In campaigning for emigration rights for Soviet Jews, American activists understood that success, if it came at all, could take decades to achieve. If activists couldn't sustain morale and gird people for the long haul, the campaign would wither. In order to create the type of commitment that could endure through the ups and downs of the struggle, year after year, the movement made activism meaningful in its own right. This lecture will explore two ways it accomplished this: Mobilizing for Soviet Jewry allowed American Jews to feel that they were playing their part in the timeless Jewish story of exodus and redemption, even as their effort to take the fight to the Soviet Union placed them at the cusp of history in the midst of the Cold War.

Shaul Kelner is Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, and past director of VU’s Jewish Studies Program. An alumnus of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, he is the author of the award-winning Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press, 2010). He is currently a Fellow of the University of Michigan’s Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, where he is writing a book on the culture of the American Soviet Jewry movement.

Sponsored by: Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies