{"id":89854,"date":"2021-10-16T17:05:36","date_gmt":"2021-10-16T15:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=89854"},"modified":"2021-10-07T13:38:44","modified_gmt":"2021-10-07T11:38:44","slug":"15-05-68","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=89854","title":{"rendered":"The New Refuseniks"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"center alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.reunion68.com\/Biuletyn\/img\/tablet-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"35%\"><\/a><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color: #000080;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/soviet-jews-stood-up-to-anti-zionism-once-before\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The New Refuseniks<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>IZABELLA TABAROVSKY<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\">\n<h4 style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>Soviet Jews stood up to anti-Zionism once before. Now they are helping the younger generation of American Jews\u2014including their own children\u2014fight back against a wave of defamation and hate, while mainstream Jewish organizations wilt.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/fc610f42832f121dfe1c911f0d57d6bd3ebebbb6-3483x5247.jpg?w=1250&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" width=\"100%\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>Protestors demonstrating for the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union, on a &#8216;Solidarity Sunday For Soviet Jewry&#8217;, New York City, 6th May 1984.BARBARA ALPER\/GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">At a&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/unitedagainstterrorism.com\/\">recent United Against Terrorism rally<\/a><\/strong><\/span>&nbsp;in Beverly Hills, Jennifer Karlan, 17,&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/1377512489143113\/videos\/395719351604815\">spoke passionately<\/a><\/strong><\/span>&nbsp;about why American Jews should stand for Israel. With remarkable confidence, she talked about a new form of antisemitism facing American Jews: \u201cToday, they no longer say they hate the Jew; today they say they hate Zionists. Today they no longer say they hate the Jewish people; they say they hate the Zionist entity. But the hate is the same.\u201d Some&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/jewishjournal.com\/news\/336955\/2000-activists-gather-in-beverly-hills-to-support-israel\/\">2,000 people<\/a><\/strong><\/span>&nbsp;had gathered for the rally. Karlan drew cheers as she insisted that Jewish identity and Israel are deeply interconnected: \u201cIsrael is not just the name of the land; it is the name of our people. We are the people of Israel, each and every one of us:&nbsp;<em>Am Yisrael Chai<\/em>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Karlan is a graduate of&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/clubz.org\/\">Club Z<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, a Zionist club for teens and quite possibly the most important American Jewish organization you\u2019ve never heard of. Club Z was founded four years ago by Masha Merkulova, a Soviet Jewish immigrant from Minsk. Along with a handful of other organizations that Russian-speaking American Jews have started over the past few years, it is changing the conversation about Jewish identity, Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, and Israel. Disappointed with the way the United States\u2019 organized Jewish community has treated these issues, and alarmed by the growing embrace of politically weaponized Zionophobia\u2014the form of antisemitism that they know so well from their lives in the Soviet Union\u2014these immigrants are taking matters into their own hands.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The recent Hamas-Israel confrontation unleashed an antisemitic onslaught on social media and in the streets of U.S. cities of a kind that American Jews had never seen before. It wasn\u2019t just the intensity of the hate that was shocking\u2014it was also its source and nature. Suddenly, violent antisemitism was coming at American Jews from the left. Suddenly, it was progressive politicians who were fanning the flames of antisemitism, while the Democratic Party\u2014the political home of most American Jews\u2014looked the other way. Nothing in American Jews\u2019 background or system of beliefs had prepared them for this moment, and many did not seem to know how to respond.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In that moment of crisis, only a few individuals and groups stood out as they fearlessly fought hate and propaganda. They did not log off their social media accounts. They showed no signs of confusion, and they most certainly were not demoralized. They simply stood up and joined the battle against what they perceived as an assault not only Israel but on who they were as Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">That ex-Soviet Jews projected a more confident and resilient Jewish identity in the midst of this crisis than many native-born American Jews is a fact that is both fascinating and significant. In the three decades since Soviet Jews arrived in the United States, they proved largely impervious to American Jewry\u2019s attempts to inculcate their sense of what it meant to be Jewish. Having never bought into the idea that religion was central to Jewish identity, they stayed away from synagogues. The American&nbsp;<em>tikkun olam<\/em>&nbsp;perspective, which demanded that Jews put the world\u2019s priorities ahead of their own, struck them as the height of folly. And they certainly did not buy into the notion that the far right had a monopoly on antisemitism.