Gendered Representations of Soviet Jews in Cold War Era American Jewish Travel Writing

• In Event: Political and Spiritual Renewal: 1960 to the Present

Abstract

The global campaign for Soviet Jewish emigration rights sent thousands of American Jewish travelers to the Soviet Union to meet with REFUSENIKS, bringing support in and information out. The unintended consequence of this was a massive outpouring of literary production in the form of travelogues submitted to movement organizations. Written by average American Jews (only few were professional authors), and generally not intended for publication, the writings offer a window onto how participants in the movement used travel writing to imagine and represent “the Soviet Jew” and “the refusenik” as conceptual constructs, and to elaborate their own self-understandings as Cold War-era American Jews. While prior scholarship has begun to take up this issue, it has done so in ways that replicate a larger problem in research on the global campaign for Soviet Jewish emigration rights: namely, a lack of attention to gender. This is especially surprising considering the prominence of women’s activism on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Of approximately 1,800 travelogues residing in the American Jewish Historical Society’s Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement, at least 400 of them were written by women. The travelogues shed light on how these diaspora Jewish encounters across Cold War lines were not simply two-way encounters between genderless Western and Soviet Jews, but four-way encounters between Western and Soviet Jewish women and men.

This paper will present findings from a digital humanities project that uses qualitative content analysis of a large representative sample of travelogues to reveal how American Jewish travelers, female and male, used travel writing to construct knowledge about Soviet Jewry through gendered representations of Soviet Jewish women and men.

Authors

• Shaul Kelner, Vanderbilt University

• Andréa Becker, CUNY Graduate Center