Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2020.1877495
L. Remennick
This article was published in the first volume of East European Jewish Affairs in early 1971, when tens of thousands of Soviet Jews were pondering the subversive possibility of emigration to Israel. The upsurge in the Jewish national consciousness and nascent movement for the right to emigrate to Israel in the late 1960s and 1970s was inspired by the impressive victory of the Jewish State in the Six-Day War of June 1967. The historical moment when Korey was writing about the right of Soviet Jews to leave was marked by constant embarrassment of the Soviet government that, on the one hand, was signatory to several international human rights conventions that stipulated this universal right, but on the other hand detested the idea of lifting the Iron Curtain for thousands of potential émigrés. Korey reviews the previous decades of the relations between the Soviet and international legal system, mostly within the United Nations-based initiatives, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 from which USSR had abstained. On the other hand, Soviet authorities actively campaigned for repatriation to the USSR of the pre-World War I émigrés and resettled close to 100,000 Armenians from France, Turkey and the Middle East in Soviet Armenia. As far as Jews were concerned, during the 1950s the Soviet government allowed repatriation of about 200,000 Polish citizens (including many Jews) to Poland, realizing that many of them would move on to Israel. However, by the late 1960s, Nikita Khrushev’s Thaw had ended and Leonid Brezhnev’s government took a more conservative turn. It resealed the few holes in the Iron Curtain, so that after 1965, just a few hundred Soviet Jews were allowed to travel to the United States or Israel for humanitarian or family-related reasons. Korey’s article cites several curious responses of the high Soviet officials (Khrushev himself, Gromyko and Kosygin) to the questions posed by Western journalists and human rights activists – to the effect that while their Israeli relatives were pressing for family reunification, no Soviet Jews were actually interested in joining their brethren in Israel. The Foreign Ministry asserted that there were no requests for emigration from Soviet Jews in the late 1960s, while it was known from independent sources (like Western journalists and Zionist emissaries visiting USSR undercover) that about 10,000 of such applications for exit visas were pending. The number of applicants went up every year starting from 1968, and by 1970 reached tens of thousands. Soviet authorities were stunned by this unexpected manifestation of resistance and free will by Soviet Jews
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2020.1880876
A. Ivanov
siia could have strengthened the analysis further, as the fates of these interrelated and interconnected policies differed. In regard to the republic’s titular population, the policy of korenizatsiia – in the sense of promoting ethnic Belorussians – continued until the end of the Soviet era. Linguistic Belorusizatsiia, on the other hand, was scaled back, rather than abolished, whereas Yiddishizatsiia was indeed abandoned. Whether the reversal was “razor-sharp” could be debated; arguably, the reversal was inconsistent and contradictory; the number of Yiddish language schools actually kept increasing for much of the 1930s. The reversal, as Leonid Smilovitskii has shown, was of a somewhat later date: 1935–1937, with Yiddish retaining its status as an official language until 1938. If some of Sloin’s bold interpretations may prove contentious, they in no way diminish the value of his study, which skillfully restores voices and agency to local, often forgotten Jewish actors. Combining economic, social, and political history, this sophisticated original work is a significant contribution not only to Soviet Jewish history, but also to our understanding of Soviet nationalities policy.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2021.1877487
A. Glaser
In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world. The Yiddish writers Peretz Markish, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Der Nister all moved permanently to the Soviet Union in the ...
