American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry: A Call to Conscience by Fred A. Lazin (review)

For many affiliated American Jews of my generation, the cause of Soviet Jewry left a significant mark on our youth. At my bat mitzvah, I was "twinned" with a girl in the Soviet Union who, I was told, could not practice her religion publicly. Three years later, in 1987, I joined 250,000 others at my first demonstration in Washington, DC: The March to Free Soviet Jewry. My own hazy memories of these events match the dominant historiographical outlines of the movement and its white, Ashkenazic Jewish leadership. In his new book American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry, Fred A. Lazin offers a competing or, perhaps, complementary, portrait: a history of the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry (the "Task Force"), a group dedicated to Soviet Jewry and headed by Sister Ann Gillen of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. Lazin's study illuminates the politics of interreligious cooperation and activism while revising our understanding of the Soviet Jewry movement.

Lazin sets the stage for the 1972 founding of the Task Force by beginning with the "constructive consequences" of Vatican II, in particular the 1965 Nostra Aetate document that drastically altered relationships between Catholics and Jews. In the years following, nuns began to address broader social problems outside of the Catholic Church, just as American Jewish leaders sought support from Christians for the cause of Soviet Jewry. First sponsored by the National Catholic Council for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Task Force gradually fell under AJC leadership with the goal "that it would serve as the national organization through which concerned Christians may act on behalf of the Soviet Jewish community" (38). Grounded in prodigious archival research, this book chronicles, in intricate detail, the multifaceted work undertaken by Sister Gillen across the United States and in the Soviet Union, at United Nations conferences, and at the World Conferences for Soviet Jewry. Under the careful and strict supervision of the AJC, and using the language of human and civil rights, Sister Gillen drew from her own Christian networks in assembling conferences, vigils, meetings, and demonstrations for Soviet Jewry. She contributed to a campaign that mobilized millions of people, Jewish and Christian, world leaders and laypeople alike, and offered a unifying cause for American Jews in the final years of the Cold War.

Lazin writes that some Jewish communal leaders spoke of "spiritual genocide" and resisted efforts to broaden the campaign to work for other (Christian) groups denied religious expression in the Soviet Union (70). He suggests that Israeli leaders led or reinforced this resistance because of their own nation's investment in Soviet Jewry's freedom to emigrate. Indeed, in the very first sentence of the book, Lazin notes that "Israeli leaders immediately faced an existential threat to the new Jewish State's existence—a population insufficient to ensure both the survival of the State and its Jewish majority" (1). The Task Force, he writes, knowingly or unknowingly served this purpose as it drew Christian allies to the cause of Soviet Jewry and of the free emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. Even Sister Gillen, he tells us, "may or may not have been aware of the role of the [Israeli] Liaison Bureau"—a "clandestine operation focused on Soviet Jewry in the office of the Israeli prime minister"—in the work of the Task Force's campaigns (65, 64).

Perhaps tied to the directives of Israeli leadership and to new geopolitical contexts, the tension over advocating for other religious groups in the Soviet Union intensified in the late 1970s. In response, Sister Gillen, joined by AJC leaders, set up a National Interreligious Task Force on Human Rights, which "shifted the focus of advocacy to one of universal human rights" (145). In these years, Sister Gillen allied with Catholics and evangelical Protestants to draw attention to...