Introduction: This is Not Russia?! Thinking with and through Comparison
Since the beginning of 2023, amid the intensifying protests against the judicial overhaul in Israel, Russian-speaking migrants, who arrived in Israel following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, have joined the weekly demonstrations. Among the many signs in these protests, one could spot a sign in Russian that warned: “We’ve already screwed up one country!” (Одну страну уже просрали!). In the spring of 2023, Zoya Cherkassky, a Russian–speaking Israeli artist born in Ukraine, depicted this sign in one of her works. Her painting shows the sign held above the head of a protester wearing a T–shirt with the word “Democracy” and carrying an Israeli flag. The origin of the phrase “We’ve already screwed up one country!” – which Cherkassky chose to portray – is related to a popular expression that emerged in the wake of the Soviet Union: “What a [wonderful] country we ruined!” During the social chaos of the 1990s, this expression came to signify the experience of political failure following the state’s collapse, as well as a sense of longing for familiar Soviet life. For Russian–speaking migrants, recent participants in the protests against the judicial overhaul in Israel – most of whom were born into post–Soviet Russia and never experienced the Soviet Union firsthand – this expression likely expressed the loss of post–Soviet liberal hopes. Many of them perceived the Russia in which they grew up as a relatively free and fairly developed country, until it became “Putin’s Russia,” and “fell apart,” prompting them to leave in haste.
We begin with the visual rendering of this phrase in Cherkassky’s painting because it offers a point of entry into the cultural and political meanings generated by the interpretive work of comparison. In its Israeli version, “We’ve already screwed up one country!” translates the experience of losing what these migrants perceived as liberal Russia into the potential loss of Israel, a place to which they relocated and which they regarded as a refuge from the autocratization of the Russian regime (Lerner and Preter 2023). Thus, Cherkassky’s painting embodies a comparison between regime change in Russia and ongoing transformations in Israel. It also gestures, albeit implicitly, toward a normative form of civic action: resistance in the face of political destruction. In other words, “We’ve already screwed up one country!” is itself the product of an interpretive act that compares the civic experience in Russia with that in Israel.
In this special issue, we bring Israel, Russia, and, to a considerable extent, Ukraine into a shared comparative framework in order to examine the meanings that comparison – both as an analytical strategy used by researchers and as an interpretive practice performed by research subjects – bestows upon political upheavals in these societies and upon the lived experiences of their citizens. The texts and works of art and literature in this special issue compare political regimes, historical periods, moral and emotional worlds, as well as modes of political expression and action. They engage with comparison on two levels of analysis: emic – the ways in which members of a culture make sense of their lives, and etic – the analytical frameworks that researchers apply to cultural phenomena.
What has guided the conception and development of this issue is the recognition that in moments of crisis, such as war, regime change, economic collapse, and migration, the interpretive power of comparison becomes particularly pronounced. As an analytical tool (etic), comparison – placing two social and political contexts in relation to one another, whether Russian and Israeli or Israeli and Ukrainian – makes it possible to grasp the scale of explosive political processes. Articles that examine comparison as an interpretive strategy used by political subjects (emic) – whether newly arrived or veteran Israelis, or citizens of Russia – focus on the ways in which comparison enables individuals to position themselves within the social field and within emerging political discourses: for or against the war, alongside or in opposition to the state.
By connecting different social and political contexts, the comparative lens makes it possible to trace how experiences of political change are translated from one place to another through existing cultural conventions. When different political contexts are juxtaposed – the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel, regime change in Israel and authoritarian rule in Russia, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and Russia’s occupation of large areas in Ukraine – a space akin to a hall of mirrors emerges, in which social identities are refracted, and reconstructed through their reflection in other political contexts. As the collection of texts in the special issue demonstrates, comparison functions as a kind of interpretive prism that connects these contexts and makes it possible to examine how subjects produce political meanings, and how these meanings reshape the political imagination and social strategies of social actors in the midst of profound transformations in the social and moral order.
The Analytical and Interpretive Value of Comparison
Comparison as a concept has long been discussed in the social sciences in general and in anthropology in particular.[1] In fact, the comparative perspective has shaped anthropology since its inception and has become its foundational principle. In the first half of the twentieth century, anthropology sought to develop a unified analytical language through which patterns of human culture could be identified by positioning them in relation to one another.[2]
Another tradition of comparative research in anthropology criticized this approach, arguing that it imposes analytical schemas that may lead to the risk of a reductive interpretation of local contexts (Candea 2017). This critique has focused on the emic level and employed comparison as a heuristic tool for “translating” the cultural differences under study. Comparison of this kind has also served scholars as a means of reflexive engagement with their own culture – a form of reflection that, in some cases, has extended into broader public discourse. Thus, Margaret Mead’s well-known work on adolescence and sexuality in Samoa quickly became a vehicle for critical thinking about sexuality in Western culture and the hierarchical relations between Western culture and non-Western possibilities for action (Janiewski 2001).
