Jeremy Shine
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
Paper prepared for the Workshop on Identity Formation and Social Issues in Estonia, Ukraine, and
Uzbekistan
August 4-8, 1997
Kyiv, Ukraine
The paper summarizes a range of issues on the current nature of Jewish identity, needs, and citizenship in Ukraine. Who are the Jews of Ukraine, and what is the significance of Ukrainian citizenship for them? Since the establishment of an independent Ukraine, those individuals who have the option of asserting a Jewish identity can choose between assimilation, emigration, or asserting a Ukrainian Jewish identity. On the basis of focus group and individual interviews, the authorís initial research suggests that the choice of identity for the interviewees is influenced not merely by material concerns but also by cultural ones. The cultural factor can be broken down into a semiotic understanding of collective memory, which empirically reveals the influence of both personal and family memories. Another factor is the impact of the recently revived Jewish communities. The latter constitute sites of entry into both a Jewish cultural world (shaped, to a significant degree, by Jewish cultural production in Israel and the West) and a social network (which also addresses certain material needs, such as care for the elderly and sponsorship of medical care).
Hostility and indifference to Ukrainian citizenship appears to reflect dissatisfaction with government performance, particularly in the economic sphere. The authorís focus on identity, however, reveals distinctions in the ways in which this dissatisfaction is narrated by the interviewees as well as in visions of the future.
The author concludes with the suggestion that the sources of Jewish identity in Ukraine today is three-fold: a collective memory shared specifically by formerly Soviet Jews; cultural artifacts brought into Ukraine from abroad by foreign Jewish activists; and obstacles to cultural assimilation into the non-Jewish environment, such as the labeling of an individual as Jewish (even if this is expressed in a positive manner). Jewish attitudes toward Ukrainian citizenship, therefore, are determined by social and cultural factors, and positive or negative orientations will depend as much on these factors as on the political or economic.