Queer, Soviet Jewish Immigrant Barbarism
In April 1991, just seven months before the collapse of the Soviet Union, my parents held two sets of airplane tickets: one to occupied Palestine (Israel), and the other to occupied Indigenous American land (the US). Although they had been studying Hebrew in Moscow (with an Orthodox Christian, of all people), my parents ultimately relocated our family, including 5-year-old me, to Kumeyaay land (San Diego, CA) on a refugee visa. The years that followed saw my assimilation into American whiteness, a process accelerated by my interpellation as a white-bodied person and by my rapid adoption of American-accented English. Today, unlike many people of color in the US, I am never asked where I am “really from”. While this ascribed whiteness certainly advantages me in material ways, it also invisibilizes and endangers Soviet Ashkenazi Jewish histories, epistemologies, and cultural practices that I hold dear and that diverge from dominant American (including Jewish American) ways of being. Thus, I inevitably approach Omer’s important book and the American Jewish movement for Palestinian solidarity more broadly through the ongoing contestation of my own racialized assimilation, locating liberatory potential in the barbarism of the margins.
My reading of Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians suggests that a reclaimed queer Soviet Jewish immigrant “barbarism” makes deorientalizing and decolonial contributions to the ongoing anti-Zionist rescripting of American Jewishness. In the book, Omer engages Slabodsky’s discussions of barbarism, citing his call to “relocate ‘the basis for a potential epistemological alliance’ among those whom Europe renders ‘barbarians’ via the colonial gaze” (Slabodsky 2014; in Omer 2019: 205). Analogously, in the US context, Soviet Jews are rendered barbaric via the imperialist and orientalizing white American gaze, including that of assimilated white American Jews. From the 1970s to early 1990s, this was operationalized in the Movement to “Save the Soviet Jewry”, an Israeli-instigated American campaign that mobilized liberal humanist logics and intra-Jewish solidarity to facilitate Soviet Jewish resettlement. Decades later, residues of the movement’s condescension linger in American Jewish institutions, including leftist, queer, and anti-Zionist spaces, reifying American Jewish superiority and Soviet Jewish immigrant alienation. Following Slabodsky, this estrangement conceals a barbarism that can be reclaimed and leveraged toward Palestinian solidarity efforts, that challenge white American domination, rather than inadvertently reinscribe.
Given the inevitabilities of assimilation, Soviet Jewish immigrant approaches to this work are at least partially informed by American Jewish organizing efforts, movements that we likewise have the chance to influence. At the same time, they are distinguished by relationships to Soviet Jewish culture, history, family, and to the historical entanglements between the Soviet and American empires, as well as to the state of Israel. While these particularities often go unheard in American Jewish organizing spaces, an emergent queer, post-Soviet Jewish immigrant anti-Zionism is currently being articulated in Kolektiv Goluboy Vagon, a virtual collective of queer and gender-marginalized Soviet Jewish immigrants across the US and Canada I first convened in October 2019 in pursuit of collective liberation. Throughout this response, I weave the voices of some Kolektiv members together with my own organizing experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area to articulate the contributions that our own re-scripting process can make to the broader “multivocal” movement (Omer 2019: 64) of American Jewish solidarity with Palestinians.
Coming up Against American Jewish Anti-Zionism
Just as the American Jewish Anti-Zionism discussed in Days of Awe challenges dominant American Jewish scripts, so too, politicized, queer Soviet Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant narratives trouble the presupposed category of “American Jewishness”. The second major wave of Soviet Jewish immigrants arriving in the US in the 1980s and early 1990s upset the expectations of the American Jewish establishment. Steven Gold (2016: 13) reflects,
Primed by decades of anti-Soviet/Russian propaganda and having heard numerous tales about Soviet Jewish refuseniks from the Soviet Jewry movement seeking religious freedom, American Jews generally assumed that Russian speakers came to the United States to reestablish their religious identities, would graciously accept instructions on how to become American Jews, and would rapidly repudiate their linguistic, cultural, and sentimental attachments to the FSU.