Even so, despite the tensions involved in this comparison and the risk of reductive interpretation of specific cultural contexts, the comparative perspective that places two phenomena side by side continues to serve as a useful heuristic tool, able to illuminate their political and social aspects through their mutual juxtaposition.
Comparison may take multiple forms and encompasses a broad repertoire of uses. For the purposes of this issue, we use comparison as an overarching term for a range of analytical and interpretive practices, such as analogy, juxtaposition, and cross-referencing. One prevalent view holds that comparison is a universal human tendency and an integral part of being human – “I compare, therefore I am” (Detienne 2019, Candea 2008). Yet even if we accept that comparison is a universal cognitive act, it is always embedded – both as an analytical research strategy and as an interpretive practice of research subjects – in specific cultural contexts, social arrangements, and political orders from which it draws. It is precisely this understanding that has guided the questions underlying this special issue: who compares and when, what is compared with what, under which social conditions, and to what end is comparison used.
An example that illustrates the analytical value of comparison as a research strategy can be found in Alex Valdman’s essay “‘The End of History’ and Dogmatic Historical Consciousness: Russia, Israel, and the Jewish-Soviet Past.” Valdman turns to a comparison between Russia and Israel as a springboard for a critical discussion of the politicization of, and dogmatic attitude toward, dramatic historical events that unfolded in the 1990s in both contexts.
In the Russian case, dogmatic historical consciousness is manifested in the adoption of an eschatological narrative of the collapse of the Soviet Union – understood either as the “end of history” and as the triumph of liberal democracy among many Western historians and politicians, or as a grave geopolitical mistake, the correction of which the Putin regime sees as its main moral imperative. The dominance of this kind of dichotomous historical thinking – victory versus failure, or oppression versus struggle – can also be identified in 1990s Israel in the idea of a “New Middle East,” and in the current nationalist right–wing coalition’s efforts to “correct” the “injustices of Oslo.”
In Valdman’s analysis, the object linking these two contexts is Soviet Jewry, through which he demonstrates the effects of deterministic historical thinking on the production of popular historical narratives about Soviet Jews. In his persuasive account, these narratives position the collapse of the Soviet Union as a kind of “end of history” or “exodus” within a Zionist eschatology. The collapse of the Soviet Union enabled Soviet Jews, often perceived in Israel and in Jewish communities in North America and Western Europe as lacking direction and meaning, to realize their Jewishness. When Soviet Jews were placed within a grand narrative of Jewish national liberation, the Jewish dissident movement in the Soviet Union, despite its limited scope, was imbued with heroic status and seen as advancing the end of history.
Valdman criticizes this historical perspective, which defines “proper” Jewish identity in terms of active national commitment and Orthodox religious interpretations, and which continues to shape historical writing on Soviet Jewry. Instead, he seeks to reinstate the story of the Soviet Jewish majority not as the embodiment of suffering or Zionist heroism, but as an account of a complex, multifaceted civic experience of a historical subject in its own right. In Valdman’s essay, then, the comparison between Russia and Israel serves as an axis for critiquing a mode of historical thinking grounded in beliefs about historical justice or necessity at the expense of a humanistic perspective centered on subjects and their lived experience within specific political circumstances.
Beyond comparison as an analytical tool, a significant number of articles in this issue examine comparison as a cultural mechanism through which research subjects themselves produce similarity and difference, refine distinctions, redefine social boundaries, and mark moral boundaries (Dekker et al., 2025). These studies trace comparison as an interpretive tool for navigating the uncertainty of a volatile reality and as a means of positioning the self within an unstable political field. Analysis of this kind also highlights the inherently political character of comparative practices, showing how everyday acts of comparison become imbued with meanings that define the limits of the political imagination of those who compare across different contexts.
A particularly compelling analysis of the interpretive work of comparison appears in Nir Gazit’s article “A Question of Identity: Israeli Volunteers in the Russia-Ukraine War.” This article presents the rare voices of Israeli Jews who volunteered as fighters in defense of Ukraine. Most hold Israeli citizenship and have familial ties to one of the post-Soviet states – either they or their parents were born in Russia or Ukraine. For these volunteers, the war in Ukraine, and war in general, become a space of comparison through which they negotiate personal identities, social positions within Israel and Ukraine, and their relationships to these two political entities. In their life narratives, comparisons between armies, wars, and states mediate the dynamics of identification with both the real and imagined national communities in Israel and Ukraine.
