Washington Post Book Reviews
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Saturday November 27, 2010
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WHEN THEY COME FOR US, WE'LL BE GONE: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry
Gal Beckerman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0618573097
598 pages
$30
Reviewed by Anne Applebaum
For American students such as myself, 1985 was a good year to be in Leningrad. The Soviet Union was in an odd moment of transition.
Some people still wouldn't talk to strangers on the street, while others were desperate to meet foreigners. One encountered Soviet pop musicians who said things like "Do you know David Bowie? I met him last year," as well as artists who gave raucous parties and intellectuals who served tea in book-lined apartments.
Most eager of all, though, were the Soviet Jews. I knew a group of them, most of whom had applied to emigrate to Israel and had been turned down: They were "refuseniks," some of the would-be emigres who had by then become a cause celebre in superpower diplomacy. I went to a refusenik wedding at the Palace of Marriages and to a secret Jewish ceremony afterward, where there was a chuppah and Hebrew songs were sung. At the time, this was highly radical dissident activity.
In the years that followed, the Soviet Union collapsed; the refuseniks left the U.S.S.R. and were forgotten. In "When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone," a fresh, surprising and exceedingly well-researched book, Gal Beckerman has retold their story.
Or rather, he has retold two stories: that of the Soviet Jews who made their religion and their desire to emigrate to Israel into a protest movement, and that of the American Jews who championed their cause. Alternating chapters between Russia and the United States, Beckerman shows how the two groups developed in a strange symbiosis, even while knowing very little about each other.
Their relationship changed both groups profoundly. Beckerman believes, in fact, that advocacy for Soviet Jewry "taught American Jews how to lobby." Before the American Jewish community coalesced around the emigration issue, its leaders had been wary of transforming their money and numbers into political clout. The need to save Soviet Jews, he argues -- not the need to support Israel -- taught American Jews how to use the tools that are so familiar today, from "targeting local congresspeople to asserting influence on the Hill."
It's an unexpected thesis, and completely convincing. Beckerman shows that the movement did not arise out of the blue but was rather the product of the events of the 1960s: Jewish participation in civil rights marches, the Adolf Eichmann war crimes trial, the Broadway debut of "Fiddler on the Roof" and the Six Day War among them. In the early days, there was Israeli input, too. A special department of the Mossad offered seed money to the first lobbying groups and even had a couple of paid agents.
But the groundswell of American popular opinion, fueled by thousands of ordinary synagogues and a few fanatical activists -- among them the repugnant Meir Kahane -- eventually left the Israelis behind.
The growing self-consciousness of the Soviet Jews also had its roots in this particular historical moment: the political thaw that followed Stalin's death, the growth of the Soviet human rights movement, the institutionalization of Soviet anti-Semitism.
Beckerman tells the stories of several Soviet Jewish activists, more than one of whom were radicalized by the public denunciations of Israel that followed the Six Day War. Having not thought of themselves as particularly Jewish before, they were offended by the language used about Israel and Jews who had, to the delight of many, successfully repelled the Soviet-backed Arab states once again.
Over time, both groups taught themselves to help each other. Like the rest of the dissident movement, activist Soviet Jews learned how to document the repression used against them and to get their reports out of the country. American Jews learned, in turn, how to beam these facts back into the U.S.S.R. on Radio Liberty, as well as how to present them to Congress, the news media and the White House. For years they pounded away at the advocates of realpolitik -- Nixon and Kissinger among them -- who wanted U.S.-Soviet relations to focus on arms and trade, not human rights.
In 1974, they won. That was the year that saw the passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, legislation that linked Soviet trade deals to Jewish emigration. Sponsored by Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a non-Jewish politician who had made this issue his own, it forced the White House to establish links between human rights violations and wider diplomatic issues. After the amendment passed, U.S.-Soviet relations were never the same. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan embraced human rights debates as a central part of the superpower relationship, something no previous presidents had done.
After the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the movement disappeared, a happy victim of its own success. In the subsequent decade, some 1 million Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel. Beckerman wants to ensure that the story of this epic struggle isn't forgotten, and I hope that, with this excellent book, he succeeds.
