Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church

This work provides a detailed study of a phenomenon in post-Stalinist Russia - the conversion of thousands of Russian Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox Christianity in the 1960s and in the 1980s, the decades before and after the great exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. It contends that the choice of baptism into the Church was an act of moral courage in the face of Soviet persecution, motivated by solidarity with Russian Christian dissidents and intellectuals. It considers the dwindling Jewish religious practice in Russia, the transformation of Jews from a religious community to an ethnic one, a longing for spiritual values, and the forging of a new Jewish identity within the dissident movement.