In 1985, while studying for my PhD orals, I did the most irresponsible thing I ever did as a student. I disappeared for three weeks to visit Soviet Jewish refuseniks during Passover.
Forty years later, the lessons I learned about the human capacity for cruelty and bovine thoughtlessness – and about Jewish history, heroism, Zionism, and hope – still resonate.
Since the 1960s, Jews protested to free nearly two million Soviet Jews from their Communist purgatory. Soviets stopped Jews from praying, learning Hebrew, expressing their Jewish identity publicly, or emigrating anywhere, including Israel. Some were imprisoned in the Gulag, the Soviet prison system.
As outsiders intimidated by Soviet power, we assumed these Jews would never be freed. Still, we dutifully shouted: “Let My People Go.” We were being good Jewish citizens, trying to help Jews in need. We attended rallies. We wore bracelets brandishing refuseniks’ strange names: Shcharansky, Kosharovsky, Kuznetsov.
At Harvard, I realized my activism made me more skeptical about Communism than my peers. Most academics had a soft spot for Marxism because of its egalitarian ideals, claiming “Marx was well-intended”; I didn’t. I knew Karl Marx believed the only “way” forward “is revolutionary terror.”
My Jewish lens focused on the Communist oppression needed to impose Marxism broadly and the absurdity of reducing people to two categories – the noble oppressed proletarians versus their evil oppressors – sound familiar? In 1983, when Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” one leading American historian called it “the worst presidential speech in American history.” Reporters decided it offended the Soviets and risked war.
Years later, research in Kremlin archives confirmed that the Soviets ignored such rhetoric – theirs was worse. Natan Sharansky reports that hearing rumors about the speech in the Gulag reassured him and other prisoners that an American president finally understood Communism’s perversity.
Lesson No. 1: Defy the trends, don’t follow the herd. Humans love reducing politics to good versus bad, all-or-nothing fights. The blindness of many liberals who couldn’t recognize Communist illiberalism made me forever skeptical of both extremes’ sheeplike preference for thickheaded loyalty over sharp-edged analysis.
Our freedom shouldn't be taken for granted
WE LANDED in Moscow on April 1, 1985. My friend sailed through customs. I didn’t. They pulled me into a side room, having noticed matzah boxes in my luggage, along with “my” tallit and tefillin – prayer shawl and phylacteries intended for refuseniks.
One customs official briefed a more intimidating plainclothes type. All I heard was “blah, blah, blah, zeeoneest” – Zionist! In this Bizarro universe, that magical word to me was a curse word to them.
Lesson No. 2: We Jews, we Americans, do have enemies.
Lesson No. 3: We are so lucky to live in freedom. We take it for granted – but shouldn’t!
Lesson No. 4: If antisemitism is the world’s longest hatred, Israel and Zionists are the world’s favorite scapegoats. Haters love demonizing Zionism, which exposes their obsession with Judaism. They falsely claim “I’m not anti-Jewish, I’m just objecting to ___ (i.e., the latest Israeli action to make a headline, or the latest big crime people accuse the West of committing and they love to pin on Israel).
Of all the heroes we visited, I most bonded with Yuli Kosharovsky. We met in the 14th year of what ultimately was his 18-year wait to immigrate to Israel. He was yet another supersmart Soviet engineer who rejected the Communists’ corrupt system when he realized in 1967 that his country was his people’s enemy. His expansiveness, his passion, transcended his drab, cramped Moscow apartment. His only weapons were his love of life and his love of Hebrew, which he taught whenever he could.
Sitting with him, his wife, Inna, his kids, his friends, laughing, feeling like instant family, neutralized my Harvardian skepticism that the movement was futile. I started wondering whether this mystical, palpable power of the Jewish people – and of Zionism – might defeat the Soviet totalitarians.
And that, lesson No. 5, was the most valuable lesson. We’re the Phoenix Nation, getting knocked down but coming up again and again. We’re a people fueled on hope, “Hatikvah”!
Our history, our Seders, all too often emphasize the Pharaohs who keep targeting us in every generation. But Jewish history, Zionism, Israel, Israelis, our heroic students worldwide, keep reminding me of our power to roll up our sleeves and make tomorrow better than today.
Every Seder this year should celebrate that optimism, that activism, that ability to turn nightmares into opportunities and dreams into realities.
One of the Jewish community’s post-October 7 buzzwords is “resilience.” American Jews say that in an age of renewed Jew-hatred, our kids must learn from Israelis and be resilient. But the word’s first definition is “the capacity to withstand” blows. That’s not what we need. We need to return to the word’s Latin roots, resilire, to rebound or recoil.
We need more bounce in our steps, more strength than endurance, more joy than oy. Every Seder, the older generation should tell the younger generation each family’s “yetziat Mitzrayim,” getting out of Egypt tale, emphasizing how lucky we were to end up in freedom. And we should recall how Soviet Jews seemed to be in a perpetual prison, until that totalitarian regime imploded in 1991 – partially thanks to the refuseniks’ heroism, amplified by our pressure.
People often ask me how I became a historian. I say, “How could I not? Look at all our holidays.”
Others ask me how I’m an optimist. I say, “How could I not be? Look at our history.”
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath, were just published.