Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Wreckage is made possible by funding from the Ford Foundation.
Additional funding is provided through the American Jewish Education Program, generously supported by Sid and Ruth Lapidus.
Archival Audio – Cooper Union Hanukkah Demonstration on Behalf of Soviet Jewry:
Written for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, There’s a Fire Burning.
(Acoustic guitar playing.)
♪♪There’s a fire burning brightly in the sky
And the roar of thunder crashing from on high
I see a nation they’re all wakening
And yolks will soon be breaking
And a nation long oppressed shall arise
A nation long ago oppressed shall arise♪♪
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On May Day 1964, more than 1,000 Jewish protestors demonstrated outside the Soviet Union’s United Nations Mission headquarters on East 67th street in New York City. Armed with signs that read “LET MY PEOPLE GO,” the protestors demanded that Soviet Jews should be given the right to leave the USSR.
The group was brought together by an activist named Jacob Birnbaum. Drawn to activism by recent global events that dominated headlines, including the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, he convened a group of concerned students from Columbia University, Queens College, Yeshiva University, and The Jewish Theological Seminary to help organize in support of Jews in the USSR. He named the group the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, which became instrumental in building a nationwide movement.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: Open Up the Gates. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. This week, we meet The Students. Our story begins on judgment day for an architect of the final solution.
Archival Audio, News Report on Trial of Adolf Eichmann: In Jerusalem, the trial of Adolf Eichmann begins, reviving memories of the Nazi horrors of the second world war. Entering the bulletproof prisoner’s box is the man charged with the annihilation of millions of Jews in Nazi death camps.
Searching problems of conscience and international law will be raised by this trial, one of the most stirring of modern times.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Joining us is Dr. Amy Fedeski, scholar of Cold War Jewish migration politics.
Amy Fedeski: So this is a big period of flux for Jewish American identity. You have the rise of a new sort of postwar generation of Jewish Americans, who in many ways blame their parents.
I think it’s the classic generational divide. They feel that their parents, particularly during the 1930s, were too mild mannered, and they didn’t take enough of a stand on behalf of the Jews of Germany who were trying to escape Nazism and. This comes back again and again. The idea that they failed.
So you have a new generation of young Jewish activists who feel that their parents’ attitudes were too assimilationist and they want to push for a more Jewish identity, and they’ve been inspired by a growing Holocaust consciousness. You have things like the Eichmann trial in the early sixties.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Adolf Eichmann, one of the highest-ranking perpetrators of the Holocaust, had gone into hiding in the last days of the Third Reich. For years, he lived undetected, first in Germany and then in Argentina, under a series of pseudonyms. In 1960, Israeli intelligence confirmed his location in Buenos Aires. Knowing extradition was unlikely, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion authorized a covert operation to capture Eichmann and bring him back to Jerusalem to stand trial. They planned for months, and in May of that year, Adolf Eichmann was captured.
The capture and trial ignited an international firestorm, and Argentina lodged a formal protest with the UN against Israel, charging that Israel had violated their nation’s sovereignty. Ultimately, the two nations quietly resolved their differences, and the trial commenced in April 1961.
The months-long trial was one of the first of its kind to be televised, and millions of people around the world watched Holocaust survivors provide witness testimony against the backdrop of the stone-faced war criminal who would soon be found guilty and sentenced to death.
Among those in Jerusalem watching was aid worker and activist Jacob Birnbaum.
Amy Fedeski: He was born in 1926, so that makes him a full generation or so older than a lot of the other Soviet Jewry movement activists. He was born in Hamburg, and he fled the Nazis with his family for England in the 1930s when he was a child.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Jacob was the son of the Yiddish linguist and scholar Solomon Birnbaum, and the grandson of Nathan Birnbaum, the Austrian writer and Jewish nationalist who coined the term “Zionism.”
Amy Fedeski: So he comes from a very politically engaged and a very religiously engaged family. Lots of rabbis in his family line. And as an adult he sort of embraces that as well. He works with displaced persons across Europe after the Second World War, and then with Jews fleeing Algeria in France in the 1950s. And towards the end of the 1950s, start of the 1960s, he starts to become more and more aware of the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union. And he decides that this is the new cause that is gonna make a big difference in the coming decades. So he decides to come to New York deliberately with the aim in mind of establishing this movement, and starting this campaign.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In late 1963, Birnbaum moved to New York City, inspired by the type of activism he saw from Civil Rights groups like SNCC: the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
Amy Fedeski: Birnbaum is actually one of the most elderly of the grassroots Soviet Jew movement activists because by the time he arrives in the US to start Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, he is the grand old age of 37.
So he sort of sets up shop in New York City, and reaches out to the undergraduates at places like Columbia, and Yeshiva University in particular. And so the major players in Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry are themselves students. You have people like Glenn Richter, who is a political science undergraduate at the time, and people like Avi Weiss, who’s a rabbinical student. And it’s really remarkable how young a lot of these early student activists were with Triple SJ. They’re undergraduates, the leadership, but a lot of them are actually high school students.
And if you look at some of SSSJ’s outreach materials, their instructions to activists, they actually write things like, “You need to be in tenth grade to give out posters.” And so you think, how many people in SSSJ were not in tenth grade, that they had to specify this in their instructions to their activists?
