Jewish Refugees in the Age of the Jewish Nation: Soviet Jews as “Cold War Refugees” or “Israeli Repatriates,” 1972-1991

Despite the foundational intertwinement of modern, formal definitions of refugeehood and the fate of displaced Jews in the immediate years after the Holocaust, as the Cold War engulfed the globe, the term “refugee” expanded to include millions of new victims of displacement. By the 1970s, as Jewish residents of the Soviet Union increasingly sough to emigrate from the world’s first socialist state, Jewish philanthropic agencies, European states, and major world leaders, were once again forced to contend with the public and legal association of Jews and refugeehood. In the decades to follow, these actors would administrate and organize the departure of over one million Jews from the Soviet Union. This time, however, largely Western Jewish organizations, such as the JDC and HIAS, found themselves at odds with Israeli diplomats and Jewish nationalists in the USSR. An agreement could not be reached: with the existence of a Jewish nation, could a Jew be a refugee? Drawing on records in the JDC Archives, the lecture will reveal not only how states and world leaders manipulated the term “refugee” in order to direct and control the mobility of Soviet Jews, but how Soviet Jews—many of whom initially had little desire to resettle in Israel—engaged the term to retain agency over their transit and resettlement processes.

Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation project, preliminary titled “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Jewish Repatriation, Family Reunification, and Emigration from the USSR 1945-1995” explores the emigration of over one million Jews from the former Soviet Union across the mid- to late twentieth century and the diplomatic clashes surrounding their departure. She is the recipient of the 2024 Ruth and David Musher / JDC Archives Fellowship.