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">During the 11-day crisis in May, it was Russian-speaking American Jews who rose to the occasion, exhibiting a sense of Jewish peoplehood, solidarity, and pride that seemed to evade many other American Jews. Neither shaken nor insecure\u2014and, most important, not surprised\u2014they had no trouble calling out fabrications and slander. What did these immigrants know that the native-born American Jews didn\u2019t?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Quite a bit, it turns out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Merkulova, Club Z\u2019s founder and CEO, came to the United States in 1992 when she was 18 years old. She put herself through school and spent some 15 years working as a registered nurse. A decade ago, she found herself volunteering with a Bay Area nonprofit that awarded small funds to pro-Israel student organizations\u2014a position that often took her to campuses of prestigious Northern California universities. It was there that she first began to meet Jewish students who told her about being stumped by anti-Israel rhetoric on campus.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cMany of these kids had finished Jewish private schools. They were kids who wanted to do something pro-Israel, who had been to Israel, who had been to Jewish summer camps and were part of Jewish groups,\u201d Merkulova told me recently. \u201cTheir parents had given them everything Jewish that they could.\u201d Yet they knew nothing about the history of Israel. They knew even less about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They had no idea what their anti-Israel professors and classmates were talking about. \u201cA Jewish student would say, \u2018Israel invented the cherry tomato,\u2019 and he\u2019d hear back, \u2018Asshole, you planted your cherry tomato on my land.\u2019 So the conversation was very short.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Soon she began to encounter Jewish kids turned anti-Israel activists. She began to read their blogs\u2014the pre-social media social media of 10 years back. Here\u2019s how she characterized the content of their rants and confessionals: \u201cI thought I knew everything, I went to Israel, I planted trees with the JNF, and now I learn that it was stolen land. What horror, nobody told us anything.\u201d When IfNotNow burst onto the scene in 2014, Merkulova might have been the only American Jewish parent who was not surprised: She had been reading that stuff for years.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Her Soviet Jewish parental instincts now fully engaged, Merkulova began to wonder how to prepare her teenage son for the antisemitic reality he was going to face on campus. She knew that there was something that the Jewish educators were getting terribly wrong. She began to ask herself, \u201cWhy can\u2019t we tell the kids that there is a problem, that it is complex, and that it doesn\u2019t have an easy solution\u2014but let\u2019s at least begin by naming what the issue is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">She started to look for resources and quickly realized that she was on her own. Synagogues and Hebrew schools proved useless, as did her son\u2019s Jewish day school. She dismissed the occasional three-hour workshop on the conflict that she saw advertised here and there because \u201cwhat can you understand in three hours? Only that there are endless shades of gray.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Eventually, she came across a seven-lesson curriculum from the now-defunct David Project, which focused on the links between Israel and Jewish identity. She liked that framing. She thought, \u201cIf I can help women birth children and teach them how to take care of them, I can teach seven lessons about Israel and Jewish identity to a bunch of teenagers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">She began to invite teens from her son\u2019s eighth grade to her home once a month after Shabbat. \u201cI would cook them dinner, and then we would study together,\u201d she said. \u201cWe would study what is Israel, what is Zionism, and why we need all of this.\u201d Soon the kids asked for more. They began to meet every other week, then every Saturday night. \u201cSomehow these teens understood that this was something special, something cool. We were learning amazing things. The more you learn about Israel, the more in awe you become, even with the warts, even with the problems,\u201d recalled Merkulova. Four years ago, she quit nursing and founded Club Z.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Today Club Z has five chapters (Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, and Charlotte, North Carolina), plus an online track. The community includes 300 current students and recent graduates. There are weekly study sessions, hangouts, retreats, and the&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/clubz.org\/get-involved\/youth-zionist-leadership-forum\/\">annual conference<\/a>&nbsp;titled \u201cZionism: A Love Story,\u201d which everyone I talked to raved about.