It’s Time for Jews to Act Like Refuseniks Again

What can American Jews do to successfully respond to the surge of antisemitism that followed the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023? The answer, says JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, may be to channel the spirit of activism that characterized the movement to free Soviet Jewry in the 1970s and 80s. He’s joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by scholar and author Izabella Taborovsky, the author of Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide. Taborovsky points out that the script for those engaging in what she calls “conspiratorial anti-Zionism was written by Soviet propagandists more than a half century ago. She says the Soviet Union didn’t merely engage in state-sponsored antisemitism but also in a similar effort to promote anti-Zionism in order to suppress Jewish dissent at home and to attack the United States and Israel. What we’re facing today, she says, is, “the same language, the same ideas, the same conceptual universe and the same explanatory logic” employed by the Soviets against Jews then. The “refuseniks”—the Jews who wouldn’t go along with this assault on Jewish identity and demanded the right to emigrate—”refused this idea that in order to be accepted, we have to give up every aspect of our Jewish ideas and identity.” Moreover, she argues, they knew they weren’t accepted anyway by a society that was drenched in Jew-hatred. The lessons she draws from this struggle, can, she asserts, be applied to the Jewish dilemmas of today. The six principles laid out in her book are to: Reclaim your Zionism and its centrality in Jewish identity; Educate yourself rather than remain Jewishly illiterate; Find comrades in arms and embrace allies, which exist in America among pro-Israel Christians; Do the unexpected and refuse to play by the rules laid down by the antisemites; Reject victimhood and embrace pride in Jewish success; and to Lead with Jewish life as a pathway to success. Taborovsky also points out that efforts to bring up the history of the Jewish Socialist Bund as an alternative to Zionism is ahistorical. The Bund was just as nationalist as Zionism; it just wanted to practice it in Eastern Europe. To revive this doomed notion is to forget that it died in the ashes of the Holocaust and the Soviet gulags. To the contrary, she believes Jews should take heart from Israel’s successes and to realize that Zionism is the future of the Jewish people. It is those who reject it or wish to destroy it that are, as in the past, on the wrong side of history. Listen/Subscribe to weekly episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, iHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Watch new episodes every week by subscribing to the JNS YouTube Channel. Register for the JNS International Policy Summit here: https://jns-summit.org