About this episode

The episode discusses how American Jews can respond to rising antisemitism by drawing parallels to the activism of Soviet Jewry refuseniks.

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…

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