Bátora’s letter, signed by members of a far-right organization that goes by the acronym D.O.S.T., (meaning “enough” in Czech, and whose symbol is a clenched fist hitting a table), claimed that the festival was “organized by groups of homosexuals and lesbians whose demands against the Czech public significantly exceed the framework of mere tolerance.” Citing Ronald Reagan, whose anti-Communism has made him an enduringly popular figure in the Czech Republic, Bátora wrote that Eisen had betrayed the former president’s legacy and threatened to rupture the “good relations between our nations.”

American ambassadors, particularly those in small European countries, aren’t supposed to be in the business of stoking controversy. Not so for President Barack Obama’s appointees. Early last year, a State Department investigation revealed that the former ambassador to Luxembourg, a major Democratic Party fundraiser named Cynthia Stroum, had so demoralized her staff that some career foreign-service officers working under her fled for posts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last month in Belgium, Ambassador Howard Gutman provoked a firestorm in the United States when he intimated that Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe was largely a response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the surface, Eisen and Gutman have much in common: Both are prominent Democratic Party fundraisers, lawyers, and the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors. But their respective controversies could not have been more different: Whereas Gutman’s remarks provided fodder for those who seek to blame Jews for the hatred directed at them, Eisen’s intervention bolstered liberalism in a country that, still seeking its place in the post-Communist era, badly needs it.

The Czech Republic is known for its carefree attitude toward sex and sexuality: It has the highest divorce rate on the continent; it’s a popular destination for British stag parties; nearly half the population identifies as atheist; and it’s a major hub for the production of gay pornography. But these ostensible signifiers of social tolerance belie what is in fact a deeply conservative society.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, for one, took umbrage at the fact that Eisen, along with 12 other Western ambassadors, voiced support for Prague Pride. The same day that Bátora marched on the U.S. Embassy, Klaus, a founder of the country’s biggest right-of-center political party, issued his own statement, declaring: “I can’t imagine any Czech ambassador daring to interfere by a petition with the internal political discussion in any democratic country in the world.” (Klaus had made his own views on the parade well known the previous week by defending an aide who had referred to gays as “deviant fellow citizens.”)

Eisen, 51, whose mother is a Czechoslovak Holocaust survivor, was now thrust into the center of a political controversy that had been roiling the country for months. Bátora had already been fingered as a man with unpalatable views: A group of Czech senators called for his dismissal from the Education Ministry a week before he delivered his missive to Eisen. The senators had raised concerns about Bátora’s involvement with a now-defunct far-right political party that promoted the expulsion of Czech Roma citizens. Bátora had also praised as “brilliant” a 1925 anti-Semitic book called The Adulteration of the Slavs, which approvingly cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and the works of German writers who would later go on to become leading figures in the Nazi Party.

Bátora’s presence in the Education Ministry threatened the country’s fragile center-right coalition government. (The most admired Czech in the world, Vaclav Havel, denounced Bátora from his sickbed.) Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, a distinguished Czech political figure and founder of the center-right TOP ’09 party, reportedly called him an “old fascist.” But it was Ambassador Eisen’s provocation that ultimately led to Bátora’s downfall.

Continue reading: The brouhaha moves to Facebook

Lucas is right, of course. In the 1950s, getting the scoop on someone like Noel Field, an American Communist who played a leading role in the Stalinist show trials in postwar Czechoslovakia, would have made a journalist’s career and maybe even changed world history. Fifty years later, Field’s name is known only to a handful of academics and ideologues—the same tiny but committed group who continue to debate the guilt of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.

For the same reason, the potency of cutting-edge, politically informed spy fiction tends to weaken over time. John Buchan’s novels about Anglo-German rivalry before World War I, or John le Carré’s Smiley tales, were read on first publication as bulletins from the front of an ongoing battle; today, they offer the quainter pleasures of genre fiction. Stone’s gamble in Damascus Gate was that a spy novel set in Jerusalem would be different. That is because, as many characters in the book have occasion to muse, Jerusalem itself is different. “Other cities had antiquities,” Stone writes, “but the monuments of Jerusalem did not belong to the past. They were of the moment and even the future.” The rivalry between the United States and the USSR lasted 44 years, but the contest between Jews, Christians, and Muslims for physical and spiritual ownership of Jerusalem is still going strong after millennia.

It stands to reason, then, that the new paperback edition of Damascus Gate (Mariner, $15.95) should be as timely as the original. In fact, the identity of past and present is the key doctrine of the religious cult at the novel’s heart. The leader of this cult is Adam de Kuff, a middle-aged American Jew turned spiritual seeker, who we first see waiting in a psychiatrist’s office. He is, Stone makes clear, a schizophrenic and manic-depressive, prey to the delusion that he is the Messiah. Such delusions are common enough in Jerusalem; indeed, the novel opens with Lucas encountering a deranged German tourist in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

What sets de Kuff above such garden-variety lunatics—in Arabic, Stone writes, they are called majnoon—is his partnership with Raziel Melker. Melker, who was born Ralph, is another American Jewish seeker, the son of a congressman who has been by turns a yeshiva student, a jazz musician, a drug addict, and a Sufi master. Stone leaves it deliberately ambiguous whether Melker actually believes that de Kuff is the Messiah or is just preying on a madman for his own hidden purposes, or some combination of both.

In any case, Raziel acts as the Saint Paul to de Kuff’s Jesus, building a cult around him and formulating a new, syncretic theology. “They talked about Zen and Theravada and the Holy Ghost, the bodhisattvas, the sefirot and the Trinity, Pico della Mirandola, Teresa of Avila,” and on and on, Stone writes, in a passage whose bop Ginsbergian rhythms remind us that he is essentially a product of the 1960s. (“You’re one crazy mixed-up chick, baby,” Raziel says at one point.) And there is a genial ’60s-ish eclecticism, not to say fogginess, about the de Kuff cult. He declares himself to be at once the Jewish Moshiach, the Second Coming of Christ, and the Muslim Mahdi: “So as the Almighty is One, so also are the believers,” he explains. The cult’s emblem is the ourobouros, the Greek image of a serpent swallowing its tail: It is meant to symbolize the unity of all times and all ways of worshiping God.

It was on the road to Damascus, of course, that Saul had the epiphany that led him to embrace Christianity and change his name to Paul. The title of Damascus Gate alludes to that conversion, and one of the novel’s main themes is appeal of faith to the nonbeliever. Christopher Lucas, as a journalist, an American, and an earnest liberal, holds himself immune to the blind faiths and sectarian loyalties that determine Jerusalem’s history. (“In the United States people are what they choose to be,” says a minor character in the novel. “It’s not that way here, unfortunately.”) Yet Lucas is also half-Jewish, and he was sent to Catholic school by his mother; the impulse to believe is vestigial in him, and the de Kuff cult makes him at least nostalgic for faith. “He could not resist the little flutter of mindless hope,” Stone writes. “In what? In nothing he could remotely conceive.” On a more worldly level, he is drawn to the cult by his passion for Sonia Barnes, a half-black, half-Jewish jazz singer who succumbs to Raziel’s persuasion.

But if Lucas can’t bring himself to believe, he is surrounded by people who are dangerously convinced. Like a detective in a film noir, he gradually unearths an ever-ramifying conspiracy: a plot to blow up the Temple Mount, in order to clear the way for the construction of the Third Temple. It becomes clear that Raziel has set up Adam de Kuff as the fall guy for this plot, whose real movers are a combination of hard-right Jewish settlers and messianic American Christians. Along the way, Stone spins a dense web of connections and betrayals: Lucas encounters a gun-running Irish NGO worker, and a Palestinian Communist doctor, and a fascistic British archeologist, and a close-mouthed American diplomat, and many more. In the novel’s frenetic last hundred pages, Lucas and a handful of other characters race to a chamber under the Temple Mount, where some are planning to detonate a bomb and others hope to stop it—and it remains unclear, until the very end, exactly who is on which side.

Damascus Gate’s combination of abstruse theological speculation (Stone clearly researched the Kabbalah) and screen-ready action sequences won it a lot of praise when it appeared in 1998. Taken together, they made the novel a good match for its pre-millennial moment, when old fears about the end of the world were taking new forms, and readers responded in kind: To Annie Dillard, for instance, Damascus Gate was “a narrative of good and evil written in letters of fire.”

Certainly no one could say that Jerusalem has calmed down in the last 13 years, or that the religious passions in the city have stopped being explosive. Indeed, just two years after Damascus Gate appeared, Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount helped to set off the so-called “al-Aqsa Intifada,” named after the mosque that Stone’s fictional terrorists hoped to blow up.

Yet that event also helps to show how Damascus Gate misunderstands the very passions it means to analyze. To Stone, the danger of religion is that it is apocalyptic: At the core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he argues, is a belief that the world as we know it will someday end, to be replaced by something infinitely better. The most religious people, in Stone’s novel, are those who take this promise seriously and try to hasten the Messiah’s arrival. “We change, we fail,” Raziel tells Lucas, “but the Torah remains, never changes under its garment. The chance to restore tikkun comes again and again.”

Because this dynamic is common to all faiths, Stone suggests, it can best be embodied in a movement like the de Kuff cult, which is post-sectarian and even New Agey in its blending of religious symbols. This licenses the biggest and, at times, most ludicrous failure of realism in Damascus Gate: the fact that its messianic plotters are not mullahs or Lubavitchers but hipsters. Raziel and Sonja are both jazz musicians and ex-druggies, and when they’re not planning the end of the world they jam at a Russian-owned club in Tel Aviv. Even the minor characters in the novel are generally cool and sexy—from Nuala Rice, the seductive Irish leftist who ends up dangling from a noose, to Janusz Zimmer, the aging womanizer and ex-Communist who seems to be masterminding the Temple plot.

Surprisingly, however, in this novel about Jerusalem, none of the main characters is Israeli or Palestinian. At one point Lucas refers to himself as being “in country,” and this foreign-correspondent’s or aid-worker’s phrase sums up the relationship of Stone’s American protagonists to Jerusalem and its inhabitants: They are sources, interlocutors, or obstacles, but seldom peers. This distance allows Damascus Gate to maintain a certain grim neutrality about the Arab-Jewish conflict. The Israeli soldiers we see in the novel are habitually brutal, and one of them—a mysterious figure who operates under the nom de guerre Abu Baraka—leads a vigilante gang in random attacks on Palestinians.

Yet these characters are at least individualized, and Stone balances them with other Jewish Israelis who are benevolent, such as the human-rights worker Ernest Gross and the worldly psychiatrist Dr. Obermann. Palestinians, on the other hand, appear most forcefully in Damascus Gate in the form of superstitious, murderous mobs: Two of the novel’s most powerful scenes involve Lucas fleeing for his life from Arab crowds chanting, “Kill the Jews.” Lucas seems to speak for the novel as a whole when he says that the Israelis, for all their flaws, are “people more like me, in the end. They may not be Knights of the Round Table, but they won’t kill me for being a Jew. Or a djinn.”

To really come to grips with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, would take a novelist more interested in history and less interested in apocalyptic mysticism. After all, when Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount in 2000, it was not in an attempt to hasten the End Times, but as a way of claiming sovereignty over territory and signaling his intentions to the Israeli public; that is, his motives were political. So were the motives of the Palestinians who responded with massive violence and suicide bombings. And the militant zealots among Jewish settlers and Palestinian Muslims are not in search of some tantalizing new spiritual insight, like Raziel’s synthesis of Sufism and Buddhism and Judaism; they do not stand for hybridity but for purity and tradition. A fundamentalist is someone who is exactly what he says he is. And that makes fundamentalism a terrible subject for a spy novel, where the narrative suspense comes from the reader’s uncertainty about whether anyone is what he claims to be.

Damascus Gate fails as a book about Jerusalem, one might say, because it is too interesting—more interesting than the city it aims to describe, or else interesting in the wrong way. The best antidote to its fever-dream is to open a book like Zeruya Shalev’s Thera, an Israeli novel in which Jerusalemites get divorced and raise children and argue and suffer, just as people do all over the world. Or, for that matter, to open the newspaper and read about how tens of thousands of Israelis are taking to the streets of Jerusalem—not to build the Third Temple, but to protest the high cost of housing. These are the kinds of human stories that keep getting told in novels, long after the flashy conspiracies are forgotten.

Today comes the publication of statements by Wallenberg’s longtime Soviet prison cellmate, which are relevant less for what they say than for the mere fact that they exist: the Russians have long denied they did. Which further calls into question that he was executed on July 17, 1947, as the Russians claim (and which was severely questioned by the revelation last year, that “prisoner number 7,” believed to be him, was questioned on July 23. Which in turn makes you wonder yet more about his fate. He would be 99 this year. On Wikipedia, his birth and date are listed as follows: “(August 4, 1912 – July 17, 1947?)”

Russians Print New Info Linked to Raoul Wallenberg [AP]
Earlier: Wallenberg Lived Longer Than Thought

Vilnius—“the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” and only increasingly central to Jewish thought during the 19th-century Haskalah—experienced its first pogrom in 1939 and 1940, when the Soviet Union’s secret police deported 21,000 political and social elites (including many Jews) and killed thousands more. Next was the 24,000 Jews killed by Polish and Lithuanian nationalists backed by the Nazis, who in 1941 invaded in violation of the deal they had inked with the U.S.S.R. two years earlier. Only then came the systematic slaughter of nearly 100,000 people from in and around Vilnius, including (and what the desecrated memorial stands for) roughly 72,000 Jews, by the Nazis and collaborating Lithuanians.

Today, the Lithuanian government has concerns other than publicizing the role of some of their ancestors in the Holocaust, or indeed in publicizing the Holocaust itself. Politically, it casts the U.S.S.R. as Lithuania’s ultimate historical enemy, and is currently after the ex-KGB officer Mikhail Golovatov, who famously commanded a group that killed 13 protesters in 1991; Golovatov was freed from Austrian custody two weeks ago, likely under the pressure of Russia, to which he fled and which wishes to protect its own and pit former Soviet republics like Lithuania against other members of the European Union. Moreover, as Dovid Katz has written in Tablet, “Holocaust obfuscation”—in which the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews are minimized and deliberately blended into the Nazis’ crimes against the Slavs and the Russians’ crimes against everyone—is in vogue in the Baltics; complicating matters is that a not-insignificant proportion of the secret policemen who carried out the first attacks on Vilnius, in 1939 and 1940, were Jews.

