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Ask Haviv Anything
Episode 64: The Soviet roots of today's antizionism, with Izabella Tabarovsky
01:19:26
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- [00:05]
A
Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Aviv Anything. I'm really excited to have today a scholar who I have learned from a great deal in recent years about Soviet Jewry, the history of Soviet Jewry, and the surprising relevance of the history of Soviet Jewry to today, to what's happening today, to a great many of the concerns and anxieties that worry us, that are familiar to us, that we talk about them constantly. But sometimes the things we talk about most hide their deepest truths from us. We think we have, we understand them because we're constantly discussing them. And then we suddenly discover that our constant talking about them actually hides a kind of confusion. So I asked Isabella Taborowski to join me today to help sort through some of the confusion of this moment. She is a scholar of Soviet anti Zionism, contemporary antisemitism. She's a contributor to many books. She's a senior fellow at the Z3 Institute and a fellow at the Wilson center in D.C. her latest book is Be a Refusenik, A Jewish Student's Survival Guide. Before that, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by Seki Alph Medina. I really hope I pronounced your name correctly. Thank you so much. As a as somebody named Khaviv who spent years in the United States, I have a deep respect for how people pronounce names, but my Turkish is not what it used to be. A longtime listener, thank you very much and member of the Turkish Jewish community who is currently living in the United States, Shaki had asked to dedicate the episode to the soldiers of the idf, the reservists and the regular army who have sacrificed so much for the safety of the Jewish state. He asked me to say, we in the Diaspora recognize our obligation to support you and to vouch for you and take great pride in celebrating your accomplishments. Thank you so much for that sponsorship and for the dedication. And he asked to dedicate this episode to the work of Shuva Achim, a volunteer based grassroots organization which has been there for IDF soldiers since the early days of the Gaza war to provide a warm meal, a cup of coffee or any other amenity soldiers need before going to war. Shuva Achim, which in Hebrew means our brothers shall return, is an impromptu cafe and way station located at the intersection right in front of Moshav Shuva, one of the Israeli villages on the Gaza border. It was miraculously spared the attack on October 7. The residents of Shuva watched as soldiers rushed to the front lines and as countless wounded were airlifted out and needing to do something to Help. Three brothers from the Moshav, Kobi, Elijah and Trabelisi took their Shabbat water urn with which is a water heater, to Shuva junction, pitched a table and began serving coffee to those soldiers. And they never left. Two years later, they're still manning a refreshment stand for soldiers coming in and out of Gaza. Now it's not just coffee. It's clothing, toiletries, food rations, drinks. They serve 2,000 cooked meals a day. This is the story of Israeli society mobilizing and of the strength of a society that is unbelievably strong, capable, competent and deeply, deeply interconnected. Finally, I want to invite everybody to join our Patreon. If you want to ask us the questions that guide what it is that we talk about on this podcast. If you want to join a discussion forum with at this point, thousands of members who load up, who put up there, just incredible resources, opinions, comments, rich interesting stuff I have learned from reading these discussion forums and participants participate in the discussion forums. And also if you want to join our monthly live stream where I answer all your questions live, that is where you do it. That's@patreon.com AskHaviv Anything. Isabella, how are you?
- [04:01]
B
I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
- [04:04]
A
First of all, thank you, thank you for joining me. It's a, it's, it's really great to have you. I'm really excited for this conversation. As I just laid out at the very beginning, very, very briefly, it's a big story. It's a story of millions of Jews and it's a story that I'm afraid we're a little bit forgetting because Russian speaking Jews in Israel, former Soviet Union Jews in Israel are just Israeli at this point. You know, my friend of mine whose parents, she was a little kid when they came, her parents brought, came from Russia. Her Russian is very bad, right? And it's just to exchange some words with grandma and she doesn't, you know, and she's deeply, deeply Israeli. The 800,000 Soviet Jews who came to America after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they're so deeply Americanized. Obviously I'm talking about the new generation, right? Under 40. And so this story is being forgotten. But really we live in a world that was in some important ways framed by this Soviet story. So I guess my first question to you is let's set the history. Can you walk us through the topsy turvy, strange, interesting Soviet relationship with Jews and then also with the Jewish state.
- [05:22]
B
And Israel and Zionism wow, that's a really broad question. So I think what I'll start with, I think the story that's most relevant is the story of the Soviet relationship with Zionism, which. With Jews, yes, but also with Zionism, because that is really, I think, what we're inheriting today and in this moment. And this story really begins quite early on. Already in 1913, Jan Stalin writes an article which can be easily found on the Internet today. It's called Marxism and the National Question. And in this article Stalin argues that Zionists are wrong when they say the Jews are a people. And this is really crucial because the entire kind of substance of Soviet opposition to Zionism, especially in the late years in the 70s and 80s after the Six Day War, is the notion that Jews are a people and Soviet Jews want to rejoin or be part of this people. And the Soviets are really opposing to that. And they use every tool in their toolbox to undermine the idea that Jews are a people. And it's something that we hear echoes of today very clearly.
- [06:40]
A
Why? Why would the Soviets be against Jewish collective national ethnic identity? We should just say that in the Russian Empire for centuries, the millions of Jews who because of the partition of Poland came under Russian rule, but before that there were quite a few Jews, not millions, but quite a few in the Russian Empire for centuries they were defined as a necessity. They were another nation, not Russians. And then suddenly comes Comrade Stalin and says, Jews aren't really a nation, they're just, I don't know what a religion. Why does this matter to them? Is this because of Marxism and universalism? And so he doesn't want there to be nations in the world?
- [07:14]
B
I think, look, in the article that Stalin writes in 1913, he says he argues with Zionists, I think, because at that point, so he argues on theoretical grounds, he says Jews are not a nation because look at the Jews around the world. They don't share the same language and they don't share a territory. They clearly don't have the same culture. They don't share any political and economic activity. So therefore, based on Marxism, they are not a people. But I think underlying this, or maybe in parallel with this, there are also practical considerations. And this is a time when in the Jewish world there is this divide between Zionists and Bundists. But what the Bolsheviks want, what the Russian socialists want, is a revolution in which all the oppressed people of the world will participate. Certainly all the oppressed people of the Russian Empire and Zionists are essentially a competition for the loyalties of the Jewish masses. Because Zionism was quite popular among the Jewish masses of the Russian Empire, which were extremely oppressed. They never became emancipated the way Jews in Europe were emancipated by the early 20th century. There's still limitations on their movement. They are confined to what's known as the Pale of Settlement. It's very hard for them to live in big cities if they want to. You know, their legal rights are not equal. So they are really oppressed. And in general, there is also, of course, the opposition to nationalism of all kinds. And Zionism is a nationalist movement. And so what do the Bolsheviks say? What are they trying to sell the masses? They're saying, you know, it doesn't matter where you come from.
- [09:05]
A
You.
