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Shaul Kelner, "A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews" (NYU Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to the Van Leer Institute series on Ideas. I'm your host, Renee Garfinkel. Today we're exploring a remarkable story of 20th century history, a story at the intersection of Cold War politics, Jewish identity, human rights, activism, and diaspora. Our guest is Dr. Saul Kellner, here to talk about his new book, A Cold War How American Activists Mobilized to free Soviet Jews. Dr. Kellner is Associate professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. His scholarship focuses on how collective memory and identity are shaped through activism, culture, and tourism. His previous book, Tours that Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism, was awarded the association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. In his new book, Kellner tells the fascinating story of how American Jews and their allies, through grassroots campaigns, lobbying, and public protest, encouraged the U.S. government and challenged the Soviet regime to open its gates and allow Jews to emigrate. This isn't just a story about international diplomacy. It's also about the ways in which a community far from the USSR came to see themselves as guardians of global Jewish solidarity. Saul Kellner, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:39]
C
Thank you, Renee. It's good to be with you.
- [02:41]
B
Saul. What drew you personally to this story? Why did you want to write a Cold War exodus?
- [02:48]
C
Well, I had been studying activism to free Soviet Jews Since I was a graduate student and it started as a graduate school paper. And when I was working on other projects, I found that anytime I was procrastinating on those other projects, I was coming back to do work on activists for Soviet Jews. So eventually I just listened to my heart and decided this is going to be my full time project. And in about 2015, I put everything else aside and I really started focusing on this.
- [03:21]
B
Did you think there was something missing from the existing narratives?
- [03:26]
C
I did. First, outside of Jewish studies, there is not much work at all on activism to free Soviet Jews. It's crazy because this is. It is a successful human rights campaign, and those are few and far between. And you would think that everyone would be looking to this as a model, something both to memorialize and to learn from. And really only in Jewish studies does it get any attention. And in Jewish studies, most of the attention that it gets is focused on its political dimensions. So how did activists in the ussr, in the us, with the support of the Israeli government, push Moscow, the Kremlin, to change its policy? And they would focus on things like the Jackson Vanik amendment, which was connecting American trade policy to the Soviet immigration, and all of those types of debates and high politics. And for me, as someone who was growing up in the states in the 1970s and 1980s, that political focus seemed to miss what was a ubiquitous part of the Jewish life that I was growing up with. The activism for Soviet Jewry was everywhere, and it was all over. Every synagogue, Jewish federation, Jewish day school, supplementary school, summer camp, youth group, even the Israel trips all had some connection to Soviet Jewry. And to miss the cultural dimensions, to me, seemed to be missing the key part of this. Well, I'll say the key part of it, the key, the main part of it is that a million and a half Jews got the right to leave. But even as this movement was focused on helping them, it changed American Jewry culturally. And that was interesting to me.
- [05:16]
B
Well, how did American Jews come to care so deeply and in such a widespread way about people who are so far away?
- [05:25]
C
It's. Renee, it's interesting because you would think Jews, of course, would automatically care and would automatically have been raising their voices to, to, to say, let my people go. And it didn't actually happen that way. In the early 1960s, you had a small number of activists who saw what was going on and said this was important, and then tried to get the American Jewish organizations to do something about it, but they were very slow to move. They had other priorities. The US Government was not interested in. In touching this issue because these were internal affairs of the Soviet Union. And if we started talking about how they were treating Jews in Moscow, they would be. The Soviets could come back and start talking about how the U.S. was treating blacks in Selma, Alabama. And so the U.S. government really was not interested in taking it up. And so these activists realized, you know what? We have to rally a mass movement. We have to get American Jews into the streets to do this. And so it was by virtue of really hard work in the early 1960s by people like Jacob Biernbaum, who founded the student struggle for Soviet Jewry, and Louis Rosenblum, who was one of the co founders of the Union of councils for Soviet Jews. These pioneering leaders really saw that we needed a mass movement, and they began to figure out ways of raising awareness and getting people involved. And they didn't know they were going to succeed. And it was hard work. Looking back on it, it seems like it was inevitable, but it was not inevitable.
- [07:06]
B
And when it became a movement, was it a movement of consensus in the Jewish community, or were there major internal disagreements?