In the case of these volunteer fighters, whom Gazit conceptualizes as trans-migrants, the war, which drives the interpretive practice of comparison, does not necessarily reinforce national identity, whether Israeli or Ukrainian. Rather, it emerges as an event that produces a fractured and ambiguous sense of identity, often accompanied by feelings of social dislocation. Although the interviewees do not articulate direct criticism of the war in Gaza, their return from fighting in Ukraine is marked by civil critique directed at the Israeli state, which they perceive as failing to recognize their actions as a form of valor and public service.
While earlier studies have tended to portray war and military service as biographical moments that consolidate ethno-national identity, this article emphasizes that participation in a “foreign” war – one that is simultaneously experienced as a “war for home” – may instead destabilize such identity frameworks, without necessarily creating new, stable alternatives. For most volunteers, this experience of combat was shaped by a double narrative: on the one hand, this act is perceived as an integral part of a personal and familial history; on the other, it is experienced as participation in a global struggle between good and evil. While many of the volunteers adopted a notion of global identity, they nevertheless seek recognition for their contribution as “citizens of the world” within the national and political arena in Israel. In their experiences, both Israel and Ukraine failed to provide such recognition. Against this backdrop, their fractured identity is experienced as a crisis-oriented identity, stemming from the difficulty of translating participation in a war on behalf of the “greater good” into concrete benefits, rights, or even basic social recognition in the local context.
A similar dynamic appears in Tanya Voinova’s article, “‘The Same Script, A Different Setting:’ The Double War Experience of Ukraine-born Migrants in Israel”, where the war in Ukraine emerges as a central object of comparison in processes of identification among Israeli citizens of Ukrainian origin. For these individuals, the experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine becomes a frame of reference for making sense of the war in Gaza, and vice versa. Voinova examines comparison as an interpretive practice of her research subjects, focusing on how both recent and veteran Ukrainian immigrants attempt to make sense of their experiences of the Russia-Ukraine war and the Gaza war following the October 7 attack. She argues that her interlocutors mobilize comparison in an effort to produce stable meaning out of a double crisis.
As in Gazit’s article, the narrative analysis here highlights the political and ideological role of comparison. However, unlike in Gazit’s findings, Voinova shows that comparative work enables her interlocutors to integrate their experiences of the two wars into the repertoire of Jewish-Israeli ethos. Prior to October 7, the narrative of the war in Ukraine – channeled through the interpretive framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – provided a familiar lens through which to process the shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Positioned as those who “know what war really is,” Voinova’s interlocutors drew on Israeli cultural conventions of wartime routine and ready-made ideological frameworks of a managed conflict to make sense of the new reality of war in the place from which they had migrated to Israel twenty or thirty years earlier. After October 7, it was the Russian invasion of Ukraine that supplied the categories of good versus evil, through which they interpreted the shock of the Hamas attack.
A particularly striking insight in Voinova’s article is that while the war in Ukraine initially created space for questioning and negotiating her interlocutors’ complex (and sometimes contradictory) identities in Israel, the comparison between the Hamas-Israel war and the war in Ukraine ultimately diminished this space and strengthened their Israeli ethno-national identity. Here, comparison operated as a mechanism that closed off alternative possibilities for interpretation, contestation, or critique of the war in Gaza. It reinforced the popular notion that it is impossible to compare between what is happening in Israel and other contexts – a notion that itself functions as a barrier to critical interpretation. In other words, the comparison between the two wars acted as an interpretive mechanism that structured the political consciousness of the interlocutors and embedded it within dominant cultural repertoires in Israeli society. This not only helped them position themselves in relation to the Jewish-Israeli national ethos, but also contributed to its reproduction by expanding the narratives that sustain it.
In dialogue with anthropological traditions of comparative inquiry, these works, along with other texts in the issue, seek to develop a “thick comparison” as an analytical tool for understanding civic experience in societies undergoing political upheaval. This type of comparison does not assume the a priori existence of two comparable objects but instead examines how objects come into being as comparable entities and how they acquire their interpretive value (Niewöhner and Scheffer 2010). Such an approach allows for a deeper engagement with diverse social practices and repertoires across different cultural and political contexts – Russian and Israeli, Ukrainian and Israeli, Jewish and Israeli, as well as Palestinian and Israeli.