- [09:06]
B
What matters is that if you are a worker, if you're proletariat, remember the slogan, proletariats of all the world unite, right? So your ties are not based on your ethnicity. They're not based on who is next to you. They're based on your class belonging. So you are closer as a proletarian in Russia to the proletarians in Japan and in Africa and in Latin America. And what are Zionists saying? Zionists are saying, you as Jews, we are together, we are a people. We take care of each other, right? Our people who are well off are taking care of our poor. And our future is in Palestine, in the land of Israel. So it's a very different project. And so from the very beginning, the Soviets see Zionism is really threatening to what they are doing.
- [10:00]
A
So Stalin's writing this in 1913. So he's a couple years before, right, the 1917 revolution. And it's competition for Jews. He wants Jewish support. There's a lot of Jews. There's a whole Jewish intellectual class. They were Russian integrationists. They turned Zionist basically because of the great, great pogroms and the oppression and the fact that the Russian Empire turned reactionary. In a sense, Stalin feels his movement and the Jews, the suffering Jews of the Russian Empire, have the same enemies.
- [10:28]
B
These views are also, by the way, correspond to Lenin's views. Stalin is really channeling Lenin's views at this point. And Lenin, it's very interesting because the Bolsheviks, in competing for Jewish loyalties, they very much speak up against anti Semitism. And the Russian Empire was nothing if not anti Semitic. Right? And it was really supported from the top. And there are, of course, terrible pogroms from the late 19th century onward, 1903, the Kishinev pogroms, and it continues. But Russia also is the Birthplace of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So this is this thinking that dominates Russian society. Very much so. Right. And so Lenin talks about antisemitism and that the Bolsheviks are against it, but in a very particular frame. So it's not. He describes antisemitism as part of the, of a characteristic of the Russian Empire as a dying kind of order, and believes that antisemitism will just wither away with the establishment of socialism because socialism is internationalist. Under socialism, there is no distinction between ethnicities and races. Everybody's equal. And so therefore antisemitism will disappear by itself. And. And of course, then the revolution happens and there are bloody pogroms during the civil war, and antisemitism does not actually disappear. Surprise, surprise. And it's also important to note that even as the Bolsheviks, who then become known as the communists in the Soviets, talk about being against antisemitism, this comes with conditions. What are the conditions? The conditions are that you shouldn't be religious because the Soviet state is against religion in general, and you shouldn't be nationalist, so you shouldn't be Zionist. So religious Jews and Zionist Jews are subjected to persecution throughout the 1920s and certainly throughout the 1930s. So as the Soviet Jews, those Soviet Jews who accept this bargain are actually now doing really well. You know, for the first time, the limitations are removed. They're free to move throughout the country, they're free to pursue any professions. All of a sudden there are Jews in prominent places, in leadership roles, in managerial positions. There were also Jews at the head of the Bolshevik Party. And so for those Jews for a while, things are fine. And I measure this roughly. I say that the 1920s is probably when the Soviet internationalism had kind of came the closest to being implemented. When you read memoirs from people who lived through that time, they would say, nobody asked anybody, what nationality are you, what ethnicity are you? Nobody really cared. We were all building this socialist enterprise. And then of course, that begins to change with Stalin's arrival. And as the state becomes increasingly more repressive, oppressive, more like a police state, a terrorist state, the sentiment toward Jews radically changes in the 1940s, because that is in the early 1940s, during World War II. That's when you start to hear the talk about, you know, it's the war, which in the Soviet Union is called the Great Patriotic War. It's a really huge, earth shattering event that lasts from 1941 until 1945. And this is when you start to hear, well, Jews don't fight. Jews are sitting the war out in Tashkent, which was a lie. Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan. A lot of people there were internal refugees who went there from the territories that were being occupied by the Nazis. And in fact a lot of Jews did end up there. But also half a million Jews fought on the front lines, which was really far outside, far outweighed their percentage in the country. But this starts to be spread. You know, the areas that have been under the Nazi occupation, you know, big chunks of Ukraine, Belarus, they also undergo the Nazi anti Semitic, Nazi propaganda. And so antisemitism really begins to blossom there. And it never really went away, but it really begins to blossom then. And also at some point Stalin realizes that in order to motivate the troops in the war, he needs to bring in this Russian nationalist sentiment. And so the Russian nationalist sentiment is revived. And so it's a real kind of final departure, I would say, from the original internationalist Soviet thinking. And that brings with it also antisemitic sentiments. And then toward the end of the war, of course, Soviet Jews experienced the brunt of the Holocaust before the European Jews, approximately a third of the 6 million were murdered in the Soviet territories within the 1939 borders. In the execution pits, they are murdered even before Auschwitz, quite a bit before Auschwitz gets going. But then when the war ends, Soviet Jews are not allowed to tell this story. And those Jewish intellectuals who try to tell this story are actually the anti fascist Jewish antifascist committee are arrested and tortured and executed on the day of the night of the murdered poets. This is what it's known as in the west, even though not all of them were poets.
- [16:31]
A
Why? Why does Stalin need to kill anti fascist Jews who in theory have it out for Nazism? They're right. What about this indicates to him that there's some anti Soviet, I don't know what, that they might not be loyal, that they might not be true Marxists. Why would he go after them?
- [16:50]
B
Well, you know, this is where I think what plays a role here is actually, I mean, I think there are multiple factors. You know, during the war this was a group of Yiddish speaking intellectuals. Solomon Halls was the best known among them. He was a great Soviet actor during the war. Stalin organizes them, creates this Jewish antifascist committee and sends them out into the world to raise money for the Soviet anti war effort. Because he remembers all of a sudden that Jews have money. He has the stereotypes. So he says Jews need to and raise money for our effort and raise support for the Soviet Union. And so they go, they go to the us, they go to South America, they go to the UK and they really propagandize on behalf of the Soviet regime. And they do it in a way, I have to say they misled Western Jews because by the time they are out there raising money, I would say the vast majority of Soviet Jews who were going to be murdered by the Nazis are already murdered. And what they're telling Western Jews is give us money so that we can help the Jews in the Soviet Union. And then they come back and the climate changes after the war, the climate changes. And I think that part of it is the establishment of the state of Israel, which interestingly enough, the Soviets played an important role, Stalin played an important role in the establishment of the state of Israel. And without the Soviet support at that UN vote, it wouldn't have happened. But the sentiment changes very fast because part of what happens is he sees the excitement that Soviet Jews express for the newly established Jewish state and to the point where some are calling the government and saying, can we go and fight in Israel's independence war? And that really triggers every kind of red flag for Stalin who is famously paranoid. When Golda Meir comes to the USSR in September of 1948, it's a really landmark moment when Soviet Jews are told, and this is around Rosh Hashanah this September holidays, high holidays, Jews are told, stay away, don't come out, just don't do anything. And Soviet Jews come out en masse. She goes to the synagogue in Moscow and Soviet Jews are hanging off the lampposts, literally. They're so excited to see this representative.
- [19:40]
A
Of the Jews of it.
- [19:41]
B
Exactly.
