Book Review: “Be A Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide”

Book Review: “Be A Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide”

A delightful lithograph hangs in the Berkeley Jewish Art Museum, a block west of the University of California’s rattled flagship campus. It shows its creator, originally a Soviet underground artist, Eugene Abeshous, dressed as a Fiddler on the Roof extra, disembarking at Eretz Yisrael. The work is called Jonah and the Whale in Haifa Port because instead of a cruise liner, its protagonist exits the gaping mouth of a sea monster. Abeshous tells the story that was once on the front pages of American newspapers, but is now nearly forgotten—that of Soviet Jews leaving the belly of the beast.

In her recently released Be A Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide, historian of Soviet Jewry Izabella Tabarovsky used the struggle of the Soviet Jews in the 1970s and 80s as an inspiration for the young Americans facing antisemitism on college campuses. Tabarovsky put the half-century-old experiences of my and her parents’ generation side-by-side with the conflicts defining the lives of our children. Even if we are “separated by decades, borders, and ideologies,” she showed how the mindset of refuseniks can—and does—inspire the students today.

Refuseniks were the Soviet Jewish dissidents who were denied permission to make aliya. My maternal uncle, for instance, applied for his exit visa in 1980, lost his scientist job, had many unfortunate encounters with the sadistic Soviet bureaucracy, and was finally granted passage in 1987, after he made it on the Ronald Reagan list of 100 refuseniks.

My uncle was perhaps luckier than most, but this was a fairly typical refusenik fate. Yet when Tabarovsky tells American students to be refuseniks, she highlights another meaning of the word—the one who refuses to surrender to the forces of evil. Her book teaches how to dive into Jewish history to find the inner strength to resist.

In one key respect, Soviet antisemitism was similar to the contemporary American antisemitism—it sells itself as antizionism. In fact—and this is something Tabarovsky discussed in her Legal Insurrection lecture—our antizionism was invented by the Soviets; it was a product of the virtual freakout over the 1967 defeat of its Arab clients. The Antizionist tropes animating the vocabulary of American college professors are traceable to Brezhnev-era Soviet propaganda.

Antizionism, Tabarovsky shows, was something that Soviet Jews, like their contemporary American counterparts, experienced on a personal level—the hysteria whipped up in the media and echoed in local Communist meetings made Jewish existence unsafe. But the defiant Zionists inverted fear and responded with pride. For instance, when his bosses brought out Nathan Sharansky for a Soviet humiliation ritual before his entire institute and started drilling him about his Jewish ideological leanings, Sharansky responded by giving a brief lecture on modern Israeli history—and found an “intrigued” audience in his co-workers, many of whom, I’m sure, found it liberating to hear Soviet propaganda exposed.

Tabarovsky found many inspiring examples of Jewish resilience. She talks about the Georgian Jews who created their own Hebrew textbook, drowning their typewriter in a local stream afterward to avoid detection, and the pregnant Marina Furman who lit the menorah in her window for her KGB tail to observe.

It took courage to be a refusenik—just like it takes courage to be a proud Jew on campus today. Tabarovsky cites many instances of the latter, like Elisha Baker, who got his shirt set on fire by the rioters in an antizionist campus encampment set up in the aftermath of the 2023 Simchat Torah massacre.

Highlighting similarities in Jewish resilience, Tabarovsky isolates the themes common to both the Soviet and the contemporary American experience that form what she dubs the “refusenik mindset.” She advises young Americans to “reclaim […] Zionism,” dedicate themselves to Jewish learning, bond with allies, “do the unexpected,” “reject victimhood,” and “lead with Jewish.”

“Lead with Jewish” is her most potent point. The author sees the refusenik mindset as an inversion of the “edgy intersectionalism” and an alternative for all Americans. Like the Soviet Union a century ago, Western wokesters promise universal liberation, requiring Jews to surrender their interests to the project. Tabarovsky rejects this option:

[R]ather than sacrificing your interests for yet another utopian vision, do what worked so gloriously for the refuseniks: Lead with your Jewish identity and your sense of what’s right for the Jewish people.

Chances are, you will discover […] that this path naturally aligns with the core values of American liberal democracy, with its emphasis on individual rights, equality before the law, pluralism, free speech, and constitutional checks and balances. And that, in turn, will place you alongside those committed to upholding one of the greatest democratic traditions humanity has ever built.

