Blast from the past: Israeli agents in America helped create the myth of
Soviet Jewish genocide
Israel's goal was to activate American Jews and use them to pressure the
Soviet Union - all while staying in the background.
Yasha Levine
Mar 3
While working on the fourth installment of my series about the forced Soviet
Jewish migration to Israel (you can read parts one, two, and three here), I
got sidetracked and started digging once again into the origins of America's
movement to Save Soviet Jews that took off in a big way in the 1970s.
I knew that Israel was involved but I never appreciated just how involved
they were. Looking at some of the evidence again a bit more closely, it's
clear that Israel's role was a massive one. It got the whole movement
started with a years-long covert disinformation and influence campaign meant
to guilt trip American Jews and convince them that their Soviet brothers and
sisters were on the verge of being wiped out by a second Holocaust - this
time by the commies. Israel's goal was to activate American Jews and use
them to pressure the Soviet Union through America, which would allow Israel
to leverage a much more powerful force for its own use - all while staying
in the background and not confronting the Soviet Union directly, which
Israel did not want to do.
Israel did back then what today's paranoid disinfo hunters at the Atlantic
Council would call "foreign meddling" and "active measures" - the sneaky
dangerous tactics that we're constantly being told are unique to "the
Russians."
Many American Jews got duped into believing that the Soviet Union was as bad
for Jews as Nazi Germany. From a 1973 protest in Washington, D.C. (Source:
National Museum of American Jewish History)
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It was an incredibly successful op that took a kernel of truth about Jewish
repression and discrimination in the Soviet Union and blew it way out of
proportion and added all sorts of malicious exaggerations to achieve a
specific political result. It weaponized Jewish-American journalists,
academics, religious and community leaders, politicians, and authors as
willing participants in the campaign. Even Ellie Wiesel was involved,
producing a very successful propaganda book that guilt-tripped American Jew
- all with the help of Israeli secret agents. And the op ensnared all sorts
of unwitting big names, including Martin Luther King Jr.
Ultimately this campaign triggered something deep in America's Jewish
community and sparked a real movement that then developed its own political
and cultural momentum. And as it became more genuine and went mainstream,
its power and usefulness to both Israel and America multiplied. And so began
a full-spectrum pressure campaign - which included economic sanctions,
diplomatic maneuvering, and psychological warfare ops - that weaponized
Soviet Jews and Jewish identity in America in the service of Israeli and
American interests.
I've been chipping away at this story because it helps me better understand
the political mechanics of how my family ended up in America. But it also
gives a historical perspective on similar covert influence campaigns being
waged against us today - like the cynical "Uyghur genocide" propaganda op
we're being bombarded with from every corner of our news media.
The cover of the magazine issue that helped launched the movement. It was
put together by a journalist named Moshe Decter, while he was a covert
employee of Native, the intelligence agency set up by Israel to find ways to
bring Soviet Jews to Israel. Moshe's not very well known today but his
relations are spread all through the neoconservative movement. Midge Decter
was his wife. She divorced him to marry Norman Podhoretz. His daughter
Rachel married Elliott Abrams.
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Israel's secret op to influence American Jews has all sorts of forgotten
characters and maddening side plots. Here's one that I didn't know anything
about: In the 1950s, Israel's mostly European Jewish ruling elite was
concerned by the influx of Middle Eastern Jews that was taking place at the
time - Jews from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq. They feared that these people would
infect Israel with their backwards Arab values and turn Israel into an
eastern society, rather than a European one. They coveted the millions of
European "white" Jews who lived in the Soviet Block - hoping to use them to
stop the dreaded "brown" Arabification of Israel. So Israel's desire to get
Soviet Jews shipped to the Holy Land wasn't just an attempt to even the
demographic odds against superior Palestinian numbers, it was an early
example of the Jew-vs-Jew racism that still pervades Israeli society today.
To put it another way: Turns out that Israeli antisemitism directed against
Arab Jews launched a covert influence campaign to create a movement in
America to rescue Soviet Jews from Soviet antisemitism. It's all very
twisted and kinda funny. And that's how things are with Zionism - an
ethnonationalist ideology that propagandizes the historical unity of all
Jews as a single race and yet can't stop hating on some Jews for being
inferior.
Date unclear. Probably sometime in the early 1970s.
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I'll do a proper write up of this highly successful Israeli active measures
op sometime soon, but for now I want to highlight the work of historian Fred
Lazin. He's done a great study of America's "Save the Soviet Jews" movement
and came to the conclusion that Israel's covert campaign played a pivotal,
yet rarely acknowledged role.