在20世纪20年代,苏联是意第绪语世界的中心。意第绪语作家Peretz Markish, david Hofshteyn和Der Nister都在20世纪30年代永久移居苏联。
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2020.1880877
Sarah Gavison
In Kfar Hogla, Israel, a cute farmhouse sits on a beautiful piece of land. No fence. Maybe not even a lock. This is where my friend Borya built his home. And one can understand why: after his youth in the Soviet Union and nine years in a labor camp for having attempted to emigrate, he needs this peace and freedom; a feeling that the cheaper apartment in which he used to live in Haifa could not provide. Fifty years ago, Boris Penson participated in Operation Wedding, the attempt by a handful of Zionists from Riga to flee the USSR. They were sixteen who shared this dream and acted upon, eleven men and five women, including two non-Jews. After their failure, four women were released, one man was tried separately in a military court, and the others were indicted and tried 15–24 December 1970, in the “First Leningrad Trial.” All were found guilty. All did time in Soviet prisons/camps. Borya was sentenced to ten years, and served nine: in 1979 he was freed and relocated to Israel. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of East European Jewish Affairs (EEJA), the guesteditors, my friends Nick Underwood and David Shneer, who was also my advisor and editor-in-chief while I served as assistant-managing editor for EEJA, asked me to comment on Rene Beermann’s “The 1970–71 Soviet Trials of Zionists: Some legal aspects.” Beermann analyzed the legal frameworks of the First and Second Leningrad Trials, and of the Riga and Kishinev Trials. As a young scholar, I wondered how I could answer the editors’ call and contribute to the story without repeating what had been said time and again. I knew Borya through friends, so I reached out to him. He has been interviewed many times about the event. I wanted to ask him about what he feels has not been covered in those interviews. In response, Borya invited me to his home, this simple farmhouse he built with his wife (“slowly, after we bought the land, there was no money left!”), in a moshav fifty kilometers north of Tel Aviv. Our conversations were trilingual, mostly in Hebrew but with some English and Russian mixed in. The translations are mine. Borya was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which was where his parents found shelter during World War II. At age four, his family returned to his mother’s hometown, Riga, Latvia. But, as he recalls, everywhere in the Soviet Union, it was populated by the same Homo Sovieticus as everywhere else in the country. I asked if this was what led him to become a Zionist. He replied: “I hated the regime. I couldn’t take the bullshit. Nothing is real, it’s impossible to get the truth. People don’t know the real history. And if you don’t know history...” He did not finish Edmond Burke’s quote. Borya studied at the Riga’s Academy of Arts and worked with painter Semion Gelberg. He knew that he would not be able to live in the USSR, though, he felt that he could not
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2020.1877492
G. Drinkwater, D. Shneer
In 1971, William Korey, a scholar of Russian history, a prolific author, and a senior leader of B’nai B’rith International, published a piece about the Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration in the first edition of a small publication out of London, Soviet Jewish Affairs, the precursor to East European Jewish Affairs. The early 1970s were a breaking point in the Soviet Union’s attitude to Israel and Jewish emigration after the Soviet Union cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 1967 as a result of the June Six-Day War. In 1970, only 1,000 Soviet Jews left the country for Israel, with only 25,000 emigrating from 1948–1970. And in 1971, Steven Roth of the World Jewish Congress’ Institute of Jewish Affairs launched Soviet Jewish Affairs. In December 1971, New York Times Moscow correspondent Hendrick Smith noted that “the well-organized Jewish emigration movement here [in the Soviet Union]” “the influence of world public opinion” encouraged the Soviet Union to allow Jewish emigration (although he noted that emigration was primarily from Soviet Georgia and the Baltics). In late 1970, a Soviet court sentenced two Jews to death (the sentence was commuted to 15 years in response to international pressure) for their unsuccessful attempt to commandeer a civilian aircraft to escape, and Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League placed pipe bombs in Aeroflot and Intourist offices in New York City as part of their campaign to force the Soviet Union to open up Jewish emigration. In 1971, 15,000 left and by the end of the 1970s, 250,000 had left the Soviet Union. For nearly three decades, Korey played a central role in using international law and human rights to allow Soviet Jews the right to emigrate. Korey, then, wrote as an expert in his essay on the legal and moral aspects of “the right to leave” for Soviet Jews in that inaugural issue of Soviet Jewish Affairs. As a legal historian, Korey goes back through the birth of human rights in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, what Eleanor Roosevelt called the “Magna Carta of Mankind.” (Korey claims U Thant, secretary general of the United Nations from 1961 to 1971, coined this phrase. It wasn’t.) Then he charts human rights laws through the 1950s and 60s, in which he says, “Next to the right to life, the right to leave one’s country is probably the most important of human rights” (Korey, 5). After creating a list of Cold-War era Soviet repatriation agreements with Poland and Greece, Korey calls on the Soviet Union to let Soviet Jews emigrate. The final line calls on the Soviet Union to “let my people go.” As the first article in the first issue in the journal, this was a call on
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2020.1877491
Anna B. Manchin