“Lead with Jewish” was a natural, if not an easy choice, in the USSR. As Aleksander Smukler, one of Tabarovsky’s heroes, quipped, “In the USSR, Zionism was like sex: There was no one to ask a question.” Everything Jewish was a target for the regime, which made it defiant, placing those with swarthy features and German-sounding names in leadership roles by the very virtue of their existence.

Tabarovsky quotes the Boston College professor and former refusenik, Maxim Shrayer, who believes that:

By the early 1980s, the KGB had largely succeeded in ‘bringing the dissident movement to a standstill through intimidation, trials, arrests and imprisonments, and the forced exile of dissidents.” But the Jewish refuseniks, all while facing the kinds of repressions described earlier, remained “the only standing force and movement of Soviet citizens who were defiant and publicly challenged in the Soviet regime—in their struggle, political, religious, and cultural activities, protests and performances, and daily lives.”

Shrayer probably overstated the case. If refuseniks remained the last standing overtly political movement, a small offshoot of the defanged dissidents mutated into and flourished as an underground bohemian culture that aimed, in the Russian-Jewish poet Joseph Brodsky’s turn of tongue, to “live vne,” or totally outside the Soviet social and cultural paradigms. Consider that Abeshous’s Jonah, with his soulful skyward gaze, bears a resemblance to other Brezhnev-era underground artists of his native St. Petersburg—I’m thinking specifically of the mitki movement. He was looking for a way of life void of Soviet officialdom—and found it in his Jewish heritage.

What made Jews unique among other Soviet ethnicities—or nationalities in Soviet parlance—is that Stalin didn’t consider us a nation because he didn’t connect us to a language and a land. This tentative status of Russian-speaking Jews came with multiple silver linings.

To properly propagandize the nations of the former Soviet empire, Stalin took the nationalist form and filled it with Soviet content. They invented post-revolutionary folklore fully aligned with Communist ideology and gave it to the ethnicities of the USSR. This practice started under the Korenization policy of the 1920s and went on until the dissolution of the USSR. For instance, the Friendship of the Nations Fountain, built in 1954 at the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy in Moscow, shows gilded peasant girls in folk costumes representing the fifteen main ethnicities of the Union, supposedly living in happiness and plenty under the Soviet regime.

Jews, as Tabarovsky pointed out, were never treated this way, which was a bit lonely and plenty scary. However, it also made us singular.

Moreover, Korenization compromised folklore. And yet at no point of Soviet history did citizens turn on the TVs to discover to their utmost bewilderment that the Communist Party realized the age-old aspirations of the Jewish people as expressed in the story of Jacob and Esau—or to hear a klezmer song praising the people’s plenum.

Tabarovsky explained that following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet regime deployed Yevsektsia—a small band of Bundists—to root out the Jewish tradition. Yevsektsia went after the Hebrew language, Zionism, and more broadly, the Jewish religion, but it hasn’t offered a reliable substitute. When, decades later, Soviet Jews began rediscovering their heritage, it was positioned completely outside of the official culture. Everything Jewish that we did was authentic—and completely vne.

It doesn’t mean that we never got anything wrong. In my native Kharkov, it was possible to get underground matzos for Passover. We had no idea what to do with them, so we ate them alongside bread. But the impulse was pure, and the custom was free of Stalinist legacy.

Here, too, we can draw a parallel to the contemporary U.S. because our institutions turned on Jews. Even Jewish organizations are largely toothless. “Young American Jews on campus,” Tabarovsky writes:

Don’t yet have a movement to join. October 7 revealed as much of a failure of Jewish establishment organizations as it did of Israeli security services and the IDF. Having failed to forestall—or even envision—the entrenchment of antisemitism in academia and progressive circles, many also proved too timid as campus erupted in anti-Jewish hate. These organizations are unlikely to produce a vision and ideas for the world in which young American Jews find themselves.

This makes all grassroots Jewish and Zionist life authentic—and attractive.

So why not be bold and, like Tabarovsky advises, do something unexpected? Unlike the Soviet Jews who were fighting to leave the inhospitable land, American Jews are fighting to stay in the largely friendly country whose very character was shaped by the intellect and creativity of our ancestors. After two thousand years of exile, America remains the last great diaspora standing. The Simchat Torah massacre might have been the beginning of the end of diaspora, but the country is worth fighting for, and it could just be the opening of a new chapter.

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