“But indubitable Western ignorance of Soviet crimes is no excuse for neglecting the historical record of the tragedy of Lithuanian Jews,” Snyder concludes. “Horrible as the Soviet occupation was, the largest group of genocide victims in Lithuania were the Jews murdered by the Germans with the help of the local population.” One more reason to tell your friends about the vandalism 70 years later of the memorial to the 72,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis in a forest outside Vilinius.

Neglecting the Lithuanian Holocaust [NYRB]
Related: The Crime of Surviving [Tablet Magazine]
Devastated [Tablet Magazine]

When the judge handed down the guilty verdict just before the New Year, hundreds protested outside the courtroom. German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the ruling, as did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The White House issued a statement condemning “abuse of the legal system for improper ends.”

Five months later, the case still hasn’t receded from Russian headlines. The press secretary of the court that heard Khodorkovsky’s case revealed to an opposition newspaper that the judge in the case didn’t write the verdict and that he was pressured from the outside. (She has since been made to take a lie detector test—she passed—and been forced out of her job.) Fifty-five “official” celebrities have signed a controversial open letter praising the verdict in the case, and 45 others signed one opposing it. When U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden gave a major policy address at Moscow State University in March, he cited Khodorkovsky’s case as a blight on Russia’s already troubled record. “Get your system right,” he said. Foreign investors regularly cite the Khodorkovsky case as a metaphor of the risks of doing business in Russia: If you run afoul of the Kremlin, you can have it all taken away in a heartbeat, even if you are the richest, most powerful man in Russia.

When Khodorkovsky was arrested, many, especially in the Jewish press, saw it as an attack against a Jewish businessman, and thus as a reinforcement of pernicious old stereotypes in a country famous for its institutionalized anti-Semitism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there were attempts to rile up the Russian public by harping on the image of the rapacious Jewish businessman, of which there were several. Surprisingly, the attempts fell flat, perhaps because Russians were at the time too preoccupied with mere survival. The Jewish oligarchs had all come of age in the Soviet Union where, unlike their Orthodox Christian countrymen, few Jews hung on to their religion. Khodorkovsky, whose father is Jewish, was no exception. His political ambitions, and his risky battle with Putin, made it even less likely that he would openly identify himself as a Jew, even as his cause was adopted by the American Jewish and Israeli press.

Khordokovsky’s former deputy at Yukos Oil, Leonid Nevzlin, who fled to Israel (which has no extradition agreement with Russia) ahead of a similar battery of charges, including murder, told the reporter Gal Beckerman that he and his former boss and friend had made opposite and deliberate choices in the face of state persecution. “I always felt that I am first of all Jewish and then a Russian citizen,” Nevzlin said. “For Khodorkovsky, it was the opposite. And the Yukos case made us face this specific question. What choice would we each make? Where would we like to live? And each of us made his own choice. I totally respect Khodorkovsky’s choice, though it doesn’t match mine.”

Khodorkovsky’s choice was Russia, a choice that landed him in some of the country’s most notorious prisons. It has also meant taking on a vaguely Christian-tinged role, a just man laid low by Caesar’s hand. In the nearly eight years since a team of commandos stormed his private plane at what appeared to be the behest of then-President Vladimir Putin, Khodorkovsky—every minority shareholder’s worst nightmare—has reinvented himself as Russia’s preeminent martyr. After his initial conviction, in 2005, for tax evasion, Khodorkovsky began to write liberal political screeds from his crowded prison cell. He wrote op-eds for Western publications, like the New York Times, and maintained a correspondence with Lyudmila Ulitskaya, one of Russia’s most famous contemporary novelists. He has PR teams in Moscow, London, Paris, Washington, and New York. During Khodorkovsky’s second, and even more politicized, trial, his cadre of lawyers is always available; every journalist in Moscow has their mobile numbers. Recently, his main PR team in London hired Washington-based Randy Scheunemann, Sen. John McCain’s foreign policy adviser during his last presidential campaign. (Scheunemann also did a stint with Sarah Palin.)

But no amount of PR could have made Khodorkovsky into such a sympathetic figure without the Kremlin’s unintentional help. Putin’s relentless pursuit of Khodorkovsky, his apparently insatiable desire to see the man remain in prison, his flashes of seemingly genuine anger whenever Khodorkovsky’s name is mentioned, the fact that Khodorkovsky was convicted in his second trial for something that directly contradicts the conviction in the first, the fact that, even before the 14-year sentence was handed down in December, rumors started to circulate about a third set of charges—all of this has shown Khodorkovsky as a victim of the Kremlin’s selective, pettily vindictive justice. There was nothing, after all, that he did that the other oligarchs—many of them still flourishing—didn’t do. “My personal opinion is that Khodorkovsky, without any doubt, was a horrible transgressor of the rights of minority shareholders, and was fraudulent and avoided taxes, but that’s not why he’s in jail,” says Alexey Navalny, a young blogger who has made his name as an activist minority shareholder in state companies. “He’s not in jail for this. My demand isn’t so much to free Khodorkovsky but to jail everyone else.”

Older generations of liberal Russians, who saw their friends jailed for their views in Soviet times, have a sort of knee-jerk empathy for Khodorkovsky: If the state has put him in prison, then he is a dissident. Indeed, last Tuesday, immediately following the Moscow City Court’s rejection of Khodorkovsky’s latest appeal, Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience. This is a strange development for a man with a soft, high-pitched voice who avoided the limelight in favor of the quiet search for loopholes and deals. “He’s not a dissident, he’s a victim of bad decisions, including his own,” Alexi Golubovitch, who served in various high-ranking positions in the oligarch’s companies, Yukos and Menatep, over 15 years, told me over lunch in his office in the historical center of Moscow. He left the company in 2001—it had become “too Soviet” in its mentality, he says.

“Khodorkovsky needs to be freed because his jailing is unjust, not because he’s a real dissident,” says Golubovich. “A dissident is selfless.” And selfless Khodorkovsky is not. There are still untold millions at stake, and a case pending at the European Court of Human Rights, in which Khodorkovsky seeks damages from the Russian state to the tune of $98 billion, the largest in the court’s history.

***

The Western investors who denounce the case against Khodorkovsky as politically biased were once his bitter enemies, trampled underfoot as he built up the biggest fortune in post-Soviet Russia. “He was uniquely ruthless, uniquely scheming,” says David E. Hoffman, whose book The Oligarchs provides the definitive account of the period. At the turn of the millennium, Khordorkovsky and his fellow oligarchs were seen not as entrepreneurs moving Russia forward, but as a danger to its future development. These oligarchs “threaten Russia’s transition to democracy and free markets,” wrote Lee S. Wolosky, a former Clinton counter-terrorism official and a professor at Columbia, in a 2000 article in Foreign Affairs. He was not alone in his assessment.

Back then, Russia was in a precarious position. It was only nine years since the collapse of the Soviet Union had shoved Russia on the fast track to a free market; it was also by no means a sure bet that Russia wouldn’t slide into the authoritarianism—both political and economic—that began to grip the other former Soviet Republics.

Continue reading: the oligarchs, Yukos, and a “socially explosive situation.” Or view as a single page.

At its height, in the 1940s, the Jewish community of Tajikistan—a poor, Muslim country in the heart of Central Asia that shares an 800-mile border with Afghanistan to the south—numbered nearly 30,000 people. That population was composed mostly of Persian-speaking Bukharan Jews who had lived in the region for millennia, in addition to Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe who came here (some by choice, others by force) during Soviet times. Today, the Jews of Tajikistan number less than 500, about half of whom live in Dushanbe. These negligible figures are themselves estimates, according to Abdurakhmanov, who is Bukharan. Most of the remaining Jews, he said, do not regularly practice, and many are “mixed,” that is, either the offspring of a Jew and non-Jew or themselves married to a gentile. When I asked if he is able to form a minyan, the quorum of 10 men required for prayer sessions, he replied, “Sometimes.”

Dushanbe’s previous synagogue, built in 1947 and located on a plot of land in the central part of the city where Jews had prayed for centuries, was razed in 2006 to make way for a gaudy, massive, presidential “Palace of Nations.” The destruction of the synagogue did not occur without controversy, although the Jewish community was quick to deny that anti-Semitism had anything to do with the building plans, which also saw the tearing down of a Russian military base and many private residences. The new synagogue is located in a converted house donated by a relative of the country’s authoritarian president, Emomali Rahmon.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Central Asian Jews made a quick exit for Israel, and Tajik Jews were no exception. According to Abdurakhmanov, 12,000 left in the years following the Soviet empire’s collapse, an exodus spurred by the Tajik civil war that raged from 1992 to 1997 and took the lives of 50,000 people. That conflict pitted a shaky coalition of Islamic fundamentalists and democrats against a government composed of former Soviet apparatchiks, and it was settled with an agreement that allowed some opposition figures into parliament. Earlier waves of Jewish emigration occurred in 1917 (the year of the Russian revolution) and in 1948, during Israel’s war of independence.

Like their Muslim countrymen, Tajik Jews faced severe difficulties while living under the Soviet Union, which repressed religious expression throughout the diverse lands it controlled. Jews had to seek permission from the state bureaucracy to celebrate holidays, and in 1946, the city’s three synagogues were nationalized so the government could monitor their activities. And while Abdurakhmanov pointed out that “the authorities have especially good relations with the Jewish community,” he also said that there isn’t much of a Jewish community to have relations with. “It’s very difficult to say that we have a community here,” he told me. “It’s not a community. When you have a Jewish community, you gather together, discuss social issues, attend funerals together, attend weddings together. It’s not happening here.”

***

Since the end of the Tajik civil war, Jewish life in Central Asia has been largely quiet and uneventful. That was until a series of surprising anti-Semitic incidents targeted the small Jewish community of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, following the violent ouster of the country’s dictatorial president in April. Unlike the situations in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where Jews have lived for ages and are intrinsic parts of the national culture, Judaism is foreign to Kyrgyzstan, with nearly all of the country’s Jews being ethnically eastern European or Russian. Accusations that a Russian-Jewish businessman had helped the former president’s corrupt son rob the country sparked an attack on the city’s ramshackle synagogue, followed months later by a bombing on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and saw the rise of an anti-Semitic discourse that foreshadowed the ethnic riots targeting minority Uzbeks two months later, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds and the displacement of 400,000. Since then, a small number of Kyrgyz Jews have made aliyah to Israel.

Tajiks are ethnically Persian, and their language is nearly identical to Farsi. Iran and Tajikistan are close diplomatically, and, as the constant stream of Farsi music videos that seem to play on television screens at every restaurant here attests, Iranian pop culture predominates. But neither the government of Tajikistan nor its people share the anti-Semitism that has become such a crucial feature of the Iranian revolutionary regime, particularly under the rule of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nor does anti-Semitism figure prominently in the rhetoric of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, an al-Qaida-affiliated group that seeks the overthrow of Central Asian regimes and their replacement with Islamic states, and that is alleged to have staged operations within Tajikistan over the past few years.

Reliable information about the IMU, its structure, and size is hard to come by, as it is in the interests of both the IMU and the region’s governments to exaggerate the organization’s importance, the former so it can attract recruits to what it tries to portray as a triumphant cause, and the latter to secure backing from Western governments intent on stamping out Islamic extremism. Earlier this year, an ambush on Tajik security forces alleged to have been perpetrated by the IMU resulted in the deaths of 23 soldiers, leading the Tajik government to launch a months-long security operation in the country’s central Rasht Valley to eliminate what it claims are IMU hideouts. Whatever the apparent success of its recent attacks, however, the IMU is far from posing a serious threat to the stability of the Rahmon regime, and its fundamentalist ideology seems to hold little sway with ordinary Tajiks.

During my visit to Tajikistan in November, I didn’t once hear an anti-Semitic remark or sentiment expressed, either offhand or when I specifically raised the question of Judaism with ordinary Tajiks. Jews have been living in Tajikistan for thousands of years, speak the same language as their fellow Tajik citizens, and appreciate the same cultural mores. Bukharan Jews are physically indistinguishable from non-Jewish Tajiks. Some of the most prominent Tajik figures in culture and the professional world have been Jewish. Tajikistan enjoys diplomatic relations with Israel, and President Rahmon is said to pay regular calls upon New York’s relatively large Tajik diaspora when he visits for the annual United Nations General Assembly. “I don’t feel anti-Semitism, organized anti-Semitism on behalf of the government or ordinary people or organizations,” Abdurakhmanov said. “I haven’t seen any of this.”

This sentiment is echoed by Akbar Turajonzoda, a Tajik legislator and erstwhile foe of the regime. Turajonzoda, whom I met at his office in a small cotton-processing factory in the Bahdat district, 12 miles east of Dushanbe, was once Tajikistan’s Qazi Qalon, or highest-ranking Islamic cleric. “We don’t have any dislike toward Jews,” he told me before going on to explain that whatever anti-Jewish sentiment does exist owes itself to Islamic extremists who use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to elicit Muslim antipathy toward a convenient target. “There is a very small minority in Central Asia, including Tajikistan, that has some opinions about unresolved issues between Israel and Palestine,” he said. “That small minority consists of some students who have studied abroad and still travel there or have access to certain Internet sites.” (Over the past year, the Tajik government has made concerted efforts to discourage young men from studying at madrassas in Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.)

But while airing grievances against Israel is a surefire way to generate anger on the Arab Street, Turajonzoda says that similar efforts by the likes of the IMU or Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist organization that seeks the restoration of the caliphate in Central Asia, are unsuccessful. “Our people have so much on their own plates that they don’t think about [Palestinians]; we have far too many pressing issues at home to care about other people’s problems. Besides, our people don’t speak Arabic to follow Middle Eastern [media] coverage of Israeli-Palestinian issues.”