An example of this kind of “thick comparison” can be found in the essay by Varvara Adrianova, Ivan Ivanov, Svetlana Chachashvili-Bolotin and Miroslava Borisova, “I Don’t Want to Talk About ‘It’: Conversations about the War among Russian Doctors in Russia and Israel”. The authors compare how doctors who remained in Russia and those who immigrated to Israel after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine cope with the war. Despite differences in political conditions in Israel and Russia, both groups of doctors display a similar pattern of avoiding speaking about the war. The authors show that both those who stayed and those who left hardly ever mention the war explicitly – not necessarily out of indifference, but due to the lack of an available and politically legitimate vocabulary. In the absence of legitimate interpretive frameworks and a shared safe language, political speech becomes indirect, fragmented, or silenced. To navigate the gap between the profound impact of the war on their lives and the lack of acceptable interpretive frameworks for articulating this impact, interviewees in both groups drew on the medical ethics of neutrality – a professional ideal that allowed them to avoid explicit political statements, protect themselves socially and professionally, and at the same time express an implicit moral stance toward the war. In this way, neutrality becomes not only a professional value but also a strategy for coping with the absence of interpretive frameworks and the risks associated with overt political speech.
The Politics of Comparison
“Thick comparison” requires engagement with its political implications. One of the most common critiques in academic literature is that, as an analytical strategy, comparison may impose categories that are not native to local contexts, sideline indigenous ways of thinking and acting, and even erase the historical contexts within which local concepts and phenomena have taken shape. In this sense, comparison can become a means of control and surveillance: who is authorized to compare, which terms may be used for this comparison, and who has the authority to determine what counts as comparable in the first place (Asad 2007; Chakrabarty 1986)[3]. Studies on the disciplining role of knowledge categories show that comparison, in its various forms, contributes to the production of hierarchies and the marking of boundaries between what is perceived as normal and what is seen as deviant. When one model is considered the standard, other phenomena are evaluated through it – concepts of “impurity” are constituted in relation to notions of “purity,” just as distinctions between the “acceptable” and the “forbidden,” or “us” and “them,” are drawn. In this sense, comparison participates in the construction of regimes of truth within which relations of power are further intensified when comparisons are presented as “neutral” and evaluations of reality which cannot be questioned (Asad 2004; Strathern 1986).
The texts and works of art and literature in this issue engage directly with this critical discussion and reveal the normative and value-based assumptions embedded in the comparative perspective. Thus, in her essay “Beyond Russianness: Post-Soviet Subjectivities in Wartime”, Yulia Shevchenko examines “post-Soviet” identity as both an emic category and an external, political-theoretical category. Post-Sovietness is examined as an ambivalent anchor of identity, serving as a basis for comparison across different identity repertoires and modes of political classification. As an analytical move, Shevchenko juxtaposes post-Sovietness with postcoloniality as two classificatory frameworks for social identities that are currently being re-evaluated in light of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza .While the postcolonial lens helps illuminate critiques of post-Sovietness as a category that reproduces Russian imperial power, Shevchenko shows that both this critique and the rejection of post-Sovietness as a meaningful emic identity category are marked by significant blind spots. Through an analysis of the experiences of Russian-speaking migrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel, she identifies a post-Soviet subject who falls between Israeli colonial-nationalist frameworks and anti-Soviet decolonial discourse. To move beyond these blind spots, Shevchenko proposes an intersectional feminist lens that examines the identity and sexual performance of post-Soviet women in Israel, who do not easily fit into the local ethno-national classificatory order.
Situating Russia, Israel, and, to a considerable extent, Ukraine within a shared comparative framework is far from a neutral move; it carries political weight and often arouses suspicion. Comparison between Israel and Russia entered what scholars now describe as “repertoires of comparison” (Dekker et al. 2025) – recurrent, institutionalized comparisons endowed with evaluative authority – during the civil protests against the judicial reform, when political developments in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and Hungary, became a reference point for understanding the actions of the Israeli government and for imagining protest strategies (Shani, 2023). For the Israeli public, the Russian case of Putin’s authoritarian regime marked an imagined endpoint of the regime transformation initiated by the government. Yet even when invoked, comparisons between Russia and Israel were often regarded as suspicious, often dismissed as exaggerated, politically motivated, or manipulative, or met with ridicule or at least raised eyebrows: “with all due respect,” or “after all,” “this is not Russia!” (Rom 2022).
From a comparative historical perspective, however, alongside clear structural differences, Russia and Israel also share several common features. A historical connection played a formative role in shaping Israeli political culture (the Zionist movement and socialism). Both maintain an ambivalent relationship to the West, positioned at its margins as both similar and “other,” and each challenges institutions strongly associated with the Western political order (such as the UN and NATO) and the post-World War II Western political agenda. Both Russia and Israel are grounded in distinct colonial projects – an ethno-national settler project in Israel and an imperial project in Russia – which have shaped cultural production, literature, and power relations. In addition, both societies have experienced authoritarian, messianic, and conservative political shifts over the past two decades.