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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OUR PATCHWORK NATION: The Surprising Truth About the "Real" America
Dante Chinni and James Gimpel
Gotham
ISBN 978-1592405732
322 pages
$26
Reviewed by Alec MacGillis
We Americans take pride in our varied nation, but also seem to take inordinate pleasure in carving it up. Every election, we watch as the cable suits slice and dice the country on their digital maps. And every few years bring another book promising to chart the country's divisions by splitting it into categories more telling than the 50 states. Former Washington Post writer Joel Garreau offered his "Nine Nations of North America" in 1981; two decades later came Richard Florida with "The Rise of the Creative Class," followed by Bill Bishop's "The Big Sort," which sought to explain why so many of us are clustering in enclaves of the like-minded.
The latest aspiring Linnaeuses are Dante Chinni, a journalist, and James Gimpel, a University of Maryland government professor, who use socioeconomic data to break the country's 3,141 counties into 12 categories. Unlike Garreau's categories, which consisted of broad regional blocs, Chinni and Gimpel's kin communities are scattered across the map: boom towns, evangelical epicenters, military bastions, service worker centers, campus and careers, immigration nation, minority central, tractor community, Mormon outposts, emptying nests, industrial metropolises and monied burbs. The result falls short of "revolutionary," as the publisher's blurb has it, but is nonetheless a useful entry in the genre. The country is a more complicated place than the view from Washington, New York or Hollywood holds, and there's value in every effort to remind readers of that.
The authors are motivated by their frustration with the oversimplified red state/blue state construct: "We hate that map. In so many ways, it represents a lie." This is something of a straw man: The red/blue concept took root because, for several cycles, the electoral-college map broke down in strikingly consistent ways, before the sharp pendulum swings of 2008 and 2010.
And even glib pundits acknowledge differences between, say, Chicago and downstate Illinois or Northern and Southern Virginia.
But Chinni and Gimpel's typology still highlights nuances too often overlooked. For instance, they are insightful in differentiating between two types of conservative rural areas: the Great Plains, where traditional Protestantism predominates and small-government sentiment does not preclude local civic investment; and the Bible Belt running from Appalachia across the upper South to Texas, where evangelical Christianity elevates church and family above all else.
Some of the authors' categorizations are curious. Their "emptying nests" lump together Florida retirement towns and graying Upper Midwest communities. Their "service workers centers" are defined as tourism-dependent places with little historic economic base of their own -- say, coastal communities in Oregon or Maryland's Eastern Shore -- but they also count among them a huge swath of mining and manufacturing towns in the Rust Belt and Appalachia that have little in common with vacation getaways.
The authors make some odd choices to represent their types: Their model "monied burb" is the sui generis atomic-research hub of Los Alamos, N.M. And using counties as their organizing unit gives the endeavor a rural bias: "Mormon outposts," with only 1.7 million residents, get their own category, while disparate big cities are crowded into the "industrial metropolis" group -- everywhere from Buffalo to Los Angeles to Jacksonville.
But such quibbles can be offered against any list. More problematic is Chinni and Gimpel's attempt to read meaning into their map. Their reporting, like their prose, comes across as a bit slapdash -- they rely heavily on local Chamber of Commerce types and make some factual mistakes, such as placing the AIG bailout before the September 2008 financial collapse and describing Tim Geithner as a "Wall Street man" (he's a career civil servant). Their political analysis of the map based on the 2008 election is somewhat dated in light of the 2010 results, a forgivable flaw in this volatile era. But even in the context of 2008, some of the analysis is off the mark. In describing wealthy suburbs as a pure swing-vote area, the authors understate their steady shift to the Democratic column over the past two decades, which even this month's election did not fully reverse. They discount the notion of a red-blue religious divide by citing high rates of religious participation in big cities, without addressing the fact that much of this can be attributed to churchgoing racial minorities. They gloss over the racial factor in John McCain's strong showing in "evangelical epicenters" (where McCain, even in defeat, outperformed George W. Bush's 2004 tally). And they refer to Orange County, Calif., as a conservative bastion without noting the shift underway there: The increasingly diverse county voted 48 percent for Obama.
The authors' analysis is closer to the mark on regional economics, with acute predictions about how the 2009 stimulus package and the recession generally are affecting their various areas. They venture closest to lasting insight when they suggest that economic policies should be tailored more to the different community types -- say, by targeting mortgage-assistance and unemployment relief more narrowly at the hardest-hit areas. This runs counter to the argument put forward by Richard Florida and others that policies should focus on people, not places, even if it means leaving certain parts of the country further behind. But Chinni and Gimpel stop short of engaging fully on this point. That debate may have to wait for the next geographer seeking to make sense of this fractured national landscape of ours.
Alec MacGillis covers domestic policy for The Washington Post. His e-mail address is macgillisa(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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