@article{THESIS,
      recid = {2482},
      author = {Beniash, Daria},
      title = {Conversations with Soviet Jews},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {B.A.},
      address = {2019-06},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {	The aim of this project is to explore the  non-assimilation into Jewish American religious life of  members of the fourth and final wave (1986-1989) of Soviet  Jewish refugees to the United States. In the late 1980s,  thousands of Soviet Jews came to the US with the help of  American Jews. As is evident in American Jewish  publications, though the American hosts expected the Soviet  Jews to engage in Jewish religious life in America, they  were often disappointed. So why have so many Soviet Jewish  refugees not fully taken on Jewish cultural and religious  identity after their immigration to the United States? In  this paper I argue that despite the extraordinary efforts  of the American Jewish community, the Soviet Jewish  immigrants of the last wave have not taken on an American  Jewish religious identity, in part because American and  Soviet Jews have different understandings of what it means  to be Jewish. Through a close examination of six interviews  conducted with fourth-wave refugees, five publications on  the subject of their integration by Jewish organizations,  as well as two handbooks published by the Hebrew Immigrant  Aid Society for Soviet Jews about American Jewish life, I  demonstrate that the Soviet Jews in the US have created  their own Jewish identity based on their experiences of  Jewishness in the USSR, and engage in American Jewish  religious life only in ways that are useful or meaningful  to them in the context of this past. I also show that the  American Jewish community has often had trouble  understanding this, as is evident in the multitude of  publications they have released in which they explore the  potential reasons for this phenomenon and search for a  solution to bring Soviet Jews into the American Jewish  religious community. Within this analysis, I explore the  concepts of identity, religiosity, and culture. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2482},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2482},
}