***

Dushanbe’s Jewish cemetery, which occupies several steep hills on the plot of a larger ecumenical burial ground, speaks to a rich history, standing in melancholy contrast to today’s dwindling Jewish presence. A thousand headstones, many of them featuring Soviet-style etchings of the deceased’s visage, dot the landscape. They showcase an erstwhile community of lawyers, doctors, and performers, many of whom, according to my Tajik guide, were once well-known figures throughout the country. The Jewish section is noticeably better maintained than the Muslim and Christian areas of the cemetery, where vegetation crawls over dislodged headstones. The close tending is attributable, I am told, to the full-time caretaker whose salary is paid by Jewish aid organizations and Tajik émigrés. He says that “a lot of visitors” from the Unites States and Israel, relatives of the buried and Jewish delegations, come to the cemetery.

The Tajik attitude toward Jews has an endearingly protective quality to it. “Our Jews,” is how one Tajik woman described her country’s Jewish population, to differentiate Tajikistan’s Bukharan Jews from the rest of the world’s. “Unfortunately, they left for Israel,” a Tajik man explained after regaling me with a list of professions in which the country’s Jews had distinguished themselves during the Soviet era (that sentiment is especially strange to hear in the Muslim world, where Jews have all but disappeared). This evident philo-Semitism, however, was never enough to convince the majority of Tajikistan’s Jews to remain in a place where they were welcome, and it probably will not be long before the country’s Jewish community, unable to form a regular minyan, all but disappears. As I left the Dushanbe synagogue, I asked Rabbi Abdurakhmanov if he presided over bar mitzvahs. “We don’t have children here,” he answered. “How can we have that?”

James Kirchick is writer at large with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a contributing editor to The New Republic.



On the sixth night of Hanukkah the authorities confiscated my menorah with all my candles. I ran to the duty officer to find out what had happened.

“The candlesticks were made from state materials; this is illegal. You could be punished for this alone and the other prisoners are complaining. They’re afraid you’ll start a fire.”

I began to insist. “In two days Hanukkah will be over and then I’ll return this ‘state property’ to you. Now, however, this looks like an attempt to deny me the opportunity of celebrating Jewish holidays.”

The duty officer began hesitating. Then he phoned his superior and got his answer: “A camp is not a synagogue. We won’t permit Sharansky to pray here.”

Camp Fire

For me, the news served as a doleful affirmation: The alleged criminals seem to have had the same thought I did when I filled out my now-deceased grandmother’s application for reparations years ago. The details of her story were true: She spent 26 months incarcerated in the Minsk ghetto, managing to escape a month before it was liquidated and her parents and maternal grandparents were murdered. But as I considered the application’s thin verification requirements, I thought: How easy this would be to fake.

So I did.

For the last year, I have been inventing stories of Holocaust suffering: a mother suffocating her wailing child to save the other Jews hiding in a cellar; a ghetto work detail sorting the blood-spattered clothes of murdered Jews; Belarussian Nazi collaborators pausing between executions at street tables loaded with chicken and beer. But rather than feeding some criminal scheme, these stories are at the heart of a novel I’ve been writing—the story of a young writer, a failure in New York magazine journalism, who, in frustration, takes to forging Holocaust restitution claims at the prompting of old Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach and other parts of Soviet Brooklyn.

In the book, as in real life, these are people who have suffered unimaginably—as Red Army soldiers in World War II; as Jews in the Soviet Union; as immigrants in the United States—but not in the way the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany specifies they need to have suffered to qualify for the reparations the German government has been making to Holocaust victims since 1952.

Slava Gelman, my fictionalized letter-writer, wants to resist the logic of these old immigrants even as his heart breaks at their misery. He, too, is a Soviet émigré; his elders brought him to America so he wouldn’t have to live by the deception that they did. In the Soviet Union, Jews were kept out of elite institutions and posts; Jewish veterans who had lost limbs at the front were taunted for having sat out World War II; a Jewish woman could hardly touch a loaf of stale bread at the food store without having her “grubby Jewish fingers” berated by the cashier. Soviet Jews lived in an inconceivable limbo of unfairness and hypocrisy. Many would have been too happy to forget their faith, but their countrymen never allowed them to.

I was also born in the Soviet Union, where Jews like my grandfather had no choice but to live by the black market. Ostensibly a barber, my grandfather developed a clandestine barter network that would impress a CIA station chief. A haircut on the side for a stick of salami; salami for free Aeroflot tickets; free tickets for the ear of a powerful person in case trouble comes. The only way to get by was to cheat the system—there simply wasn’t enough to go around fairly. It’s hard to think of a regime that claimed to do as much in the name of its people while impoverishing them more—materially, physically, morally. It’s hard to fault an ex-Soviet person for feeling owed. But, as a character in the novel says, “the Soviets aren’t offering restitution. The Germans are offering.”

***

The low burden of proof required by the reparations program wouldn’t tempt the average American: The law is the law here. That is the wonder of this country, for all its flaws: There’s enough to go around. Connections, pedigree, and money all help, but so many ordinary people can achieve what they’d like simply by working fairly and honestly. You can afford to be decent here.

Had the defrauded funds been American rather than German, it isn’t hard to imagine the news sticking in some immigration-obsessed Tea Party congressman’s craw, with its easy iconography of interlopers illegally sucking down precious native resources. The law is the law; the Holocaust-fund suspects should be prosecuted. So should, for that matter, those who cross the border illegally. But what should find no tolerance is the nativist demonology that so often accompanies news of malfeasance by a small portion of a minority group. The Russians have gotten off easy, their persecution limited to movies like Red Dawn and Gary Shteyngart’s novels. But what of more hideous gestures, such as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s video of faceless Mexican marauders scaling the walls of our innocent land? The vast majority of illegal Mexican immigrants are here to make money to put clothes on the backs of children in Puebla—money earned doing work most Americans won’t deign to do, and for a pittance. Since so much modern journalism seems to have squandered its traditional mandate to force primitive instinct to contend with nuance, perhaps fiction has to step in.

The poison inside the people who allegedly defrauded the Holocaust fund would be inside you, too, if you had lived as Jews in the Soviet Union. Whatever their sins, these people are heroes, too, for having survived it. The struggle to defeat its legacy requires a daily application of conscience and will, even for members of my generation. I actually envy Slava, my own fictionalized protagonist, for the way in which he chooses America at the end of the book. Fiction is freeing that way; that’s one of its limiting seductions. For some, in real life, it’s simply too late.

Nothing is more uplifting than the American gospel of self-reinvention, but America forgets that human nature sometimes has a limit. That is part of America’s vital, ferocious, oblivious beauty. But it’s too late for those who traded their complimentary American synagogue memberships for cash; for those who sign for imaginary pills and massages to split profits with doctors who file for Medicare reimbursement; for those for whom it’s still 1977 in Minsk.

Slava spends only the 400 pages of my book arguing with his grandfather about the meaning of justice; I have spent more than a decade arguing with mine. In this time, I have achieved things I never imagined, but I have changed nothing about what men like our grandfathers see in the world. That creates one kind of conundrum for the American legal system, and another for Russian-Americans of my age. Our grandparents are our shame, but they are also our wisdom, courage, and tenderness. They gave up everything so we could have more. But in the United States, they remain Soviet—that singular cocktail of cunning, fear, paranoia, ambition, materialism, anti-intellectual refinement, tribalism, prudery, soul. It is the lasting curse of our magical, hideous birthplace. How do you forgive and revere these people at once? How do you honor someone whose definition of honor is entirely different from yours?

I found my only answer in fiction: Consider them individually, as the idiosyncratic, reduction-imploding human beings that they—that we all—are.

Boris Fishman is a 2010-2011 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

And yet new petitions on his behalf have recently begun to circulate, and gain momentum, both in the U.S. Congress and the Israeli Knesset. This is, in large measure, because Pollard’s situation rests on a contradiction: He was guilty of a reprehensible crime, and yet he has been treated abominably. One of the most infamous Jewish criminals in modern times, he is also the victim of the worst act of official American anti-Semitism in our lifetimes. With his round face and shoulder-length hair, Pollard today still looks more like a perpetual grad student than an arch criminal, but he has suffered severely. He has served hard time, mostly in maximum-security prisons, spending years in lockdown 23 hours a day. Websites pleading his case detail his medical ailments, noting that he has “developed diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-glaucoma, and arthritis while in prison.”

From the moment he was sentenced, there were people in the Jewish community—and beyond—who believed Pollard had been unjustly punished and who fought for his release. But they were few and far between, and they often made the wrong case for him. This newest round of argument on Pollard’s behalf is different. For starters, many of his champions have been careful not to lionize him. Rather, they focus on correcting what Judge Stephen Williams, who filed a dissent in one of Pollard’s failed appeals, deemed “a fundamental miscarriage of justice.” Most surprisingly, on September 27, 2010, a former assistant secretary of Defense confirmed many people’s decades-long fears that, at some point, the case had turned personal—and poisonous. Without explaining what prompted him to break his silence, Lawrence Korb, who served in the Pentagon in Reagan’s first term, wrote President Barack Obama: “Based on my first-hand knowledge, I can say with confidence that the severity of Pollard’s sentence is a result of an almost visceral dislike of Israel and the special place it occupies in our foreign policy on the part of my boss at the time, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.”

Decades into this tragic and pathetic tale, American Jewry’s continuing allergy to defending Pollard says more about our communal fears and the price we are willing to pay for social and political acceptance than it does about Pollard and his crimes.

***

On November 21, 1985, FBI agents arrested Pollard, 31 at the time, just outside Israel’s embassy in Washington. Since June 1984, Pollard had been routinely removing sensitive documents from the Naval Intelligence Support Center on Friday afternoons, passing them to his Israeli handlers for Xeroxing, and blithely returning them on Monday mornings. When first interrogated by the FBI, Pollard called his wife. After he worked the word “cactus” into the conversation, their designated SOS code word, Anne Henderson-Pollard scurried about their house—with a neighbor’s help—sanitizing it. The neighbor subsequently gave the FBI a 70-pound suitcase filled with secret documents, reflecting the volume of Pollard’s activities and sloppiness.

Despite transferring thousands of documents to his Israeli handlers, Pollard failed to gain asylum at the embassy on that day in 1985. Backpedaling furiously, Israel first labeled Pollard a rogue agent, as his handlers worked out of a shadowy organization called Lekem, the Defense Ministry’s Bureau for Scientific Relations. The department, headed by the legendary Mossad man Rafi Eitan, was disbanded shortly after Pollard’s arrest. Israel granted Pollard citizenship in 1995—long after such a move could have done him any good. And it wasn’t until 1998 that Israel finally acknowledged what everyone knew: Pollard had been an authorized agent spying for Israel.

An American Jew’s arrest as an Israeli spy was upsetting enough for American Jews. But Pollard’s defense made the affair excruciating. Minimizing the thousands of dollars he earned, the diamond-and-sapphire ring the Israelis gave him, and his efforts to shop American secrets to South Africa and possibly Pakistan, too, Pollard portrayed himself as a Zionist idealist. Anti-Semites bullied him as a child, he recalled. He claimed that the documents he smuggled out, so crucial to Israeli security, should have been shared freely. And, using a most obnoxious and threatening term, he said a “racial obligation” compelled him, as a Jew, to defend the Jewish state.

Suddenly, amid Ronald Reagan’s resurgence of hard-bodied patriotic machismo, in the age of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo and Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy “make my day” taunt, a balding, mustachioed, jowly-faced American Jewish nerd in glasses was betraying the red, white, and blue for the blue and white. Pollard’s crimes epitomized Zionism-run-amok, with the ideological implications of Jewish tribal solidarity pushed to its extreme.

“I feel my husband and I did what we were expected to do, and what our moral obligation was as Jews, what our moral obligation was as human beings, and I have no regrets about that,” Anne Pollard said defiantly on 60 Minutes shortly before being sentenced, one of many arrogant, self-destructive moves the couple made back then. While stirring up the terrifying “dual loyalty” charge—far more terrifying to Jews than to Irish-Americans and other hyphenated Americans—the Pollards defined every Jew’s ultimate loyalty as being to the Jewish state. Desperately repudiating the charge, the prominent academic Jacob Neusner would declare America to be the true “promised land.”

This American Jewish skittishness regarding Pollard was particularly surprising because by the 1980s American Jews were thriving in America’s suburban meritocracy. Some American Jewish superstars were accented immigrants like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel. But most American Jewish success stories were 100 percent American. Speaking unaccented English, they were supposed to be unscarred psychologically, unapologetically American.

***

American Jews had been here before. Three decades before Pollard made headlines, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s arrest, trial, and conviction as Soviet spies for stealing atomic secrets rendered the American Jews’ nightmare scenario in pinkish hues. But in the 1950s, American Jews were greener, more marginal. Julius Rosenberg represented the intellectual, foreign-born, New York Jew as Communist, at a time when Communism was disproportionately popular among Jews.

With the Rosenbergs—as with the Pollards—the rightness of finding them guilty was often confused with the wrongness of their punishment. The zeal with which they were prosecuted, the way Judge Irving Kaufman presided over their trial, and Ethel Rosenberg’s unjust execution along with her husband, all suggested something deeper in both the American Jewish psyche and the larger American political culture. The American legal establishment particularly enjoyed prosecuting these treasonous Jews, while many American Jews leapt to prove their own loyalty—at the Rosenbergs’ expense.

Just as in the Rosenberg case, the judge presiding over Pollard’s sentencing was swayed to render too harsh a punishment—a decision that kicked up new waves of suspicion and anxiety.

In an effort to keep his wife out of prison, Pollard pleaded guilty to one count of espionage. His wife, Anne, then 26, pleaded guilty to the milder charge of illegally possessing classified documents. In return, the prosecutor asked the judge to punish Pollard with a “substantial number of years in prison.” During the sentencing phase, one voice proved damningly influential. In a secret 46-page-pre-sentencing “damage-assessment memorandum” sent to the judge—and an additional four-page memo that was recently declassified—Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger made a fierce argument. “It is difficult … to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel,” wrote Weinberger, before adding—malevolently and unnecessarily—that Pollard’s “loyalty to Israel transcends his loyalty to the United States.”

Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sentenced Jonathan Pollard to life in prison and his wife to five years. (After Anne Henderson-Pollard served three-and-a-half years, she was paroled. Jonathan Pollard divorced her so she could rebuild her life without him.) The sentence was surprisingly harsh. By comparison, in 1987 Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, who’d been seduced by a Soviet agent, became the first Marine ever convicted of espionage. His crimes compromised agents and the American embassy in Moscow. Yet a military court—under Weinberger’s direct authority—sentenced Lonetree to 30 years in prison, and he eventually served nine years. Richard Miller, an FBI agent who spied for the Soviets in the 1980s, served 13 years. Spies for other allies, like Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Egypt, and the Philippines, served anywhere from two to four years, with maximum sentences of 10 years. Pollard’s extreme sentence—along with the continuing refusal to free him–has raised questions about official American anti-Semitism and whether Pollard is enduring harsher punishment for the crime of being an American Jew spying for Israel.

Given that neither Weinberger nor Robinson ever explained their actions, the Pollard case remained shrouded in this noxious mystery. Years later, Weinberger would skip over the case in his memoirs and, when asked about the omission, would dismiss the Pollard case as a “very minor matter.” But it’s clear that his accusation that Pollard committed “treason”—and harmed the nation—had a devastating impact.

In his recent letter, Lawrence Korb suggested that Weinberger, his former boss, had exaggerated the damage Pollard caused and that an anti-Semitic bias distorted the case. From the start, some speculated that Weinberger, who had Jewish grandparents but was a devout Episcopalian, sacrificed Pollard to exorcise his own ancestral demons. There was something about this pudgy, sloppy, unapologetic Jewish spy for Israel that repulsed Weinberger. Weinberger was also one of the Reagan Administration’s leading Israel skeptics. Caught in a power struggle with the pro-Israel Secretary of State George Shultz, Weinberger usually viewed the Jewish state as more albatross than asset.

More benign observers guessed that the secrets Pollard spilled did more damage to U.S. interests than Pollard or the Israelis suggested. Perhaps, some argued, Russian spies secured key codes thanks to Israeli-based KGB agents. Others assumed Pollard received instructions from a higher-level mole who remains unexposed. After Aldrich Ames’ arrest for spying in 1994, some speculated that Weinberger and others may have blamed Pollard for the damage Ames had actually caused, including the deaths of as many as 10 CIA assets. The author John Loftus and others theorized that Ames, who was a top CIA counter-intelligence official, probably pinned his own crimes on Pollard. In 1995, Moment magazine editor Hershel Shanks would quote Loftus quoting naval intelligence “sources” who admitted that “90 percent of the things we accused [Pollard] of stealing, he didn’t even have access to.”

***

After Pollard’s sentencing, New York Times columnist William Safire warned that Pollard encouraged “anti-Semites who charge that Jews everywhere are at best afflicted with dual loyalty and at worst are agents of a vast fifth column.” Issuing a personal declaration of independence from Israel, Safire proclaimed: “American supporters of Israel cannot support wrongdoing here or there. In matters of religion and culture, many of those supporters are American Jews, but in matters affecting national interest and ultimate loyalty, the stonewalling leaders of Israel will learn to think of us as Jewish Americans.”

But one keen observer of American Jewry, the political scientist Daniel Elazar, noticed that it was American Jews—and not their non-Jewish neighbors—who were actually raising the dual-loyalty specter, “apparently in the hope of preventing the issue from surfacing by raising the charge in order to deny it. Even more frequently, it was raised by Jews in the media, most of whom were highly assimilated but still apparently needed to demonstrate their ‘bona fides’ as Americans.” Elazar concluded: “The level of American Jewish insecurity is astounding.”

American Jews still viewed themselves and their community as on probation in the United States, with their ultimate acceptance conditional on good behavior. This pathology would be stated clearly, if unconsciously, years later, by one of the highest-ranking Jews in American history, who served his country nobly as director of naval intelligence from 1978 to 1982 and yanked Pollard’s security clearance—temporarily—years before the spying began. Rear Admiral Sumner Shapiro sounded like a scared yid when discussing Pollard. Annoyed at fringe American Jewish groups that defended Pollard, Shapiro told the Washington Post in 1998: “We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are, and to have somebody screw it up … and then to have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me.”

All minorities want to celebrate their tribal successes as reflecting the best of their people without being tarred when one of their own acts poorly. And given the torturous history of anti-Semitism, American Jews feel this intensely. We circulate lists of Jewish Nobel prize winners, delighting in each American Jewish success, using Jewish achievements to validate our rich but complex Jewish baggage. And while we reserve the right to cringe when a Bernard Madoff becomes the modern face of the greedy Jew or a Jonathan Pollard becomes the modern face of the traitorous Jew, we also reserve the right to object when our neighbors make similar leaps from the one bad apple to the whole bunch.

Nearly two years after Pollard’s arrest, with the sentencing returning the case to the headlines, the Israeli academic Shlomo Avineri zeroed in on this American Jewish insecurity—and inconsistency. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, first condemning Pollard as a traitor and his own government as clumsy, Avineri mocked the “nervousness, insecurity, and even cringing” of American Jews. Playing the role of the abrasive Israeli—or biblical prophet—Avineri wrote: “Today, American Jewish leaders by their protestations of over-zealous loyalty to the United States at a moment when no one is really questioning it, are saying that America in the long run is no different from France and Germany. When you have to over-identify, there is no other proof needed that you think that your non-Jewish neighbors are looking askance at your Americanism. You are condemned by your own protestations of loyalty and flag-waving.” At a time when Israel’s actions made it unpopular with many American Jews, Avineri’s aggressively Zionist analysis only exacerbated tensions.

***

The controversy–and speculation–peaked during the Wye River negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in October 1998. Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first round as Israel’s prime minister, lobbied hard for Pollard’s release. President Bill Clinton seemed set to free him as a sweetener to Israel until the CIA director, George Tenet, threatened to resign. Such power politicking against a spy who had been imprisoned for over a decade reinforced both camps’ speculation. Those who fear anti-Semitism say this irrational move reflects a deep aversion in the WASP-iest bastions of the American government. Those who believe Pollard did more damage than we know insist that the usually mild-mannered Tenet had a good reason to be so rigid.

To Israeli settlers, Pollard’s case symbolizes the anti-Semitism of even benign non-Jewish polities such as the United States and the weak-kneed appeasement policies of successive Israeli governments, which have failed to free Pollard. The most popular pro-Pollard bumper sticker in Israel simply appeals for Pollard to come home “haBaytah,” but a few years ago one poster challenged: “BUSH: FREE YOUR CAPTIVE.” This poster not only targeted a good friend of Israel’s, George W. Bush, but it pictured Pollard with the young Israeli Hamas is holding, Gilad Shalit. The implicit comparisons, between the innocent Shalit and the guilty Pollard, as well as between the democratic United States and the terrorist-state Hamas, were offensive. While the right’s support has sustained Pollard emotionally, it may have made his get-out-of-jail card even harder to get. The Israeli right is unpopular with both the American Jewish community and the American political establishment, making Pollard even more unappealing.

***

However unappealing he may be, the time has come to free Jonathan Pollard—not as some sop to Israelis but as a matter of justice. Holding an individual hostage to the vagaries of the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process is cruel and unusual punishment. The Pollard case has become a question of justice, American-style, unrelated to American-Israeli relations. And justice when applied too zealously becomes unjust. For decades, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil-rights organizations have taught that we take up certain criminals’ cases not because we like the criminals or excuse their crimes but because, at a certain point, it becomes the right thing to do.

Imagine another case in which an accused man served a disproportionately long sentence after being tried in a court where direct pressure was applied by the secretary of Defense for reasons that may well have been mistaken or personally motivated. If there was another such case, one imagines that it would attract lots of attention from the ACLU and other groups concerned with the civil liberties of Americans. So why are they silent? More to the point, why are we silent?

If the Pollard case represents the worst of American anti-Semitism, then, by historic standards, anti-Semitism American style is mild indeed. Still, that American Jews, despite their long record of defending the underdog, still hestitate to champion Pollard’s release now, suggests that we—like Jonathan Pollard—remain victims of the “astounding” insecurity Elazar witnessed two decades ago.

Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, is the author of six books on American history and Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.

Three hundred of us had been flown in for the founding conference of a new Moscow-based watchdog organization, World Without Nazism. For the event’s kick-off, conference participants gathered in a sun-dappled Vichnoyi Slavy Park, home to the city’s Monument of Eternal Glory at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier. We were each handed a red carnation, arranged in parade formation, and led 100 yards toward a massive obelisk memorial. My moment of supreme disorientation occurred just a few steps into the procession, when from behind the bushes came a jolting martial thunder: Previously unseen Brezhnev-era trucks topped with what looked like air-raid sirens had begun blasting the opening chords of “People, Awake!” a 1941 hit from the back catalog of the Red Army Choir. After we reached the obelisk, the very loud Soviet anthem gave way to another, and then another.

“We’ll come back with victory!” promised the all-male choir. “The Red Army is the strongest!”

Under this siege of Soviet orchestral swells, I struggled to remember my purpose in Kiev. Was I here for a conference on combating anti-Semitism? Or had I been cast in a shitty remake of Battle at Kursk?

A similar schizophrenia defined the rest of the inaugural conference of World Without Nazism (WWN), a new initiative from the World Congress of Russian Jewry and its president, the Kremlin-connected mini-oligarch Boris Shpigel. On the opening morning of proceedings, the event distinguished itself by becoming what might be the only conference to receive official letters of support from both Hillary Clinton and the autonomous government of South Ossetia. At the podium, speakers spoke of trivialization and denial, though it was not always clear whether they were referring to the Holocaust, or the decisive sacrifice of millions of Red Army soldiers. At the Hotel Prezidente, where the conference was taking place, whores prowled the muzak-cursed lobby as aggressively as they would have 15 years ago.

The most potent symbol of this schizophrenia is also its primary source. While the new organization aspires to global influence and credibility—a kind of Moscow-based Anti-Defamation League that would partner with the European Union and the United Nations—its founding president and public face is a man whose fortunes depend in part on framing Jewish interests to fit the view from the Kremlin.

Boris Shpigel is a bald, round man who looks older than his 57 years and is given to slumping in his seat. He emerged early in the Boris Yeltsin era. Like others who prospered during the 1990s, he anticipated the coming curve and founded the pharmaceuticals firm Biotek shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By the time Vladimir Putin assumed power, Shpigel had grown his firm from a small research outfit south of Moscow to a major producer dominant in more than 70 markets across the Eurasian expanse. In 2002, he helped found and lead the Party of Russia’s Rebirth, a centrist social-democratic party that enjoyed the blessing of Mikhail Gorbachev (and, thought some, the Kremlin, which had been known to fund center-left parties designed to siphon off support from the Communists). By the time Shpigel was elected president of the World Congress of Russian Jewry in 2007, he was a major player at the nexus of business, diplomacy, and culture among Russia, Israel, and the Russian-speaking Jewish Diaspora. Today, as a Duma member, Shpigel sits on committees that handle everything from public institutions to the funding of science, culture, education, and health care.

Concerns over coziness with the Kremlin have dogged WWN’s parent organization, the World Congress of Russian Jewry. When it was founded in 2002 as an outgrowth of the Lubavitch-led Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, some worried the WCRJ was too intertwined with the Russian government to be an effective advocate. Since assuming the WCRJ presidency, Shpigel has only helped validate these concerns. During Russia’s conflict with Georgia over South Ossetia in the summer 2008, Shpigel issued an overheated statement on WCRJ letterhead calling for a tribunal to investigate what he termed acts of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” committed by the Georgian military. Though the casual use of such language is anathema to responsible Jewish leadership, Shpigel did not hesitate to echo the Kremlin’s bombast. It was left to Shpigel’s deputy at the Congress, Israeli Knesset Member Ze’ev Elkin, to dial back the statement. The role of the WCRJ, an exasperated Elkin told Haaretz, is to worry about the well-being of Jews worldwide, not get involved in “geo-political conflicts.”

Yet viewed from Moscow, the growth of far-right activity in the former Eastern bloc is hard to disentangle from geo-politics. This is especially true when this activity bubbles up behind NATO lines, embodied by groups espousing anti-Russian and anti-Semitic rhetoric. WWN’s early fire has been directed toward the Baltics, where attacks on Soviet war monuments are increasingly accompanied by efforts to celebrate the Nazis (as well as their local collaborators) and edit the history of the Holocaust. In July, WWN’s first official statement targeted a decision by Riga’s Administrative Court to sanction a public demonstration honoring the Nazi occupation government. WWN was quick and correct to publicize and condemn the decision. But its letter contained a whiff of Kremlin anti-Western boilerplate, blaming EU leniency for the rise of far-right nationalism in the region.

That the European Union has indeed failed to rigorously enforce laws on extremism and denial does not change the fact that the WWN’s condemnations, if they are to be taken seriously, must be matched by efforts to shame authorities in Russia itself, which is home to a growing culture of far-right street violence targeting Jews, activists, and, especially, migrant workers from Central Asia. Notably, WWN was silent in late August when 100 skinheads attacked a concert in the central Russian city of Miass, resulting in dozens of injuries and the death of a 14-year-old girl. (The organization did, however, find time in August to issue a statement in opposition to Manhattan’s Park51 development, aka the “Ground Zero Mosque.”)

One speaker in Kiev publicly addressed these issues and urged the new organization to recognize the historical crimes of communism, even as it challenges official efforts in Eastern Europe to equate and conflate those crimes with those of the Nazis. That speaker was Dovid Katz, a former professor at the University of Vilnius (and Tablet contributor) and the curator of HolocaustInTheBaltics.com. “While we reject the theories of ‘equivalence’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes,” said Katz, “we must be careful never to join those who would deny or mitigate or trivialize the enormous crimes committed by Stalinism and Soviet domination of many lands and peoples against their will.”

