Pocket your kippah. Tuck your Star of David into your shirt. Keep your head down as you walk through the quad, That’s just some of the advice Jewish college students around the country told the Soviet-born writer and activist Izabella Tabarovsky they were given by the leaders of major Jewish organizations as a strategy to weather the anti-Israel and antisemitic storms that have raged on campus since Oct. 7, 2023.

Tabarovsky’s counter-message: Don’t hide. Reclaim your Zionism. And take inspiration from the Soviet refuseniks of the 1980s who stared down Communist Party strongman Leonid Brezhnev, held fast to their Judaism and eventually won their freedom.

Tabarovsky lays out some of these strategies for college students in a new book, Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide, in which she argues that the anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses in recent decades, which has metastasized into antisemitism, mirrors Soviet anti-Jewish propaganda. In the book, Tabarovsky looks back to that era not only to understand the root causes of contemporary antisemitism, but to take inspiration on how to fight it.

The book features a history of Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda with its parallels to the rhetoric on college campuses today, interviews with refuseniks – Soviet Jews who were denied the right to emigrate to Israel, and often imprisoned for trying – and campus activists, and a foreword from the best-known refusenik, Natan Sharansky. Tabarovsky, who was born in the Soviet Union, emigrated to the U.S. in 1990 and now lives in Israel, also offers concrete strategies for students encountering antisemitism to stand proud and strong as Jews.

Tabarovsky told Jewish Insider that she saw a need for her book after many discussions with young Jews: “We’re in a bleak moment, and a lot of books diagnose the bleakness. … I saw a hunger for an inspirational message.”

In the near-decade that she has been writing about the subject, it has become “widely accepted among scholars and people involved in this [activism] that the patterns of anti-Zionist demonization and erasure are some of what Soviet Jews experienced in [former Soviet Union leader Leonid] Brezhnev’s USSR,” she said.

“If American Jews are today encountering the same language, the same explanatory logic and worldview … wouldn’t it make sense to look at how Soviet Jews responded?” Tabarovsky said. “We have this heroic story at the center of the Soviet Jewish story, which is really bleak, but had one really bright light that led to massive change.”

Tabarovsky clarified that, while the U.S. is a democracy and the Soviet Union was an oppressive totalitarian regime, “historic parallels are complex and nothing is ever exactly the same. I would never say that America today is like Brezhnev’s USSR, and the dangers that American Jews face are incomparable to what somebody like Sharansky faced.”

However, she said, “what is similar are the ideological echoes and anti-Zionist erasure. … In every society, there is a scale of punishments that’s different. What’s the worst thing that can happen in America? Your reputation is ruined; you lose your career, you’re ruined financially. All of these things can happen to people who declare themselves Zionists.”

While the refuseniks are remembered for their attempts to emigrate from the Soviet Union, Be a Refusenik focuses on their domestic dissident activity, especially their underground actions to strengthen Jewish identity, spread Jewish education, teach Hebrew and learn about Israel and Zionism. They were “crowdsourcing Jewish knowledge” when the Soviet party line was that “Zionism is racism, is Nazism,” Tabarovsky recounted.

Part of the strategy Tabarovsky suggests for young Jews on campus is modeled after “an inner journey the refuseniks took” in strengthening their Jewish identity.

“Some refuseniks told me this is how they viewed it,” Tabarovsky said, “the system refused to allow them something they wanted, but before that, they refused [to accept] something about the system itself. They refused [to accept] the antisemitism that the system demanded from them, that they erase their Jewish identity, that they give up their sense of peoplehood. … The refuseniks said ‘we don’t buy it; we refuse [to accept] this version of reality. We believe something different.’”

Tabarovsky noted that in her speaking engagement with young American Jews, she realized that many are unfamiliar with the refuseniks, and when she would ask for examples of Jewish heroes, they would usually mention the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or the Maccabees.

“[Refuseniks] are a real example of Jewish courage and defiance. … They found each other and created a different reality. They wrote their own Jewish story and recreated the Jewish identity that had been taken away from them. … They are the role models we need,” she said.

Tabarovsky said that American Jews need to rebalance the narratives of Jewish victimhood and heroism, because victimhood has become too dominant.

