Rebecca Kobrin

The Shtetl, Reconsidered

A new generation of scholars is upending traditional notions of Jewish ‘memory’ and why Jews left Eastern Europe.

Staff Writer

When the historian Rebecca Kobrin began researching her book “Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora,” which came out this spring, she was struck by the strange way Eastern European Jewish immigrants used words like “exile” and “diaspora.” Between 1880 and 1914, when most of America’s Jews came over from Europe, they did not speak about exile in terms of Israel, as we often do now. They used those words instead in relation to the places they actually left: Bialystok, Vilna, Warsaw, Lodz.

“Fiddler on the Roof,”
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