Cold War Disappointments: Contextualizing Israeli Views of the USSR and Soviet Jewry, 1953–67

This article offers a new perspective on the relationship between Israel, the USSR, and Soviet Jews during the post-Stalin Thaw. Its point of departure is that the Israeli–Soviet encounter, often analyzed primarily in terms of Cold War diplomacy or Zionist and other ideological frameworks, merits a deeper contextualization that takes into account internal Israeli and Soviet-Jewish social and cultural dynamics, as well as their interrelation. The article shows that the views of contemporary Israeli elites toward the USSR were often independent of narrow ideological stances and arose from a variety of sources, ranging from personal nostalgia to anxieties over ‘careerism’ and ‘Americanization’. It further demonstrates how the same factors frequently framed Israeli attitudes toward Soviet Jews, oscillating between idealization and disappointment. In doing so, the article provides a contextualized case study of a transnational ideological and cultural juxtaposition within the Cold War. It shows that internal Israeli dynamics were no less significant in shaping elite attitudes toward Soviet realities than the ideological and strategic conditions of the Cold War, the anti-Jewish and other oppressive policies of the Soviet regime, or abstract Zionist goals such as the promotion of immigration to Israel or the ‘negation of the diaspora’.