In this highly sophisticated work of cultural history, which started out as a doctoral dissertation, Kenneth B. Moss argues that after the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, a cultural renaissance was engineered by members of the educated strata of the Jewish community. It was a renaissance that profoundly affected literature, the arts, theater, music, and, perhaps most importantly, the language to be used by the community in the envisaged new structure of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe. On the one hand, there was a resurgence of interest in Hebrew, which many intellectuals believed should be the primary language of the Jewish people in Russia. Others, however, opted for Yiddish, which was widely spoken by Jews in their everyday activities and relationships. In either case, the underlying idea of the renaissance was that the Jewish community was to be transformed into a national entity that would enjoy cultural autonomy within the new Russia emerging after the collapse of tsarism. In the author's words, the aim was nothing less than the creation of a “separate, encompassing Jewish high culture” (3). It was an enticing and noble dream that seemed to have some chance so long as the liberals, who took over authority in February, remained in control. By 1919, by which time the Bolsheviks appeared to be firmly in control of the country, the aspirations of the “Jewish culturists,” as Moss refers to the intellectuals leading the renaissance, were well on the way to being shattered.

In seven concise chapters, Moss, who has very good command of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, describes and analyzes the numerous endeavors by a wide range of Jews to implement their plans for a new, largely secular, culture. This involved endless meetings and conferences to plan to create programs as well as the publication of journals and books in Hebrew and Yiddish, and the creation of schools—hundreds of them—to educate youngsters in these languages and in the new culture. The leaders of the renaissance also intended to establish “Jewish museums for ethnography and art, traveling theaters, and mobile exhibitions to bring the new culture to the provinces” (3). They called on the most prominent Jewish writers to create a rich Hebrew and Yiddish literature for children, and the response was very impressive. It must be kept in mind that the culturists tried to implement these ambitious programs at a time of incredible political and social turmoil, when no one could be sure of the outcome of political struggles between social groups, parties, and individuals. At the same time, Russia was involved in a war that it was losing badly and that the country's new leaders did not know how to end.

Moss has dug deeply in the sources, many not easily accessible, and has marshaled an impressive array of data to buttress his thesis. Some of the evidence may be new even for scholars who have worked in the field of modern East European Jewish history and most probably to those who have specialized in the more general field of Russian history. Moss begins his book with a discussion of the tireless efforts of Hillel Zlatopolsky, who was a magnate devoted to the idea of converting Jews into a Hebrew-speaking community that would eventually constitute a “Jewish state in Eastern Europe.” Zlatopolsky's right-hand assistant was his daughter Shoshana, who came to be known as Persits and who was elected to the first, second, and third Knessets in Israel. Zlatopolsky spent a large amount of his fortune on founding a “network of publicly recognized schools, kindergartens, and gymnasia . . . linked to a Hebrew cultural sphere that he and like-minded activists sought to render independent of the market through organized communal funding” (24). The Zlatopolskys and other leaders of the cultural movement led interesting lives and at times one wishes that Moss had paid more attention to their personal affairs. It would not have detracted from the value of this study; it would have made it even more interesting. But this quibble aside, Moss's work is absorbing and important, in short, a very good book.

Moss does not confine himself to describing the establishment of various institutions designed to disseminate the new Jewish culture. He also provides accounts of the literature produced by the culturists and offers thoughtful insights into them. In addition, he includes fine translations of the poetry of Dovid Hofsteyn as well as of the penetrating criticism by Yeheskel Dobrushin. The chapter entitled “To Make Our Masses Intellectual” is a fascinating account of how people such as Yosef Klausner—who later became a professor of literature at Hebrew University and the author of an influential biography of Jesus—sought, as editor of the journal ha-Shiloaḥ, to transform “blinkered Diaspora Jews into cosmopolitan, European Hebrews.” The list of outstanding writers and thinkers whose work is analyzed in pithy and colorful language is too long to be mentioned in a brief review, but no one reading this book can doubt that culturally East European Jewry underwent a major shift in focus during the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Moss is therefore entitled to claim that his book “is the first attempt in a single history, with a special focus on Hebrew and Yiddish culture—and to analyze this diverse body of creativity in relation to the intellectual, aesthetic, and political problems of this tumultuous period and of East European modernity as a whole” (280). But he is also right to draw attention to the fact that the Jewish renaissance of 1917–1919 was not a totally new cultural movement within the Russian or East European Jewish community. As Jeffrey Veidlinger argued in his recently published Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire, for several decades before the upheaval in 1917 Jewish intellectuals had produced literature and works of history that marked a distinct turn to secular culture. It was a critical turn that, together with the Renaissance that Moss chronicles so well, profoundly influenced the culture of modern Jewry, and especially of Israel, which is now widely regarded as the major center of intellectual and artistic creativity of worldwide Jewry.