 | Jews in the Former Grand Duchy of Lithuania Since 1772 This volume of Polin, based on scholarship that has emerged since the fall of communism, is a wide-ranging contribution to the complex history of the Jews in Lithuania. Focusing on the specific character of Lithuanian Jewry, the volume opens by examining how their relationship with the surrounding society developed after 1772, both under tsarist rule and then in independent Lithuania. Moving to more recent times, the devastating impact on the Jewish community of the Soviet and Nazi occupations during the Second World War is discussed, as are the further negative consequences on Jewish life of the reoccupation of the country by the Soviets between 1944 and 1990. The volume concludes with material on the slow revival of Jewish life since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-emergence of an independent Lithuania, which was accompanied by the revival of many disciplines, such as the study of Jewish history, repressed by Soviet censorship. Sarunas Liekis is Dean and Professor of the Faculty of Political Science and Diplomacy at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas. He studied and did postgraduate research at Vilnius University (habilitation procedure passed in 2005); Brandeis University (1993 - 98, Ph.D.); the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and the University of Oxford. He publishes extensively on Jewish history, minority issues, and the international and political history of Lithuania and Poland. His latest book is 1939: The Year that Changed Everything in Lithuania's History (2010). Antony Polonsky is Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Until 1991, he was Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry; author of Politics in Independent Poland, 1921 - 1939 (1972), The Little Dictators (1975), The Great Powers and the Polish Question, 1941 - 45 (London, 1976); co-author of The History of Poland since 1863 (1980) and The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (1981); and co-editor of Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology (2001) and The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (2004). His most recent work is The Jews in Poland and Russia, I: 1350 - 1881; II: 1881 - 1914; III: 1914-2008 (2010 - 12), published by the Littman Library. ChaeRan Freeze is associate professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (2001), which received the Koret Foundation Publication Award and the Salo Baron Award for the Best First Book in Jewish Studies. She is co-editor (with Jay Harris) of Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia, 1825 - 1914: Select Documents (forthcoming) and is working on a book Sex and the Shtetl: Gender, Family, and Jewish Sexuality in Tsarist Russia. |
