Beyond the Pale

Leon Pinsker and <em>“Autoemancipation!”</em>: A Reevaluation

“…23 Yet a number of new studies of the patterns of Jewish political nationalist thought have demonstrated that, prior to World War I and during most of the interwar period, notions of territorially based selfdetermination of Jewish nationality, on the one hand, and of the reassertion of Jews' civic emancipation as a part of the diaspora Jewish nationality concept, on the other, were far from being mutually exclusive. 1 rectly perceived to be paradigmatic of the intellectual-political transformation among his Russian Jewish contemporaries.…”

Was the East Less Rational than the West? The Meaning of “Nation” for Russian Zionism in Its “Imagined Context”

“…The "selected" Jews had a chance to be permitted to reside beyond the "Pale," in St. Petersburg, for instance. 29 Although vague in definition, these Jews were evidently the opposite of the stereotypical images of exploiters and fanatics. Until the collapse of the Empire, the official policy toward the Jews was basically along this line; the government barely attempted to dismiss the collective existence of the Jews while attempting to integrate them into the Empire.…”

Samuel Moyn and the new history of human rights

“…Soviet dissidents drew on the Stalin Constitution (of all things) and subsequent versions, along with the UDHR and the Helsinki Final Act. 20 People like Andrei Sakharov and Va´clav Havel achieved great moral stature. They sought to refurbish the Soviet or the Czech communist states in a more humanitarian, more democratic fashion.…”