- [07:16]
C
Yes, and yes, it was a movement of consensus with major internal disagreements. So the consensus was that the situation for Jews in the Soviet Union was intolerable and that as Americans and as Jews and as American Jews, we had to do something about it. And no one, really, no one disagreed about that. Where the disagreements were on how to do it, what tactics to use and what goals to press for. And so there were debates in the movement about whether to focus just on getting Jews religious and cultural rights in the Soviet Union, or to say, there's no chance that that's going to happen, just to focus on getting them out instead. On immigration rights. There were differences between the. There was a very small, violent faction from the Jewish Defense League, so there were some disagreements over whether to use violence or nonviolence. Most of the organizations, the vast majority, 99%, were committed to nonviolence within the nonviolent, that part the main body of the movement. There were disagreements about how hard and how fast to pressure the Soviet government. And part of the concern was that there could be a backlash. And the backlash would not hit American Jews. The Soviet government would fight back by further oppressing Soviet Jews. So would activism in the states endanger the people who we were trying to help? So there were a lot of fights over that. And then there were debates between some in the Orthodox community and Aguda Chabad, who were doing very, very quiet and important work on the ground with Soviet Jews in the Soviet Union and did not want public protest to mess those efforts up. So there were a lot of internal debates over how to fight this, this fight, but everyone agreed that the way that the Soviet government was treating its Jewish citizens was unacceptable.
- [09:22]
B
There. There were other human rights campaigns at the time. Was this one different and in what.
- [09:28]
C
Way this movement in this movement comes up in the 1960s. In the 1960s are at time of a lot of social activism. The civil rights movement, the women's rights movement. In the 1970s, as this is continuing, you get the beginnings of the gay rights movement in the States, there was also the anti war movement. And so part of what's happening is there is a general ferment in the society. There's a general acceptability and expectation that if you want change, you go out and protest for change. And certainly among the younger Jewish Americans, the baby boomers who were in their college years at the time, this was just one more way to do what young baby boomers would be doing, which was going out and protesting for justice, for rights. And so it fit into that. And at the same time, I think there's a misconception that the Soviet jury movement followed other movements, followed what the civil rights movement was doing, followed what the women's rights movement was doing. If you look at the timeline of some of the tactics that this movement developed, they were out on the streets, really, really visible with Jewish symbols, wearing tallises and blowing shofars and having protest Passover Seders before the. Before other Jewish movements, before the Jewish women's movement was doing women's seders before the Arthur Wascow and his new Left freedom Seder was using Passover for civil rights and the like. So this movement was really on the vanguard of that identity politics, that being yourself and being different in the streets of America is nothing to be ashamed of, but it's actually something to be proud of. And so you go out and you say, I'm Jewish and I'm protesting. And the baby boomers were doing this in part because they were. They were upset at their parents generation for not having done more during the Nazi Holocaust. And so there was generational politics going on. And a lot of the accusations were unfair against the older generations who were doing what they could do. But the situation in America was different. And the 1940s, people were not in general going out on the streets and parading and saying, black is beautiful and I am woman, hear me roar. In the 1960s, 70s, that's happening. So it's much easier for Jews to do that also.
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B
Yeah, there was also no State of Israel in the 1940s, so Jews didn't feel quite as bold. But tell us a little more about the tactics. Were there some pivotal moments? A boycott, a dramatic protest, something of that nature that changed the course of the campaign?
- [12:22]
C
Yeah, the, the main shift comes in the early 1970s, and it comes after the Jews in the Soviet Union were themselves protesting to say, let us go. So before that happens, in the 1960s, American Jews would go out and they would demonstrate in the streets and they would hold protest seders and they would have Hanukkah rallies, but they would only speak about Soviet Jewry writ large. And if you were to ask someone to name a Jew in the Soviet Union, people would have been really hard pressed to do that. There were no names that were attached to this cause. But once Jews in the Soviet Union start demanding their own rights and word of that gets out to the west, then the people who are doing this become heroes and they become symbols of the movement. So what you get in the early 1970s is a shift towards a personalization of protest. And that's when you start seeing things like adopt a prisoner, adopt a refuse nick. The bracelets with the names of Anatoly Sharonsky and Vladimir Stipak and Ida Nudel, very, very famous. They were prisoners of conscience, they were called prisoners of Zion. You had things like twinning bar and bat mitzvahs where a 13 year old kid in the States would be symbolically paired with a 13 year old refusenik in the Soviet Union who couldn't have the bar bat mitzvah and they would be pen pals. And there was a very, very personalized connection. You knew that you were not just advocating for Soviet Jewry writ large, but you were advocating for your specific prisoner refusenik twin who you adopted, who your family adopted, who your community adopted. And you knew these people by name and you would wear their names as jewelry. Now you'd wear them as bracelets or as medallion necklaces. So they were with you every day. And that shift to personalization in the early 1970s was probably the biggest inflection point in the movement's tactics and how they raised awareness.
