Chapter Descriptions

Introduction: Let Them Live As Jews or Let Them Leave
Introduces the movement to free Soviet Jews and the state-sponsored antisemitism in the USSR. Sets out the book’s research questions: How did activists invent their mass mobilization tactics? How did these tactics shape Jewish American culture? Situates the Soviet Jewry movement in the Cold War, the post-Holocaust era, and America’s transition from 1960s Civil Rights movements to the Reagan Revolution.

Chapter 1: Illuminate the Past and Present
Presents the book’s analytic strategy, drawing from the sociology of culture to treat tactical innovation as “cultural production.” Critiques the sociology of American Jews’ emphasis on demography and social psychology at the expense of meso-level analyses of institutionalized collective action. Examines conventional wisdom about “tactical repertoires” in social movement studies and offers the “production of culture” approach as a solution. Introduces key analytic concepts: praxis, framing, endogenous explanation, emergent meaning, and the mobilizing gaze.

Chapter 2: This Is the Matzo of Hope
Examines how activists shaped American Jewish religious and political life by mobilizing Jewish holidays and rituals. Traces the evolution from ad hoc uses of Passover and Hanukkah to systematic mobilizations of the entire Jewish holiday calendar: Freedom Seders, the Matzoh of Hope, Rosh Hashanah greeting cards, Tisha B’Av protest fasts, Hanukkah Menorah Marches, and Simchat Torah dances. Shows how tactical ritualization forged an American Judaism in which ethnic solidarity and activism for Soviet Jewish rights were sacred imperatives.

Chapter 3: How to Find and Meet Russian Jews
Examines how activists enlisted Jet Age leisure tourism to mobilize transnational activism across the Iron Curtain. Analyzes Elie Wiesel’s 1965 visit to write The Jews of Silence—the travelogue that galvanized the movement. Traces how Israel’s Nativ agency and American organizations created tourism programs sending thousands to Russia. Analyzes the guidebooks, briefing kits, and bureaucratic routines that created a novel form of Cold War travel: simultaneously aid mission, roots quest, heritage tourism, and adventure tourism.

Chapter 4: From Russia with Angst
Draws on the writings of more than 4,200 tourists preserved in movement archives—travelogues, diaries, speeches, sermons, and op-eds—to uncover how tourists understood their experiences. Examines writers’ ambivalent uses of James Bond and John Le Carré spy genre conventions; how the Nazi genocide invaded 1970s and 1980s narratives; and how encounters with Soviet Jews led American travelers to wonder whether they were saving Soviet Jews, or whether Soviet Jews were saving them.

Chapter 5: We’ve Said No to PepsiCo
Examines how activists invented mobilization tactics for America’s consumerist, leisure-driven, media-saturated society. Traces the evolution of movement jewelry from trinkets to gifts cast in 18K gold. Shows how activists coopted the fitness craze of the 1970s and 80s to create corporate-sponsored “Freedom Runs for Soviet Jewry.” Examines how activists denied Americans the luxury of imagining leisure to be apolitical—bringing protest to US-Soviet cultural and sporting exchange and the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Chapter 6: Natasha’s Dream
Examines how the movement came to think of elementary school children as potential activists; how it invented tactics to mobilize them; and how it transformed children’s involuntary participation into voluntary civic engagement. Analyzes the movement’s first handbook for children’s activism, based on a poem by refusenik child Natasha Korenfeld. Examines curricula that made learning about oppression engaging: “Escape from the USSR” simulations, family history projects, art contests, puzzle books, and board games.

Chapter 7: My Soviet Twin
Examines bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah twinnings—a tactic that saw thousands of American Jewish teenagers symbolically share their coming-of-age with Soviet refusenik youth unable to celebrate freely. Traces the organizational processes that managed twinnings nationwide, describes how synagogues staged the rituals, and analyzes the 13-year-olds’ sermons to reveal what the ceremonies meant to them. Shows how twinning refashioned the Jewish American coming-of-age ceremony into ritualized celebration of American freedom and Cold War-era youth activism.

Conclusion: Voices of the Vigil
Considers the Soviet Jewry movement’s afterlife. Success left activists with nothing to protest, and mass mobilization tactics formerly ubiquitous in Jewish American life disappeared in an instant. Reviews how the movement shaped Jewish American religious and political culture. Argues that social movements construct meaning by inventing mass mobilization tactics to engage people in concrete behaviors, captured by the Talmudic concept na’aseh v’nishma—”first we do, then we understand.”