- [19:42]
A
An amazing moment. But can I ask, there was, there was a perfectly rational Soviet anti Zionism. They're anti nationalist in principle. They're competing for the suffering masses of Jews. Whoever gets those suffering masses builds a movement of millions. In the end the millions are killed and the surviving Jews build Zionism. But the competition is clear. The anti nationalism of Marxism is clear. And then there's anti Israel opposition, deep opposition and alliance with the Arabs and reorganizing of the, I mean Nasser's basically military backbone for the entire Pan Arab alliance in the 50s is Soviet weaponry. I mean that's the patron of that whole alliance. Why does Gromyko at the UN defend the Jewish state? Why is the Soviets in this little window when their vote is absolutely necessary for the establishment of Israel or at least for the passage of the UN approval of the establishment of Israel? Why are the Soviets in that little window, Zionist?
- [20:44]
B
Well, in that window. They're not really Zionist, unless we say it with tongue in cheek. This is all part of geopolitical calculations. They are aware that the Jews in Palestine, many of whom have come from the Russian Empire, many of whom are Russian speaking, they have established this kibbutzim that are very socialist in orientation. Many are quite Stalinist, actually. They are beyond Leninist. They are Stalinist. And he believes that Israel, once it's established, can become sort of a Soviet foothold in this really critical region, which he understands that the post war environment, the geopolitics as such, that this region is very important. This is where the British Empire is still kind of there, right? So he's hoping that Israel will become this platform for which the USSR could attack and ultimately defeat British imperialism. And he was also hoping there were some contradictions and disagreements between the British and the Americans with regard to Jews in Palestine and what should be their future. And so he was hoping that this could sort of create intensify the tensions. So this is really the geopolitical calculation. And so one of the reasons why he turns his mind or changes his mind is that Ben Gurion pretty early on makes it clear that Israel will not be a Soviet puppet state. And this in combination with his perception that at home there is the fifth column, the Jews are at the fifth column, really creates a turn. And so that's the turn also against the Jewish antifascist committee. And this is when you mentioned how early on the Soviet. The Bolshevik opposition to Zionism was fairly rational. And I completely agree with that. And when we look at early Soviet dictionaries, how they defined Zionism, they look at Zionism through a Marxist perspective, but they describe it in a way that would be recognizable to, to all of us today. They explained that Zionism arose as a response to European antisemitism, et cetera, et cetera, that it is a specifically Jewish national movement, that it's relevant to one particular part of the world, Palestine. When you get to Stalinism, late Stalin in the 1940s, it begins. The anti Zionism of the Soviet Union begins to acquire a conspiracist dimension. He begins to tap into antisemitic conspiracy theory as he thinks about Zionism. And so what does that mean? So Zionists are the enemy of the Soviet people. Zionists are the enemy of socialism. Zionists are the enemy of communism. Zionists seek to undermine us from within. You start to hear that language and that is kind of the overarching theme. You know, at that time they. They talk about bourgeois Nationalism with regards to Jews. But what. What they mean is Zionism. And, and so there's a whole bunch of things that happens. They are instigating this trial against Czech Communists in Prague, completely loyal Czech Communists who were anti Zionist. You know, they were as kind of hardcore classic orthodox communist as can be. But they are accused of being bourgeois nationalist, and they're executed. So that's late 1952, and then early 1953, you have the doctor's plot, where a bunch of Jews, Jewish doctors, are accused of plotting to murder the Kremlin leadership to poison it, et cetera. And accusations of bourgeois nationalism are there as well. So in other words, these Jews are more loyal to their national, kind of. To the state of Israel, to Zionist forces. You know, they start to bring in the idea of foreign intelligence services that are acting to undermine us. This was always part of Soviet propaganda that there's this intelligence services out there, the CIA, the Mossad, et cetera. So this is. And at this point, Stalinism. And Stalin dies in 1953. And Soviet Jews always remember that he died on Purim, which is highly symbolic. But this is kind of that turn where Zionism becomes conspiracist in the Soviet view. And that will carry through to, you know, I notionally divide Soviet anti Zionism into three stages. I mean, it never ended. But the first one is that early stage when it's still. When Soviets think of it, the Bolsheviks think of it in terms that are recognizable to us to then conspirological under Stalinism. And then after 67, that acquires a really massive international dimension because under Stalin, it largely remains within the country. It only spreads to Czechoslovakia. But after 67, it really goes global.
- [26:03]
A
So now we are in the 50s. The Soviets, Israel sides with the Americans were at the height. Not at the height. I guess that's the 60s. But the cold War is well underway and it's clear that Israel's not Soviet. And therefore the Soviets, you know, go with the Arabs in a big way and for other reasons, but nevertheless. And. And now Israel is set up as a geopolitical adversary of the Soviet Union. And maybe it becomes rational again. It becomes this crazy conspiracism. But. But standing against Israel and then deploying, you know, this tyrannical empire's, you know, tools to stand against something. The propaganda, et cetera, is not unimaginable. It's not hard to understand. And then in the 50s, we see, and this is something I read among other places in your writing, a kind of Jewish Soviet turn to Zionism which we have to think, given the dancing in the streets in 48 when Golda Meir shows up, we have to. As ambassador from the new state of Israel, we have to think was latent, was deep, was there. Russian Jews were the most excited about zionism from day one. Herzl at the Basel conference in 1897, he doesn't get the tremendous confidence that this weird little movement that he just started with 200 delegates in a Swiss town, and you know that it's going to become. How does he write in his diary at Basel established the Jewish state. He writes it right after that first Zionist Congress. He wasn't writing it about a handful of Americans or British aristocrats who showed up. He was writing it about the power and the commitment and the need that the Jews from the east were expressing at that conference. He was writing it about the Russian Jews. And so there's this deep latent sense that they're Jews. The Soviets had a chance to offer them solutions. The Soviets chose not to offer the Jews the egalitarian universalist solution. And now we're in the 50s, and the Soviet Union has basically criminalized Zionism. You know, it's criminalized thought, But Zionism is one of those crimes. But it has also begun to actively enforce that criminalization. It is actually a death sentence if you are accused. It can be. It depends on the local commissar, but it can very much be a death sentence if you're a Zionist activist. And yet in the 50s, we see Soviet Jews turning to Zionism in larger numbers or maybe just in more public numbers. This thing that is quiet in the house, the whispering Jews, becomes something in the streets. Tell us about that. What drives a rise in Zionism? Dafka, as we say in Hebrew specifically, despite there's no good translation for Dafka at a moment when it's the most dangerous time to be a Zionist in the Soviet Union.