Below I'm posting an excerpt from a lecture he gave over a decade ago based
on his book, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics: Israel
versus the American Jewish Establishment. If you're interested in the topic,
I recommend reading the whole thing. It provides a very concise and very
readable history for people who don't know much about any of it.
Here it is:
The Liaison Bureau's emissaries in the United States worked to put the
Soviet Jewry issue on the public agenda. They charged the Soviet state with
committing "cultural genocide" against its Jewish citizens. They demanded
that the Soviet government honor its Jewish citizens' rights or allow those
citizens to leave for their homeland.
While referring to "cultural genocide" the Liaison Bureau emissaries
generally did not suggest a potential Holocaust. Yet, others in the Soviet
Jewry movement sometimes hinted about a potential slaughter of Soviet Jews.
Many activists and scholars have suggested that the American Jewish response
to Soviet Jewry was motivated by guilt over the failure to rescue European
Jews during the Holocaust.
The American psychiatrist and Soviet Jewry activist Paul Appelbaum claims
that early on advocates for Soviet Jewry emphasized the theme of a potential
Holocaust in the Soviet Union. As early as 1965 Rabbi Joachim Prinz,
chairman of the Presidents Conference and a refugee Rabbi from Hitler's
Germany, told Congress that the Soviets, like the Nazis, want "to bring to a
close the long Jewish religious and cultural expression." The philanthropist
Max Fisher noted "the emotion energizing the community as a combustible
fusion of sorrow and guilt over the failure to rescue millions of Jews from
Nazi brutality. 'Never again' was the shibboleth of the Jewish Defense
League, and though most of American Jewry scorned the JDL's militant
tactics, this intense emotional commitment to deterring any semblance of a
Holocaust was common in the community."
The following three examples illuminate the Liaison Bureau's efforts to get
the plight of Soviet Jewry on the public agenda in New York City and the USA
in general.
During the regime of Nikita Khrushchev hundreds of people in the Soviet
Union were arrested for economic crimes. Some were sentenced to death in the
early 1960s. Soviet Jews were overrepresented in both groups. Although some
people charged anti-Semitism, the issue did not become important to most
Americans including most American Jews. The situation resulted in little if
any protest in the United States.
Moshe Decter, who had previously edited the New Leader, which published a
double issue in September 1959 on the Jews of the Soviet Union with
materials supplied by the Liaison Bureau, had been hired by the Liaison
Bureau. His identity as an employee of the Liaison Bureau was not revealed
until many years later. Under the Bureau's surreptitious auspices he headed
a research organization on Soviet Jews that was housed in a carriage house
on the grounds of the American Jewish Congress in Manhattan.
Decter drafted a letter of protest to Khrushchev about the arrest of Jews
for economic crimes. He convinced Martin Luther King Jr., Supreme Court
justice William O. Douglas, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr to sign the letter. The story made the front page of the New York
Times, thus publicizing the alleged persecution and anti-Semitism. Decter's
research organization became the Conference on the Status of Soviet Jews, a
"private group of eminent intellectuals, academicians, scien tists and
artists, labor and civil rights leaders, founded in 1963 by...Norman Thomas,
Walter Reuther, William O. Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr., and Arthur
Miller." Decter's operation sponsored many academic and public conferences
and meetings on the subject of the persecution of Soviet Jewry.
.The third example of the Liaison Bureau's efforts involves Elie Weisel and
his book on Soviet Jews, of which anthropologist Fran Markowitz writes, "In
the 1960s Elie Weisel shook the Western Jewish world by alerting it to the
tragic situation of Soviet Jewry. Wiesel's compelling portrait of the Jews
of Silence became the definitive statement of Soviet Jews and their plight.
...[I]t ignited and intensified movements to free Soviet Jews, to stop the
ethnocide or cultural denudation of this people."
In an interview Wiesel explained that as a New York correspondent for an
Israeli newspaper he would have had good reason to go on his own to the
Soviet Union to do a story on Soviet Jewish refuseniks. Yet the Liaison
Bureau encouraged him to travel, probably funded his trip, arranged for his
meetings with Jews in the Soviet Union, and helped him find a publisher for
his book.
Significantly, the translator of Wiesel's manuscript, which was written in
French, thanks Moshe Decter for supplying information for the afterword,
which provides fifteen or more pages of facts showing how the Soviet Union
denied cultural rights for Jewish minorities in several republics. If it
came from Decter then it came from the Liaison Bureau - all of this without
mentioning its name.
The above three examples can be multiplied by tens, hundreds, or possibly
thousands, which are the numbers of activities that the Liaison Bureau and
its supporters initiated, aided, and conducted in an effort to get American
Jews and non-Jews interested in the plight of Soviet Jewry.
-Yasha Levine