In recent years, comparisons – between protest repertoires, discourse regarding “traitors” and “foreign agents,”[4] and more – have entered mainstream public discourses in Israel, often saturated with political anxiety. The phrase “with all due respect” has given way to “one shouldn’t compare, but…” These comparisons warn of troubling similarities between the regime overhaul processes initiated in Israel in January 2023 and the autocratization of Russia’s political system since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has further heightened the interpretive value of comparing national projects and occupation in both contexts. Since October 7, 2023, such comparisons have intensified in light of ongoing wars alongside governmental measures for silencing dissent (Svetlova 2024). Comparison also emerges in relation to how citizens in Russia and Israel confront international public opinion and sanctions, which often disproportionately affect those who identify as liberal and express anti-war opinions (Katzir and Hovav 2023; Ilany 2024).
Thus, comparison between political processes in Israel and those in Russia, as well as between the war in Israel and the war in Ukraine, constitutes a political choice – one that at times functions as a political strategy in its own right.[5] Rotem Leshem’s article “Political Comparisons and Russian Imaginaries in the Affective Politics of Israeli Twitter” examines the use of analogies in Israeli political discourse on social media. It analyzes how images of Russia are mobilized on the platform X during the protests against the judicial overhaul and demonstrates the central role of political interests in the deployment of analogies. Analogies between Israel and Russia, between Netanyahu and Putin, and between the Supreme Court and the Bolsheviks frame the polarized political discourse in Israel as a moral-emotional discourse. They produce evaluative judgments of the political situation, mark it as a state of acute emergency, and shape political imaginaries of Israel’s future.
For both political camps – supporters of the government and the opposition alike – “Russia” functions as a symbol of primitiveness, antisemitism, and a desire for authoritarian and brutal rule. This cluster of images constructs “Russianness” as a symbolic resource deployed by political actors in Israel to interpret local political reality. Through a sophisticated methodological analysis of tweets and reply chains on X, Leshem shows that Netanyahu’s supporters tend to mobilize historical imagery of the Bolshevik-Soviet regime to represent perceived injustices associated with the historic Mapai establishment, which they in turn identify with the contemporary “left.” By contrast, the opposition draws on contemporary images of Putin’s authoritarian regime, invoking narratives of the persecution of human rights activists and political opponents, the suppression of liberal institutions, and the repression of dissent. According to Leshem, in a context of deepening political polarization and intense ideological struggle over the interpretation of political reality, analogies have the power to consolidate ambiguous feelings into coherent narratives and to generate a sense of urgency for moral political action.
Comparison in Transition and Migration
The use of comparative thinking is particularly prevalent among those who themselves embody the convergence of two states – Russia and Israel, or Israel and Ukraine (Rozovsky 2024). For many of them, reflection on the experience of migration and comparison across citizenships, wars, and migrations become the foundation of their daily interpretive repertoire and a source of artistic inspiration. Migration ties between Russia and Israel, as well as between other former Soviet states and Israel, create political diasporas, some of which mourn “two homelands,” while some adapt to them, and some fight for them.
In the current context of heightened political control and escalating violence in both Russia and Israel, nostalgia – a classic theme in scholarly and literary writing on migration – takes on a new form. Nostalgia, which typically expresses longing for a place left behind, becomes a source of discomfort, often accompanied by feelings of guilt, and may even be interpreted as a form of betrayal of one’s liberal political community and its values. Linor Goralik, whose personal biography is marked by repeated movements between Israel and Russia, writes in her literary essay “Nostalgia in the Discourse of Russian speaking Migrants of the New Migration Wave in Israel,” about the loss of a shared vocabulary for expressing and describing nostalgia. She reflects on nostalgia in the context of political migration to Israel, which is perceived by those who oppose Putin’s regime and the damned war in Ukraine as an escape from a “bad” place. Is it still permissible to long for the place one fled due to opposition to the regime? To conceptualize this muted form of nostalgia, Goralik adopts a different kind of comparative perspective, drawing on the political and cultural language of writers and artists who were forced to flee Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and found themselves in a similar, yet distinct, condition of rupture, longing, and yearning for the place they had lost.
