A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews
New York University Press, 2024
★ Winner, 74th National Jewish Book Award
Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that helped free Soviet Jews and reshaped the American Jewish experience from the Johnson era through the Reagan–Bush years.
What do Ingrid Bergman, Passover matzoh, Banana Republic®, the fitness craze, the Philadelphia Flyers, B-grade spy movies, and ten thousand Bar and Bat Mitzvah sermons have in common? Nothing, except that social movement activists enlisted them all into the most effective human rights campaign of the Cold War.
The plight of Jews in the USSR was marked by systemic antisemitism, a problem largely ignored by Western policymakers. In the face of governmental apathy, activists in the United States hatched a bold plan: unite Jewish Americans to demand that Washington exert pressure on Moscow for change.
A Cold War Exodus delves into how these men and women, through ingenuity and determination, devised mass mobilization tactics during a three-decade-long campaign to liberate Soviet Jews—an endeavor that would ultimately lead to one of the most significant mass emigrations in Jewish history.
Reviews
“Kelner argues, persuasively and subtly, that as much as American Jews might have done for Soviet Jews, the movement did more for them, both collectively and individually. It changed the nature of American Jewish communal life for three decades… [a] brilliant social history.”
— Jewish Review of Books
“Kelner breaks new ground by focusing on the strategies and tactics used to mobilize American Jews… In a particularly brilliant and perceptive chapter, he analyzes travel accounts from Jews who visited with ‘refuseniks.’”
— American Jewish History
“This book tells us exactly how the Soviet Jewry movement did what it did… It is not a history of the Soviet Jewish escape from totalitarianism; rather, it focuses on the activist tactics used to drive attention to the cause.”
— Commentary
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