- [28:55]
B
Well, so the 1950s, this is where we're in the Khrushchev era. So 56 is when I say it really begins to revive. I would say not en masse yet, but for some Jews. And what happens in the 1950s after Stalin dies? He dies in 53. Then I think in 56 is when there is an amnesty for the victims of Stalin's terror and at least a million people come out of the Gulag. And there is actually a bit of a loosening, they call it the Khrushchev saw. So there is a loosening of the atmosphere a little bit. And there are sort of Dissident movements start to be born both on the left and kind of liberal, I would say, and conservative all the way up to the far right, like neo fascist, neo Nazi. There's just a general bubbling under the surface because the repression has ended and people naturally feel more free to express themselves. But among the people who come from the Gulag are the old Zionists, the members of the youth movements who were arrested in the 20s and 30s, those who were lucky to have survived, who were not executed. So some of them come back. And most of them, you know, you see it especially in Latvia, for example, in Riga. Riga was a really important center of the revival of Soviet Jewish, of Zionism, really Soviet Zionism, and one of the centers of Soviet Jewish national movement that really gets going after 67. But in the 1950s, these people come back there and they begin to talk to other Jews who are still there. And remember, this is after the Holocaust, so the numbers are really diminished. Latvia had massive, you know, mass execution sites akin to Babi Yar in Rumbula and elsewhere outside of Riga. And these old Zionists come in and they kind of gather around them the remnants of Latvia's Jews who are not afraid, you know, because everything's really in deep freeze. Then after the Stalin, you know, the Stalin's antisemitic campaign, the Jewish life and sentiment is in deep freeze. But the fact that this is happening in Riga and in Latvia is significant because Latvia was one of the Baltic states, were one of the last to join, to be annexed to the Soviet empire. Ukraine, for example, had been already under Soviet rule since 1918. And Riga and Latvia, there were people there who still a remembered Yiddish and spoke Yiddish, remembered Jewish observance. A lot of them had relatives who had gone to Palestine. So there were those, you know, the Jewish identity was a little bit thicker than in the rest of the Soviet Union. And so they start to organize Jewish youth, these old Zionists. And what do they do? You know, this is already getting into the early 60s. They start with something very simple and also something very Zionist. Somehow I can't even really explain what makes it so Zionist. Maybe you can tell me. But they organize this Jewish youth and they start taking them to these sites of mass murder, to these mass graves in Rumbula, in the Rumbula forest. And they just start cleaning them up. That's all they're doing. And some of the people I've talked to over the years talk about Josef Mendelevich, for example, a great refusenik, really one of the heroes of the Jewish people that we all should remember. And for some reason I think a lot of us have forgotten. But he says that something happened to him at those graves. Being there and looking at what had been done to Jews and realizing that the Soviet power was not doing anything to uphold or tell the story of what happened to Jews during the Holocaust, was really letting these graves go and be desecrated completely. Something happens to him there. He says he comes to a realization that this is the fate of our people. This is what has been done to our people in the past, and if we stay here, it will also be done to our people in the future. And at some point he gives a speech and he's only 18. This is really extraordinary, like 18 or 19. On one of the anniversaries, he gives a speech where he says, you know, these graves are telling us, they're whispering to us, don't stay in this cursed land. Go to the land of your forefathers. And so I don't know if this is. Do you think, I want to ask you, do you think this is something that the Zionists understood? What is so Zionist about this project of caring for Holocaust graves?
- [33:58]
A
I think there's a core, I don't even know if it's an idea, an ethos, an instinct and impulse of Zionism, that the Jews have each other and in the end that's all they have. And this was a debate that in Soviet times, under Soviet rule, had to be implicit. But the debate was basically, you know, is there a world community which can be class, it can be based on other, you know, frames of religious or, I don't know what the Judeo Christian or the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths or, you know, international community after World War II, framed in international law. Is there a world community, a universalism that can accept me, by the way, the only place where it is a serious Jew, not a stupid idea, not an ideological idea, not willfully blind idea that there might be has been in America, has been in the democratic, liberal, English speaking West. Outside of those spaces, Jews had only ever actually been able to rely on each other. And so an act of taking care. In Judaism, taking care of the dead is a mitzvah that is called a chesed shel emet, a righteousness of truth or a perfect righteousness, a pure righteousness. Why is it a pure righteousness? Because when you care for the dead, the dead can't reciprocate. The dead can do nothing for you. It is pure giving and so taking care of somebody to get them a proper burial to Clean up the place where they were massacred to respect them, to remember them. There isn't that. It's one of the purest forms of I might not steal because I want to live in a society where my own property is protected. There's a lot of self interest in don't steal. There's no self interest in taking care of the dead and honoring the dead. And so, yeah, the core, it's not ideological, it's Jews will take care of each other and nobody else will. And as you relate this story, okay, and I know some of it, I, by the way, some of it learned from you. So that's why I know some of it. But I can't help but I want to get into the story of Biro Bijan, for example. To me, Biro Bijan encapsulates the Soviet Jewish story. But I come at it without deep knowledge. And so I'm afraid to do that. But basically the story of Biro Bijan is that in the 1930s, I think it begins in 1928, where the Soviets begin to talk about Zionism is actually very popular, by the way, to talk about the latency of Zionism, it suddenly explodes. Well, if it suddenly explodes, it was there the whole time. They just couldn't talk because you're a dictatorship, you're a tyranny. But in opposition to this Zionism of this of the Russian Jews, the Soviet Union builds this Jewish autonomous province oblast, a self governing kind of province where Yiddish is an official language, obviously not Hebrew. And it's a response to Zionism where communism says, hey, Jews can even express their culture. By the way, they're still not allowed to express their religion. There's a whole debate are Jews of religion or are Jews of people? Well, they're not allowed to quite be either. But they could be some kind of a culture that's neither religion nor people, just like you described it. Okay, that's very little. That's bagels and Yiddish theater. There's literally, there's no sense, there's no identity there. And Birobidzhan will express that in case you need an identity. But then of course, Stalin in the 30s and more so in the 40s, massacres them. I mean, it massacres the leaders, massacres the playwrights, you know, and Birobidzhan empties almost to the last Jew. I don't know if there's a Jew left in Birobidzhan. There must be a Chabad. So obviously there's a Jew there. But in the, you know, in the 90s, the fall of the Iron Curtain. And now there's still streets named in Yiddish, there's still Yiddish street signs, but there's nothing outside. What was fascinating to me about Birobidzhan was that I remember the first time years ago, when I read about how the Jews got to what is today Ukraine. Because it was over the course of centuries that the Russians and the Ottomans fought wars. The Ottomans controlled the north of the Black Sea. The Russians conquer that territory, you know, Crimea, establish the city of Odessa, which is only, I don't, 200, 300, I don't remember, exactly 100 years old. It's not an ancient city, Odessa. It's a new Russian imperial city, basically meant to establish a foothold in newly taken territories from the Ottomans. And then what does the Russian Empire do? Because the partition of Poland in the 1700s, it suddenly controls millions of Jews. It creates the Pale of Settlement essentially to force them to settle in these newly conquered territories as a settlement. Now, where was Birobidzhan under Stalin? Birobidzhan is in the Far east, on the Chinese border. And so what was Stalin actually doing? He was sending his Jewish population, which was absolutely not allowed to be what it wanted to be, needed to be. The state does not serve. It lives or dies for the state to a place he needed to settle. He needed to populate on the Chinese border for defensive reasons, for demographic reasons. And that's it. The Jews were just useful pawns for the great empire to the Jewish experience. The move from the Russian Empire to the Soviet empire changed nothing. Except I think that the breakup of the traditional shtetl, except that it took away their religion, it changed nothing. The only alternative that ever arose in Eastern Europe that wasn't just the same old thing, but worse was Zionism, was taking care of each other, was circling the wagons, dancing for the Israeli ambassador when she shows up. All of that was the only time you could actually be a Jew because everything the Soviets offered you was tsarist evil, reframed. And that's my sense of it, of.