- [14:36]
B
In addition to that personalization, the, the intimacy in, in the movement, you also describe it as being a kind of civic religion. What, what do you mean by that?
- [14:50]
C
Yeah, so the term itself, civil Judaism, is something that the sociologist and Jewish community leader and great educator Jonathan Wucher of Blessed Memory had written about in the 1980s, where he was saying that if you look at what is really sacred to American Jews. And he was looking at the. If you're looking at what's really sacred, by looking at what they're doing in their organizations, you will see that the things that. That they care the most about, that gets them the most passionate, and that if you cross that. If you. If you cross these lines, people will get very upset with things that were related to the Holocaust, to Israel, to this sense that America was different. And the. And the Soviet Jewry movement is a really good example of this. So it became a civil religion, a civil Judaism, in the sense that every single Jewish holiday on the calendar became a moment for people to raise awareness about Soviet Jews. The bar mitzvah, the bat mitzvah, the key life cycle, coming of age moment becomes a time to become active for Soviet Jews. So imagine you're religiously engaged as the Jewish American in the 1970s and 1980s, and you can go through your Jewish year. At Passover, you will raise a matzah of hope at your family seder and speak out for Soviet Jews. At Tishaba Av, you will fast and you will remember, and you will fast also in protest of the murder of Soviet Jewish leaders. At Rosh Hashanah, you will send greeting cards to the Soviet Union, to synagogues, and to your adopted refusenik family. At Sukkot, you will welcome in Ushpizin symbolic guests. Who are the symbolic guests? The famous refuseniks, Sleepak, Sharansky, Nudel and the like. Chanukah. Some people would light an extra candle in memory of Soviet Jews. Others would leave a menorah unlit to symbolize that in the Soviet Union, people were not free to practice their religion and on and on. And then Purim Spiels and planting trees in Israel for. For tu bishvat, every single holiday. And if Soviet Jewry is coming up every holiday, it becomes woven into the fabric of Jewish religious life. So it really was in that era, it was up there with God, Torah and Israel as one of the pillars of being Jewish. If you were a Jew in the States and engaged in the 70s and 80s, you were speaking out for Soviet Jewry because it was a religious obligation. There was a rabbi who was leading the student struggle for Soviet Jewry, Rabbi Avi Weiss. And at one point in the early 1980s, he said, people keep asking us, why do we come out to protest on Passover in front of the Soviet consulate? And my answer to them is, how can you not? How can you celebrate Passover, the festival of liberation, the festival of Exodus and Not demand liberation and freedom and exodus for the Jews of the Soviet Union.
- [18:08]
B
As integrated as you describe it to have been, and that's extremely integrated into Judaism and the Jewish practice. But it wasn't just a Jewish movement alone. Tell us about what role non Jews played in the campaign. Were there any surprising allies?
- [18:31]
C
There were allies across the aisle. Democrats, Republicans. There were allies from within the civil rights community. There were allies among Christian clergy. There were allies in the labor movement. There were allies in the business community. The movement really made a priority of enlisting as much support as possible because really, American Jews, I think, understood it's going to be very, very difficult for, you know, the Soviets are not listening to their own citizens. Why are they going to listen to a few American Jews? They needed to get the United States of America writ large in support of this issue. And, you know, part of the, I think for civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King, for example, addressed by telephone about a dozen different Jewish community rallies, so tens of thousands of people. This was in, I think, 1966. Bayard Rustin, who was a major civil rights leader, and a. Philip Randolph, also really, really big allies of the movement. There was something that was called the Inter Religious Task Force for Soviet Jewry, and that was led by Sister Anne Gillen, and she was doing a lot in mobilizing Catholic and Protestant clergy. And in Washington, D.C. there's a great example of Father Reverend John Steinbrook, who was the leader of a church that really, really took on Soviet, the Soviet Jewish cause as their own. And in Washington D.C. activists had a daily vigil in front of the Soviet embassy. And this went on for 20 years, every single day and on Shabbat and on Jewish holidays, days when Jewish groups were not able to go and be there for the vigil, Reverend Steinbrook's church was there and they made sure that this continued.
- [20:22]
B
And Speaking of Washington, D.C. how did the U.S. presidents at the time, over that 20 years, respond to the movement's demands?