“Reflections on the Polish Experience” was written in the aftermath of the mass exodus of Poland’s remaining Jewish population. In the months following the anti-Jewish campaign of March 1968, nearly half of Poland’s 25-30,000 remaining Jews emigrated; organized Jewish life took a huge hit. L. Hirszowicz and D. L. Price’s notes consider the effects of domestic politics, foreign affairs, and diplomatic developments on the relationship between the Polish state and the Polish Jewish community, and on individuals from Jewish backgrounds living in Poland. The authors’ perspective reflects the general disillusionment that followed intellectuals’ realization that the antifascist, internationalist, utopian vision of the communist movement in postwar East-Central Europe could potentially create a new, more welcoming society for Jews was a fantasy. For most Jews who remained in the East, this early promise faded fast, and by the late 1960s, optimism had become hard to sustain for even the most ardent theoretical Marxists living in the West. The national turn in communism across much of Eastern Europe had led to a suspicion of international organizations and anything else extending beyond the nation. Zionism and Zionists (often used as code words for Jew) became political enemies seen as subversive and dangerous to communism and national unity. The Six-Day War intensified anti-Zionist policies and rhetoric by East European socialist governments. In Poland, shifting relations between Germany and Poland further decreased the party leadership’s commitment to anti-fascist rhetoric. After 1968, it was clear that communist Poland had failed to integrate or accept the Jews. Hirszowicz and Price pondered what this meant about the place and nature of antisemitism in twentieth century Polish society, and for the future of the Jewish community in Poland. The first part of that question, which focuses on the effects that political and diplomatic changes and antisemitism has on the Jewish community, were the dominant features of research on Jews in Poland until the 1990s. It was there that historians and sociologists of Polish Jews emphasized mostly postwar assimilation and nationalization. The second part of the question, which concerns the post-1968 possibilities for Polish Jewish life, has been the focus of scholars only recently. Since 2000, there has been a shift from favoring political and diplomatic history, towards one emphasizing the importance and relevance of social history and alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life). This has brought more attention to the mundane and to lived, bottom-up experiences of the Jewish community itself. By looking at the daily experience of rebuilding Jewish communities and living Jewish lives in communist Poland, Jewish strategies and adaptations in both religious and secular practices, a more nuanced picture emerges on the continuities and
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2020.1877496
Rebecca Kobrin
Is immigration – the right to leave one’s place of birth and find refuge in another nation – a basic human right? Indeed, the United States government has told thousands of Central Americans since 2017 that it will refuse to recognize their right to claim asylum at the United States border despite this being, considered by international law a basic human right. The US government under Donald Trump also embraced a policy of family separation in which children were ripped from their parents, some never to be returned. As the United States rejects its commitment to protecting human rights and challenges the broader international system of asylum, it is interesting to reflect back on the work William Korey penned fifty years ago for this journal. Korey sought through his activism and writing to make the plight of Soviet Jewry central to the Cold War. By establishing in “The Right to Leave for Soviet Jews – Legal and Moral Aspects” that “Soviet Jewry’s right to emigration was a basic human right,” he enlisted the United States in powerful ways to fight the Jewish community’s war against the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Jews. Indeed, reading this article fifty years after it was penned demonstrates not only the many inconsistencies in United States policy, which had long denied other groups fleeing persecution and Communism entry into the United States. It shows how the work and writings of American Jewish activists like Korey through publications like this, Korey helped make the fight to “free Soviet Jewry” central to the United States arsenal in the Cold War by linking human rights and open immigration as key weapons that could defeat the Soviet Union. In general, the embrace of human rights in US immigration policy was never a US imperative; indeed, Korey’s other life project – getting the United States government to sign the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – suggests one should question the United States broader commitment to human rights. Rereading this piece lays bare not only Korey’s astute insight about how to coopt American power for Jewish interests. He appreciated that “US Immigration policy has always intersected with more global concerns about the status, extension, and maintenance of the United States power in the world,” to use the words of historian Paul Kramer. The success in Korey’s emphatic call “ to establish Soviet Jewry’s right to emigration as a basic human right, which the United States should fight for in the international arena,” illustrates how he understood that during the Cold War “immigration policy was an instrument of United States’ global power.” Indeed, from the vantage point of 2020, we see clearly that basic
{"title":"US Cold War Immigration Policy, Human Rights, and the Soviet Jewry Movement: Reflections on William Korey’s “The Right to Leave for Soviet Jews – Legal and Moral Aspects.”","authors":"Rebecca Kobrin","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2020.1877496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2020.1877496","url":null,"abstract":"Is immigration – the right to leave one’s place of birth and find refuge in another nation – a basic human right? Indeed, the United States government has told thousands of Central Americans since 2017 that it will refuse to recognize their right to claim asylum at the United States border despite this being, considered by international law a basic human right. The US government under Donald Trump also embraced a policy of family separation in which children were ripped from their parents, some never to be returned. As the United States rejects its commitment to protecting human rights and challenges the broader international system of asylum, it is interesting to reflect back on the work William Korey penned