orthodoxy began to experience their Jewishness in a new and positive way.

Providing a gripping, first-hand account of the Chmielnicki massacres in 1648-58, in which tens of thousands of Jews perished in Poland and the Ukraine, Rabbi Nathan Hanover describes the events themselves and their effect on European Jewry.