Shaul Kelner, My Soviet Twin: Jewish Youth Activism During the Cold War
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Joseph Lebovic Memorial Lecture
My Soviet Twin: Jewish Youth Activism During the Cold War
In the 1980s, thousands of North American Jewish teenagers turned their bar and bat mitzvahs into expressions of solidarity with Soviet Jewish youth who were not able to celebrate the ritual freely in the USSR. How did these "twinning ceremonies" refashion an ancient rite of passage into Cold War-era celebrations of Western freedoms? And what did the ceremonies mean to the Gen-X youth who took part in them?
Shaul Kelner is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on transnational Jewish solidarity and the intersection of culture and politics in Jewish life. His newest book, A Cold War Exodus (NYU Press, 2024) is a National Jewish Book Award-winning study of mass mobilization tactics in the movement to free Soviet Jews. His first book, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press, 2010), won the Association for Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Book Award was named Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association Culture Section’s Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book.
Prof. Kelner has been a Fellow of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Michigan’s Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, as well as a visiting scholar in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He has served as a board member of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry. He received his Ph.D in 2002 from the CUNY Graduate Center, which he attended as a Wexner Graduate Fellow.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science recognized him with an Innovative Teaching Award for Creating Engaging In-Person Learning Environments.