“It is also very important that our movement has a democratic Western atmosphere,” he continued. “It must never be seen to be in any way subservient to today’s Russian area politics. We should be meeting in Amsterdam, London, and Paris, not just Kiev, Moscow, and Minsk.”

Regardless of where it holds future meetings, and however compromised by Kremlin ties it may be, WWN hardly lacks for urgent work. As the multinational cast of speakers in Kiev made clear, there is a rising “brown tide” in Eastern Europe and throughout the continent. Well-organized neo-fascist political movements are on the march in Hungary and Italy. In the Baltics, monuments to the Holocaust are being removed and the Nazi occupations publicly glorified. Far-right thugs and activists prowl the streets, march on capitals, speak in universities, and organize online, often in flagrant violation of the law.

If World Without Nazism is to join the fight against these developments, it must overcome suspicions that it is little more than just a PR operation for the Russian foreign ministry. Here’s hoping that it does.

Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.

In one of these towns—Oguz, Azerbaijan, a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Baku, the country’s oil-booming capital on the western shore of the Caspian Sea—live up to 80 Mountain Jews among a population of more than 6,000. The history of the Mountain Jews, who live mainly in Azerbaijan and the Russian republic of Dagestan is, according to members of the community, rooted about 2,500 years ago in their exodus from Israel, their gradual passage through Persia (where they picked up the Farsi-based language they still speak), and their eventual settlement in the Caucasus mountains.

Sitting in the dark-stone building that houses Baku’s Mountain Jewish synagogue, Semyon Ikhilov, the Mountain Jews’ national leader, shakes off the idea that his people might be descended from indigenous Caucasian mountain dwellers who converted to Judaism. “We’re real Jews who came out of Israel,” Ikhilov said, explaining that they acquired the moniker “Mountain Jews” because they settled in the peaks. “We were not mountain people.” And according to a recent genetic study led by researchers in Israel and Estonia, Mountain Jews share a common origin in the Levantine region of the Near East with other Diaspora Jewish communities.

While once there were as many as 40,000 Jews in Azerbaijan, today there are between 8,000 and 25,000. The estimate varies widely in part because many of them live in Israel or Russia but still retain Azeri passports. Among those who remain in Oguz, many seem to practice a Judaism guided by the spirit of the religion rather than by the letter of its law. They live in a country where more than 90 percent of the population is Muslim, and the demanding rhythm of working on the Soviet-era kolkhoz, or collective farm, coupled with the atheism of the Soviet Union, may all have, over time, muted the zeal of the Jews of Oguz.

Yet push a bit further and an attachment to Judaism emerges. “Last night we lit the Shabbat candles,” says 30-year-old Gunai Iusupova, sitting in the airy dining room of her wooden-balconied Caucasian house. “We said a brucha and ate salted bread. I served up food prepared fresh for Shabbat.” The garden outside was bright with pale pink and deep red summer roses. “And that’s not just us, that’s all the Jews here in Oguz,” she adds, explaining that although they may not observe all the rules of Shabbat precisely, Friday night dinner is sacrosanct.

Standing in the hot sun outside one of the town’s two synagogues, Temur Natalinov, 54, who maintains both houses of worship, explained that he opens them every Shabbat. The men leave quickly, he said, but the women often linger.

Arranged marriages are not uncommon here, Racim Hananayev, 50, the leader of Oguz’s Jews, told me, even for those who leave the town. Hananayev’s wife, Dilbar, served a breakfast of egg, salty cheese, fresh bread, and thick homemade strawberry preserve. She offered met, a bitter, uniquely Caucasian condiment made from the green cherry plum.

Nowhere is the mix of Azeri and Jewish cultures more fascinating than in Krasnaya Sloboda, which sits across a river from Guba, famous throughout the Caucasus for its woven rugs. Just beyond the two settlements looms an imposing mountain, white and icy even in summer.

The two towns seem similar enough, though Krasnaya Sloboda looks more prosperous, full of houses with freshly painted brickwork, new windows, and new iron and lattice roofs mixed in among a few dilapidated wooden homes.

But the difference is more than surface deep. Krasnaya Sloboda is inhabited almost exclusively by Mountain Jews, between 2,000 and 5,000 of them, according to various estimates. In the mid-18th century the khan of Guba, Hussein, established Yevraiskaya Sloboda, literally “Jewish settlement,” as a place for Jews to live safe from attack. His son and successor, Feteli, so the story goes, decreed that if anyone came to attack the town, the Jews should light fires and he would see them from across the river and send help to defend the inhabitants.

The town, which was renamed “Krasnaya,” or “red,” in honor of the Soviet Red Army, has seen its population dwindle from its Communist-era height of 18,000. Some emigrants have gone to Israel, others to Moscow, where many are successful businessmen—hence the prosperous appearance of some buildings here—and where a few have become multi-millionaires, with their reputations becoming legendary back home. According to one Jewish local I spoke with, one of these titans “holds half of Moscow in his hands.”

Those that stay while away the hot days in an outdoor chaikhana, a typical Azeri teahouse, sucking on sugar cubes soaked in tea. Nearby, under the shade of chestnut trees, old men play nard, a traditional board game.

Iunus Davidov, a Jewish 19-year-old, explains that there was no work in the town and that in winter there is hardly a soul to be seen there. “It is hard,” he says. “And in winter it is so cold, it can fall to minus 35 degrees, and sometimes there is no gas or electricity.”

Nonetheless, Krasnaya Sloboda has three schools and two synagogues, with a third being beautifully restored, and in the summer nearly all the émigrés return to spend some time in their hometown, Davidov said.

“There is always a minyan, indeed we always have at least 50 people at prayer time,” says Boris Simanduyev, a community leader. “There has always been a rabbi from Krasnaya Sloboda, and there always will be.” On entering the town’s main synagogue, which is covered wall-to-wall in overlapping oriental rugs, we had removed our shoes, as is the custom here.

Rugs also cover the floor of the cool central room in the Yevdaev family home, where 32-year-old Sara Yevdaeva gathered leaves to stuff with meat to make dolma, food for relatives who were due to arrive from Moscow and Baku for the first anniversary of Sara’s mother-in-law’s death. Sara explains one of the customs of her community. “Whether it is here or in Moscow or elsewhere, Mountain Jews don’t allow their wives to work,” she says.

The hardships of winter make year-round life in the town impossible for Sara to imagine, but Moscow, where she lives for most of the year, has its difficulties too. The rise of extreme nationalism in Russia means Sara, who like many Mountain Jews looks much like any other person from the Caucasus, has experienced the racist abuse frequently leveled at people from Russia’s southern borderlands and beyond. The Mountain Jews all concur that, unlike in Russia, in Azerbaijan they have never experienced any prejudice.

This is all the more surprising, perhaps, in a country where international observers have documented increasing restrictions on freedom of expression and where dissent is often quashed. The current president, Ilham Aliyev, took over from his late father, Heydar, in 2003. Posters of both Aliyevs, in action and thoughtful repose, are everywhere. In 2009 the government amended the constitution to tighten controls on religious groups, making all unregistered religious activity illegal. Those who received their religious education abroad, for example, are banned from leading religious activities.

The Azerbaijan State Committee for Work with Religious Associations, though, argues that the changes in the law on religion strengthen tolerance in the country. The committee’s press office explains that some religious leaders educated abroad had come under the influence of radicals who aimed to destroy Azerbaijan’s “tolerant atmosphere,” and the minister in charge of such matters has previously linked the 2009 moves on religion with combating Islamic fundamentalism—the threat of Wahhabism and of Islamic violence in the North Caucasus spilling over into Azerbaijan.

In late 2009, a Baku court jailed 26 people for an August 2008 attack on a mosque in the capital, in which two people were killed. Those convicted claimed to be members of a radical Islamist group that is believed to have roots in the north Caucasian republic of Dagestan. Also in 2009, two Lebanese men were jailed in Baku for conspiring to attack the Israeli embassy there. In 2007, the Azeri authorities said they had prevented attacks on oil installations and the British and U.S. embassies planned by what they called a “radical Wahhabi group.”

Critics, however, suggest that the authorities are using the threat of fundamentalism to tighten the screws on religious communities and restrict free speech.

Evidently, the government perceives no threat from Azerbaijan’s Jewish communities, nor from Israel, with which it has a developing relationship. Shimon Peres’ 2009 trip to Baku was the most recent and highest-level visit by an Israeli dignitary, a move that angered Iran. Azerbaijan—which is locked in an unresolved territorial conflict with neighboring Armenia—buys arms from Israel, and there is an Israeli embassy in Baku. This relationship is doubtless appreciated by Azerbaijan’s Jews, who are courted by the authorities with official greetings on Rosh Hashanah and Pesach and visits to synagogue openings.

According to Alexander Murinson, an expert on Azerbaijan’s Jews and Azeri-Israeli relations, Azeri respect for the Jews is genuine and deeply rooted—in part stemming from the fact that in Soviet times, Jews, especially Ashkenazim, were well represented among the Azeri intellectual elite. Those Jews who stayed, he said, still have some leverage, with the Mountain Jews wielding power due to the strength of their trading clans.

There is also a more calculated political element to the relationship. In the early days of Azeri independence the authorities deliberately reached out to the Jewish communities, realizing that they could be a magnet for the organized Jewish community in the United States, with its impressive lobbying power, said Murinson. And for a government sometimes accused of intolerance, its relationship with the Jewish minority seems to be put on display, not least by Jewish leaders, two of whom insisted to me that President Aliyev had repeatedly described the Mountain Jews as his brothers. Many foreign dignitaries visiting Azerbaijan find that Krasnaya Sloboda is on their itinerary, as what Murinson called a “showcase.” The state, by email, disagreed: The visits are not for show, a spokesman explained, but to meet its own high standards of tolerance.

Sarah Marcus is a freelance journalist based in Tbilisi, Georgia, and has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Daily Telegraph.

Was it hard to return to Orthodox Judaism after all those years in which you called yourself a “freethinker”?

Well, don’t forget I was educated Jewishly, thank God, and I’ve never had trouble admitting I was wrong. Thank God for that, too, and that may be because I made so many mistakes. Thank God for all of them.

Was it a mistake going underground against the czar?

No, I don’t think so, though it was a mistake going against Judaism—or at least abandoning it for freethinking. It would have been better to have fought the czar and defended Judaism.

Who made you realize that?

Levinsky. David Levinsky. He was a fictional character, of course, my own creation. But it’s no coincidence that at the start of the novel and the end of it, Levinsky notes that all his worldly success meant nothing to him and he was still, in his innermost being, the same Yeshiva boy who had swayed over his prayers. I wrote that at the peak of my career, and it was the most important thing I ever wrote, and it just came out of me. And I began rethinking my whole life at that time.

When was that?

Well, I started writing The Rise of David Levinsky in 1912 for McClure’s. I’m not sure the magazine understood what it was getting in to. I finished it in 1917, and we brought it out just before the Bolshevik Revolution. I was 57 at the time. There were a lot of friends, including that young fellow Mencken, who wanted me to give up newspaper work and spend the last third of my life writing fiction. I rather liked Mencken, by the way, despite his attacks on the Jews; we used to lunch once in a while at the Algonquin, and I helped him with his Yiddish monograph. He later wrote of his disappointment that I couldn’t give up the “razzle dazzle” of the newspaper life.

Was that it, the razzle dazzle?

Well, there were serious matters. And not just World War I, which was one of our mistakes, and a serious one—the pacifism was a serious mistake, but not as bad a mistake as the cynicism about America and America’s motives. The fact is that even as we all came to America we underestimated her.

Someone once made a remark about the little speech in David Levinsky about how, for all the exploitation of Jewish garment workers by the bosses, the Americans were the best-dressed people in the world. The remark was that it signaled your understanding that maybe the labor unions themselves were too cynical.

While I was writing that chapter, the garment workers were outside the Forward building throwing stones at my office. That’s because I’d urged a settlement in the strike. It was a bitter time. I began to rethink a lot of things then.

Like Zionism.

That, too.

What was your error?

Arrogance. A lack of vision. I came to understand only later that no socialist, not one of them, could compete with Herzl in that department. He was just way ahead of us. And the people were with him.

Meyer London taught you that?

He was the first socialist ever elected to Congress, and he lost his seat over it because the voters, the workers, right here in the Lower East Side, the workers who had just elected a Socialist, they understood what it would mean to have a Jewish state. He was asked about the Balfour Declaration. He said: “Let us stop pretending about the Jewish past and let us stop making fools of ourselves about the Jewish future.” He promptly lost his seat. Looking back, we can see it was a kind of socialist arrogance. His own workers were ahead of him.

Can that be said of about your movement vis-à-vis the communists?

No, I think we adjusted to the facts sooner than most anyone. I declared my position in 1923 when I got back from the Soviet Union and said: “Russia has at present less freedom than it had in the earliest days of Romanov rule. … The world has never yet seen such a despotism.” It would have been impossible, illogical for me to go back to a literary career at that point. It was essential that we defeat the communists here, and that was what I gave it all up for. In the fight against the Soviet, we were not followers but we were in the lead. I gave up a lot for that fight. I think Mencken understood that better than most, believe it or not. I am like the son who gave up a literary life for business—only on my business everything depended, and I have sorrows, but no regrets.

You failed to lead on Zionism.

I met my match in Jabotinsky. It was an important error in my life, my denunciation of him after his speech at the Manhattan Opera House. That was 1940. He called then for the urgent evacuation of the Jews from Europe to Eretz Israel, and I turned around and belittled him in the pages of the Forward. I gave a whole page to it, and that’s when I wrote, “Six million is a pretty small state.” I was derisive, and I was wrong.

When did you realize that?

Immediately, and when Jabotinsky died a few weeks later—he lay down from fatigue at a right-wing camp in upstate New York where he was training young Jews to defend themselves, and his heart gave out as he was lying down—it was a terrible blow for all Jews. I was furious at the staff of the Forward, which refused to cover his funeral. So, I wrote the editorial that has been quoted ever since, saying that his death was, coming as it did at such a grim time for the Jewish people, “in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe.” I predicted that he would be missed not only then, in the middle of the storm, but later, “when the storm is over and the time comes to heal the wounds and rebuild Jewish life on new foundations in a new time.”

