Soviet in Form, American in Content?

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

We reapproach the reception, reproduction, and repudiation in the USA of Soviet and Soviet-Bloc discourses on race and Jewishness (as separate and entwined concepts). With the distance of thirty-plus years, we step back from Western triumphalist narratives to analyze and question the redeployment of these ideas in the US past and present. They have often appeared as foils against which to measure political virtue. They have been used and continue to be used to delegitimize leftwing and anti-racist politics. Sara Miriam Feldman will show how the complicated story of Paul Robeson's solidarity with Soviet Jewish intellectuals has been deployed as a vehicle for opposing or downplaying Black American struggles against racism in the United States. Miriam Chorley-Schulz analyzes the American wing of the Soviet Jewry movement, its complicated links to the U.S. civil rights movement and the ‘Americanization of the Holocaust,’ and asks how the 'Soviet Jew’ was conceptualized racially against Soviet discourses on race and Jewishness. In doing so, she will trace the continuities of delegitimizing leftwing and anti-racist politics from American Jewish constructions and domestication of the uncanny Soviet Jew during the Cold War to contemporary developments. Jacob Ari Labendz will challenge attempts to delegitimize contemporary anti-Zionist politics through attribution to Soviet propaganda. Rather than rejecting continuities in form and content, Labendz will reframe the underlying historical and political assumptions, i.e., the implied (contemporary) contexts, of such analyses. The roundtable format will encourage conversations among attendees and allow space to discuss continuities and distinctions between the three presentations.

Sub Unit

• History: Since 1990

Chair

• Mollie Arbuthnot, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

Roundtable Members

• Miriam Chorley-Schulz, U of Oregon

• Sara Feldman, Harvard U

• Jacob Ari Labendz, Ramapo College of New Jersey