- [39:42]
B
The meaning of taking care of the graves.
- [39:45]
A
Right. I went farther along. You know a lot more about this than I do. Is that a fair assessment I'm sometimes accused of simplifying? Is that a fair sense of the Jewish experience of those at that 200 year arc?
- [40:02]
B
Well, look, I think that there are a lot of things that are similar. In fact, I was actually thinking about it today as I was preparing for this conversation. Some things remain the same. And in the Russian Empire, the Russian Empire acquires Jews with Catherine's, under Catherine the Great, as you say, during the partition of Poland. And they don't really know what to do with them. And there is this long couple of centuries where they are vacillating between integration and segregation, integration and segregation. And different czars approach it differently. Some want them more segregated, others want them more integrated. But characteristically, in most cases, the reforms end up actually harming Jews. And Jews experience them as an attack either on their traditional way of life or in general, on their life, on their families, et cetera. In some ways, the Soviets are also struggling with the same in their own kind of Soviet way. On the one hand, they want their Jews to be completely integrated or as we would say today, assimilated. And to that end, they remove every marker of Jewishness from Jewish life. So religion, culture, Jewish knowledge, languages, all of it is either removed and made unavailable or it is, in fact prohibited. You know, and I remember growing up in the USSR in the 70s and 80s, you know, I wrote about it in a piece in Sapir a while ago. You know, I could tell you I could describe to you the national dress and national cuisine and songs of every major nationality in the Soviet Union. It was very much part of our upbringing, friendship of the peoples. You know, we are all friends. We all love each other. You know, Georgians, Tajiks, Russians were all friends. I would not have known. I would not have been able to tell you one thing about what it means to be a Jew. And I wouldn't have even thought to ask. That's what's so interesting. That's the extent to which they really completely removed Jewish, everything Jewish particularity from your field of awareness and experience. But at the same time, you know, Jews were not segregated territorially the way they were under in Russia, but they were segregated socially in a way, you could say, because we all were easily identified as Jews, because first of all, we were all marked as Jews in our internal documents, which everybody was, you know, the Soviets just attached huge importance to your ethnicity, as it was known, nationality, you know, so it was stamped in your passport, but of course, only in the case of Jews. It signified a whole slew of, you know, oppressive measures. It meant discrimination. So as soon as from the early age, when a kid came to school, it's a very common motif in ex Soviet Jews stories of their awareness of their Jewishness. When they come to school in the first grade, age 7, and the teacher opens the list of students on the first day and reads out the name of the Student and also their ethnicity, again, really important to mark. This student named so and so is Russian. This student named so and so is Ukrainian. This student named so and so is a Jewish. At which point everybody laughs or everybody turns around and looks at the kid and they say, really, you're a Jew. You know, because by then being a Jew became so demonized and there was something so shameful attached to it. So in a sense you always felt like you were not part of the society, but you couldn't really. So the segregation motif, right, but you couldn't really explain though what made you different. And this is something that in 1967, when Jewish revival and renewal begins underground, you know, with the refusenik activists, et cetera, this is one of the questions that they struggle with the most. They're asking, okay, I'm a Jew, what does it mean? I don't even know what it means.
- [44:33]
A
The Soviets tried a two pronged attack, right? You empty the Jews of their identity, culture, religion, history, sense of self, but also you corner them, you box them in, you segregate them socially to preserve their sense of self. That's not the reason, but in a way that you need to know that they're Jews. Never mind what they know, you need to know that they're Jews. Because centuries of Christian society in Russia knew that they were Jews, they were the underclass. That's how the Christian knew he was the overclass. This is the law. This is the law of the land. When Alexander III comes to power and he is reactionary against his father, first thing he does is pass the May laws. The May laws are reinforcing, doubling down, tripling down on Catherine's Pale of Settlement, on the restrictions on the anti integration. He was afraid his father, before he died, might have accidentally integrated the Jews, by the way, a lot of Jewish thinkers thought that. And so you hold them separate because you need the Jew to be something separate you can look at and look down at. And yet you also try to empty them of every sense of self and content. And one of the fascinating things to me is 67 comes along and Israel's astonishing, inexplicable victory. The day before the war, the Israelis are digging mass graves in Tel Aviv. The Soviets are parroting all the propaganda from the Egyptian radio, etc. About Israel about to be destroyed. The Jews are listening to this. They don't have access to proper Western countries, media trying to report six sides of the story. And then the victory is so great and enormous you can't spin it. You try, you fail you cannot spin it. And suddenly the Jews have been emptied of all other avenues of Jewishness because of the integrationist demand of the Soviets. Zionism is the only thing left to fill it. The Soviets turned their own Jews Zionist by trying to both annihilate all Jewishness, all other avenues of Jewishness, while also holding them exactly in the same social place that the old sort of Orthodox Christian, Russian imperial system held them at. They keep making Zionists, these anti Zionists or these anti Semites. I wish I could just explain it to them. If they just love their Jews, there'd be so much less Zionism in the world. Why doesn't anybody understand?
- [46:54]
B
It's very, very true. And what happens in 67 is the Soviet Jews for the first time realize that there is something positive that can be attached to your Jewish identity, that there can be a sense of pride, because until then it's only associated with shame and discrimination and abuse in the streets and certain professions being close to them. And now comes 67 and Israel's victory, and there's just an incredible explosion of Jewish pride, which, by the way, I think also happens elsewhere. I think American Jews, I've heard them describe 67 as a pivotal point for them, right? It's when they decide to go to Israel or otherwise, their identity deepens. But for Soviet Jews, it's really radical. And many begin to think, or some begin to think and recognize that this is what they. You know, for many, it's the first time that they really become aware of Israel and its meaning as a Jewish state. And they realize that they want to be there. They think, well, you know, this country doesn't like us. This country, in fact, hates us. So why am I still here? I want to be part of that story.