New foundations—or old ones.

Hah! Alt-neu-foundations. How’s that?

Is that when you began to re-think religion?

Well, I’d been re-thinking it for a long time, as the beginning and end of The Rise of David Levinsky makes clear. It never left me. It was gnawing at me the whole time. But freethinking is a kind of addiction of its own. What started the dam to break was Sholem Asch. He came in and plopped his novel about Jesus on my desk, and it just came out. He was suggesting that Jews treat Jesus the way Christians view Jesus, and I threw him out. I told him to burn the novel. And when he resisted, I banned him from the Forward. And I wrote a whole book attacking him, and in that book I insisted that I wasn’t religious. And then the illogic of my position began to eat at me, and that is how it happened, and I worked my way back to the Torah and to Talmud and I made peace with the boy in the yeshiva, and I consider it my greatest achievement.

Did it destroy all that came before in your life?

[After a pause.] I would have to say it validates it. Remember that as Levinsky stood at the rail of the ship as it prepared to deposit him on American soil, he said a prayer, and it was that God would not hide his face from him in the new land. It was a promise as much as a prayer, and I tend to see my return to religion as a redemption of that promise.

This is an imaginary interview. So, what are we to make of it?

Read the record. It will show you where I was going. My great deputy at the Forward, David Shub, wrote long after I had passed away that what I lived for above all else was Russian literature, and it is true. It was my greatest love. But literature itself is something that can’t be proved and is a matter of faith and speculation. It doesn’t make it wrong.

Seth Lipsky is the founding editor of the English-language Forward. He is writing a biography of Abraham Cahan for Nextbook Press.

In mid-1966, this was the dilemma faced by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, when he received—from his Soviet backers and others—convincing reports that Israel was about to cross the nuclear threshold.

A mild disclaimer is in order here: We are not comparing, much less equating, Israel and Iran, nor the character and purposes of their respective nuclear programs; indeed, we have no first-hand knowledge of the Israeli project, much less the Iranian one. What we researched, and where we found intriguing parallels with the present day, is how the Israeli nuclear enterprise was perceived and counteracted by the Egyptians and Soviets. In our book Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, we described how fear of an Israeli nuclear bomb became a central motive for their joint, deliberate instigation of a crisis designed to precipitate a war in May and June of 1967.

One salient difference between these two cases is in the role of the global actors. Even the recent leak of a paper by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decrying the lack of an effective U.S. policy to prevent Iran’s nuclearization was quickly followed by a clarification from the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman that military action would be the last option to fill this gap. This did not exemplify a shift under the administration of President Barack Obama. Washington—correctly in our view, though perhaps for the wrong reasons—stopped brandishing military threats against Iran in the George W. Bush years. Since then, a succession of U.S. messages and messengers to Israel has reportedly been aimed at restraining any warlike intentions on the latter’s part.

In the mid-1960s, once the Soviet Union had evidence from Israeli and other sources that Israel was intent on producing or acquiring a bomb, Moscow briefly tried to engage Israel much as Obama has tried with Iran—in fact, the Soviets, with an embassy in Tel Aviv and good contacts in Israel, were better positioned to do so than the Americans are today in Iran. But Israel effectively rejected Soviet proposals of a WMD-free zone around the Mediterranean (which, Israel said, it could risk only if conventional weapons were barred too). Egypt and other Arab states, on the other hand, strongly protested the modest concessions that Moscow offered to Israel in return, such as improved cultural and scientific exchanges, which the Arabs saw as an ominous pro-Israeli swing by the Soviets. They raised an outcry, and the USSR relented; the carrot that it had dangled in front of Israel was replaced by a very big stick.

The Soviets had their own reasons to want to halt Israel’s nuclear development. One was a matter of regional influence. Only 11 years earlier, a thinly veiled nuclear threat from Moscow had been instrumental in forcing Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai, which it had captured from Egypt in a joint military campaign with Britain and France. Historians still argue whether it was the Soviet nuclear threat or U.S. diplomatic pressure that actually did the trick—but the Soviets themselves and their Arab protégés chalked up all the credit to the USSR. Moscow’s standing in the Middle East was enhanced by the threat of a nuclear strike to back up its clients’ interests, thus increasing their dependence. This advantage would be canceled out if Israel achieved a nuclear counter-deterrent.

But the Soviets evidently perceived Israeli nukes also to be a direct threat to their own territory, especially once it was reported that the Israelis had contracted to buy French missiles that could reach the southern USSR. Moscow had a deep-seated fear of encirclement by nuclear-armed pro-American alliances. From its 1962 setback in Cuba, it had salvaged the withdrawal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Now it seemed that Israel would replace Turkey in the encircling U.S.-led nuclear alliance.

In addition, after assisting China to acquire the bomb—and then regretting it—the Soviets adopted a firm nonproliferation line and had no desire to face future demands for the bomb from Egypt or other Arab clients. This obliged them, in mid-1966, to grant Nasser an alternative: a Soviet nuclear “umbrella,” carried by Soviet nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean, which had orders to launch missiles at Israel if it got a bomb and tried to use it, an arrangement much like what the United States is promising its Middle Eastern clients today.

More important for this analysis, the Soviets not only signaled that they would support Egyptian military action to halt Israel’s nuclear development, they also embarked on planning a joint strike that would take out Israel’s main nuclear facility at Dimona. This direct Soviet intervention was not limited to the nuclear objective; it was also designed to ensure a defeat for Israel on the ground that would drive it at least to the borders of the 1947 U.N. partition (which the USSR had supported and was still committed to) and force it to renounce any future nuclear aspirations.

These dramatic Soviet aims were to be achieved by supporting Egyptian and Syrian invasion forces and air attacks with a Soviet naval landing, a paratroop drop, and Soviet strategic (but conventional) bombing of Dimona and other Israeli targets. By contrast, an invasion of Iran to compel its surrender, or even an air offensive overwhelming enough to topple its regime, is unthinkable today in terms of U.S. capabilities and inclinations, let alone Israel’s. In 1967, the Soviets were aiming for more.

Moscow insisted both on maintaining the appearance of legitimacy and on minimizing the risk of a direct confrontation with the United States. The Soviets therefore preferred that Egypt take a series of belligerent measures against Israel without actually opening fire; the signal to begin these steps was a false Soviet warning about Israeli forces massing on the Syrian border, which Moscow transmitted to Cairo 43 years ago last May. The Israelis would be provoked into a preemptive strike, which the Soviets calculated that Egypt could contain in the expanses of Sinai. The Israeli first strike that determined the later course of what became known as the Six-Day War was therefore a key part of Soviet strategy. Once Israel was condemned as the aggressor, the USSR believed it could intervene in favor of the victims—since Moscow correctly reckoned that Washington would make good on repeated cautions to Israel that if it shot first, it would stand alone.

Israel’s prime minister in 1967, Levi Eshkol, has gone down in most histories of the war as hesitant and indecisive in responding to Nasser’s Soviet-instigated measures (moving his army into Sinai, expelling the U.N. force from the border zone, and blockading Israel’s southern port). But Israel’s temporizing brought Egyptian-Soviet tensions to the surface; the Egyptians rightly feared that they would not be able to withstand an Israeli offensive and sought clearance to strike first, according to a battle plan that was later captured in Sinai and included an air attack on Dimona. The Soviets demurred and insisted that Egypt await Israeli action. In order to provoke an Israeli response, the Soviets sent their most advanced, still-experimental, and secret aircraft, later to be known as the MiG-25 or Foxbat, on two sorties over Israel’s most sensitive and guarded installation—the nuclear complex. The Israelis had nothing to match the Foxbat’s speed or altitude, the targeting and vulnerability of Dimona was demonstrated, and the fright this caused in Israel went a long way toward its decision to go to war on June 5—just as Moscow intended.

Then Murphy’s Law took over, and the Soviet-Egyptian effort went horribly wrong. The unexpectedly devastating effect of Israel’s opening air raids on Egyptian air bases not only deprived the Egyptian forces of air cover, they also prevented Soviet bombers from landing on Egyptian runways. Under such conditions, the Egyptians’ anxieties were borne out: The Middle East’s first nuclear war (that is, the first war about nuclear weapons) turned into a historic disaster for the Soviets and their clients alike.

An Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities—even with U.S. backing or participation—would be undertaken under circumstances considerably less favorable than those enjoyed by Moscow and Cairo in 1967. For one thing, the USSR almost certainly had better intelligence assets in Israel than either the United States or Israel appears to have in Iran—or else their assessments of Tehran’s nuclear progress and intentions would not have fluctuated as wildly as they have. The Soviets evidently received good field reports from Israel, but their interpretation was skewed at the top to meet political expectations, a problem that is not unfamiliar elsewhere.

We do know that Iran’s program is widely dispersed, while Israel’s was concentrated at one site. So was Iraq’s nuclear project when Israel attacked it in 1981. Though successful, that raid only delayed the Iraqi effort. Hindsight shows it took a full-scale war and imposition of external control to end it 10 years later, and, even afterward, Saddam Hussein managed to keep up appearances so well that a nuclear threat could wrongly but successfully be invoked to justify another war in 2003.

Most important, Iran today has far greater capability to strike back at Israel than Iraq did in 1981, or than Israel had in 1967 to strike back at the Soviet Union or even at neighboring Arab states. Together with Iran’s geographic distance from Israel, these capacities will permit Tehran to retaliate with impunity. The recently reported transfer of Scud missiles from Syria to Hezbollah underlined the almost-complete coverage of Israel’s population centers by short- and mid-range rockets possessed in vast quantities by this Iranian-sponsored Shiite group, along with the smaller stocks possessed by Hamas in Gaza. The sporadic, but almost daily, launch of a rocket or two from Gaza into southern Israel has become so routine that it hardly makes the local news, much less the world media. But it demonstrates that Israel has yet to achieve and deploy an effective defense against the least-sophisticated types of such weapons. Obama—despite accusations of a policy tilt against Israel—has proposed, and Congress has just approved, U.S. funding to accelerate the deployment of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system. But even once installed, Iron Dome would provide only partial protection against massive volleys of short-range rockets, if only because it pits an advanced, costly projectile against each crude, cheap incoming round.

We agree wholeheartedly that a bomb in Iranian hands would be pernicious in many ways and that it should be prevented by any reasonable means if not at all cost. We doubt, however, whether this can be accomplished. The new sanctions package that was at last adopted by the U.N. Security Council had to be watered down to the point of doubtful effectivity in order to gain Russian and Chinese consent. Even so, the countries have since been blowing hot and cold about their compliance—and its practical significance remains in question, especially in respect of such vital aspects as energy, banking, and supply of air-defense systems that might doom any attack plan. Persuading the Iranians by other means that forswearing the nuclear option would be better for them is definitely worth a try, but the prospects are dim.

Like it or not, then, it looks as though we will have to contend with a nuclear-armed Iran. Are the ayatollahs rational enough to be contained and deterred by Israel’s pre-existing nuclear reputation, not to mention U.S. overt and overwhelming power? Once the Iranians cross the threshold, will the region settle into an unfortunate but manageable balance of terror—or will they toss their bomb at Israel regardless of the national and personal suicide it means? Our historical research offers no clear answer to this question, and the two of us hold different opinions that are no better informed than those of other lay observers. What we did learn from studying the mistakes of the Egyptians and Soviets in 1967 is that embracing any option, and especially a massive military intervention, just because something has to be done is a potentially calamitous way to conduct policy—the first rule of warfare being that whatever can go wrong will go wrong.

At a conference in Washington last October, our faces must have betrayed our dismay when a panel including a U.S. general and his Israeli counterpart came within an inch of explicit calls to bomb Iran forthwith. Someone at our table, clearly exhilarated by the prospect, noticed and asked our opinion, which was “heaven forbid.” “So, you’ve been deterred!” he sneered. You bet.

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez are research fellows at the Truman Institute of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Their book, Foxbats Over Dimona, won the Silver Medal in the inaugural award of a new book prize from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Even more poignantly: The photographs were almost always taken by Jews.

David Shneer, a professor at the University of Colorado, writes in Through Soviet Jewish Eyes that the Soviet government wanted citizens to view these products of its nearly all-Jewish corps of photojournalists and believe that the Nazis had not distinguished among their victims.

“During World War II,” an article about the book in Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine reports, “the Soviets saw an advantage in framing the Nazi assault as being against the entire nation, not just Jewish people. As Shneer observes, there was a rationale: ‘Do you think a bunch of Russian peasants wanted to go fight a war because of Jews?’”

Take the photograph above. It was originally captioned, “Kerch resident P.I. Ivanova found her husband, who was tortured by the fascist executioners.” There is no note of the fact that her husband was likely one of 7,500 Kerch Jews murdered, for being Jews, before the Red Army retook that southern city.

Another, similar photograph was captioned, “V.S. Tereshchenko digs under bodies for her husband. On the right: the body of 67-year-old I. Kh. Kogan.” The name Tereshchenko (a Ukrainian surname) is still alive; the Kogan is not.

The photographer’s name? Mark Redkin.

A few months ago, Tablet Magazine editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse looked at how Roman Vishniac’s famous photographs have also been put to use crafting an alternate narrative for the Jews of Europe.

Prof Uncovers Early Holocaust Photos [Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine]
Related: A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac [NYT Magazine]

That is a phrase I first read in Anne Applebaum’s book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which was published five years after the Wall came down. She likened Central Europe during communism to a lake frozen over by ice, and wrote of peering through the ice to see the countries and cultures that existed beneath the Soviet empire.

The person who taught me to see through the ice—or at least to try—was my wife and guide, Amity Shlaes. We had met on the foreign desk of the Wall Street Journal, where Amity’s assignment was to read the transcripts of broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain issued daily by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and to pick out from them newsworthy items for a weekly column.

In 1983, she spotted an item from Yugoslavia. It reported that something of a riot had occurred at a soccer game in Kosovo. The disturbance erupted after rowdies in the crowd began shouting “E-Ho, E-Ho.” They were rooting for the Maoist madman Enver Hoxa, the dictator of Albania. Amity told me that some analysts saw portents. “Yugoslavia can’t survive,” she said.

