Today in Tablet Magazine, Alexander Zaitchik interviews Yuli Edelstein, a Ukrainian-born Refusenik who is now serving as Israel’s first minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora. “Soviet Jews in Israel have never voted against the stream,” he says. “They are always with the stream, sometimes with a slight shift towards the winner. In 1992 they mostly voted for Rabin and the Labor Party. In ’96 they mostly voted for Netanyahu, but so did most Israelis. In ’99, they voted for Ehud Barak and Labor, as most Israelis did. And then Ariel Sharon—the same thing. So it’s a nice legend about all Soviet Jews being very hard-nosed.”
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