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Perhaps the best way to understand what Club Z is about is to hear what its students and graduates say about it. Teens typically join Club Z in the eighth grade and graduate in the 11th grade. At a recent Bay Area chapter graduation,&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-svDTwjsoEI\">Natalie Arbatman<\/a>&nbsp;talked about arriving at Club Z as a shy and inarticulate teenager who had no idea what it meant to be a Jew. She is graduating having spoken in front of hundreds at a rally, defended herself online and at school, and pushed back on the opinions of her teachers and classmates. She is leaving knowing that \u201cI carry on my shoulders a memory, a history, and a tradition that I couldn\u2019t trade for anything in the world\u201d and that she is \u201cpart of a people\u201d that she feels deeply proud of.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">When watching videos and interactions, you\u2019re struck most by how preternaturally poised, articulate, and thoughtful Club Z teens are when talking about Israel, Zionism, and Jewish identity. You can\u2019t help feeling that you are looking at the future leaders of the American Jewish community, or at least part of it.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">According to Ilan Eisenberg, a recent Bay Area graduate who will be starting at Yale University in the fall, the central aspect of Club Z\u2019s curriculum is the exploration of Jewish identity. To be sure, there are social events to celebrate Jewish identity and discussions about how to defend it from antisemitism in the broader Jewish community, he told me. \u201cAnd yet, there is nobody who wants to ask the question of why. Why are we doing this? What is it that we have to maintain? What is it that we are fighting for when we are fighting against antisemitism?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">He notes that the same people who downplay the exploration of Jewish identity will downplay Zionism. For many, Zionism is \u201cabout fighting BDS, or it\u2019s about ending antisemitism or protecting Jews on college campuses and on social media.\u201d But there is more to Zionism than that, he says: \u201cZionism isn\u2019t reactionary. Zionism is an expression of our purpose as a people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Merkulova confirms that providing the kids with deep knowledge rather than talking points is one of Club Z\u2019s goals: \u201cWe don\u2019t have memes, we have long explanations.\u201d Teaching critical thinking is an important part of the curriculum. So is the cultivation of leadership. But the biggest gift Club Z gives its teens, says Merkulova, is confidence: You may have all the knowledge in the world, but if you don\u2019t have confidence, you won\u2019t stand up in class, declare yourself a Zionist, or challenge your teacher. Students learn to debate, and they work with a public speaking coach.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Teens also benefit from being part of a network that stays with them even after they graduate. The network proved its value in spades during the recent Hamas-Israel confrontation. It was a hard time. Many kids were losing friends. \u201cRemember how adults were saying that the silence was deafening?\u201d asked Merkulova. \u201cImagine what it was like for teenagers. Their social life is everything\u2014it\u2019s all they have.\u201d Teens began to use the Club Z national group chat to share screenshots of what their friends were posting, asking for advice on how to respond. One of the most revealing moments came when one member asked a friend why he was posting hateful stuff. He said, \u201cBro, I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m posting, but I know that if I don\u2019t post, I\u2019ll look like I don\u2019t care. I have to post.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">American Jews often perceive the Soviet Jewry story as one of silence and oppression. But that perception is hardly complete. Resistance and dissidence are also part of the Soviet Jewish DNA. From Natan Sharansky\u2019s&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/history\/articles\/american-jewish-soviet-experience-natan-sharansky\">insistence on living in truth<\/a>, to the&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/arts-letters\/articles\/a-letter-to-golda\">eighteen Georgian Jews<\/a>\u2019 dramatic&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/the-letters-of-the-eighteen\">manifesto<\/a>, which inspired Golda Meir and Jews all over the world to fight for them, to the Leningrad hijackers\u2019 attempt to take over a plane and&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/history\/articles\/tabarovsky-leningrad-hijacking-history-soviet-jews\">fly it to freedom<\/a>\u2014these stories are part and parcel of the Soviet Jewish identity, too.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">For many Soviet Jews, the trigger that led them to embark on a journey of Jewish self-exploration was their early experiences of antisemitism. As they grappled with the question of what exactly made them different from others, they began to seek out books on Jewish and Israeli history and to join underground study groups. The inescapable conclusion that they came to was that they were part of a people that was indeed different from those around them. One of the most frequent arguments that Soviet Zionist activists made to the authorities as they demanded the right to emigrate was that just as Ukraine was the national home of Ukrainians and Russia was the national home of Russians, Israel was the national home of the Jews. They simply wanted to go home.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/95e1b95e9a5984538934ec37a48211812d7ba0b8-2310x3362.