The Wreckage: Open Up the Gates

The Wreckage, Season 3: “Open Up the Gates” A narrative podcast from the American Jewish Historical Society Hosted by Rebecca Naomi Jones Produced and written by Gemma Birnbaum, Shaul Kelner and Andrew Sperling 9 episodes · 2025 Listen at AJHS | Apple Podcasts About the Season The Wreckage follows Soviet Jews struggling to leave the…

Posted by kelnersj on March 25, 2026 in , podcasts, Soviet Jewry Movement

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A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews

AmazonNYU Press 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,…

Posted by kelnersj on March 19, 2024 in , book, featured, Soviet Jewry Movement

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Foreign Tourists, Domestic Encounters: Human Rights Travel to Soviet Jewish Homes

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…

Posted by kelnersj on December 23, 2019 in Articles, Research, social movements, Soviet Jewry Movement, tourism

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À la rencontre des juifs de l’autre côté du rideau de fer : récits de voyage de juifs américains et représentation du judaïsme en Union soviétique

2019. “Encountering Jews on the other Side of the Iron Curtain: American Jewish Travel Writing and the Representation of Judaism in the Soviet Union”, in Andreas Nijenhuis-Bescher, Susanne Berthier-Foglar, Gilles Bertrand and Frédéric Meyer, eds., Frontières et altérité religieuse : La religion dans le récit de voyage [Boundaries and Religious Otherness : Religion in Travel Writing]….

Posted by kelnersj on December 22, 2019 in Articles, Research, Soviet Jewry Movement, tourism

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Where is the Next Soviet Jewry Movement? How Identity Education Forgot the Lessons that Jewish Activism Taught

2019. In Jon Levisohn and Ari Y. Kelman, eds., Beyond Jewish Identity: Rethinking Concepts and Imagining Alternatives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press. Pp. 193-215.

Posted by kelnersj on November 23, 2019 in Articles, Research, education, Soviet Jewry Movement

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The American Soviet Jewry Movement’s ‘Uneventful’ 1968: Cold War Liberalism, Human Interest and the Politics of the Long Haul

2018. In American Jewish History 102(1), 5-35. How did the American campaign for Soviet Jews, a movement born in and of the 1960s, manage to pass the tumultuous 1968 in relative quiet? And what does this reveal about the movement itself, its relationship to the politics of the New Left, and the relationship between internal…

Posted by kelnersj on October 18, 2018 in Articles, Research, social movements, Soviet Jewry Movement

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Religious Ambivalence in Jewish American Philanthropy

2013. In this chapter, I consider Jewish philanthropic federations, and their ambivalent relationship to Jewish religion from the 19th century to the present. I attempt to show that much of this ambivalence stems from the fact that these philanthropic institutions understand themselves not only to be agents of voluntary action for the public good but…

Posted by kelnersj on April 23, 2014 in Articles, Chapters, Research, chapters, Federation, philanthropy, religion, social movements, Soviet Jewry Movement

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The Bureaucratization of Ritual Innovation: The Festive Cycle of the American Soviet Jewry Movement

2011. Jewish Cultural Studies 3:360-391. Since the 1960s, social movements have been key forces in the development of new religious rituals that are reshaping American Judaism. This article examines how the American movement to free Soviet Jews systematized and even bureaucratized the process of ritual innovation as it developed an annual calendar of activities pegged…

Posted by kelnersj on December 12, 2011 in Articles, Research, articles, ritual, social movements, Soviet Jewry Movement

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Ritualized Protest and Redemptive Politics: Cultural Consequences of the American Mobilization to Free Soviet Jewry

2008. Jewish Social Studies 14(3): 1-37. The significance of the worldwide movement to free Soviet Jewry cannot be measured solely by its success in achieving its goals vis-à-vis Soviet Jews. It was also influential in shaping American Jewish political culture during the years it was active. During the 1960s and 1970s, and to a lesser…

Posted by kelnersj on September 22, 2011 in Articles, Research, articles, ritual, social movements, Soviet Jewry Movement

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