- [48:16]
A
Can you characterize for us that awakening? Tell us a little bit about that. 1967 on awakening. I was once, for a couple of years, a spokesperson for Nathan Sharansky when he was chairman of the Jewish Agency. And I had read him and I had admired his story and generally the story of the refuseniks and Josef Mentelevich, which you talked about, who begins as this almost Jewishly illiterate, right, Communist Jew in the Soviet Union, ends his life as an Israeli rabbi. So that arc, you know, some dreams are fulfilled, but it's a story that is, you know, astonishing. These are people who, in order to attach themselves to their own sense of self and story, stared down the Soviet empire, stared down the kgb, went to the Gulag for years. There's a member of Knesset today Yuli Edelstein, who sat in the Gulag for three years. And he always, he doesn't always complain. I once heard him, as a joke, complain, but he complained that he's good friends with Nathan Sharansky. Nathan went to this gulag for nine years, went to a kgb, actually prison for nine years. Yuli only went for three years. Nobody respects three years in a KGB prison because everyone's always looking at not the nine years, but wow, I couldn't. I don't know if as a young man I would have. I mean, I only ever was in America and Israel. I was only ever in democracies. But wow. So that's strength. Describe for us that 1960s awakening and then what are we, 40, 50 minutes in? I want to get to our point, but our point is Soviet anti Zionism and its influence today.
- [49:53]
B
So 67, 67 is a real turning point for many people. For Moscow, it's a real crisis. And it's a crisis because they don't understand how is it that a tiny little state in the Middle east has overcome the Soviet trained and armed and financed armies, and they come to the conclusion, which is very much on brand, that of course Israel couldn't have done it itself. Of course it was supported by the biggest Soviet opponent, which is the United States, which is not true in 1967. But this is the conclusion they. And most importantly, because the Soviets view the world through the ideological lens, right? And they are in this counter. They're in this. There's a good Russian word for it, which I can never find an English equivalent. It's the Cold War. They are fighting their primary opponent, the United States, looking at everything ideologically. So they're asking themselves, what is it? What is the ideology that is behind Israel's victory? And here is their good old friend and enemy, Zionism. And so they really. This is when they unleash a massive, massive propaganda campaign in multiple languages targeting multiple countries in which they are equating Zionism with every evil under the sun and every secular evil. Remember that in classical antisemitism, you know, Jews are the devil. Well, the Soviets are atheists. They can't talk about the devil, so they talk about the Nazis. So they equate Zionists with the Nazis and with the fascists. And they talk about Israel as a genocide and apartheid state. Already, you know, 67. It's already part of the propaganda, but actually it appears even before then, they talk about Israel as a colonial state, as an imperialist state. So everything that is essentially the enemy of the global left, they attach Zionism to it because they genuinely believe, in a very conspiratorial fashion. But you have to understand, you know, they genuinely believe that Zionists are everywhere and they control the world and they control everything in America because look at all the Jews and all the synagogues that have the Israeli flag in them or you know, all the Jews who are Zionists who are in positions of power. In the 1950s, under Khrushchev, the KGB adopted a doctrine which stated that the United States, that it could defeat the United States by spreading its influence to the Third World, as it was known then. And they were quite successful at it and they were doing quite well, really imposing their influence or drawing into their sphere of influence, the post colonial world, the African, Latin American states, et cetera, and of course the Arab states. And then all of a sudden this victory in the heart of a region that the Soviets really viewed as their sphere of influence. So that's number one, that's the external reason and there's also the internal reason. And that goes back to the Jewish national revival that happens in 67. All of a sudden they're seeing Jews inside the country agitating, demanding more rights, showing more interest in their Jewish identity, showing more interest in Israel, in learning Hebrew, in learning something about Judaism and Jewishness, and also demanding a right to emigrate and go to Israel. And they also see, what they also see is that in the United States and in other countries around the world, but most importantly in the United States, a campaign arises in support of Soviet Jews. So that's the Soviet Jewry campaign. That's really a unique 20, 25 years in the American Jewish history, which also for some reason American Jews have forgotten about. But it's a moment of incredible solidarity, incredible, you know, working on behalf of other Jews who are oppressed on the other side of the world. American Jews really created a miracle through this campaign, working together with the refuse inside the country.
- [54:19]
A
And so what is clarify, you're saying the Soviets are not stupid for seeing American Jews and American Jewish organization as set against them. They're not crazy for seeing Israel as a fundamental undermining and they're actually scared of what it's doing to the Jews within, getting a little uppity, stepping a little bit out of the social role assigned to them by society and all of those things for cultural, social reasons within and for geopolitical reasons and American advocacy reasons. So they're set against. And they now have launched this after the 60s mass propaganda war. Can you describe to us how this works. And describe to us how this gets to academia. One of the surprising things I have found on college campuses facing college kids is that I have had everything thrown at me. Not just a certain framing of Israel as bad, not just a framing of Israel as settler colonialist. That is an ideological frame that is less Soviet, it's more new than that. It's basically from the 90s, the way what specifically academics talk about when they talk about settler colonialism. And I think we're going to do more episodes on that and discuss it because it really is an important part of the story of the discourse about against Israel. But I have been accused of being imperialist and colonialist and Nazi and apartheid and fascist and an ethnostate. I get accused of being everything. And that to me is a sign that I'm not really being accused of being anything. I'm being accused of existing while being Jewish. All of these debates I've had, I've had them till they're coming out of my ears. I've had them till I'm exhausted. I've had them till I just want to turn the world off and go watch tv. None of them matter. None of them matter. It doesn't matter if it is the next day. Someone who agrees with me that it's not colonialism. On the other side, we'll still use the word colonialism because it's useful ideologically, pedagogically, propagandistically. All of these words deployed, all of them. There's not a word that now there's new sides being deployed. Ecocide and other side. It's not. Genocide is no longer enough because it's overused. So now we're going to find other sides just to showcase just how evil is. It's all the evils, right?
- [56:27]
B
Genocide, etc.
- [56:28]
A
Where does that come from? How does that work? How much did they get that from the Soviets?
- [56:33]
B
Yeah. So, you know, when I listen to this discourse, when I even listen to you describing it, first of all, I have a deja vu. I feel like I'm back in the USSR in the 1970s. I feel like I'm, you know, the seven year old girl listening to the Soviet TV and I hear all these words floating at me from there. You know what we are dealing with. We are putting so much effort into debunking these arguments. They're not arguments. They were created as propaganda for specific geopolitical purposes of one particular empire in the 20th century. When you look at how did they arrive at these terms? Well, so they wanted to demonize Zionism. Remember that the Soviets wanted to win the Cold War in the third World. And they came quite close. You know, they thought that they were doing really well in the 1980s in terms of their influence. So, you know, if you compare Zionists to Nazis to the Europeans, they immediately get the point. You know, associations are immediate. You get the story. You know, you don't need to explain anything. If you go, for example, to Africa, the association is not immediate. But you know, what would be much more immediate is if you say that Zionism is racism or if you say, well, you know what Zionists are just like, the Zionist Israeli state is just like South Africa. You know how terrible South Africa is, it's apartheid. So, you know, Israel is just like.
- [58:07]
A
British colonialism in Kenya or where they gave their local example.