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" width=\"=&quot;100%&quot;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>Solidarity Sunday for Soviet Jewry demonstration in protest at the Soviet Union\u2019s treatment of Jewish people, in New York City, New York, 13th April 1975.PETER KEEGAN\/KEYSTONE\/HULTON ARCHIVE\/GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Their experience of antisemitism also gave Soviet Jews insights into the kind of left-wing antisemitism that comes under the rubric of \u201canti-Zionism\u201d and Israel demonization that American Jews no longer have the luxury of ignoring. One of the deadliest accusations used in Stalin\u2019s antisemitic purges was that its targets were Zionists (aka \u201cbourgeois-nationalists\u201d), not \u201cJews.\u201d In a 1968 essay titled \u201cWhy I Am a Zionist,\u201d which was widely circulated in samizdat, Boris Kochubievsky, one of the early refuseniks,&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1981\/09\/27\/magazine\/babi-yar-s-legacy.html?searchResultPosition=5\">explained<\/a><\/strong><\/span>&nbsp;how the anti-Zionism that he experienced at the hands of the Soviet state was no different from the antisemitism of Adolf Hitler, which killed his relatives at Babi Yar. It was anti-Zionism, he wrote, that was turning largely atheist and assimilated Soviet Jews like himself into Jews who were passionate and proud of their Jewish identity.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cI had to fight antisemites as a 12-, 13-, 14-year-old. I heard antisemitic stuff from an early age: \u2018You Zionist garbage,\u2019 \u2018go back to your Israel,\u2019\u201d says Alex Leybengrub, who immigrated to the United States from Kyiv, Ukraine, and lives in Brooklyn with his family. Leybengrub\u2019s father and grandfather had strong Zionist views: \u201cThere was always talk about Israel at home.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Simona Kurgan, from Los Angeles, grew up in Riga, Latvia\u2014one of the key centers of the Soviet Jewish national movement. Her parents applied to emigrate in the 1970s, were denied, lost their jobs, and spent 10 years in the refusal limbo. Simona grew up learning about Zionism, Israel, and Jewish identity in the underground study circles that the Zionist movement\u2019s activists had set up to help their fellow Jews deepen their sense of themselves as Jews. Together with other Jewish kids, Kurgan visited Holocaust mass graves in the Rumbula forest and helped the aging and impoverished&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.yadvashem.org\/righteous\/stories\/lipke.html\">Jan Lipke<\/a>, a Righteous Among the Nations who had saved scores of Latvian Jews. Being part of the movement gave Kurgan a sense of meaning. \u201cI think it\u2019s important to have a cause,\u201d she told me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">It is this legacy that makes Leybengrub and Kurgan feel so proud of their Club Z sons learning to fight for themselves, speaking out, and educating others. During the May crisis, a teacher at Leybengrub\u2019s son Daniel\u2019s progressive Manhattan private school emailed the students, announcing that a Jewish student would be making a special unscheduled presentation connecting Zionism with white supremacy and colonialism. Daniel objected. In a polite and well-argued letter, he offered to complement the presentation by inviting a speaker who would provide a different point of view. When the teacher rejected his offer, Alex wrote a letter of his own to the principal. He told him that he used to hear the kind of language that the teacher used in the announcement back in the USSR. Today, like in Soviet times, Jews around the world are being beaten up \u201cfor the \u2018crime\u2019 of Zionism and the slur that \u2018Zionism=racism,\u2019\u201d he wrote. \u201cDo you want to be responsible for the Jewish students in your class being heckled as racist?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Kurgan, for her part, wrote to the CEO of the company she works for (who is Jewish) and asked why the company didn\u2019t issue a statement condemning antisemitism. She did not expect a political statement about Israel, she wrote, \u201cbut you made a statement about the BLM. You made a statement about anti-Asian hate. What about the Jews?\u201d She acknowledges that writing a letter like this may have repercussions for her job. But she felt that it would be \u201cextremely hypocritical\u201d of her to be silent when she was trying to teach her kids to be brave.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">This kind of thinking is precisely what Merkulova hopes will take root among American Jewish parents. \u201cCourage is the rarest virtue. But it\u2019s a muscle. It\u2019s a muscle! Our kids need us to show them what it looks like.\u201d She insists that every Jewish adult attend at least one anti-Israel rally to experience the hate \u201con their skin,\u201d and has little patience for those who refuse: \u201cThis is what your kid will face every day. Your kid doesn\u2019t have a choice.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">To be sure, Russian-speaking American Jews are not a monolith, and not everyone is engaged in the same issues to the same degree: Members of the second generation in particular tend to ground their Jewish identity in the same concepts as other American Jews and are just as likely to end up in the anti-Israel activist camp as their peers. But as American Jews&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.timesofisrael.com\/us-antisemitism-far-worse-than-reported-say-conference-of-presidents-leaders\/\">increasingly awaken<\/a>&nbsp;to the meaning of anti-Zionism, Russian-speaking Jews who remain rooted in their own family histories and cultural experiences are proving to be an invaluable resource for the American Jewish community as a whole. They seem to be holding a piece of the Jewish identity puzzle that American Jews have lost.