Posted by kelnersj on Monday, December 23, 2019 in Articles, Research.

2020. In Sune Bechmann Pedersen and Christian Noack, eds. Tourism and Travel during the Cold War: Negotiating Tourist Experiences across the Iron Curtain, London: Routledge.

Circumventing the Soviet government’s travel bureau, Western organizations working for Soviet Jewish emigration rights collaborated with Jewish activists in the USSR to create an alternative tourist track that regularly opened Soviet apartments to Western visitors. In this way, human rights tourism provided thousands of ordinary westerners the rarest of vantage points into Soviet life: the view from inside Soviet homes.

This chapter in a book on Cold War tourism examines how the Soviet Jewry movement opened the homes of Soviet Jews to American visitors in the midst of the Cold War.

Tags: social movements, Soviet Jewry Movement, tourism