I suggested she write it up for the next day’s paper. She thought it was an awfully long reach to make on the basis of some football fans in Kosovo. When I pressed, she remonstrated, “You right-wingers are all the same.” But it was newspaper work, and she wrote the column. The clipping that resulted became, once Yugoslavia disintegrated, a memorable item in her scrapbook.

By the late 1980s, we were married and living in Brussels, on assignment to cover the climactic years of the Cold War. One day Amity came into my office and closed the door, looked at me, and announced, “It’s over.” I thought, “What have I done?” Before I could actually say anything, she said, “The division of Europe, it’s over.” This was in July of 1988. The Russians and our side still had intermediate-range nuclear missiles pointed at each other all over the place. The ice looked frozen solid.

It turns out that she’d just read a piece in one of the provincial German newspapers saying that the Soviet party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, was going to permit the Volga Germans, who had been living in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great, to leave. Not only was Gorbachev prepared to let them leave, Amity told me, but they were going to go not to Communist East Germany but to West Germany. A receiving center was being set up for them at Friedland. She told me it was an astounding development, one that meant that the Kremlin had concluded the division of Europe could not be sustained.

“It’s over,” she repeated several times. “It’s over.”

Amity left immediately for Friedland, from which she cabled a dispatch about the refugees and what she called the “provocative way their arrival posed the question of reunification.”

Then things entered a quiescent phase, and by November 1989, I was back in the United States, working on the agreement to bring out the Forward in English.

On November 9, I boarded a plane to visit Amity in Brussels. When I got there, I found my secretary had left on my desk a message Amity had dictated by phone. “Remaining Berlin, Hotel Kempinski.” I rushed back to the airport and caught a flight to Dusseldorf, thence another into Berlin’s Tegel Airport, reaching the Kempinski’s lobby just in time to find Amity dashing for a bus for Checkpoint Charlie, a transit point between the free and the Communist side.

The evening before, at a live press conference, an East Berlin party functionary, Günter Schabowski, had been trying to explain some changes in the rules for exit visas. One description of it is contained in a piece last month by the Wall Street Journal. It describes how questioning by a German tabloid reporter and an Italian foreign correspondent got the hapless Schabowski flustered. My own viewing of the press conference suggests the key moment came when Daniel Johnson, then of the London Daily Telegraph and now the editor of Standpoint, asked what I have called the most consequential question ever asked at a press conference.

It was ten words: “Herr Schabowski, was wird mit der Berliner Mauer jetzt geschehen?” [“Mr. Schabowski, what will happen to the Berlin Wall now?”] Johnson’s account of the “Seven Minutes That Shook the World” is here. Poor Schabowski waffled. And because his waffling was being broadcast live, East Germans by the thousands and thousands began pouring out of their homes and heading for freedom. By the end of the evening, the division of Europe had, in the practical sense, ended.

When I found Amity at the Kempinski, it was 9 p.m. on November 10. We crossed over to the East side and spent the evening with dissident, pro-democracy East Germans. The enormity of what was happening hadn’t sunk in, and they were still pleading for photocopying machines and other tools of the democratic struggle. It was after midnight when we crossed back into Free Berlin, only to discover the crowds had swelled. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands were now in the streets, many holding tools and streaming toward the Wall. Someone gave us a rock-climbing hammer, and we spent the small hours of the morning chipping away at it like everyone else.

When we left Berlin that Sunday, we held hands in the taxi and talked of how it was the right moment to leave Europe to the Europeans and return to America. A piece that we’d chipped from the Berlin Wall is now embedded in the stone retaining wall of our garden in New York. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself would be gone and Germany united—a reunification the prospect of which a resurgent Forward greeted with what it called “mixed emotions.”

Not that there was any lack of joy at the liberation of Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet empire. But the Zheleznovodsk summit, where the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and the Soviet party boss, Gorbachev, cut the deal that would lead to formal unification, proved to be an uneasy moment. Kohl was too bland, and Gorbachev lacked a democratic mandate to speak for Russia. When we think of what happened to the Jews of Europe, the Forward concluded, “the labors of our leaders will always look small.”

When the final papers were drawn up, there was one eloquent cri de coeur reflecting what so many of us were thinking. It came from Heinz Galinski, who after the war rebuilt the Jewish center in Fasanenstrasse and embedded within its walls parts of the famed synagogue. He protested the wording of the unification treaty. He wanted the documentation to contain, as it was characterized in the Forward, a “clearer expression of historical responsibility for Nazi war crimes.” He got nowhere, and when he went public at a press conference, Reuters described him as “visibly angry,” saying the chancellor had not even given him the dignity of an answer. Galinski died in 1992.

A few years ago, Amity and I took our children to Berlin, and one afternoon, we visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. It includes—aside from the typewriter on which Charter 77 was written—several exhibits of the methods East Germans used to try to escape Communism by going over, under, or through the Wall. One is a flying contraption. Another is a car in which visitors are challenged to find a full-sized mannequin that has been secreted therein. A white booth that stood on our side of Checkpoint Charlie is now perched a few yards from the museum, in the middle of a street that bustles with commerce. I walked one of the boys over to show him the hut where GIs on duty kept warm as they guarded the entrance to the American sector and the plaza where, under the muzzles the guns of the Warsaw Pact, I had courted his mother. I tried to reassure him that in his time there would be new struggles in which he no doubt would throw himself. It happened to be an unforgettably cold day, and I pulled his collar up around his ears when I got to the part about the importance of not taking history for granted and remembering to look beneath the ice.

Except a congregation.

“In 1972, we had 3,150 people,” said Gershon Chachashvili, a man in his late sixties and one of Oni’s de facto Jewish community leaders. “Now we have just 25. We have no rabbi.”

Refurbished in the last few years, the 114 year-old temple now symbolizes the dispersion of Georgia’s once-thriving Jewish community. In spite of close relations with their Christian neighbors and a degree of religious and cultural acceptance uncommon within the former Soviet Union, Georgia’s Jews have relocated to Israel en masse, with splinter communities settling in the United States.

Oni Synagogue in Georgia’s Racha region

Ethnographically Mizrachi, the first Jews arrived in Georgia some 2,600 years ago, and their origins are said to snake back along the centuries to the time of the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE. Further waves entered by way of the Byzantine Empire. The royal house of Georgia’s Golden Age (10-12th century)—the Bagrationi dynasty—proudly claimed Hebraic descent, tracing their ancestry back to the Biblical forebears David and Solomon. After the authority of the Bagrationi dynasty waned, and Mongol and Persian conquerors arrived, life grew tough for Georgian Jews. Small clusters climbed deeper and higher into the Western mountain lands. Many eventually became serfs, migrating to the cities when possible in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. With Russian czarist rule, the first Ashkenazi Jews appeared in the Southern Caucasus. Accusations of blood libel broke out, a by-product of czarist influence. Since then, a host of historical factors—including Stalinist anti-Semitism and the civil warfare of the post-Soviet era—has contributed to the ongoing Jewish exodus, but perhaps none so much as Zionism, which boasted an influential leader from Oni.

In the early 20th century, the Zionist David Baazov served as Rabbi of Oni. Educated by Ashkenazi rabbinical teachers in Tskhinvali and abroad, Baazov established a Talmud Torah here in 1905, spreading Hebraic teaching and Enlightenment thought. Though his students adored him, Baazov became a controversial figure among the more conservative Jews in the nearby city of Kutaisi. In August 1901, the 18-year-old Baazov popped up the first Congress of Caucasian Zionists, making a deep impression on the distinguished leader. During subsequent Congresses, Baazov was always ready to deliver a rousing lecture in Hebrew. For his troubles, he was passionately denounced within Chabad-influenced Georgian circles as a “missionary and Christianizer, heretic and renegade.” The Lubavicher Rebbe of Kutaisi joined with other critics to discredit Baazov who, in spite of the calumny, went on to create the first Zionist newspaper in Georgia.

David Baazov’s educational mission in Oni ended abruptly in 1917, when the Talmudic Academy he founded ran out of funds. That wasn’t the only threat to Oni’s community looming on the horizon. “In 1917, the Communists tried to destroy the synagogue, but the people came and would not let the officials touch it,” said Chachashvili. “‘You will have to destroy us first,’ they said, and it was saved.” Though the Bolshevik victory of 1921 eliminated the commercial structures of trade and private enterprise that provided a livelihood for Georgian Jewry, the bans on religious practice were neither as strictly enforced in Georgian Communist circles, nor as effective, as they were in Russia itself. Many Georgian Jews resisted the pressure to join collective farms, some becoming adept at smuggling and black-marketeering. “The stereotype,” Chachashvili said, “is that Oni’s Jews were traders and merchants. Some were peasants, but many were professionals. Jewish people have lived here since the 15th century.”

Gershon Chachashvili, left, seated with two companions, outside Oni synagogue

Baazov’s Zionist passion persists in Georgia to this day. In 1969, a group of 18 families from Soviet Georgia astonished the Soviet authorities by petitioning the United Nations Human Rights Commission, requesting help in securing for the right to emigrate to Israel. The Six Day War had left a psychic imprint. They wished to make aliyah. Their bid for emigration was well publicized in the West. Prime Minister Golda Meir, Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, took up the cause, reading from the text of their protest letter in the Knesset. Sit-down demonstrations of Georgian Jewish students in Moscow’s Central Post office followed in 1970. Under pressure, the Soviet authorities decided to grant exit visas to the troublesome Georgian Jews, dispatching a thousand visas to Israel—and in the process opening up an avenue of egress for rural Jews like those in Oni.

Over the next two decades, the trend of immigration continued. As Georgian youth in the capital city struggled against Russian domination in the late 1980s, standing up to the Soviet Special Forces, rural towns like Oni were losing their way. The garment factories and mineral spas closed. Jobs became scarce. By 1991, Georgia was independent, its Communist-era economy moribund. Then, in April 1991, an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale struck the whole region of Racha, destroying homes in Oni, and cracking the synagogue walls (renovations were completed in 2005). Many local Jewish families came to the decision not to rebuild. The community shrank to a fraction of its former dimensions. Baazov’s contemporary Nathan Eliashvili—also a leading intellectual and rabbi—once wrote that Georgians “felt a moral obligation to treat the Jews with honor,” in part because of a shared history of persecution and conquest. Though many of its congregants have vanished, the Oni synagogue remains—an emblem of a deep Jewish history in this small mountain town. Soon, there may be no congregants left to tell the story behind the ornate architecture and the stacks of prayer books.

The migration of Jews to Israel is registered acutely by Oni’s Orthodox Christian population. “A third of Oni’s people were Jewish. They were close neighbors,” said Khatuna Archvadze, 58, a retired lighting engineer. When the Jewish people left for Israel, they did not sell their houses or forget their roots. They send money sometimes. We still write and call each other.”

Far is Spektor’s fifth album, but only the third to be released on a major label. After emigrating from the USSR with her parents in 1989 (reluctant to leave behind Regina’s piano and her music teacher, they escaped only when it became necessary), Spektor went to Jewish day school in the Bronx. Earlier this year, the singer, (who has her own entry on the blog Stuff Jewish Young Adults Like) wrote an impassioned blog post in support of Israel, in which she wrote that although she is in many ways a liberal, she believes the media’s portrayal of Israel is heavily biased. “Many of us try to un-Jew ourselves all the time,” she wrote. “It comes from a mixture of fear, guilt of surviving while others didn’t, and embarrassment. We are the root of our and the World’s problems, it seems…The instinct that drives them is the same instinct that drove them to blend in, and then be very surprised when they were put in the ghetto, too.”

This defiance of the areligious conventions of hipsterdom, from which many of her fans hail, reflects her commitment to unironic honesty. Spektor seemingly has the ability to see into loneliest corners of people’s minds, and transform their shame, fear, and angst into song. She has said that for the most part she doesn’t write songs about her own life—rather, it’s clear she writes with generous compassion toward the lives of others.

Like many artists, Spektor’s sound has grown less edgy and more polished over the course of her last few albums. But what makes Spektor a little bit punk rock has never been her music. It’s more about the candor of her lyrics, and the tough stubbornness she seems to exert in rebutting the mundane drudgery of life. Spektor maintains something of the Russian-Jewish refusenik to her style. She sings of bodies and cramped physical spaces and oppressive philosophical ideas, but also of imagination and triumphant weirdness and spiritual escapism. The song “Machine” captures the imagination of someone steeped in Soviet ideas about the West (“Everything’s provided, consummate consumer”), but who nonetheless thinks of it wistfully, and takes comfort in the thought of a sort of Marxist deity “who lacks my organics/and who covets my defects.”

Spektor turns words into sounds, which then somehow become more meaningful than the words, as in the song “Eet,” in which she animates that title syllable with all the power of her wide-ranging vocal prowess. Just when it seems like she might veer into Betty Boop cuteness, she drops an octave and slips instead into soulful crooning. And where her heartbreaking piano playing and devastating lyrics might weigh down another musician, her songs are shot through with the breezy air of her seductive voice.

Far is full of idiosyncratic wisdom. In “Laughing With,” she sings: “No one’s laughing at God in the hospital/No one’s laughing at God in a war…But God can be funny/when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket or Santa Claus/God can be so hilarious.” “One More Time With Feeling” is a whistling-in-the-dark song about mortality masquerading as a life-affirming ditty. I defy anyone to listen to it without thinking of the death of someone they knew. And if no one you know has died, consider yourself warned.

The themes in Far emerge through characters, mostly male, that make the songs feel as though they are non-denominational gospels on the topic of life, or musical chapters in the lives of unheralded prophets. Although it comes in the middle, the track “Human of the Year” is the album’s raison d’etre, the tale of one Karl Projectorinski who finds his fear of a higher power assuaged by the revelation that its realm is earthly. “Why are you so scared you stand there shaking in your pew/The icons are whispering to you/They’re just old men like on the benches in the park/except their balding spots are glistening with gold,” sings Spektor. “Outside the cars are beeping out a song just in your honor/and though they do not know it, all mankind are now your brothers.” When she chants “Hallelujah” at the songs climax, it feels like the one thing she’s been getting at throughout the album, like she is finally giving in to an exultant impulse.