The everyday repertoire and political meanings of comparison also appear in the art and poetry portfolio included in the issue. The artists describe themselves and their works as a complex, nonlinear movement across cultures, languages, and social and political spaces. Haim Sokol, a double and even triple migrant, arrived in Israel from Ukraine in 1991, later moved to Moscow, and then returned to Israel following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He identifies as Jewish, as a Russian-speaking Israeli, and as a Russian artist. In contrast, Zohdy Qadry, a Palestinian raised in the Galilee and an Israeli citizen whom the State of Israel “does not fully recognize,” was driven to pursue his artistic aspirations outside Israel. This led him to Russia. In Russia, like Sokol, he became an artist with a cosmopolitan or European identity. In Russia, he also encountered the complexity of his identity as perceived by others – sometimes seen as Arab or Muslim, and sometimes as an Israeli passport holder. During the turbulent 1990s in Russia, he also encountered forms of violence different from those he had experienced in Israel. The works of both artists reflect a reflexive engagement with family memory, as well as with national history and its erasure. For Sokol, art is a “strainer at the bottom of the sink” – it captures and reveals what is being washed away from the national collective memory. His works examine political violence, ethnic supremacy, and the sense of victimhood in both Israeli and Russian contexts. For Qadry, art is “the space of truth.” His works document Palestinian life on the eve of destruction and its aftermath.
The poetry of Evgeniia Vezhlian is rooted in the oscillating comparison of identity and memory on the Russia-Israel-Russia axis. Alongside the visual comparative work of Sokol and Qadry, in three poetic sequences – on literature, on space, and on memory – she brings together images from “here” and “there.” Vezhlian arrived in Israel from Moscow, which, in her poetic imagery, embodies literature and culture, poetry and pottery. Yet she also arrived from a Moscow marked by war into a new reality of war and violence. Her poems speak of objects and clothes from here and there, but also of the transformation of one violence into another, one loss into another, and of parting – from literature, from belongings left behind in haste, and from memory itself. Hers is a profoundly reflexive body of work that shines a light on the experience of doubling and overlap between two places in times of war – on imagined similarities and differences between spaces and landscapes in Israel and in Russia.
“Normality” in Comparison
A significant part of the works in this issue that reflect on the meaning of comparison, whether by emphasizing radical difference or unsettling similarity, are grounded in personal experiences of political violence directed at citizens, in memories of better times, and in fantasies, and sometimes hopes, for life in a “normal state.” Of course, like any emotional and moral judgement, the value of a state’s “normality” is relational and acquires meaning only in comparison to another imagined state (Fischer 2010).
The idea of “normality” through comparison appears in Ilya Budraitskis’s lecture, which analyzes the development and decline of Russian liberalism in the post-Soviet period – from the collapse of the Soviet Union to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Budraitskis demonstrates how conceptions of a “normal” and desirable social and political order among those identified as liberals in Russia in the 2000s are deeply rooted in comparative thinking that situates Russia in relation to an imagined ideal of Western liberalism. Russian liberal thought casts “Russian” liberalism as “lagging behind” its Western counterpart, thereby producing a hierarchy that grants Western liberalism the status of a universal model. Russia’s political development is evaluated through this comparative lens and appears as a deviation from a norm that Russia is expected to attain, sooner or later. Accordingly, one of the common claims about post-Soviet Russia prior to the invasion of Ukraine was that its political regime combined elements of both liberal democracy and authoritarianism. This view gained popularity among the liberal public in Russia, in part due to the work of political scientist and public figure Ekaterina Schulmann. Schulmann argued that ultimately, thanks to the moral superiority of liberal ideas and the persistence of certain social institutions that preserve political and civil freedoms, the Russian political regime was destined to evolve into a democracy and to return Russia to its “natural” path of political development. According to Budraitskis, this belief blinded liberals and hampered their ability to correctly assess the trajectory of the Putin regime toward autocracy and war.
For many recent migrants from Russia to Israel as well, Israel is constructed as “normal” in comparison to the government, military, legal system, education, healthcare, and political leadership in Russia. As they describe this, Russia represents a “true” dictatorship, and some are intimately familiar with the personal and collective costs of opposing it. For them, living alongside the state – with reservations about it or even in opposition to it – has taken on a concrete and tangible meaning of detachment, distancing, and severing ties with Russia, alongside an embrace of the new state. Because the new state remains insufficiently familiar, these migrants often occupy its margins, even if, in their opinion, it is finally a “normal” state, one that does not devour, persecute, exploit or abandon its citizens. Even those who participate in protests against the Israeli government frame their actions in terms of Israel’s “normality,” which, as they see it, allows citizens to exert influence through what they describe as “the healthy person’s protest” (Lerner and Preter 2023).
