Jewish Americans and the Movement to Free Soviet Jews: Cold War Culture, Identity Politics and Social Movement Mobilization

FAIN: FT-229663-15

Shaul Kelner
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)

Summer research and writing on Cultural History, Jewish Studies and Sociology.

At the peak of détente, a global human rights campaign for Soviet Jews engaged Jewish Americans in what was at once a Cold War-era confrontation and a 1970s-era ethnic pride movement. Activists transformed ancient Passover rituals into moments of anti-Soviet protest and co-opted modern tourism to send Jewish Americans behind the Iron Curtain to contact Soviet Jewish dissidents. My book project on the cultural strategies employed by the Soviet Jewry movement advances 1) the sociology of social movements, by analyzing the contradictions that inhere in efforts to treat culture as a means to political ends; 2) the cultural history of the Cold War, by expanding our understanding of the diversity of American Cold War cultures; and 3) the movement's historiography, by breaking with the focus on policy efforts to highlight its cultural work. The stipend would support research at the American Jewish Historical Society, with materials made newly accessible by an NEH Preservation & Access grant.

Associated Products

The American Soviet Jewry Movement's "Uneventful" 1968: Cold War Liberalism, Human Interest, and the Politics of the Long Haul (Article)
Title: The American Soviet Jewry Movement's "Uneventful" 1968: Cold War Liberalism, Human Interest, and the Politics of the Long Haul
Author: Shaul Kelner
Abstract: How did the American campaign for Soviet Jewish emigration rights, a movement born in and of the 1960s, manage to pass the tumultuous 1968 in relative quiet? And what does this reveal about the movement itself, its relationship to the politics of the New Left, and the relationship between internal factors and external contexts in shaping how the movement unfolded? This article how the uneventfulness of 1968 for the American Soviet Jewry movement stemmed from the activists’ rejection of the New Left’s strategy of using confrontation to create watershed moments—a rejection rooted in the Soviet Jewry campaign’s implicit Cold War liberalism and desire to coopt, not challenge, American governmental power. While this left the struggle for Soviet Jewry on the sidelines in 1968, it enabled the campaign to successfully enlist the U.S. government as an ally in the decades that followed.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/685280
Primary URL Description: Link to article on journal website
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Jewish History
Publisher: American Jewish Historical Society

Refuseniks (Exhibition)
Title: Refuseniks
Curator: Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
Abstract: Collaboration with artist Britt Stadig. Book art installation, part of the exhibition Telling Stories / Stories That Tell.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://tellingstoriesstoriesthattell.com/shaul-kelner/
Primary URL Description: Link to website for Refuseniks piece in the Telling Stories / Stories That Tell exhibition

Where is the Next Soviet Jewry Movement? How Identity Education Forgot the Lessons that Jewish Activism Taught (Book Section)
Title: Where is the Next Soviet Jewry Movement? How Identity Education Forgot the Lessons that Jewish Activism Taught
Author: Shaul Kelner
Editor: Jon Levisohn
Editor: Ari Y. Kelman
Abstract: Nostalgia for the Soviet Jewry movement contains an implicit critique of Jewish educational models that prioritize shaping individual identity above engaging people in world-changing collective action. American Jews valorize the Soviet Jewry movement as a moment when Jews in great number creatively and passionately engaged the world as Jews in order to change the world in specific ways. This chapter draws out implications for American Jewish educators today.
Year: 2019
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Book Title: Beyond Jewish Identity
ISBN: 9781644691298

À la rencontre des juifs de l'autre côté du rideau de fer : récits de voyage de juifs américains et représentation du judaïsme en Union soviétique (Book Section)
Title: À la rencontre des juifs de l'autre côté du rideau de fer : récits de voyage de juifs américains et représentation du judaïsme en Union soviétique
Author: Shaul Kelner
Editor: Andreas Nijenhuis-Bescher
Editor: Susanne Berthier-Foglar
Editor: Gilles Bertrand
Editor: Frédéric Meyer
Abstract: "Encountering Jews on the other Side of the Iron Curtain: American Jewish Travel Writing and the Representation of Judaism in the Soviet Union.” Pp. 253-273 in Boundaries and Religious Otherness : Religion in Travel Writing.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/frontieres-et-alterite-religieuse-la-religion-dans-le-recit-de-voyage-xvie-xxe-siecle/oclc/1119639796
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Publisher: Presses Universitaires De Rennes
Book Title: Frontières et altérité religieuse : La religion dans le récit de voyage
ISBN: 978-2753577848

Foreign Tourists, Domestic Encounters: Human Rights Travel to Soviet Jewish Homes (Book Section)
Title: Foreign Tourists, Domestic Encounters: Human Rights Travel to Soviet Jewish Homes
Author: Shaul Kelner
Editor: Sune Bechmann Pedersen
Editor: Christian Noack
Abstract: During the Cold War era, Western travellers used visits to the Soviet Union as a means of directing the tourist gaze at the Cold War itself, using the country as a theatre of signifiers of the geopolitical conflict that divided the globe. But whereas the majority of Western sightseers in the USSR engaged in this Cold War tourism only in their consumption of Soviet public space, human rights tourists constructed their understanding by turning their gaze on Soviet Jewish refuseniks' domestic spaces as well.
Year: 2020
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: Tourism and Travel during the Cold War: Negotiating Tourist Experiences across the Iron Curtain
ISBN: 9780367192129

People-to-People: Cleveland’s Jewish Community and the Exodus of Soviet Jews (Book Section)
Title: People-to-People: Cleveland’s Jewish Community and the Exodus of Soviet Jews
Author: Shaul Kelner
Editor: John Grabowski
Editor: Sean Martin
Abstract: This chapter traces the evolution of person-to-person connections in Cleveland's mobilization for Soviet Jewish emigration rights--from the Cleveland Committee on Soviet Anti-Semitism’s mobilization for Jews in the USSR to local Jewish communal agencies’ work to resettle two waves of Soviet Jewish migration, first in the 1970s and then in the late 1980s, when former Soviet Jews joined as new Americans in the efforts to assist in the resettlement of the newer arrivals.
Year: 2020
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Book Title: The Jews of Cleveland: Tradition and Temptation in the Urban Midwest

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