US Artists’ Enthusiasm for Stalin’s Jewish ‘Homeland’ Remembered in NY

WASHINGTON, June 27 (RIA Novosti) – “The Time of a Great Dream: American Artists’ Gifts to the Jewish Autonomous Region of the USSR” currently running at The Harriman Institute in New York recalls a long-forgotten time when some members of America’s intelligentsia hoped the Soviet Union might provide the Jews with a homeland.

Established by Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, the Jewish Autonomous Republic was located in the swamps of Russia’s Far East, between China and the Arctic Circle. Nevertheless, it initially attracted immigrants from across Russia and even the United States. It is the only place where Yiddish has been and remains an official language.

The gifts in the exhibition were intended for the museum in the capital, Birobidzhan, but which - this being the era of Stalin’s repressions - never arrived. Many more were destroyed during World War II. Part of the Russian American Foundation’s Annual Russian Heritage Month, the exhibit is open until Friday.