Bad Jews by Emily Tamkin

Author:Emily Tamkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Refugee Jews

OLYA WAS BORN IN the Soviet Union. Her father had grown up in a fairly religious household; her mother, in a secular one. Her mother’s first Passover seder was at Olya’s father’s parents’ home. For her father, Judaism was a religion. For her mother, in the Soviet Union, it was “a form of protest.”

“For both of them,” Olya told me, “it was something that caused discrimination and made their lives more difficult.”

Olya, who asked to be identified by only her first name, and her parents were refuseniks—people, primarily Soviet Jews, who were refused the right to emigrate. Her family finally, with help from the American Jewish community, which lobbied on behalf of their Soviet coreligionists, came to the United States when she was six years old.1

Olya and her family’s story stands in contrast to that of many of the American Jews whose families came over in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but Olya’s family was hardly alone. In September 1989, the New York Times reported on the arrival of the largest group of Jewish refugees to come to the United States in a single day since World War II (on that day, 1,356 Soviet Jews reached the United States, joined by roughly 250 Pentecostal Christians). They arrived in time for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.2

The passing of legislation in the 1920s that severely restricted Jewish immigration was significant in part because, without an influx of Jews primarily from central, eastern, and southeastern Europe, assimilation and acculturation intensified, as did the contestation over what it meant to be an American Jew.

But though there were fewer Jewish immigrants to arrive after 1924, there were indeed still some Jewish populations who found their way to the United States. They came from different countries and contexts and had been forged by different political circumstances, but they shaped, and still shape, what it means to be Jewish in America differently than did many American Jews whose families came to the United States earlier, too.

This chapter looks at two such groups: Soviet and Persian Jews, thousands of whom fled to the United States in the 1970s, during the Islamic Revolution and the end of the Persian monarchy.3 Though there are many differences between them (and, indeed, there are many differences within both groups), both serve as a reminder that there is more than one American Jewish immigration—and assimilation—story.

There was a moment, at the beginning of the early twentieth century, when Jews let themselves believe that the Soviet Union would be their true home. That it was there that Socialism would bring about the conditions for Jewish intellectualism and culture to flourish. That it was in the Soviet Union that Jews could be their most authentic selves, a condition somehow always just out of reality’s reach.4

It was a fleeting moment. The Soviet Union would not provide a haven for Jews.

Despite the trope that Jews were all secret Communists, in the actual Soviet Union, Communism, as it developed, was hostile to Jewish practice.

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