American Activism: The Movement to Free Soviet Jews

FAIN: GE-50362-11

American Jewish Historical Society (New York, NY 10011-6301)
Evan Kingsley (Project Director: August 2010 to April 2011)
Susan L. Malbin (Project Director: April 2011 to August 2012)

Planning for a 3,000-square-foot traveling exhibition, a traveling panel exhibition for libraries, and a public conference examining the American Soviet Jewry Movement.

The exhibition and the public conference or symposium will position the Soviet Jewry Movement as a quintessentially American activist enterprise that relied on a combination of grassroots political organizing and advocacy, nationally scaled media events and behind-the-scenes political lobbying. The American Soviet Jewry Movement embraced techniques employed by those engaged in the heroic struggles for labor rights in the 1920s and 1930s, voting and civil rights in the 1960s, and the maelstrom of protests against the Vietnam War. This story of activism and agitation has roots in the American political process, beginning with the American Revolution and continuing into the 20th Century with mass protests, vocal advocacy, and political engagement. The civil rights, antiwar and Soviet Jewry movements from the 1950s?1980s, their participants energized and organized to continue their engagement with a variety of seismic human-rights struggles, continued into subsequent activism and advocacy