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Because of Russian-speaking Jews\u2019 unique perspective, Merkulova hopes to see more of them take on larger public leadership roles. In fact, many do. Seeing parallels to her family\u2019s Soviet experience, Elina Kaplan&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.calethstudies.org\/\">founded a nonprofit<\/a>&nbsp;to fight against California\u2019s divisive, tribalist, and hierarchical ethnic studies curriculum, which&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/california-ethnic-studies-curriculum\">she says<\/a>, \u201cinvites anti-Zionism into the classroom,\u201d and is \u201cthe greatest threat facing American Jews today.\u201d Inna Vernikov, an immigrant from Chernivtsi, Ukraine,&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.jns.org\/americans-against-antisemitism-launches-millennial-focused-womens-committee\/\">took up leadership<\/a>&nbsp;of the&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/americansaa.org\/\">Americans Against Antisemitism<\/a>\u2019s millennial-women-focused Women\u2019s Committee. She is now running for the New York City Council. She&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.jns.org\/fed-up-with-socialism-and-anti-semitism-attorney-seeks-to-clean-up-new-york-city\/\">criticizes<\/a>&nbsp;Democrats\u2019 failure to confront their colleagues\u2019 antisemitic rhetoric and argues that the party promotes \u201cexactly what we ran from\u2014a place where speech was censored, where we were not allowed to practice religion, where we didn\u2019t have freedom or economic opportunity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Among the local organizations that co-sponsored the pro-Israel rally in Beverly Hills was another group founded by a descendant of Soviet Jewish immigrants: Students Supporting Israel (SSI), which today is the largest pro-Israel grassroots student movement in North America. But when its founder and CEO Ilan Sinelnikov, 28, first enrolled at the University of Minnesota in 2012, he had no idea why such an organization might be necessary in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Sinelnikov, who was born in Israel to Soviet immigrants and thinks of himself primarily as an Israeli, can recite his family\u2019s Soviet Jewish history by heart. Fourteen of his family members were murdered at Babi Yar. The youngest one was several months old, and the oldest was 77 years old. One family member found himself among the group of Soviet POWs who the Germans tasked with burning bodies in the ravine in advance of their retreat. He was one of the few who managed to escape and survive to tell the tale. When another member returned to Kyiv from evacuation, the neighbor who took over her apartment kicked her out with antisemitic curses. His grandfather Nachum applied to emigrate in the 1970s and was refused. He lost his job, and his daughter was kicked out of high school. When they came to Israel in 1989, he joined Sharansky\u2019s political party Yisrael BaAliyah, which fought for the rights of Soviet immigrants in Israel. In 2008, Sinelnikov\u2019s father found a job in Minneapolis, and the family moved there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In March of 2012, Sinelnikov, a freshman at the UMN, encountered his first Israel Apartheid Week. The lies and demonization shocked him. But when he approached local Jewish organizations with an idea to fight this, he found them in a \u201cwe shouldn\u2019t do anything\u201d frame of mind: \u201cWe don\u2019t want to add fuel to the fire. We don\u2019t want to escalate the situation on campus even more,\u201d he remembers them telling him. For Sinelnikov, it did not compute: \u201cWhat do you mean, escalate?\u201d he asked, incredulous. \u201cThe situation is already bad. There is nowhere else to escalate!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The tipping point came when he and his sister Valeria, then a senior at the UMN, saw a Students for Justice in Palestine poster that pictured U.S. dollars pouring into a funnel with a Star of David on it that opened into a blood-filled vat. In the vat, Palestinian children swam and drowned. \u201cThat was not even anti-Israel; that was straight-out antisemitic,\u201d Sinelnikov said. That is when he and his sister decided to stop listening to others in the Jewish community and founded the SSI. At their first meeting, there were seven people. Together they watched&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Crossing-Line-Intifada-Comes-Campus\/dp\/B008PSQJHC\">Crossing the Line: The Intifada Comes to Campus<\/a>, a film that explains how anti-Zionism crosses into Jew-hatred.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Since its founding, SSI has operated on 140 campuses and counts 1,000 active members and alums. What makes SSI unique among other campus pro-Israel initiatives, Sinelnikov explains, is that it is an official campus club\u2014like College Democrats or College Republicans or, for that matter, SJP\u2014rather than an outside Jewish organization with a presence on campus. This has multiple advantages\u2014including the fact that it can run its candidates for student government. The first time SSI did this (\u201cwe ran a very aggressive campaign,\u201d says Sinelnikov), 10% of the student government were SSI members. Buoyed by this success, they set themselves the next goal: to pass a pro-Israel bill in the government. They succeeded again. It was a landmark win, and it put SSI on the national map. Since then, 24 such resolutions&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ssimovement.org\/sgia.html\">have been passed<\/a>&nbsp;by SSI chapters across the country.