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ARA relief campaign in the Volga region, Jewish anthropometric statistics, and the scientific promise of integration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2019

Marina Mogilner
Marina Mogilner*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago, US and Affiliated scholar, Tyumen State University, Russia
*
Email: mmogilne@uic.edu
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Argument

The article builds a case for the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (Obshchestvo Okhranenia Zdorov’ia Evreiskogo Naselenia [OZE]) as a project of medicalized modernity, a mass politics of Jewish self-help that relied on a racialized and medicalized vision of a future Jewish nation. Officially registered in 1912 in St. Petersburg, it created the space for a Jewish politics that focused on the state of the collective Jewish body as a precondition for Jewish participation in any version of modernity. OZE futurism survived the years of World War I and the Russian Civil War, when the organization had to concentrate on rescue and relief rather than on facilitating the development of new bodies and souls. New archival evidence reveals how race science, medical statistics, and positive eugenics became composite elements of the Jewish anticolonial message and new subjectivity.

Keywords

OZE (Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population)ARA (American Relief Administration)JewspogromsCivil Warstarvationrace sciencehead indexanthropometric statisticspublic medicine
Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 32 , Issue 1: Scientific Medicine and the Politics of Public Health: Minorities in Interwar Eastern Europe , March 2019 , pp. 5 - 24
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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