The article by Varvara Preter, Julia Lerner, and Marianna Getnikova-Krichak, “Performance of ‘Loyalty’ in Russian Israeli Digital Media”, examines how migrants translate their emotional orientations toward Russia and Israel – two distinct yet comparable arenas marked by illiberal turns and conditions of war. The authors’ analytical comparison does not seek to identify a substantial structural similarity between the two regimes, but rather to trace how emotional and moral repertoires, as well as patterns of media consumption shaped under a quasi-authoritarian regime like Putin’s Russia, are translated, adapted, and reactivated within the political context of democratic backsliding in Israel. The authors analyze digital content produced by Russian-speaking middle-class content creators who have migrated to Israel over the last decade. They examine these creators’ sense of political loyalty toward the new state in light of patterns of disengagement from the state that they had developed in Putin’s Russia. The discussion of the content-production practices highlights the migratory context as a site in which the need for comparison as an interpretive tool intensifies. As actors move across different political and national contexts, they are compelled to assess similarities and differences between familiar civic repertoires and to develop ways of translating, adapting, or reproducing them in a new setting. In this context, comparison operates as an interpretive mechanism through which migrants reorganize positions of loyalty, criticism, and silence, and situate themselves within a shifting political and civic order.
Coda: Comparison as a Tool for Critical Reading
Comparison is present in this issue, albeit less overtly, in the interpretive lens of Israeli readers. Examining the Russian context opens a window for deciphering and making sense of the vortex of political and physical violence that has unfolded in Israel over the past three years. Reading about the indirect, cautious, and reserved discourse of Russian doctors who (do not) speak about the war in Ukraine invites reflection on how doctors and other professionals in Israel may (not) speak about the war in Gaza. It also raises questions about professional discourses that can serve as a refuge of neutrality from the national language that frames the war as an act of revenge and national revival. The difficulty in speaking about nostalgia among recent migrants, who feel ashamed to long for the country they left behind, prompts reflection on the ways in which those who left Israel may adopt different emotional repertoires for speaking about Israel – as homeland, as state, and as national community – and how these may be separated from their stance toward the current regime in Israel.
Shaul Setter’s response to Budraitskis’s lecture illustrates comparison as a tool for critical reading. Setter analyzes the profound crisis of liberal thought in Israel through a dialogue with Budraitskis’s arguments about the myopia of Russian liberalism. The important critique that emerges from this dialogue – itself a form of analytical comparison – concerns the short-sightedness of a fragmented liberal consciousness in Israel that relies on separating the war in Gaza from the local regime overhaul, and that refuses to recognize the deep connections between the regime’s actions inside and outside the state. This comparative mode of thinking calls for lifting the liberal veil and recognizing that, just as Russia’s actions in the war in Ukraine are directly linked to the deterioration of its domestic politics, the war of annihilation in Gaza is directly connected to the authoritarian regime that is gradually forming in Israel. Setter’s response to Budraitskis, thus, demonstrates how comparison, as a tool for critical reading of reality, can expose the regimes of truth that structure liberal discourse while also enabling the imagination of a politics that exceeds the limits of the liberal imaginary.
The academic articles, theoretical essays, and works of art and literature in the issue mobilize comparison to describe and analyze cultural, historical, and political phenomena of social change, democratic backsliding, protest, civil resistance, wars, and migration. Taken as a whole, the issue demonstrates both the analytical power and the – implicit or explicit – political potential of comparison. Above all, the issue suggests that the social and political realities in Israel and Russia, as well as the ties between political violence and wars in both contexts, constitute a fertile, creative, and politically charged empirical field that, to use Claude Lévi–Strauss’s famous saying, is “good to think with.” Like Lévi–Strauss’s binary oppositions, the interpretive work of comparison illustrated in this issue does not merely reflect social experience; it actively constitutes cultural worlds, social identities, and the languages required to articulate this experience.
https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.63.2026.0520
*We would like to thank all the participants of the conference “Living in Comparison: Experiences of Citizenship in Russia, Israel, and Between Them,” held on May 5, 2025, at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, for their contribution to deepening the comparative thinking that underlies this special issue. We extend a special thank you to Dina Moyal for her contribution to the development of the idea for the special issue. Finally, we would like to thank the journal’s editorial team, particularly the editor, Shaul Setter, and deputy editor Einat Arnheim, for their partnership and close professional guidance in shaping the intellectual contours of the project as a whole.
[1] Detienne 2008; van der Veer 2016; Candea 2019; Epple and Erhart 2020
[2] Niewöhner and Scheffer 2010; Candea 2016; 2019
[3] This criticism was voiced by anthropologists well before the emergence of feminist and postcolonial theories that challenged Western cultural perspectives presenting themselves as universal standards guiding modern social research (Candea 2019).