Instead, many recent arrivals formed insular communities, in which they helped one another navigate racial capitalism and maintain Soviet cultural practices. As some Kolektiv members have shared in the group, in early years, American Jews offered their families invaluable material support and a bridge to Judaism for those who were interested. But, as Gold suggests, at times they also related with a condescension that reflected their own internalized orientalism, white supremacy, and US centrism. Today, when members of the Kolektiv enter American Jewish spaces across the political spectrum, our Soviet Jewish experiences are too often patronized or simply not imagined, reinforcing a lingering sense of alienation.
Outside of the cultural and pedagogical work of the Kolektiv, many members also participate in decolonial and anti-white supremacy work in organized American and Canadian Jewish settings, including synagogues (e.g., Tzedek Chicago, Kehilla in Oakland), organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and grass-roots Indigenous (American) solidarity efforts like Jews on Ohlone Land. Sasha feels grateful for her involvement with these groups:
American Jews helped me detangle antisemitism from antizionism, which was seared together for me growing up in reform Jewish cultural institutions, and in my family. American Jews helped me understand the depth of what was happening in our names, and gave me community to organize and take action with. (Sasha, personal communication, 7 February 2022)
Organizations like JVP offered Sasha and other immigrants the chance to unlearn and organize against “what was happening in [their] names” (to echo a line used throughout Omer’s book), as Jewish people. Furthermore, as discussed in Days of Awe, some of these spaces center queer perspectives and explicitly reimagine Jewish spirituality through solidarity with Palestinians, offering a meaningful entry to Judaism for queer Soviet Jews who were reclaiming it for themselves.
Despite these affordances, the new American Jewish scripts being fashioned in anti-Zionist spaces still do not imagine Soviet Jewish immigrants. As Omer illustrates, powerful organizing among BIJOCISM has challenged white supremacy and Ashkenormativity in Jewish institutions. Still, imaginations of both Ashkenazi identity and whiteness continue to be limited to white, middle-class assimilated Ashkenazi Jews whose ancestors immigrated at the turn of the twentieth century (or, in some cases, after the Shoah) (Yusim and Sobko 2020). Beyond our shared positionality of white-body supremacy in the US context, the histories and lived experiences of white Soviet Jewish immigrants diverge from those of white assimilated American Jews. This includes a tumultuous century spanning Russification, WWI and WWII, the Revolution, and Sovietization, including enforced atheism and ongoing antisemitism – not to mention immigration. These events live on in our family stories and nervous systems, but are invisibilized by our ready inclusion into white American Jewishness.
Thus, whereas for Omer’s interviewees anti-Zionism seems to be the primary source of alienation from dominant American Jewish spaces, Soviet Jewish immigrants are already multiply estranged via xenophobia, orientalism, and hegemonic whiteness, axes of the larger matrix of domination (Collins 2021) that Omer describes. While Anya T., a Kolektiv member and queer Soviet Jewish organizer with JVP, greatly appreciates American Jewish anti-Zionist organizations, she explains:
in these spaces it has always been very difficult for me to relate to American Jewish experiences and their relationships to their own Jewish identities and their guilt surrounding that – especially the whole “my idyllic Jewish summer camp and youth group turned out to be a racist lie” phenomenon (which is why I always say me hating my Hebrew School because they were xenophobes and horribly condescending to all the Soviets is partially why I’m an anti-Zionist; I never had an idyllic Jewish community to become disenchanted with!). I also always get annoyed by anti-Zionist Jewish spaces’ just complete negligence of Soviet experiences and their completely flattened understanding of what “Ashkenazi” means as synonymous with privileged, assimilated, and American but that rarely if ever presents itself as something that urgently needs to be reckoned with in this work. It’s definitely annoying but in my opinion not something we can actually afford to dwell on when people’s homes are being demolished and bombed. (Anya, personal communication, 7 February 2022)
Whereas Omer generally discusses American Jewish organizations like If Not Now and JVP as spaces of belonging for anti-Zionist American Jews, Anya’s Soviet immigrant perspective suggests that the reproduction of dominating structures in these contexts is itself alienating. Still, she considers these dynamics a mere “annoyance” in comparison to the immediate and overwhelming oppression that Palestinians face. As a dedicated anti-Zionist organizer, her priority in this work is to support Palestinians, not to negotiate intra-Jewish politics.
