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Rina Lapidus was born in Moscow, former Soviet Union; she studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, earning a BA in Hebrew language, an MA in Hebrew literature, and a PhD in Talmud. Since 1984 Lapidus has worked at the Department of Comparative Literature of Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She has authored and edited 15 books and has published numerous academic articles. Lapidus's scholarly investigations center around the reciprocal relationship between Russian and Jewish literature and thought, a field in which she is the leading researcher today.
""This is an interesting contribution to Jewish literary and intellectual history and is recommended for academic libraries."" — Shmuel Ben-Gad, AJL News and Reviews “This book by Rina Lapidus contains deep and insightful research on the emergence of the set of Jewish national ideas and concepts of Jewish national identity as they were reflected in Jewish thought and Hebrew literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, here examined within the broad context of the ideologies of Eastern European and mainly Russian nationalisms. As Lapidus has earnestly demonstrated, most Jewish thinkers and writers of that epoch perceived Russian ideological and literary tradition as their own, rather than alien, and simultaneously as the epitome of the highest cultural values. Of exceptional interest is her innovative analysis of the influence that the nationalistic doctrines of the Russian Lovers of Wisdom, early Slavophiles (especially Khomiakov), later Slavophiles (like Strakhov), post-Slavophiles (like Viach. Ivanov and Berdiaev), and representatives of the “Soil” Movement (Dostoevsky and others) had on multiple Jewish thinkers and writers.” — Vladimir Paperni, Professor Emeritus, Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, The University of Haifa “Russian thought and literature exerted enormous influence on Jewish nationalism, modern thought, ideology, and Hebrew literature. This vital cultural impact was sometimes assumed, imagined, or surmised but mostly overlooked or neglected by scholarship. This new groundbreaking book by Rina Lapidus offers both a penetratingly nuanced and splendidly comprehensive picture of Russian influence on the Jewish intellectual and psychic world and reveals categorically new phenomena, that were totally unknown nor previously intuitively construed. It is a major and trailblazing work; through extensive research it greatly enriches our understanding of contemporary secular Judaism, paving the way for future productive research in the field.” —Dov-Ber Kerler, Indiana University
