There Are Still Jews in Russia?

I recently read and reviewed Maxim Shrayer's new book, With or Without You: The Prospect for Jews in Today's Russia, for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. You can read it here. It's a really interesting study, particularly because ever since the success of the Free Soviet Jewry movement of the 1960-1980s, we have heard less and less about the situation of Jews remaining in Russia.

I think we sometimes forget that not everyone left.

I used to live in the Russian Jewish area of West Hollywood, and certainly living there made it feel like all of Russia's Jews had moved to LA at some point. And then there's all of the amazing new fiction being written by Russian Jews like Boris Fishman, Lara Vapnyar, Anya Ulinich, and David Bezmozgis (some of whose works are reproduced in part in a book I co-edited with two of my favorite colleagues). The works of these writers comprise some of the best and newest American/Canadian immigrant fiction, and we hear more of these stories than those of the ones who did not, for one reason or another, leave Russia for a so-called better place. At any rate, I really enjoyed Shrayer's study because it raises some questions I hadn't thought to ask, let alone answer.