Challenging the world's conscience: The Soviet Jewry Movement, American political culture, and United States foreign policy, 1952--1967

In 1991 Natan Sharansky, presently an Israeli cabinet minister, recalled organizing a mock trial in the mid-1970s for the benefit of his fellow Soviet political prisoners. On trial was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The tribunal of dissidents charged Kissinger with obstructing the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the 1974 Trade Act, which explicitly linked the Soviet Union's trading status to levels of Jewish emigration. After judging Kissinger guilty, the court considered several bloody punishments before settling on a telling sentence: Kissinger would be stripped of his American citizenship, sent to the Soviet Union, and left to try to make his way out on his own.; As Sharansky's anecdote illustrates, Soviet Jews were dependent on the support of individuals and organizations in the United States. American efforts on behalf of Soviet Jewish rights affected more than just the refusniks and prisoners of conscience, however. The twenty years preceding the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment witnessed the emergence and evolution of a multi-faceted and dynamic Soviet Jewry Movement (SJM) in the United States. This dissertation traces that development and its implications from the waning months of the Truman administration through the Six Day War and its aftermath. Although the SJM produced few tangible results for Soviet Jews during this period, the advocacy campaign—led by American Jews and closely connected to memories of the Holocaust—adapted to and resonated with a protean American political culture. Speaking to both the nation's oldest ideals and its most contemporary concerns, the SJM contributed to a “feedback loop” among the evolution of American Jewish identity and civic engagement, the changing American perception of Israel, and the broader transformation of American political and foreign policy culture.