fifty years ago for this journal. Korey sought through his activism and writing to make the plight of Soviet Jewry central to the Cold War. By establishing in “The Right to Leave for Soviet Jews – Legal and Moral Aspects” that “Soviet Jewry’s right to emigration was a basic human right,” he enlisted the United States in powerful ways to fight the Jewish community’s war against the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Jews. Indeed, reading this article fifty years after it was penned demonstrates not only the many inconsistencies in United States policy, which had long denied other groups fleeing persecution and Communism entry into the United States. It shows how the work and writings of American Jewish activists like Korey through publications like this, Korey helped make the fight to “free Soviet Jewry” central to the United States arsenal in the Cold War by linking human rights and open immigration as key weapons that could defeat the Soviet Union. In general, the embrace of human rights in US immigration policy was never a US imperative; indeed, Korey’s other life project – getting the United States government to sign the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – suggests one should question the United States broader commitment to human rights. Rereading this piece lays bare not only Korey’s astute insight about how to coopt American power for Jewish interests. He appreciated that “US Immigration policy has always intersected with more global concerns about the status, extension, and maintenance of the United States power in the world,” to use the words of historian Paul Kramer. The success in Korey’s emphatic call “ to establish Soviet Jewry’s right to emigration as a basic human right, which the United States should fight for in the international arena,” illustrates how he understood that during the Cold War “immigration policy was an instrument of United States’ global power.” Indeed, from the vantage point of 2020, we see clearly that basic","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"50 1","pages":"281 - 283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13501674.2020.1877496","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47677923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2020.1880875
P. A. Rudling
a productive career that spans more than two decades. The work, however, would have benefitted greatly from a sharper analytical focus that develops evidence-based arguments and interprets these fascinating materials to make more nuanced and better substantiated claims. Furthermore, the book desperately needs an editor. It is highly problematic that so much of a burden is placed on the reader, who must work through very extensive quotes from primary sources and establish connections and conclusions in place of the author’s own analytical narrative. In addition, the extremely lengthy sentences that follow already very extensive direct quotes (with subclause after subclause of biographical information about the memoirist quoted), serves neither the scholar, the memoirist, nor the reader. Making it through this somewhat tangled text of quotes, analysis, citations, and unedited writing is challenging yet, in the end, reveals a rewarding book.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2020.1877498
Shaul Kelner
The first article in the first issue of what was then called Soviet Jewish Affairswas not about Jews in the Soviet Union, per se, but about Jews getting out of the Soviet Union. William Korey’s “The ‘Right to Leave’ for Soviet Jews: Legal andMoral Aspects” framed the question of Jewish emigration from the USSR in the context of international law: “(1) How does international opinion and international law address itself to the issue of the right to leave a country? (2) What legal and moral obligations has the Soviet Union assumed in respect of this right?” Korey’s distinction between opinion and law, legality and morality gives some hint at the context. When a Western human rights campaign for Soviet Jews began emerging in the 1950s and early 1960s, it focused its initial demands on anti-discrimination reforms within the USSR – opening synagogues, allowing religious instruction and ending economic show trials that disproportionately targeted Jews. By 1971 – as a result of pressure from Jews in the Soviet Union, greater Israeli willingness to openly challenge the Kremlin after the latter had severed diplomatic relations in 1967 and jockeying between rival factions in the American movement – the movement shifted emphasis, prioritizing the demand for unfettered Soviet Jewish emigration. To ground that demand in human rights law would confer leverage as well as legitimacy. As it stood, however, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ affirmation of the fundamental right to leave one’s country was only a statement of principle, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which would endow the Declaration with binding legal force, still had not received the requisite thirty-five ratifications to enter into effect. (That happened in 1976). The most elaborated treatment of the right to leave taken up by the United Nations was a 1963 report to a United Nations Economic and Social Council sub-commission examining the situation de jure and de facto, and presenting recommendations, all with the caveat that “The views expressed in this study are those of the author,” Special Rapporteur, Judge Jose D. Ingles, from the Philippines. There is an element of circularity in Korey’s treatment of the Ingles report, as he had been a contributor to it. William Korey (1922–2009) had left his position teaching Russian history at City College of New York in 1954 to take up civil rights work as director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith’s Illinois-Missouri office. The position introduced him to Philip M. Klutznick, a Chicago attorney and real estate developer who also served as president of B’nai B’rith International and as a member of the US delegation to the United Nations, appointed by President Eisenhower. When B’nai B’rith decided to open a United Nations Office in 1960, Klutznick recruited Korey to head it. (In the same year, Korey completed his dissertation, “Zinoviev and the Problem of World Revolution, 1919–1927,” in Columbia Universi
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