Transnationalism in Soviet Jewish Identity and Emigration

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The post-Stalin Soviet Jewish experience was influenced both by Khrushchev’s easing of domestic restrictions and by the slight raising of the Iron Curtain. One outcome of this ‘thaw’ was rising national consciousness among the Soviet peoples, including Soviet Jews, who had to rebuild their Jewish identity in the wake of the Holocaust, Stalin’s eradication of Jewish life, and Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s pervasive, albeit less violent, anti-Semitism. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, a mass movement for emigration from the Soviet Union—largely to Israel—had emerged, with strong Western support.

Alexander Valdman’s paper examines encounters between Soviet Jews and foreign tourists in the late 1950s and early 1960s, focusing on the role of nostalgia and historical consciousness in shaping Soviet Jewish self-identification and in Western and Israeli representations of the Russian-Jewish past. Noam Bizan’s paper, focusing on the late 1960s to early 1970s, picks up this new self-consciousness and looks at Soviet emigration law and at the legal and practical procedures that Soviet Jews had to go through in order to emigrate. Many Jews were denied the right to emigrate and became so-called “refuseniks,” around which a transnational campaign for their emigration developed. Accordingly, Dmitry Asinovskiy’s paper explores how Soviet leaders under Brezhnev decided who was allowed to emigrate, decisions which determined the scope of this transnational campaign. Together, these three papers draw on new primary source material to provide a non-teleological reconsideration of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, from its early post-Stalinist days until the dramatic changes of perestroika.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Studies

Chair

• Dina Fainberg, City St George's, U of London (UK)

Papers

• Memory, Nostalgia, and the Transnational Meanings of the Russian-Jewish Past after 1953 - Alex Valdman, Ben Gurion U (Israel)

• Learning How to Emigrate: The Legal and Practical Process of Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1966-1973 - Noam Bizan, U of Cambridge (UK)

• 'A Handful of Jews Who Arouse Acute Emotions in the United States for No Reason': Brezhnev’s Politburo and Soviet Jewish Emigration - Dmitry Asinovskiy, Tel Aviv U (Israel)

Discussant

• Dina Fainberg, City St George's, U of London (UK)