- [20:33]
C
It's really interesting because you might think, you know, this is. This is telling the Soviet Union, one, respect religious freedom, and two, open your gates. And this is the Cold War. And of course, American presidents would all be on board with that. And that was not the case. So the movement begins when Kennedy is president, but Kennedy is assassinated before anything really gets started. So Johnson really is the first president who they're. Who they're working with. And Johnson is dealing with other issues, and he's not that keen on taking up the Soviet Jewish cause. So there's some lip service. But Then what happens with Nixon and Kissinger as Secretary of State is they are pursuing detente and they're trying to stabilize the U.S. soviet superpower relationship because they don't want to blow up the world. And all of a sudden you get an American human rights movement that's saying, hey, don't just do business as usual with the Soviets and don't do businesses better than usual and don't try to stabilize the situation on the backs of people in Russia who are being oppressed. And the Nixon administration really did not like that. So it was very difficult at first for American Jews because on the one hand, you think they're fighting against the Soviet Union. What's more American than that during the Cold War? But in the era of detente, there was a real concern among activists that that pressing for Soviet Jewish rights could undermine detente and go against American foreign policy. And American Jews could be seen as spoilers. So they were worried that American Jews would be accused of warmongering and the like when the Nixon administration was trying to create detente. So Jimmy Carter comes in and he has a different emphasis. He is much more focused on putting human rights at the center of. And he begins to take up the issue. And then Ronald Reagan and his Secretary of State, George Shultz fully embrace the issue and they become very, very strong allies of the movement. And it really was a major success of the movement because the goal was citizens are not going to be able to pressure the Soviet government. Only the US Government can really effectively pressure the Soviets. And Reagan embraced it.
- [22:52]
B
So we've. You've talked about how the freeing Soviet Jewry movement interacted with America and American politics. In a large sense, how did the activism around Soviet Jewry impact American Jewish engagement with Israel?
- [23:12]
C
So this is interesting because a lot of different things are happening. It goes in a lot of different directions. So on one hand, Israel is involved in seeding activism around the world. And they were on this in the 1950s. They had a. It was an arm of the Prime Minister's office that had some connection to Ali Abet that was working in the Soviet Union to essentially keep the flame of Jewishness alive. They didn't know when the gates would open, but they wanted to make sure that in the face of all these pressures in the Soviet Union for Jews to abandon their Jewishness and assimilate away, that when the gates did open up, there would be Jews who would have their eyes towards Zion and would and would want to move there. So they were working there and they were also working in the west to encourage people to organize, to encourage intellectuals to speak out and the Israelis speak. This Israeli organization was called Nativ. They really felt that as the state of Israel, they should be in charge of coordinating the movement. And in the United States, which is much more grassroots organization, volunteers are running this. They felt, listen, we're capable of making our own decisions and we don't need the Israeli government to tell us how we should run this campaign. And so there's a degree of tension between the American, the American organizations and the Israeli government as to who should be in charge of this movement. And in the US the factions split and there was a faction that was more aligned with the Israeli, with the Israeli Nativ and was more willing to follow its line. And then there was the grassroots Union of Councils of Soviet Jews, which set up a whole bunch of independent programs to try to create a direct line, to refuse niks to circumvent having to go through Israel to get information. And these, these conflicts came to a head in the mid to late 1970s when there were about between 30,000 and 50,000 Jews leaving each year. And the vast majority were choosing to go elsewhere, some other place besides Israel. And the Israelis were extremely, extremely upset about this. And they wanted the American activists to help channel the immigration to the state of Israel. And within the American movement, there is a really strong desire for the, for the Soviet Jews to choose themselves to go to Israel. But they were very reluctant to say, you have to go there. From the American side, they considered it freedom of choice. From the Israeli side, they saw it as dropout. And there were big fights about this. The Soviets ended up solving that problem by closing the gates. But then it reappears later on. But this really was a moment when American Jews were establishing themselves independently as their own separate, self confident, political, self confident political actors. They were willing to go up against their own American government and they were willing to go up against the Israeli government, you know, even as they were also going up against the Soviet government. And I don't know that there was another moment in Jewish American history when American Jews forged such an independent path. If I can say one other thing about it, at the individual level, a number of leading activists from the United States ended up moving to Israel by virtue of their activism in the Soviet Jewish cause. They saw how much Jews in Russia and Ukraine and Lithuania were willing to sacrifice and suffer for their Jewishness and to leave and to go to Israel. And they realized, I'm here in the States and I can go to Israel anytime I want. And yet I haven't gone. Why are they willing to sacrifice and I am not? And so a number of leaders moved from the States to Israel and continue their activism from there.
- [27:28]
B
That's really inspiring. And that tends to be the way things happen, isn't it? You think you're doing something to the other, and you're shaped in turn by that. And when you look back, how much of the actual immigration do you ascribe to the work of American activists?
