Silent No More: Saving the Jews of Russia, the American Jewish Effort, 1967-1989

by Henry Feingold

Overview

Leading scholar and author of the celebrated five-volume series, The Jewish People in America, Henry L. Feingold offers a fresh and inspiring look at the Russian/Soviet Jewish emigration phenomenon. Haunted by its sense of failure during the Holocaust, the Soviet Jewry movement set for itself an almost unrealizable goal of finding sanctuary for Jews from a hostile Soviet government. Working together with activists in Israel and Europe, and with a remarkable group of refuseniks that had been denied the right to emigrate, this courageous group mounted a relentless campaign lasting almost three decades. Although Feingold credits Israel with initiating the struggle for Soviet Jewry and fostering it within American Jewry, he maintains that it was the actions of a secure and confident American Jewry that finally delivered the Jews from the Soviet Union. Feingold's mastery of detail and broadness of scope provide a prodigious and sweeping account of the American Jewish movement. He finds early roots of the effort in the American Jewish involvement with Jewish emigration in late Tsarist Russia. He highlights both the human dimension of the exodus and the complex international ramifications of the movement, especially in the Middle East. "Silent No More" concludes by pondering the role of the movement's effective public relations campaign, which focused on the human right of freedom of movement in hastening the collapse of the Soviet empire. Feingold's rigorous scholarship sheds light on an important, yet rarely told episode in history, one that will enliven further examination of the subject. This book will be of interest to scholars of American Jewish history, the cold war, Israeli studies, and American ethnic and immigration history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815631019
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	01/03/2007
Series:	Modern Jewish History
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	418
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.15(d)

About the Author

Henry L. Feingold is professor emeritus of history at The Graduate Center and Baruch College, CUNY, where he is the director of the Jewish Resource Center. He is the author of numerous books including Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust and Lest Memory Cease: Finding Meaning in the American Jewish Past, also published by Syracuse University Press, where he serves as the editor of the Modern Jewish History series.

What People are Saying About This

Robert M. Seltzer

No one in American Jewish history has limned the parallels between American Jewish concern for Jewish emigration in late Tsarist Russia with post-Holocaust American Jewish concern for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. [Feingold's] analysis is therefore a nuanced articulation of the web of pressures, calculations, miscalculations, and surprises. . . . Comprehensive, daring, brave, and brilliant. (Robert M. Seltzer, author of Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History)