While Anya ethically recenters Palestinian solidarity as the primary and immediate goal of this work, to the extent that American Jewish anti-Zionism is an “intersectional” movement oriented toward “collective liberation” (Omer 2019: 93, 117), the internal negotiations of power that Soviet-American Jewish relations expose are also a relevant part of this work that “need to be reckoned with”. Such a reckoning would not only make Soviet Jewish immigrant participation in American Jewish anti-Zionist spaces less fraught, but it may also inform the movement by revealing and challenging the insidiousness of white supremacy and US centrism. This would bolster the promising vision of a truly decolonial and deorientalized anti-Zionism that Omer offers at the end of her book.
Toward a De-assimilated, Post-Soviet Jewish Anti-Zionism
Since its beginning in 2019, Kolektiv Goluboy Vagon has been co-created as a virtual space for nurturing critical queer and gender-marginalized Soviet Jewish immigrant consciousness, and for renarrativizing our shared histories against the prescriptions of racialized assimilation, including white supremacy, cisheteronormativity, ableism, and Zionism. While our collective anti-Zionist work is quite nascent and has primarily taken virtual pedagogical, discursive, and cultural forms, its potency lies precisely in the chance to leverage these shared histories and cultural practices toward our decolonial commitments. It is something we can only do together.
Just as the American Jewish organizers in Omer’s book draw on Jewish histories and cultural symbols, Kolektiv members also practice “critical caretaking” of our own historical and cultural inheritances. As immigrants, any entitlement we may feel to colonized “American” and “Canadian” land is tenuous and vulnerable to decolonial contestation. As Jews, the ongoing settler colonialism in the US is now part of our migration stories, just as the more recent occupation of Palestine is happening “in our names”. Thus, we often speak of Palestine and Indigenous North American liberation in one breath. Our more pointed work toward Palestinian solidarity has involved virtual sessions in which facilitators centered Palestinian voices while also making space to discuss the particularities of Soviet Jewish American/Canadian entry into solidarity work. Kolektiv members learned about the connections between Israeli and US settler colonialism, including programs like Deadly Exchange, shared information on Israeli involvement in Soviet migration to the US, discussed their own relationships to Palestine and Israel, and processed how Zionism weaponized their families’ recent Soviet traumas.
This cognitive and emotional unlearning has been followed by cultural production that leverages queer, Soviet Jewish immigrant histories, practices, and aesthetics toward Palestinian solidarity. Several submissions to Kolektiv Goluboy Vagon’s zine/samizdat (published in May 2020) speak directly to challenging Zionism as queer, post-Soviet Jews. Anya T. writes,
i am 14 when i first read that Gaza is on fire i ask mama what Nakba means she tells me go play piano do my homework don’t ask questions Palestinians don’t exist Israel is the only reason we’re safe do you know why we left so you could be Jewish i didn’t come to this country for you to become an anti-Semite. ( Kolektiv Goluboy Vagon 2020)
As her own emergent voice rises, the tension mounts:
i ask her about Deir Yassin she answers Babi Yar i ask her about checkpoints tear gas eighteen year olds carrying machine guns she doesn’t answer her silence speaks for her says Israel will keep us safe whiteness keeps us safe and all i want to do is scream back Zionism is choking us whiteness is killing us. ( Kolektiv Goluboy Vagon 2020)
Although the themes of this text are reminiscent of stories shared in Days of Awe, they focus on the particular experience of immigrant trauma and sacrifice, which the author’s mother holds over her.