- [58:12]
B
Precisely. And they varied their propaganda depending on the target audience. You know, in the early 70s, late 60s, early 70s, they're talking, they're comparing the Palestinian cause to the cause of the Vietnamese who are fighting the Americans. And they're also comparing it to the cause of the Chilean socialists before Pinochet comes to power. So whatever is the current moment, whatever is the current popular cause, you see Soviet propagandists equating Israel to that and equating Israel to the evil side of that, and Palestinians putting them on the side of that cause that the left is fighting. So this becomes, it's a tool, it's an industrial strengths propaganda machine which is in fact grounded in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in Nazi propaganda. But it speaks in terms that can be acceptable to the global left. And they are putting these ideas out through, you know, through the communist press which they sponsor. You know, they sponsored communist press all over the world. And so it's very interesting to see how in 67 there is a switch. You know, the global left, the American left, the British left, are not really speaking about Zionism and Israel in those terms. I mean, they critique it, they dislike it, they have all kinds of bad things to say about them. Again, because they're internationalists and Zionism is a nationalism. But this poisonous, toxic rhetoric that's grounded in conspiracies thinking only comes after 67. So for communist press, this is what they do. And there are all kinds of communist symposia and events where they introduce this rhetoric, where they literally fly people from all around the world to all these conferences and they inculcate these ideas at these events. They understand, you know, there is this idea of first pioneered by the sociologist Emile Durkheim collective effervescence. And they understand that when people get together for mass events and they participate in some kind of a ritual, they normalize ideas and values. And something that may have seemed extreme before no longer seems extreme after you participated in this collective ritual. And that's what he refers to as collective effervescence. So the Soviets give the youth of the world, the socialist and communist youth of the world, and just the New Left. They're no longer so ideological that they only work with communists. They're quite omnivorous at this point. Whoever wants to join them, they give them this experience of collective effervescence. Their youth festivals. It's three day. It's one of the ways in which they do it, we should say, because.
- [61:06]
A
I don't know if it's clear to everybody, this is not something that needs to be told to Americans in the age, but it does need to be told to Americans today. This was an immense operation. There were front organizations. Your article mentions the World Peace Council. There were the International Federation of Trade Unions. There were maybe 200 of these organizations that were essentially front organizations for this Soviet effort. They spent tens of billions of dollars over the course of these decades. They probably, they had millions of members in these organizations that were Soviet franchise for these information wars. It was probably the most, the largest ideological export operation. That's how one scholar, American scholar, describes this process in the history of propaganda, in the history of war, in the history of ideological contests. And it was immense. There were probably 200,000 people employed in the Soviet global propaganda effort, much of which was focused on the Third World. So you're describing things I just want people to understand. You could not have done it bigger. They did it as a foundational tenet. They spent on it like they were building an army, like they were building a nuclear program. They spent on it, you know, a percentage of their economy, that is, how big it was in their scale and how it went. And people just Google it, go to ChatGPT, look it up, you will be astonished and you will begin to understand. By the way, in universities in the Third World and also universities established in Moscow, essentially with the express purpose of taking in foreign students, inculcating this stuff in them and then sending them back into their countries, whether it's Kenya, by the way, Palestinians armed with these tools, armed with this ideological toolkit, with this vocabulary and with this propaganda.
- [62:53]
B
Well, that's right. And Mahmoud Abbas, of course, famously defended his thesis in Moscow. He studied at Patrice Lumumba and defended his thesis at the Institute Institute of Oriental Studies under Primakov, one of the chief Soviet ideologues at the institute that was part of that system that you're describing, whose explicit purpose or there was a department in this institute, it was called the Israel Department, but its explicit purpose. There weren't really Israel specialists there. I don't even know if they had any experts who spoke Hebrew. But its explicit purpose was to legitimize the propaganda, because the propaganda was already there.
- [63:31]
A
So they doctorate was an analysis of the Holocaust that argued that it wasn't as big as they say. And also Zionists are responsible for it.
- [63:41]
B
The Zionists collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust.
- [63:44]
A
University is essentially a propaganda package. Yes, a PR package that you have to build yourself and deploy into the world and then you go home knowing how to do that. It was a propaganda university.
- [63:56]
B
Well, and when you look at that thesis, which I have looked at, you know, as a scholar and a nerd, the first place I go to is the footnotes. And so you look at the footnotes and you see who he quotes. And he quotes all of these people who were known as Zionologists. So the propagandists specifically hired and employed in order to develop this propaganda that we are talking about, there were maybe a dozen and a half of them. They were employed by the kgb, but more openly or kind of more overtly, they were employed by the international department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. So at the highest level, so this is who he quotes. And some of them were openly antisemitic, actually were part of those far right neo Nazi, neo fascist circles that developed in the USSR in the 50s and 60s and 70s. So it's all really, really, really toxic, you know, and just to illustrate something, you mentioned the scale of this operation. So in that article I talk about how these front organizations, how do you know that it was coordinated? So all of these front organizations that claim to be representing students and women and journalists, you know, this is what made them fronts. They claimed to have one agenda, but in reality their agenda was to support Soviet geopolitical goals abroad. And so when the Yom Kippur war started, they all came out with a statement that was practically the same. All these massive organization put out a statement that condemned Israel and called it an aggressor and called for all the good people of the world to stand up against it. So this has been propagated for years and decades. And you know, so through also through diplomatic channels, we have records of the correspondence of a long serving Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, with his superiors in the foreign ministry from 1970, where he is being told, you have to go and talk to the people on the Hill, both Republicans and Democrats, and tell them about the evils of Zionism and try to create a division between Zionist Jews and non Zionist Jews. And I'm paraphrasing here, but this is because these were his explicit instructions. And imagine that this was being done all around the world because the Soviets really believed that Zionists operated all around the world and needed to be fought everywhere. And what I want to say, I want to bring us back to where we started. Remember how we said that early on the Bolsheviks had a fairly realistic, if skewed, ideologically biased understanding of what Zionism was. They understood that it only related to a small group of people, namely Jews, and had relevance to one tiny territory geographically, which was Palestine. And they understood the causes and effects. By the time you get to 67, all of that is gone. You have a picture straight from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion about Jewish conspiracy, only it uses the word Zion. And so how does it get to the academy? You asked me a long time ago and I'm still getting to the answer. You know, what we see is that already in the early 70s, the global left is speaking in this language by like 72, 73, it has adopted this language. And so I think that from there it just naturally proceeds into the academy because the academy tends to the left. And so it just became kind of a default understanding of Israel and the Palestinian issue and Zionism on the left. And I used to say that it was just the far left. And now the more I read about it, the more I think that actually it was in plain view in, in regular, kind of in the mainstream press at universities already in the 70s, and we just ignored it. You know, there's a really interesting article that was published in 1971. I remember the date, January 3, 1971, a 5,000 word essay in the New York Times that talks about how anti Zionism has become a new, new antisemitism, essentially. So it analyzes in detail 1971, how the left is now attacking Zionists in the way that right wing anti Semites attack Jews. So the question that I'm really struggling with, and there's other evidence I see, that academics already saw it. It was already present at universities. Of course, the UN ruled that Zionism is racism in 75, and actually the World Jewish Congress ruled already. I think it organized a symposium in 76 where it was already hearing from attendants from Latin America that they were distancing from Zionism because it became so toxic. So the question I'm struggling with is why didn't we pay attention then? Because people already saw it then. And why is it that we're here now 50 years later, we're still calling it new antisemitism. And every time a crisis arises, we are like a deer in the headlights trying to improvise strategies to counter it on the fly. When again, it's been around for 50 years.
