When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Gal Beckerman

Just a kid during the Cold War, Gal Beckerman opens his lengthy, lucid account with memories of his unseen bar mitzvah “twin”a boy whose family was refused permission to immigrate from the Soviet Union. When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone is both an insightful history of the plight of Russian Jews from the 1950s-’80s and a chronicle of how American Jews organized to support them. In so doing, they atoned for inaction during the Holocaust and enhanced the power of their political lobbying in the United States. Along with Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents, their tireless campaign exposed the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet regime. “The Soviet Jewry movement cannot claim responsibility for finally shoving the Soviet state off the cliffthere were too many other factors responsible for that,” he writes. “The right to leave gave one the chance to vote with his or her feet.” In any such election, the Communist Party would have lost in a landslide.