The wave of pogroms in Russia in 1881-2 forcefully brought to the surface a complex of demographic, ideological and cultural developments that had been working their way through the Jewish communities of the Pale since the mid-nineteenth century and which were to affect profoundly modern Jewish history. Commemorating the centennial of those catalytic years and their aftermath - especially the mass emigration and resettlement of Russian Jews during the three decades that followed - the book under review re-examines the impact of these events on different areas of life of twentieth-century Jewry.

The volume consists of fourteen short essays presented originally as papers at the 9th Annual Conference on Society in Change held at Brooklyn College in March 1981. It opens with an apt introduction by Irving Howe on the ‘fresh churning energies and yearnings’ that burst through the seemingly stale surface of Jewish life in the Pale in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These made it possible for a suppressed and powerless people ‘to escape, or evade or transcend its circumstances’ in a collective pursuit of religious, cultural, or social renewal and transformation, reflected in every important Jewish movement of that period: Haskalah, Yiddishism, socialism, folkism, Zionism, and mass emigration. The subsequent articles are as follows: a review by Jonathan Frankel of the events of 1881-2 and of the immediate responses by Russian Jewry to this crisis; Michael Stanislawski's discussion of the gradual disintegration of the authority of the kahals, the traditional Jewish self-government in the communities of the Pale; an analysis of the rapidly progressing urbanization of Russian Jewry and its attendant problems as perceived by maskilim (enlighteners) by Steve Zipperstein; Robert Seltzer's investigation of the intellectual evolution of Simon Dubnov and of the significance of ‘Dubnovism';