- [69:35]
A
Could it be that we have kind of known it was there but not actually noticed it or done anything about it? Because the simple truth of Jews outside of Israel is that they actually are dependent on the, on the good wishes and good faith of everybody around them and that they don't actually have a lot that they can do to defend themselves, if not simply hope that society remains liberal and accepting of them. What could Jews have done? Prevented the universities from becoming a left wing monoculture?
- [70:05]
B
I think that you're right. Probably in the 70s, American Jews still felt really confident in their position actually in American society that they didn't have to worry about it. So on the one hand you're probably right. They don't want to fight anything. And on the other hand they feel pretty secure. A lot of what we talked about I mention in my book. Can I plug my book? Is that okay?
- [70:31]
A
Please. We'll put a link to it also in the show notes.
- [70:33]
B
Okay, so the book is Be a Refusenik, a Jewish Student Survival Guide. So a lot of this history that we covered today is covered there as well in a very brief way. Really user friendly. But also I wanted to tell, to remind American Jews of this story, that they were part of the refusenik's fight. How they fought for them and how they fought for themselves, for their Zionism, for their sense of peoplehood, how they really just ignored the propaganda. You know, we talk a lot about fighting antisemitism, but I think there's a lot to be said for strengthening your core. It's what you're talking about. It's part of your, your toolbox is not actually to give it up. We know from the history of Soviet Jewry that the more you give up, the worse it gets. And the only solution is to reclaim all of these parts of your identity that your enemies want you to discard. And I think the good news today is that we have young people and I write about them too. I profile six American Jewish activists and I actually, I match those stories with the stories of the refuseniks because there is a certain mentality that is very, very similar. Obviously the systems are completely different. No question about that. You know, Shabbos Kestenbaum is not going to go to prison for saying what he's saying or to the gulag especially. But there is a certain shift in mentality that at some point these American Jewish activists today who have become household names, arrive at, which incorporates reclaiming all the things that they're being told to discard and standing up for themselves and for the Jewish people and for their identity.
- [72:18]
A
Are you optimistic for the future of American Jews? There's a lot of articles out there about the end of the golden age. There's a lot of debates over what this new anti Semitism means. We had a conversation today about the left. That was our topic. Obviously everybody's watching this unbelievable explosion and the Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson side of the Republican Party of insane neo Nazi, explicit, you know, Hitler wasn't necessarily the bad guy of World War II. Kind of unbelievable. Just, it's cartoonishly, you know, one, one commentator said about one of the Tucker Carlson podcasts that he was accusing the Jews of usury again. And he said that was his attempt to completely embarrass every one of his remaining defenders. Now that is in a very optimistic take that suggests that his defenders are embarrassed. I don't know that his defenders are embarrassed. And these are some of the biggest podcasts and some of the biggest people in the world, no matter what crazy, insane thing they're saying. And so we're watching that. But in that vice of this long running, intellectualized, basically protocols, the elders of Zion, and on the other side, the just return of Nazism. Are you optimistic about the state of the Jews? Can they rise up and fight these things back? Beat them back? Is American society generally going to come through this moment having pushed those forces to the sidelines, or is this more of what the future holds for American Jews?
- [73:54]
B
I mean, this is really the key question. You know, I just came back from California. I was at the Z3 conference out there and I gave a couple talks to a synagogue in Palo Alto and at the Z3 conference. And I got to talk to members of the Jewish community there. And, you know, I have kind of a dual feeling. It's very hard to be optimistic right now. And I think that there is a division between grassroots and the establishment, which I think is very interesting because during the Soviet Jewry movement there was also the same division where the grassroots really led the struggle. And the establishment, the Jewish establishment came in later and joined the fight and brought its institutional and financial muscle to the struggle. I don't know what will happen here, but I feel like the establishment, the established Jewish organizations, they're much more hesitant and perhaps are at a loss and confused and don't know what to do. Whereas, and this is what gives me optimism, I did sense some energy from grassroots organizations which want to give a fight to what's going on. And I'll tell you what, I think this fight is about to begin with, and this is just me sensing it out through my ex Soviet Jewish sensibility. I think it's a fight for our Jewish dignity. I think people have been subjected to such an incredible amount of toxic, demeaning propaganda that they want to fight it. And so I think that there is hope. I think the hope is in the grassroots. You know, the first people who encountered it in America were Jewish students, and they encountered it already. I write about it in the book in 2017, 2018. Nobody wanted to hear them. They kept calling attention to what was happening on campuses. People were ignoring it, just like they ignored it in the 1970s. And then it all exploded in our faces and we can't ignore it anymore. But I think that there are enough young Jews who will not surrender their dignity and their Jewish identity. And I want to remind people also that this is again why the refusenik story is so important, is that it doesn't take a lot of really kind of powerful high profile figures like Sharansky and like Edelstein. Not everybody can be a Sharansky. Not everybody can be Edelstein. Not everybody can be Josef Mendelevich or Silva Zalmanson. It takes a very special character to be that, to go through something like that, to go. And whatever the equivalent of abuse is in America. Obviously, again, I'm not comparing it directly, but students go through abuse, so not everybody can rise above that. But you don't need a whole lot of them around those heroes. In the refusenik movement. There were maybe a few hundred of those, but then there were concentric circles. There were thousands of those who were also refuseniks, but not activists. But they resisted at the family level, in their kitchen. They taught their children not to buy into the propaganda. And then even a broader circle of maybe a few hundred thousand who quietly helped out with the underground publications. Maybe they would deliver a SAM as that publication from one place to another in their suitcase. So I think that we have to. I think this is a very useful model that perhaps can give us a bit of optimism and hopefully that if we want. I think American Jews can fight this. I really think they can. But the only pass is through reclaiming Zionism, peoplehood, rejecting victimhood. You know, one of the most extraordinary things about people like Sharansky or Edelstein, you know, Edelstein was really injured in the gulag. He was there for only three years, but I think in his case, one year counts for five. I mean, he was really, really injured, but none of them thought of themselves as victims. That's what's so extraordinary about it. I think we have to give that up and we have to prioritize our Jewish interests, the Jewish interests. It doesn't mean that we give up, that American Jews need to give up their broader political commitments, but I think it's time to understand that we are in a very precarious moment and we need to prioritize what would help the Jewish people today.
- [78:45]
A
Isabella Taborowski, thank you so much for joining me. I really, really appreciate it. I think that there's a lot of depth here and a lot of history here that if you, once you see it, once you see the connection, once you understand the scale of Soviet propaganda and once you understand how the vocabulary through these Third world kind of ideas make it into the academy, how utterly unchallenged it is in the academy, you begin to understand what it is, what it is we're dealing with. And none of it is criticism about the Gaza war. Thank you so much for coming on.
- [79:20]
B
Thank you so much for having me.