Word: oistrakh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That, to put it mildly, is something of an exaggeration. A talented Jew can rise to great eminence in Soviet society, as have Violinist David Oistrakh and Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, but the ordinary Jew is subject to rigid quotas that often bar him from universities and good jobs. Teaching Judaism and Hebrew is illegal; Yiddish culture is severely restricted. In the streets, Russia's traditional anti-Semitism has never really died. "We may not be victims of physical genocide," says Mikhail Zand, a distinguished philologist who recently managed to get out of Russia and settle in Israel...
...rigidly centralized economic control, and his ideas are now widely emulated in Eastern Europe. An estimated one-third of the Soviet Academy of Sciences is Jewish. Bolshoi Prima Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and perhaps 90% of the Bolshoi Orchestra are Jewish, as are Violinists Leonid Kogan and David Oistrakh and Pianist Emil Gilels. Nor do the Soviet Jews face the open, rampant persecution that German Jews endured in Hitler's Third Reich. But that is small consolation for the vast majority of Russia's 3,500,000 Jews who suffer job discrimination, racial slurs, and the anxiety that arises...