Luba (Люба) Yusim & Sophia (Соня) Sobko
Growing up as post-Soviet Jewish immigrants on Turtle Island (the U.S.), we often felt not Jewish enough, not American enough, and sometimes not even Soviet enough. We internalized this on an individual level, never feeling fully accepted into any space and often feeling the need to conform for safety and belonging – key elements of internalized anti-Semitism highlighted in this map. Though our experience in American Jewish spaces has increased our access to opportunities, the need to straddle multiple worlds and the pressure to adapt to a dominant version of Jewishness has kept us from showing up as our full selves.
For us these spaces are often dominated by a specific type of Ashkenazi culture and rooted in a push for assimilation, forgetting, and shaming. On the one hand, many post-Soviet immigrants are invisibilized, as those of us who are white and speak American English blend in as white Ashkenazi American Jews. On the other hand, we are othered: exoticized as Eastern European, perceived as a group that has been “saved” by benevolent American Jews, and patronized for not possessing certain knowledge of Jewish religious practices (something kept from us by the enforced secularism of the USSR).
When we find ourselves in American Jewish spaces, which are often dominated by Ashkenazi assumptions, we are always working, often unknowingly, to pass as a specific type of Jewish person – one that has the same Jewish practices, the same experience of immigration, and the same narrative around collective trauma. This is internalized anti-Semitism in action, and it’s especially painful because it occurs in the very spaces we seek out for healing and connection.
Somehow we have been looked down upon as those ‘poor Soviet Jews’ with ‘foreign’ names and ‘old world’ habits, many of which were intentionally forgotten generations ago by Ashkenazi immigrants assimilating into white American culture for safety. We’ve walked around with shame, often overcompensating by working extra hard to fit in, at our own expense. Some of us have changed our own names, forgotten our mother tongues, and broken ties with family members. These pains live viscerally in our bodies.
Assimilation has also kept our ancestral histories from us. Over and over again we learned about the Holocaust’s many Central European deathcamps with never a mention that most of the Jews murdered in the Shoah were in fact Soviet Jews. Our families were obliterated by firing rounds, death marches, and hangings, and were left in mass unmarked graves – a fact rarely spoken about. Babi Yar, where nearly 34,000 of Kiev’s Jews were atrociously murdered in less than 48 hours in an organized firing round, is not Baba Yaga. Many don’t know the difference and this is just one painful example that reinforces our feelings of not belonging and otherness in the collective narrative.
Over the last year, more than two dozen of us have come together from across the country to organize around our shared identities, experiences, and questions. For many of us this was the first time we had encountered others with so many of the same overlapping identities and experiences as immigrants, post-Soviet Jews, and queers in American society. As we connected over experiences rarely spoken about in dominant Jewish spaces, we realized that we belonged and we finally felt that we were enough. As we began organizing, we started exploring many of the topics covered in this map and began truly understanding, together, how distinct our experiences were, that we were not alone, and that we could show up as our full selves – as post-Soviet immigrant, American, queer Jews.
As an Ashkenazi minority group in the U.S., it is critical that we do this work v’meste – together, in this place. Doing so helps us understand the systemic forces that shape our experiences, enabling us to shed the isolation of shame, self-hatred, powerlessness, silencing, and accomodation. Furthermore, examining internalized anti-Semitism and intergenerational trauma together enables us to resist the pressure to assimilate into dominant Ashkenazi Jewish culture – one that prioritizes forgetting for survival and appropriating the ‘old world’ for connection.
Finding each other has been a blessing, but it has also made being in American Jewish spaces ever more painful. While we believe our work around internalized anti-Semitism is most powerful when done in the context of our queer, post-Soviet Jewish family, we inevitably still yearn for recognition and belonging in broader American Jewish communities. As imaginations of who is in the room expand (JOCISM, adoptees, those who choose Judaism, mixed faith families), we seek recognition of post-Soviet Jewish immigrants as a group with distinct lived experiences, practices, knowledge, and traumas.
The analysis afforded by this map can transform organizational culture within Jewish spaces insofar as the organizations/individuals using it imagine that intergenerational trauma manifests differently for groups of various histories and lived experiences. Mapping alongside one another, white Ashkenazi (non-immigrant) Jews and post-Soviet Jews (not all of whom are white) can articulate where their experiences with internalized anti-Semitism and other traumas converge and diverge.
This important work of coalition and community building necessitates that members of the dominant group suspend assumptions of shared experience, listen, and learn. We ask white Ashkenazi American Jews for heightened awareness around the assumptions they make around Jewish knowledge and experience: many of us never went to Jewish summer camp, some of us have not attended High Holy Days and do not know the Shabbat prayers, and most of us do not want to be pitied for this.
When American Jews take us as we are, learn from us, and share knowledge (e.g. Jewish prayers) transparently, we chisel away at our own internalized anti-Semitism.
We ask for criticality around the use of Eastern European cultural references. To us, tropes like Baba Yaga are not abstractions or sources of comedy; they evoke our own babushkas, whose hands we held or had to let go of when we emigrated. It should be added that a “babushka” is a grandmother, not a headscarf, and the emphasis of that word goes on the first syllable, not the second. We ask for criticality around the glorified use of Soviet imagery, as our families suffered from Soviet anti-Semitism.
Finally, we request deeper sensitivity for those visiting ancestral homelands, and returning to report on their trips. These countries are neither playgrounds nor graveyards for American consumption; they are our birthplaces and the places where many of our relatives still live. American Jews should know that they are visiting as Americans, and should take the time to learn the history of Jews on that land, from the time their ancestors left to the present day. Learning this history will help American Jews understand the waves of oppression and forced assimilation that our families endured up to the last three decades when we left for Turtle Island.
As American Jews do the work to see us, we continue to feel the power of exploring internalized anti-Semitism in our own Jewish, queer, immigrant, post-Soviet community. This work makes us stronger in our identities – individually and together. As we clench even harder to our language, customs, and family experiences, we narrate our own stories, and resist the trap of assimilation. We are not the same as Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to the U.S. generations ago and we reject the pressure to forget who we are. Realizing this, in itself, is healing.
Luba (Люба) Yusim & Sophia (Соня) Sobko
Sophia and Luba are members of Kolektiv Goluboy Vagon, a collective of queer, post-Soviet Jewish immigrants. Learn more by visiting www.kolektivgoluboyvagon.com.