The clunky moments in some of the album’s lighter songs seem designed to keep them out of iPod commercials, which they might otherwise suit. The dolphin noises (seriously) she makes in “Folding Chair” are forgivable because they’re a reminder that the song is offering respite in the form of no-holds-barred silliness and childlike logic with lines like “I’ve got a perfect body ‘cause my eyelashes catch my sweat.”

In the album’s closer, “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” Spektor sings of a character who could easily be God himself: “He begins his quiet ascension…To a place that no religion/has found a path to, or a likeness.” Maybe not, but Spektor provides as viable a path as any to enlightenment.

My grandfather, Yakov Milner, was born in November or December of 1915 in the Latvian town of Baltinava, at the edge of the Eastern Front. He claimed as his earliest memory the rumble and menace of artillery. The rest of his childhood memories were almost uniformly idyllic. Until the onset of the next war, he lived in a kind of a Yiddish fairy tale—a sweet, remarkably peaceful interlude between calamities. His father was a respected merchant who owned a general store and a boot-making workshop where Jews and Latvians cobbled amiably together. Family, community, and Jewish tradition ordered daily life. To the east and to the west the type was being set for a death sentence, but in Baltinava my grandfather went to synagogue, attended festive weddings, and observed the holidays. So deeply was he a product of this fading world that he, like others of his generation, only knew his birthday according to the Hebrew calendar. And although his passport arbitrarily gave as his birthday the 20th of August, we always celebrated the occasion on the proper date, varyingly in November or December, on the eighth day of Hanukkah.

I was born on June 2, 1973, in what had by then become the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia. If my birthday coincided with a Jewish holiday, I do not know it. The Communist revolution had obviated Jewish religion and replaced it with the teachings of Lenin and Marx. Any attempt to uphold Jewish tradition was considered subversive and so most Jews relinquished the traditions and aspired instead to be model Soviet citizens. Ostensibly, my family was also composed of model Soviet citizens—university graduates, esteemed professionals, even a few Party members—but during Jewish holidays we gathered at my grandparents’ house, drew the curtains, and engaged in subversive activities. The main provocateur was my grandfather, whose commitment to Judaism never wavered. For Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Purim, and Passover, the curtains were drawn and the family gathered. And, every year, on the eighth day of Hanukkah, my grandmother fried potato latkes, the curtains were drawn again, and we celebrated my grandfather’s birthday. I was a child at the time, kindergarten-aged, and for everyone’s protection—lest I disclose the dark family secret—the nature and significance of these gatherings were never explained to me. Instead I was told that we were marking my grandfather’s birthday. Thus, to my childhood mind, my grandfather was singularly blessed with four or five birthdays each year.

This episode is part of the family lore which, like lacquered wood paintings, feather pillows, and Russian translations of Sinclair Lewis, we brought with us to Canada. My memory of it is not very distinct. Memories of family life begin for me in the northern suburbs of Toronto, which became home. Here, liberated from Lenin and Marx, we made an effort at resuming the old ways. I was sent to Hebrew school. My father dutifully gave money to support the Jewish Russian Community. For the High Holidays, my parents dressed up and chatted with their friends outside the junior high school that served as a makeshift synagogue. And yet, fundamentally, we did not change. To experience a sense of solidarity with God, the Jewish people, and each other, we still gathered around my grandparents’ dining room table—albeit with the curtains open. We didn’t become more observant, only less anxious. Customs which we had neglected in Latvia—eating kosher, keeping the Sabbath—we mostly neglected in Canada. But the rituals which we had performed furtively there we now performed more elaborately here.

Hanukkah, for instance, saw us making a concerted attempt to light candles on each of the festival’s eight nights. After dinner, often with a hockey game on in the background, my father and I would obediently retrieve the yarmulkes from a cupboard, place them briefly on our heads, whereupon I would recite the prayers and validate my Hebrew school education. Inevitably, we would skip a night or two, but the general point would have been made: That which was forbidden in Riga could be done with Semitic impunity in Toronto.

Hanukkah mornings, particularly on the weekends, I would wake to the enticing aroma of potato latkes. I would descend and find my mother standing by the stove, continuing a tradition that no commissar had managed to disrupt. At my grandparents’ apartment I would find my grandmother in the identical stance: having peeled and grated dozens of potatoes by hand, she would be poised above a sizzling frying pan. “Yasha, cum essen,” she would call, and my grandfather would join me at the cramped kitchen table, where a container of sour cream would be set amidst chipped plates. If I had to isolate an enduring image of Hanukkah and Jewishness this would be it: sitting in their clean, modest kitchen, eating the rich, oily food, listening to their affectionate fussing, their Yiddish.

My grandmother died in January of 1999, bringing to a painful conclusion many things, but most acutely, the 53 years of my grandparents’ marriage. The division of responsibilities they had established—to him the spiritual; to her the practical—made us wonder how he would be able to manage by himself. His confusion and disarray reflected our own. Without my grandmother’s contribution, her presence, her cooking, it was difficult to envision our future. How could we continue with family gatherings, holidays, birthdays? In Russian, my mother, aunt, and uncle, repeated the mournful refrain: She will be forever lacking. My grandfather nodded sagely, intoned my grandmother’s name, and cried.

And yet gradually, over a period of months, as if recognizing that he must now embody everything, my grandfather started to assume some of my grandmother’s responsibilities. We would visit him and he would lead us into the kitchen and ask—with a mix of apprehension and pride—that we sample his cabbage, his farmer’s cheese, his jam. And nearly a year after my grandmother’s death, for Hanukkah and his birthday, we came to his apartment and smelled the familiar smell. In his slow, meticulous manner, he had worked for much of the day, and he beckoned us into the kitchen, apologizing that they were not hers, but inviting us to try, taste, take more.

David Bezmozgis is the author of the story collection Natasha and Other Stories. His first novel, The Free World, will be published in early 2011. This essay originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Canadian House and Home and is reprinted by permission of the author.

For more than 2,000 years, the Jews of Central Asia existed independent of other communities, and developed their own traditions. Their music draws on literary sources from Persian poetry to the Zohar.

Evan Rapport, a graduate student at the City University of New York, introduces music by Roshel Rubinov, Moghulcha-i Dugoh, Menakhem Malakov, and the husband-and-wife team of Ilyas Malayev and Muhabbat Shamayeva, from the ensemble Maqam.

Dmitri Shostakovich

One thing Shostakovich was not was Jewish, by birth or belief. Yet from the frenzied klezmer dance melody of the Second Piano Trio (1944) to the mournful vocal cycle From the Jewish Folk Poetry (1948) to the sweeping sorrow of the Holocaust evoked in the Thirteenth Symphony (“Babi Yar“) of 1962, Shostakovich carried on a lifelong affair with the sound and soul of Russian Jewry. Why would a non-Jewish composer living in one of the modern world’s most bitterly anti-Semitic and repressive societies, where mere possession of Hebrew literature could lead to arrest and imprisonment, choose to make Jewishness a recurrent theme in his work? The answer is tied up with the debate over the man behind the music.

Shostakovich was a Communist Party member and First Secretary of the Soviet Composers’ Union, and his signature appeared on a 1973 letter attacking the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. Few doubted his tremendous musical talents, but there was little interest in the West for a composer who seemed such an obedient musical apparatchik.

Then came Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovitch as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, purportedly dictated shortly before the composer’s death in 1975. Volkov, a senior editor at Sovetskaya Muzyka, the leading Soviet music journal, brought the manuscript to the United States in 1976 and published in English in 1979. Testimony offered a startling image of the quiet, legendarily taciturn composer as a secret freedom fighter, an anti-Soviet liberal who revealed himself only in these private conversations. Volkov’s Shostakovich was boldly courageous and pettily proud, alternately explaining the hidden anti-Soviet political meaning in many of his famous compositions and dismissing former colleagues such as Prokofiev in unflattering, gossipy terms.

The book’s convoluted title was the first indication that this was not a standard autobiography. In fact, charges of forgery immediately began to surface among Soviet authorities and Western scholars. Volkov offered as evidence of Shostakovich’s approval the composer’s signature on the first page of each chapter, certifying that he had read the contents. And in the context of the Cold War and the political movement on behalf of Soviet Jewry, Westerners eagerly embraced the new heroic image of Shostakovich as a secret dissident, making his music a new concert hall favorite and Volkov’s book a bestseller.

Shostakovich with Ivan Sollertinsky

Among the themes to emerge from Testimony was the central place of Jews and Jewishness in Shostakovich’s life and creative work. Many of the people closest to Shostakovich were Jews, including his favorite pupil, Venyamin Fleishman, and his best friend, Ivan Sollertinsky. Both men died tragically during World War II, Fleishman as a Red Army soldier and Sollertinsky of illness exacerbated by wartime living conditions. Shostakovich produced musical tributes to each. He completed Fleishman’s unfinished opera, Rothschild’s Violin (1944), based on a Chekhov short story about a Jewish klezmer musician. Sollertinsky he recalled in the mournful, piercing Second Piano Trio, written as word of the Holocaust was reaching Moscow. The final section of this piece includes a freylekhs, a Jewish wedding tune that seems to link the dead and the living in a desperate, sacred dance of joy and sadness.

These are among a dozen major works in which Shostakovich displayed an intense, sustained interest in the larger symbolic meaning of Jewishness and Jewish music. What was the source of this attraction? Testimony provided one answer:

Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it’s multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be… Jews became a symbol for me. All of man’s defenselessness was concentrated in them. After the war, I tried to convey that feeling in my music. It was a bad time for Jews then. In fact, it’s always a bad time for them.

The problem is we don’t really know if Shostakovich actually said so. In 1980 American musicologist Laurel Fay published an article demonstrating that large chunks of Volkov’s supposedly original oral interviews in Testimony were taken verbatim from previously published articles. The evidence against the book’s authenticity only grew more and more damning over the ensuing years. Leading scholars of Russian music— Fay, Richard Taruskin, Malcolm Hamrick Brown—now agree that Testimony is at best a sloppy embellishment of Shostakovich’s words and at worst an audacious forgery. On the other side of debate are a few highly vocal Soviet émigré musicians and their sympathizers.

Much of the scholarly detective work on Testimony has been assembled in a new anthology, A Shostakovich Casebook. Editor Malcolm Hamrick Brown wants to present the clearest possible case against Volkov’s Testimony; he includes interviews with relatives and close friends, including the composer’s widow, that challenge many factual and linguistic details. Its centerpiece is a new essay by Laurel Fay that exhaustively and conclusively shows that the signatures held up by Volkov as proof that the memoirs were genuine were forged. Despite its slightly monomaniacal air, the Casebook succeeds in demonstrating that Volkov’s Testimony simply cannot be trusted.

Determined not to be outflanked in the Shostakovich wars, Volkov published Shostakovich and Stalin: The Composer and the Dictator, a smooth, erudite attempt to prop up his heroic, cardboard image of Shostakovich. He maintains that Testimony is a faithful document, but because of the “confusion,” he avoids quoting from it, relying instead on a range of colorful anecdotes culled from other interviews and memoirs. Volkov engagingly and skillfully synthesizes decades of complicated Soviet cultural history, but ultimately repeats the thesis first articulated in his introduction to Testimony. To survive under Stalin, Shostakovich adopted the guise of the yurodivy, or “holy fool,” a folk trickster figure who uses craftiness, feigned insanity, and artistic ability to secretly criticize those in power. To demonstrate this subversion, Volkov interprets Shostakovich’s music against his biography, teasing out the hidden anti-Soviet codes in the symbolic language of dark dissonances and jagged rhythms.

Solomon Volkov with Shostakovich

Problems with Volkov’s current effort to lionize Shostakovich extend beyond the shadow of Testimony. For instance, Volkov admits he has no convincing explanation—musical or otherwise—for why Shostakovich joined the Communist Party in 1960, when the Stalinist threat was long over and the dissident movement was just beginning. However, on the question of Shostakovich and Jewish music, he zeroes in on a simple, powerful truth: In the postwar Soviet Union, to write music on Jewish themes of any kind was a provocative, explicitly political act, a direct critique of the regime’s anti-Semitism. There is no question, for instance, that a work such as From the Jewish Folk Poetry, composed in 1948, the year in which Stalin began his murderous campaign against the country’s leading Yiddish poets, actors, and writers, was a direct commentary on the brutal Soviet regime. So too the use of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar“—which caused a scandal upon its initial publication in 1961, when discussion of the Holocaust itself and Jewish suffering was forbidden—as the text of his Thirteenth Symphony. Other recent Russian-language memoirs, such as émigré musicologist Vladimir Zak’s Shostakovich and the Jews (1997), buttress this assertion, documenting how Shostakovich went to great lengths to defend many prominent Jewish musicians targeted by Stalin for persecution. We may not have Shostakovich’s actual testimony, but his music and his actions speak volumes about his respect, compassion, and deep friendship.

Shostakovich fails on all three counts the test once proposed by scholar Curt Sachs, that Jewish music is music created “by Jews, as Jews, for Jews.” And yet in some of his works, Shostakovich used melodies, rhythms, and other musical elements borrowed from traditional Eastern European Jewish folk music. Beneath the thunder of Shostakovich’s archmodern dissonances, the village fiddler and cantor are wailing away. What’s more, Shostakovich’s explicit intention to acknowledge and honor the Holocaust and Yiddish folk poems certainly lends his music a meaningful Jewish theme. These works, then, are Jewish in both form and content.

To that we may add a third factor. A substantial portion of his Jewish audience, in Russia and beyond, continues to claim Shostakovich’s music. Vladimir Zak calls Shostakovich’s musical language a form of Jewish “biblical romanticism.” Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the late exponent of American Jewish religious music, spoke of Shostakovich’s music as soaked through with “the sorrow of the Jews…crying out together with the Torah.” And so Volkov’s work, while it may not successfully prove that Shostakovich was a political dissident, does rightly remind us that the great master of modern Russian music was also a great Jewish composer.