- [27:49]
C
This is a huge debate in the scholarly circles that are studying this. And a lot will say, look, there were so many factors that affected the Soviet immigration policy. And to attribute it to one activist movement overseas is overstating the power of that movement. I tend to disagree with that. So just because the Soviet government would have. When the Soviet government was willing to finally open its gates, it did not necessarily mean that Jews would choose to leave or that they would be able to go. Like, logistically, if they didn't want to go to Israel, it wasn't clear that other countries would have been willing to accept them. And what the movement did, in addition to, to pressuring the Soviet government, it also created the legal frameworks, the logistical frameworks to turn an opening of the gates into an actual immigration with resettlement support and the like to make the immigration a success. So in that sense, I think the movement was extremely important. And I'll also say, in terms of changing Soviet policy, activists understood they could not tell the Soviet government what to do. The Soviets were not going to listen to. To them. They were not going to. They were not going to be pressured. But what they could do is they could put the issue of Soviet Jewish immigration on the Cold War agenda. And if the US Government took this up and began negotiating and saying to the Soviet government, amongst all the other things that they're negotiating about and freedom for Soviet Jews, then the Soviet government could use opening the gates as a way to signal that they wanted better relations with the West. And you see this really clearly. When the Soviets and the Americans were negotiating and trying to move toward a more cooperative relationship, the gates opened. And when Cold War tensions chilled, then the gates tended to close. And the Soviets understood very well Soviet Jews and their immigration was a symbol that they could use. And the other groups were not getting out. The Jews had the ability to get out. And that was because the activists made Jewish immigration this symbol of good Cold War relations.
- [30:10]
B
Shaul, the book is a great read. It's a powerful story, and it's just a little bit in our history. It's practically now, historically speaking, but not well known. It's a wonderful read. What do you hope, readers, especially people unfamiliar with that chapter of Jewish history, what do you hope they'll take away from the book?
- [30:35]
C
There's a lot I really hope first that people will remember and honor the work that the activists did because people really devoted their lives to a successful freedom campaign. And to forget about that is so sad. And it's really. It's unconscionable not to remember the good that people do in their lives, especially when it was good on this scale. So that's one thing I really want them to remember and honor. The activists who saw that there was a problem and then stepped up and did something about it. There's a lot to be inspired about in terms of how creative this movement was in inventing ways to raise awareness, to get people involved. If at any point you're despairing of the political situation, wherever you are, whenever you are, you can look back at this hopeless cause and see that you know it's not hopeless. That if you have passion and you have creativity and you have dedication and you have faith, you can do a lot. And so there's that as well. I think there's. I really like the inspiring nature of the story. And the truth is that's one of the things that kept me going over the decade that I was immersed in it. And when I finished writing it, I felt sad and empty in that I'm done with the project because living in the history of the Soviet dream movement is so inspiring. And then for people today who are worried about the rise of in anti Zionism, which is echoing Soviet tropes that Jews in the Soviet Union were dealing with, I think this book is a will offer a good lesson that the oppression of Jews did not only come from the political right. It didn't only come from racists and anti Semite Semites in the tradition of Hitler, but there is also a tradition of anti Zionism that emerged in the Soviet context that was oppressive and really, really, really difficult and problematic. And it didn't end when the Soviet Union collapsed. We're seeing it now in the US We've seen it in Europe. So this is an example of inspiration. It will be inspiring. You know, we have fought this before and we have to fight it again. And it will also remind people to, when they're thinking about the way that Jews were treated, don't just look to one side of the political spectrum to see the problems. You're going to see problems on the other. Side, too.
- [33:05]
B
And that brings me to my final question. When you say we've done it before and we'll have to do it again, what are you working on next? I'm looking forward to reading another one of your books.
- [33:18]
C
Well, you know, there will be some things there. There are little follow up things that are going to be connected to this, more analysis of travelogues and trip reports of people who went on these programs. But I'm actually shifting to something that is hyper present and hyperlocal. I live in Nashville, Tennessee. This is Music City, usa, and it is not yet the capital of Jewish music in America, but it can and it should be. And I'm studying artists and musicians who are trying to make that happen. So this is about cultural creativity and it's also a story of hope and it's a story of celebration and a story of song.
- [33:57]
B
Sounds wonderful. I'll look forward to reading it. The book is A Cold War How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews by Saul Kellner. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today, Saul.
- [34:12]
C
Thank you, Renee.
- [34:13]
B
And thanks to our researcher, Bela Pasak.