So it’s really very much a youthful movement, a predominantly Jewish movement, and a movement that is very much embraced by more religiously observant activists as well.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Many members of the Triple SJ, particularly in the earliest days as the group was still being formed, were also engaged in the movement for Black civil rights. Before joining Birnbaum’s efforts to start the Triple SJ, Glenn Richter had been an active member of SNCC.
Richter, a native New Yorker and student at Queens College, first met Birnbaum at a gathering for the American League for Russian Jews. Inspired by an article on the status of Soviet Jews that he’d read in Foreign Affairs magazine by the activist Moshe Decter, Richter felt strongly that students needed to take up the cause.
Amy Fedeski: A lot of the time they come from the Civil Rights Movement having been kind of alienated by the movement towards more violent tactics or more direct tactics in the 1960s. So they bring from that a sense of perhaps alienation, perhaps a desire to embrace something that’s a little bit more specific to Jewish activism. But also I think they bring their tactics and their ideas.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Many of the protests were evocative of methods that had become trademarks of the Civil Rights movement – organized peaceful marches and gatherings of well-dressed Jewish students and their allies began to pop up across New York City, and became a regular occurrence outside landmarks such as the United Nations building on the east side of Manhattan. Birnbaum required all slogans and signs to be pre-approved.
Amy Fedeski: They’re very much on message, very well organized, but very interested in sort of public grassroots efforts. So it’s all about, you know, sit-ins, and a direct protest standing outside the United Nations building, being very much publicly visible as the face of the movement.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The May Day protest came together quickly. On April 27, 1960, more than 200 interested students showed up to a meeting at Columbia University. It was there that they decided to hold a demonstration. Just a few days later, more than one thousand students marched for over four hours outside the Soviet Mission to the UN. They did so silently, meant as a symbol of the silence experienced by Jews in the Soviet Union.
It was the last time they would ever hold a silent protest. As the movement – and a clamorous decade that included a growing anti-Vietnam war movement – progressed, the Triple SJ began to employ more attention-grabbing tactics.
Amy Fedeski: They loved to set up a sukkah outside the United Nations or—when I did my research at Yeshiva University, which is where the archives of SSSJ are held, they had the remnants of the Soviet bear piñata that they had. And they would used to—they’d show up with this bear-sized bear, and they would attack it with baseball bats that were written, like, “Let my people go,” and “Human rights.” They would, like, smack this bear to pieces. And it had “The Russian bear is unbearable.”
They used to do, like, an annual joke book for Purim with Soviet jokes inside. Yeah, they were all about the kind of public, shtick-y, silly protests with the idea that this would bring media attention to their cause. So they’re a very entertaining group.
And it’s really interesting, the way that their language really molds together the very Orthodox Jewish kind of imagery that they use—they quote from the Torah. They have all sorts of comparisons between Brezhnev and Pharaoh at Passover. They organize all of their activism around the Jewish year. So it’s very much embedded in Jewish identity at the same time as they’re almost echoing groups like the Yippies who were doing really silly public protests at this time.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Throughout the rest of the 1960s, the Triple SJ was one of the only American organizations dedicated full-time to the movement to free Soviet Jews.
By the late 1960s, the era of detente – President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy designed to ease tensions with Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR – allowed for the movement on behalf of Soviet Jews to begin to flourish. But it also came with new complexities that challenged the activist community.
Amy Fedeski: A lot of Soviet Jewry Movement activists actually have kind of complicated feelings towards what’s happening with the Cold War at this time: on the one hand, the period of détente allows for these greater connections, and it allows, I would say, for the Soviet government to kind of start issuing these exit visas, which was something they really didn’t do at all in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War; whereas at the same time, this move toward détente, a lot of Soviet Jewry Movement activists see as appeasement. They’re appeasing the Soviet government, and they should be taking a more hardline approach.
Archival Audio – The Jewish Defenders: Now to the United States, where we visit a young peoples’ summer camp with a difference.
“This is the antisemite. The purpose is to run at him, grab him, knock him to the ground!! Put him into the ground!! Mash his ugly face into the ground so that he will never pick on a Jew again!
“Ready, when I say down, everyone gets up. When I say go, HIT HIM. Ready? DOWN. GO. UP. Let’s go, GET UP.”
[Audible yelling from the children.]
Camp Jedra, in the hills of upper New York State, has little in common with the typical American summer camp. While most teenagers home from school take holidays learning to sail, play tennis, or swimming, these youngsters are being taught how to kill.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In 1968, rabbi Meir Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League, a right-wing, militant activist organization with a stated mission of protecting Jews from antisemitism by any means necessary – deliberately borrowing language from the Black Panthers.
Kahane, an ardent anticommunist, had worked as a consultant with the FBI in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as Red Scare politics continued to dominate headlines and disrupt lives. He also allegedly worked with the FBI to infiltrate and report on the John Birch Society, a far right activist group that both the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center classified as a hate group, trafficking in racism and antisemitism. Over the years, Kahane became more radicalized, and signs brandishing the slogan “Every Jew, a .22” became a JDL staple.
