For the Jewish communities of 19th-century Europe, and particularly in the Russian Empire, politics was not the business of managing a state—they had none—but the business of survival. In this week’s podcast, I revisited Jonathan Frankel’s excellent collection of essays, Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews. Frankel argues that for a stateless diaspora, “crisis” plays the same … Continue reading The Crucible of Crisis: How Persecution Shaped Jewish Politics in Imperial Russia