Reading “Days of Awe” through Queer Soviet Jewish Immigrant Barbarism

In April 1991, just seven months before the collapse of the Soviet Union, my parents held two sets of airplane tickets: one to occupied Palestine (Israel), and the other to occupied Indigenous American land (the US). Although they had been studying Hebrew in Moscow (with an Orthodox Christian, of all people), my parents ultimately relocated our family, including 5-year-old me, to Kumeyaay land (San Diego, CA) on a refugee visa. The years that followed saw my assimilation into American whiteness, a process accelerated by my interpellation as a whitebodied person and by my rapid adoption of American-accented English. Today, unlike many people of color in the US, I am never asked where I am “really from”. While this ascribed whiteness certainly advantages me in material ways, it also invisibilizes and endangers Soviet Ashkenazi Jewish histories, epistemologies, and cultural practices that I hold dear and that diverge from dominant American (including Jewish American) ways of being. Thus, I inevitably approach Omer’s important book and the American Jewish movement for Palestinian solidarity more broadly through the ongoing contestation of my own racialized assimilation, locating liberatory potential in the barbarism of the margins. My reading of Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians suggests that a reclaimed queer Soviet Jewish immigrant “barbarism” makes deorientalizing and decolonial contributions to the ongoing anti-Zionist rescripting of American Jewishness. In the book, Omer engages Slabodsky’s discussions of barbarism, citing his call to “relocate ‘the basis for a potential epistemological alliance’ among those whom Europe renders ‘barbarians’ via the colonial gaze” (Slabodsky 2014; in Omer 2019: 205). Analogously, in the US context, Soviet Jews are rendered barbaric via the imperialist and orientalizing white American gaze, including that of assimilated white American Jews. From the 1970s to early 1990s, this was operationalized in the Movement to “Save the Soviet Jewry”, an Israeli-instigated American campaign that mobilized liberal humanist logics and intra-Jewish solidarity to facilitate Soviet Jewish resettlement. Decades later, residues of the movement’s condescension linger in American Jewish institutions, including leftist, queer, and