They opened summer camps that on the surface, looked like any other sleepaway camp, but inside, children aged 13 and up wore green Army fatigues. Rather than the usual pastimes of color wars, archery, and scary stories by the campfire, campers were taught hand-to-hand combat and how to use shotguns.
The JDL emerged as an antagonist – not just to those they listed as enemies of the Jewish people, but also to organizations like the Triple SJ who were committed to non-violence.
Amy Fedeski: They argue that they’re defending the Jewish working classes against violence. This very much comes across in their very violent direct protests. They are also very active in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. They do threatening and violent protests with Soviet targets intended. And so they are—they consider themselves to be part of the Soviet Jewry Movement. I’m not sure that SSSJ is especially welcoming to this movement that has such violent goals, given that so many SSSJ activists actually came into Soviet Jewry Movement activism because they were alienated by the increasing turn towards more direct action protests in the Civil Rights Movement.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In the aftermath of 1970’s Leningrad trial, in which death sentences were handed down to refuseniks Eduard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshits for their roles in attempting to hijack a plane and fly it from the USSR to Israel, the JDL increased their efforts to recruit new members, including trying to pull activists away from the Triple SJ and other groups dedicated to Soviet Jewry.
Amy Fedeski: SSSJ’s activists sometimes complain that the JDL try to market themselves at SSSJ protests. They’re trying to appeal, again, to these young Jewish Americans who are becoming politically active, and they’re trying to say, hey, come and join us. You know, we’re the only ones who are really making a difference here, and come and embrace our methods. So you do find some SSSJ activists joining the JDL later on, but in terms of the leadership and the relationship, they are very much not getting along. They are extremely antagonistic to each other because of that difference in methods and tactics. The SSSJ is a very clearly nonviolent group. The JDL is explicitly violent. It’s okay with armed protests, and it does a lot of threats as well as part of its kind of activism.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kahane and a number of JDL’s other leaders and members were indicted on multiple acts related to domestic terrorist attacks. Charges included conspiring to manufacture explosives, leading attacks on officers guarding the Soviet Mission, plotting the kidnapping of a Soviet diplomat, and conspiring to bomb the Iraqi embassy in Washington, D.C. In 1972, the violence escalated – a bomb outside Russian-born American impresario Sol Hurok’s office was detonated, killing a young Jewish employee named Iris Kones, and injuring several others. Hurok had been a verbal target of Kahane’s, which led many to believe the JDL to be responsible, but no one was ever convicted for the bombing.
Amid his legal woes, Kahane moved to Israel, and continued his brand of activism from his new home.
Amy Fedeski: When I spoke to Glenn Richter he talked about, well, the problem of the JDL really only goes on until the early-mid seventies. Seventy-three, seventy-four, the JDL ceases to be a sort of meaningful political force in the US because it’s been already dismantled, effectively, by the FBI, and a lot of the group’s founders and leaders have already moved to Israel. So he sort of talks about it as very much being an issue of the first decade of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. But by the time you get into the late seventies and the eighties, it’s no longer a force. They’re not really engaged.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Kahane’s life in Israel was no less tumultuous, and he was arrested dozens more times over the years. In 1980, he served a 6-month jail sentence over allegations that he was planning armed attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank. He sought to, quote, “avenge the killing of Jews in the occupied territory,” reported the Montreal Gazette. In 1984, he was elected to a seat in the Knesset, Israel’s legislative body, where he was repeatedly condemned for what other representatives called “inflammatory rhetoric.”
On November 5, 1990, while in New York City for a speaking engagement, Meir Kahane was assassinated by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born extremist who would go on to be convicted for his part in the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center.
The Triple SJ was officially disbanded after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but Jacob Birnbaum continued to advocate for Jewish communities in post-Soviet nations for the rest of his life. He passed away in 2014 at the age of 87. In his chosen home of Washington Heights in New York City, a section of Cabrini Boulevard near Yeshiva University is now known as “Jacob Birnbaum Way.”
Glenn Richter made multiple trips to the USSR on behalf of refuseniks, and led hundreds of demonstrations across the US. He served as Triple SJ’s national coordinator from 1964 until its end in 1991. He continues his advocacy work to combat antisemitism today, and was instrumental in preserving the archives of the movement.
Archival Audio – Cooper Union Hanukkah Demonstration on Behalf of Soviet Jewry:
♪♪A trumpet rings through the night
The dawn appears we see the light
We wake the world we make them see
That our people must be free
Freedom’s trained and racing swiftly through the land
And the tide of love is pounding on the sand
I can see the whole world crying
For a nation that’s been dying
It will soon hold out a helping hand
It will soon hold out its helping hand
There’s a fire burning brightly in the sky
And the roar of thunder crashing from on high
I see a nation they’re all wakening
The yolks will soon be breaking
And a nation long oppressed will arise
A nation long oppressed shall arise♪♪
Rebecca Naomi Jones: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written and produced by Gemma R. Birnbaum and Shaul Kelner. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Transcription is provided by Adept Word Management. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society and its Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement, the AP Archive, Time Magazine, the New York Times, and Yeshiva University’s Triple SJ archive.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