[4] The draft of the proposed Law on Non-profits (Amendment – Donations from a Foreign State Entity) was introduced to the Knesset in 2024. The wording of the proposal closely resembles Russia’s “Foreign Agents” Law, which, since its adoption in 2012, has become an effective administrative tool used by the regime to silence and dismantle critical voices within Russian civil society. (Elder 2013; Tysiachniouk et al. 2018)
[5] Comparisons between Israel and Ukraine are also employed by Ukrainian politicians and journalists, who have been publicly engaged in drawing parallels between the Ukrainian and Israeli experiences since the beginning of the Russian invasion. See, for example, a conversation that took place during the first year of the war in Ukraine between Alexei Arestovych, a political adviser and close associate of the Ukrainian president, and the Israeli ambassador to Ukraine, Michael Brodsky, on the topic “What Ukraine Can Learn from Israel” (Arestovych 2022).
Bibliography
אילני, עפרי, .2024 ״כמו ברוסיה, התגברות הלחץ על ישראל עלולה להביא למנטליות של מצור״, הארץ, .31.1.2024
לרנר, יוליה, וורברה פרטר, .2023 “חיים בהשוואה: המשבר המשטרי בישראל בעיני פליטי הדיקטטורה הרוסית,” סוציולוגיה ישראלית כד,)2( עמ’ .242–230
סבטלובה, קסניה, .2024 ״שחיתות, ריסוק בתי המשפט, עינויים (נשמע מוכר)? — כך ישראל נהפכת לרוסיה״, הארץ, .4.8.2024
קציר, איתמר, ואופיר חובב, .2023 ״מוחרמת, מבוטלת ומסוגרת: האם בחסות המלחמה ישראל תהפוך לרוסיה החדשה?״, הארץ, .29.11.2023
רוזובסקי, ליזה, .2024 “עליית הרבע מיליון: פוטין סידר לישראל הגירת ענק של ליברלים״, הארץ,
.17.7.2024
רום, איתי, .2022 ״ישראל היא כמו רוסיה? לא הגזמתם קצת?״, הארץ, .1.3.2022
שני, איילת, .2023 ״מה שקורה אצלכם מתוכנן מראש, התסריט כתוב. יש לי עצה אחת: תהיו זהירים. ראיון עם פרופסור אנדראה פטו״, הארץ, .18.1.2023
Arestovych, Alexey, 2022. “Арестович: Чему Украина может научиться у Израиля?” [“What Can Ukraine Learn from Israel?”]
, YouTube, July 16. Asad, Talal, 1986. “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California
Press, pp. 141–164.
Candea, Matei, 2016. “We Have Never Been Pluralist: On Lateral and Frontal Comparisons in the Ontological Turn,” in Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish (eds.), Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology, London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 85–106. https://doi. org/10.5040/9798881812645.ch–4
–––, 2017. “This Is (Not) like That,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(1), pp.
517–521. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.036
–––, 2019. Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108667609
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2007. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi. org/10.1515/9781400828654
Dekker, Mischa, Thijs van Dooremalen, and Galen Watts, 2025. “Repertoires of Comparison: How Common Comparisons Shape Social and Political Life,” Cultural Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755251334516
Detienne, Marcel, 2008. Comparing the Incomparable, trans. Janet Lloyd, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Elder, Miriam, 2013. “Russia Raids Human Rights Groups in Crackdown on ‘Foreign Agents’,” The Guardian, March 27.
Epple, Angelika, and Walter Erhart, 2020. “Practices of Comparing: A New Research Agenda Between Typological and Historical Approaches,” in Angelika Epple, Walter Erhart, and Johannes Grave (eds.), Practices of Comparing: Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice, Bielfeld: Transcript, pp. 11–38. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2f9xscg.4
Fischer, Claude S., 2010. “Compared to What?” Contexts 9(4), p. 84. https://doi. org/10.1525/ctx.2010.9.4.84
Janiewski, Dolores, 2001. “Margaret Mead and the Ambiguities of Sexual Citizenship for Women,” in Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake (eds.), Women’s Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 105–120. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333977644_7
Niewöhner, Jörg, and Thomas Scheffer, 2010. “Thickening Comparison: On the Multiple Facets of Comparability,” in Thomas Scheffer and Jörg Niewöhner (eds.), Thick Comparison: Reviving the Ethnographic Aspiration, Leiden: Brill,
Strathern, Marilyn, 2004. Partial Connections, Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. https:// doi.org/10.5040/9798216409311
Tysiachniouk, Maria, Svetlana Tulaeva, and Laura A. Henry, 2018. “Civil Society under the Law ‘On Foreign Agents’: NGO Strategies and Network Transformation,” Europe–Asia Studies 70(4), pp. 615–637. https://doi.org/10.10 80/09668136.2018.1463512
van der Veer, Peter, 2016. The Value of Comparison, Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374220
More Articles from this issue
