Soviet writings on atheism and religion: Supplement

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Soviet writings on atheism and religion: Supplement

     

Soviet Jewish Refugee Women:

In the following article, you will meet some typical Soviet Jewish refugee women. Three came to America more than a decade ago, the others within the last eighteen months. Although they are from different regions and diverse backgrounds, their stories bear a common thread of the effects of living under totalitarian rule. They suffered anti-Semitism on the streets and sexual harassment in the work place. Yet even wife battering, overcrowded living conditions, and daily governmental repression would not induce any of them to seek professional help. Stress and trauma were never mentioned outside of the family.     

Western literature on Soviet psychology and physiology of behavior: A selected bibliography

The present bibliography includes the most important writings which have appeared in Western countries about Soviet psychology, and the translations (into English, French, German, Spanish and Italian) of monographs and anthologies of Soviet psychologists. The references were collected in connection with the preparation of a work on the diffusion of Soviet psychology in Western countries.     

Acculturative Hassles and Immigrant Adolescents: A Life-Domain Assessment for Soviet Jewish Refugees

Abstract

In a sample of 146 adolescents, the authors developed and validated a measure of acculturative hassles for Soviet Jewish refugees. They based the measure on an ecological perspective, which focuses on hassles involving person-environment transactions occurring in life domains of school, family, peers, and language. The authors reviewed conceptual and methodological issues in existing instruments and incorporated efforts to address current limitations into instrument development. The measure was correlated with psychological distress, level of acculturation to Russian and U.S. cultures, and outcomes in life domains; it contributed to outcomes over and above effects of nonacculturative hassles. Implications for measurement of acculturative hassles are discussed.     

Escape through Poland: Soviet Jewish Emigration in the 1950s

The emigration movement among Soviet Jews is usually dated to the 1960s–1990s. This essay focuses on the premovement emigration in the 1950s, which prepared the ground for the massive departure of Jews and non-Jewish members of their families, primarily to Israel and the United States. The parameters for leaving the Soviet Union in the 1950s were in many ways similar to the parameters for returning to Poland in the immediate post–World War II years. On paper, the basic pools of emigrants were the same: Jews who at the outbreak of World War II were Polish nationals. In reality, many repatriates of the 1950s were more Soviet than Polish, leaving the country where they had lived for up to twenty years, which often was a lion’s share of their lives. Those—that is, the majority—who ultimately reached Israel went through two repatriation processes: first, as returnees to their pre–World War II homeland and, second, as Jews going back to their historical homeland. As this essay shows, the contemporaneous political and social climates in the Soviet Union and Poland, the nature of those countries’ mutual relations and of their relations with Israel, not present on the map until 1948, framed a unique context for emigration in the early post-Stalinist period.     

Biology and the Jewish question after the revolution: one Soviet approach to the productivization of Jewish labor

In the 1920s a group of health professionals and biologists in the Soviet Union embraced the nascent eugenics movement in order to justify the promotion of physical labor among Jews. Eugenics offered a scientific approach to solving the “Jewish question” through the productivization of Soviet Jewry. Drawing upon the work of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, this group linked the settlement of Jews on the land to the belief that the physiognomy of Jews engaged in physical labor would be genetically passed on to their offspring. The goal was to overcome the perceived debilitating psychological and physical traits of shtetl Jewry by mobilizing Soviet Jewry for the building of socialism. By the late 1920s, however, eugenics fell victim to the Kremlin’s materialist conception of human society that emphasized social engineering and voluntarism and excluded biological influences on the transformation of Soviet society.     

Career and Employment Counseling With Soviet Jewish Immigrants: Issues and Recommendations

This article addresses issues faced by career and employment counselors working with Soviet Jewish refugees and provides recommendations for working effectively with this population.     

Acculturative hassles and immigrant adolescents: a life-domain assessment for Soviet Jewish refugees

In a sample of 146 adolescents, the authors developed and validated a measure of acculturative hassles for Soviet Jewish refugees. They based the measure on an ecological perspective, which focuses on hassles involving person-environment transactions occurring in life domains of school, family, peers, and language. The authors reviewed conceptual and methodological issues in existing instruments and incorporated efforts to address current limitations into instrument development. The measure was correlated with psychological distress, level of acculturation to Russian and U.S. cultures, and outcomes in life domains; it contributed to outcomes over and above effects of nonacculturative hassles. Implications for measurement of acculturative hassles are discussed.