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>recommended by: <strong>Leon Rozenbaum<\/strong><\/em><\/span><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.reunion68.com\/Biuletyn\/ico\/leon-r.jpg\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Sinelnikov describes SSI\u2019s objectives as being visible, staying on the offensive, and controlling the narrative. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to let SJP teach us what Zionism and antisemitism is,\u201d he says. The group empowers its members to publicly challenge the demonization of Israel and Jew-hate wherever the opportunity presents itself. When Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad spoke at Columbia University in 2019, it was an SSI student who <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1sZqR0rWEqY\">challenged<\/a><\/strong><\/span>&nbsp;him publicly on his Holocaust denial.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">SSI attracts students from all walks of life\u2014including Christians and Muslims. But Sinelnikov notes a trend in leadership: Along with Israeli Jews, Russian-speaking Jews often become particularly active members and chapter leaders. I spoke to one of them\u2014Naena Drazman, 19, who is the president of the University of Toronto\u2019s SSI chapter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Drazman comes from a family that immigrated to Canada from Soviet Ukraine. Her story traces familiar lines. Nineteen members of her family were murdered in the Holocaust in Dnipropetrovsk (today\u2019s Dnipro) and Kharkiv. Some were shot in the shooting pits, others hanged on their own balconies. Soviet antisemitism followed. She remembers \u201cbeing so outraged\u201d at the stories of how her family had been targeted, \u201chow it was so hard to even leave the country to go to Israel.\u201d Her mother had to change her last name to enter a university. \u201cIt just makes my blood boil,\u201d said Drazman.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Under her leadership, the chapter has grown from two to 22 members. Like other SSI members, she sees her priority as making sure that U of T students have access to a different point of view than the one that dominates on campus. During a recent Israel Apartheid Week, they set up a mock bomb shelter on campus\u2019s main street. \u201cWe were like, you know what? You want to talk about apartheid? You want to share your narrative of what\u2019s happening? We\u2019ll show you our narrative that Israelis pretty much live in bomb shelters, that every apartment building has to have a bomb shelter,\u201d said Drazman. She rejects the conventional wisdom that says that Jews should be quiet in the face of antisemitism. Drawing on her family\u2019s experience, she says, \u201cI just think it doesn\u2019t work anymore. It\u2019s not working for us, and we need to be the ones. No one else is going to stand up for ourselves and our community.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Like everyone else I spoke with, Drazman noted that it\u2019s time for American and Canadian Jews to acknowledge that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. \u201cJews are being attacked in the streets for looking Jewish. It has nothing to do with whether you support Israel or have family in Israel,\u201d she says. \u201cWe have been screaming about this for years,\u201d said Merkulova. She hopes that the May events will help American Jews to finally get this point: \u201cIn the streets of London, they didn\u2019t yell, \u2018Fuck the Zionists and rape their daughters.\u2019 They yelled, \u2018Fuck the Jews and rape their daughters.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><strong>Izabella Tabarovsky<\/strong> is a contributing writer at Tablet and a researcher with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center focusing on the politics of historical memory in the former Soviet Union. Follow her at @IzaTabaro.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\">\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"content-alignment\">\n<div id=\"watch-description\" class=\"yt-uix-button-panel\">\n<div id=\"watch-description-text\" style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p><em>Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion&#8217;68,<\/em><em><br \/>\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion&#8217;68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.<br \/>\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:<br \/>\n<\/em><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong><em><a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"mailto:webmaster@reunion68.com\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\">\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New Refuseniks IZABELLA TABAROVSKY Soviet Jews stood up to anti-Zionism once before. Now they are helping the younger generation of American Jews\u2014including their own children\u2014fight back against a wave of defamation and hate, while mainstream Jewish organizations wilt. Protestors demonstrating for the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union, on a &#8216;Solidarity Sunday For [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89854"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89868,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89854\/revisions\/89868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}