Sweet Burdens: Welfare and Communality among Russian Jews in Germany

By: Sveta Roberman

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Synopsis: Sweet Burdens presents a detailed ethnographic study of the lives of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Germany over the past twenty years. Focusing on the first generation of adult immigrants, Sveta Roberman examines how they question and negotiate their moral economy and civic culture vis-à-vis the host German state and society, on the one hand, and the Holocaust past, on the other. She approaches the immigrant-host encounter as one of many cycles of social exchanges taking place in multiple and diverse arenas. The book sheds light on a number of issues, including the moral economy of Jewish-German relations, immigrants' performances of civics and citizenship, modes of inclusion and exclusion, consumption and consumerism, work and the phenomena of unemployment and underemployment, the concept of community, and the dynamics and difficulties of reinventing Jewish identity and tradition.