As the last lines imply, members of the Kolektiv, like other Soviet Jewish immigrant anti-Zionists, join American Jewish anti-Zionists in rejecting the idea that settler colonialism and whiteness offer safety and well-being. Instead, safety is found in radical alliances. A zine entry by Irina Z. uses the popular Soviet symbol of Cheburashka (a cartoon character read by some as being both Jewish and queer) to affirm this conviction. They write:
So now, what is our obligation? What is our legacy? To live fully and queerly as the post-Soviet Jews that we are. To fuck with gender norms, to fuck with capitalism, to fuck with whiteness, and Zionism. Even and especially when we’re being told that we’re not real and we don’t exist and that we’re making life for ourselves and others difficult by being our true and authentic selves. Healing for me in this moment is to recognize myself as a Cheburashka and stop trying to be a Pioneer; reject the lure of settler colonialism and white supremacy. ( Kolektiv Goluboy Vagon 2020)
As Irina’s text implies, in asserting their politics, queer Soviet Jewish anti-Zionists are speaking back to hegemonic prescriptions. Similar to the other writer, Irina’s pursuit of the “true and authentic” self and the creation of an ethically oriented post-Soviet Jewish legacy are forged only through decolonial and anti-white supremacist solidarity work.
The notion of an ethically oriented queer, Soviet Jewish “obligation” and “legacy” is further visualized in “The Four Mitzvot of the Queer, Soviet Jewish Diaspora” (2021), an art piece created by me, Irina, and Aravah, all members of the Kolektiv. The piece is composed of four traditional Russian/Ukrainian headscarves, embroidered with the messages: “Abolition это мицва (is a mitzvah); A Free Palestine это мицва; Queer это мицва (is a mitzvah); Rematriation это мицва”. The work leverages our languages, traditional aesthetics, and Jewish lineages to define “mitzvot” – something we did not grow up with in our secular households – as an obligation of collective liberation. In the process, we reclaim Jewishness and Judaism for ourselves, without sacrificing our Soviet inheritances.
Conclusion
A few months ago, on a trip to visit Irina in Chicago, I saw a sign by her front door left over from a protest. It said, “just another queer post-Soviet Jew for Palestine”. Just three years ago, neither of us would have thought such a thing would be possible. I am still in the processing of co-creating this particularly queer, post-Soviet Jewish immigrant anti-Zionism. It is emergent, relationally constructed, and reaching toward de-assimilation, in generative tension with American Jewishness. Having grown up in the US with interpellated whiteness, I am hardly exempt from the tendencies of white supremacy and US centrism to reassert themselves, even in liberatory movements. Still, to the extent that my queer, Soviet Jewish immigrant experience challenges intra-Jewish white supremacy and US centrism, it pushes the already “multivocal” movement in a more ethical and liberatory direction.
I am still a relative newcomer to the work of anti-Zionism and Palestinian solidarity, and have much to learn from those who have been active, including Palestinians, other post-Soviet Jews who have dedicated years to this work, established American Jewish activists, and, as Omer concludes, Jews in Palestine who speak beyond the often-protective and abstracting distance of “diaspora”. Three decades ago, I too was the imagined benefactor of an American Jewish political campaign (Save the Soviet Jewry) that promoted the modern Western logic of human rights but questioned my full humanity. Today, Omer reminds me to remain skeptical of such logics when advocating for others, and to remain vigilant of my own now-Americanized abstractions and assumptions. As assimilation continues its pull, her book cautions me and other white(ned) immigrants not to identify with white diasporic American Jewish complicity and humanitarian saviorism so fully as to reinscribe American imperialism and whiteness into our anti-Zionism. Rather, we must ground in the barbarism awaiting us on the margins, and, as she suggests, center the deorientalization and decolonization efforts of those who are most directly affected.