MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | GENRES OF PROOF | FALL 2025

A Cold War Family Reunion?: Genres of Recognition Across Life-Worlds

Victoria Smolkin • Wesleyan University

December 8th @ 5pm • Room 100 of The Frank Center for Public Affairs

Between 1961 and 1991, more than a million Soviet Jews left the Soviet Union—the largest ethnic emigration from the USSR, and the largest Jewish migration since the “Great Migration” of the turn of the century. The legal framework that provided the mechanism for this exodus was “family reunification.” Yet for the USSR to allow emigration in such numbers, this legal concept had to become a political tool that could be leveraged against Soviet power on the international stage, and before this could happen, Jewish activists abroad had to reimagine their relationship to Soviet Jews. “Family reunification” had to be something more than a legal category; it had to become a moral and emotional imperative that mobilized a movement to “Save Soviet Jewry.” How did Western Jewish activists come to reimagine Soviet Jews—politically suspect and often culturally assimilated and religiously estranged—as family? Soviet Jewish emigration provides a case study to analyze the evidentiary and affective gaps between institutional genres of proof and the lived realities they attempt to represent. What kind of evidence was needed to make distant strangers on the opposite side of the Cold War divide into real and symbolic relations? This talk explores how bureaucratic forms structured and legitimized migration across ideological imaginaries and political borders, while also tracing the silences and uncertainties that haunt the historical archive.

Genres of Proof
View Fall 2025 Lecture List

Center for the Humanities · 95 Pearl Street, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/humanities