“You read the horrible things refuseniks went through, but none of them talked about themselves as victims,” she said. “They felt like protagonists in their own story. They took responsibility; they took risks consciously. We need to think of ourselves in these terms, as well.” 

Tabarovsky said she heard from many students who were told by large Jewish organizations to keep their heads down and try not to provoke or attract attention, or engage, and applauded those who did not take that advice.

To Jewish students, Tabarovsky suggests: “Reclaim your Zionism.”

“Build a community. Find other people like you. Re-empower yourself and think about your situation strategically,” she said. “The Jewish community has been improvising responses on the fly, while the other side is in the driver’s seat, creating all these propagandistic narratives. … We need to think strategically about how we need to organize ourselves.” 

Once that happens, Tabarovsky said she is confident that Jewish students “will know how to act.” One example she cited was Lishi Baker, a rising senior at Columbia studying Middle East history, who she said saw American flags being defaced during anti-Israel protests at Columbia University and organized a counter-protest with American, not Israeli flags, to show that the protests are not only anti-Israel, but anti-American.

Tabarovsky called on students “to be more creative in the way they protest. The other side is doing all kinds of things to attract the media. The Soviet Jewry movement was so creative and knew how to attract attention.” 

In 1999, with the lofty goal of bringing every young Jewish adult to Israel free of cost, the nascent Birthright Israel launched its first trip to the Jewish state. Over the next 25 years, the organization would bring over 900,000 young Jews from some 70 countries to Israel. 

Last night, at a gala marking a quarter century of activity at Manhattan’s Pier Sixty, Birthright Israel Foundation’s CEO Elias Saratovsky announced two new goals: a $900 million fundraising campaign aimed at securing the organization’s future and bringing 200,000 participants to Israel over the next five years.

The campaign has already secured more than $220 million in commitments, Saratovsky told eJewishPhilanthropy — $132 million toward its $650 million goal for trips, and $90 million toward its $250 million goal for legacy commitments.

“We have a solid foundation of gifts,” he told eJP. “We’re grateful to everyone who has given so far, and now the opportunity we have in front of us is to ask the entire Jewish community to support an organization that has impacted the entire Jewish world over the last two and a half decades.”

Alongside Jewish summer camps, Birthright trips are credited with increased connection to Israel and Jewish engagement among participants, research from Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies has found. A participant on the first Birthright Israel trip, Saratovsky also credits that experience for his own Jewish involvement. 

But at $5,000 per participant, the signature trips are also a mammoth financial undertaking, requiring both logistical mastery and a constant funding stream. (See: the organization’s efforts to quickly charter a cruise ship in order to evacuate participants who were stranded in Israel after the skies were closed during the war with Iran last June.)

Since its early days, Birthright has benefited from support from some of the Jewish community’s most prolific donors — chief among them Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, as well as Sheldon and Dr. Miriam Adelson, who donated half a billion to the organization over 15 years; following Sheldon Adelson’s death in 2021, the family scaled back its contributions, encouraging other donors to fill the gap. 

Many of those supporters — representing nearly every major Jewish foundation and individual donor family — turned out for the Manhattan gala — a sprawling, candlelit affair packed to capacity. Attended by nearly 1,000 trip alumni, along with Jewish professionals and donors, Lynn Schusterman was honored for her contribution to the project, delivering a speech about the love that her late husband, Charles, had for Israel and the butterfly effect she’s witnessed since the program launched. 

“Each of you in this room has the power and the responsibility to decide how the story of Israel and the Jewish people unfolds. When my late husband, Charlie, passed away, I had this idea of creating what I call ‘the Charlie’ — young people who had gone on Birthright, got past their community and [gave] back from what they had learned and the impact of Birthright,” said Schusterman. 

The event was emceed by Jonah Platt. Schusterman’s daughter, Stacy, and the co-president of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Lisa Eisen, co-chaired the event. Other speakers included Birthright Israel cofounder Charles Bronfman, Saratovsky and Birthright Israel CEO Gidi Mark.  

“This is a room filled with leaders, with dreamers, with community,” said Platt. 

Fortunately, for an organization seeking nearly $700 million in donations, it was also a room filled with philanthropists.