Professor Ziva Galili, acting executive dean of the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS), is the recipient of the 2008 Daniel Gorenstein Memorial Award for outstanding scholarly achievement and exceptional service to the university. Galili, a historian, is an expert in the social and political history of Russia in the early 20th century. During the past two summers she spent time in Moscow, researching the history of Jews and Zionism in Soviet Russia of the 1920s directly following the Bolshevik Revolution. At an award ceremony April 21 at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum on the College Avenue Campus, she presented a lecture, “Travels in the Past: From Moscow to Kibbutz Afikim and Back.” Galili has served the university in many administrative roles since coming to Rutgers in 1981. In the history department, she served two terms as chair and as vice chair for undergraduate education. She was vice dean of the Graduate School–New Brunswick before becoming acting executive dean at SAS two years ago, when the school was created as part of the transformation of undergraduate education.

FOCUS: You’ve been at Rutgers 27 years. Which ones have been the best?

Galili: The last two years at the School of Arts and Sciences have, in some ways, been the most meaningful because it just so happened that I came in when the school was on the verge of a major, major change. Almost by definition, it was a very meaningful time, and for me a very exhilarating time of taking the school through a fundamental change – one that I had thought for many years was the right way to go.

FOCUS: How has working with undergraduates at SAS been different from your work as dean of the Graduate School?

Galili: It’s often said that graduate education and undergraduate education are two competing areas of activity for our faculty, but I very much think of them as complementary. Indeed, one of the ways in which we can improve the education of undergraduates is to have the outstanding graduate students that we do in most of our graduate programs. The quality of undergraduate programs is improved by enhancing the graduate programs. Most teaching assistants instruct recitation and lab sections, so they balance and augment the lecture courses. Graduate students are a very important resource for the undergraduate programs.

FOCUS: So improving the graduate programs attracts better graduate students, which benefits the undergraduate programs?

Galili:  Exactly.

FOCUS: What got you interested in the history of Jews and Zionism in Russia right after the Revolution?

Galili: There was a thriving Zionist movement in Russia before the revolution, but it has generally been assumed that it came to an end after the revolution – that the revolutionaries fought against religion, and against any nationalist movement, such as the Zionist movement. My research has shown that for roughly a decade after the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, the attitude of the Soviet government and the Communist Party toward Zionism was much more ambivalent – and there were differences within the party and even within the precursors of the KGB.

One aspect worth remembering is that the Soviet government had to deal with a very large and very impoverished Jewish population that had lost its source of livelihood, and they welcomed some of the promises and goals of the Zionists, particularly labor and socialist Zionists, to change the Jewish economy and to make Jews into industrial and agricultural laborers. That’s one explanation for why some of the leaders of the Soviet government thought that the Zionists could actually play a constructive role, as long as they did not state public opposition to the Soviet government.

FOCUS: But weren’t many of them deported?

Galili: Yes, many Zionists were deported – to Central Asia, Siberia, the Urals. Only people who had leading positions or were active on the political side would get a sentence of three years in a political prison. Moreover, starting in 1924, an opportunity was offered to many Zionists to replace their exile to faraway places with immigration to Palestine – only to Palestine – and this arrangement was called “substitution.” My goal in the end is to trace the Zionists from Russia to Palestine, but right now I am using the access I have – quite unprecedented access – to look at everything I can find about their lives and activities in Russia.

FOCUS: Does this have a personal backstory for you?

Galili: Yes, it does: My parents were both active in one of the Zionist organizations, and each one of them separately was arrested. The first two arrest files I was given were of my parents. It was very moving, although the files were thin; there weren’t great findings about the Zionist movement in my parents’ files. There was a certain ethos they had inherited – the revolutionary ethos in Russia – which called for noncooperation with the investigator. So on many questions put to them by the interrogator, they would just say, “I refuse to answer the question.” But it was still touching because there were letters in those files that my grandfather wrote to every Soviet official he could think of, trying to convince them that his son should be released, and letters from my mother’s brother about how he was trying to provide her with books and how he was prevented from leaving books for her. My parents were interned for about one month, six weeks. Each of them eventually went to Palestine. My mother got out, to Palestine, under the “substitution” arrangement. My father’s story is more complicated.

FOCUS: Your address at the reception for the Gorenstein Award is titled “Travels in the Past: From Moscow to Kibbutz Afikim and Back.” Can you share some of its highlights?

Galili: In my talk I outlined my intellectual journey as a historian, but because my interest in Russia grew out of the environment in which I grew up – Kibbutz Afikim in Israel – and because my recent work has delved into the history of people like my parents – in many cases people who were very close to my parents – the talk had a biographical dimension as well. The title refers to the journey in historical time taken by my parents. It also is the journey that I took back to Moscow, an intellectual journey into Russia’s history as well as a spatial journey: one that took me first to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to Columbia University in New York, then Rutgers, and finally to Moscow. For much of the 1990s I divided my life between New Brunswick and Moscow, spending two or three months a year in Russia. I worked closely with a team of Russian archivists and historians and made many Russian friends, but this return took on a new significance when my intellectual interest turned to the history of Zionism during the first decade and a half of the Soviet Union. The task I set for myself was to recover the Russian roots of my parents, their friends and comrades at Kibbutz Afikim and, by extension, the Russian roots of Israeli society. Three years ago I was given a special three-year license to consult the arrest files of Zionists, mostly from the late 1920s and 1930s. My lecture closed with a brief description of these files and especially the stories of my parents as they were revealed to me in their own arrest files.  I used the lecture to exemplify the close connection between the professional and the personal in my recent work as a historian. It was a remarkable honor and pleasure to be able to speak about all this to colleagues and friends from across Rutgers.