{"id":137,"date":"2010-12-16T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2010-12-16T12:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/kissinger-and-soviet-jewry-contextualized.html"},"modified":"2010-12-16T12:00:49","modified_gmt":"2010-12-16T12:00:49","slug":"kissinger-and-soviet-jewry-contextualized","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/kissinger-and-soviet-jewry-contextualized.html","title":{"rendered":"Kissinger and Soviet Jewry, “contextualized”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"KissingerHenry
\nKissinger’s attempt to weasel out of the appalling comments he is now
\nrevealed to have made regarding U.S. policy on Soviet Jewry is not,
\nshall we say, convincing. Here, courtesy of Jim Besser’s good post<\/a> on the subject, is what Kissinger said to Richard Nixon in the White House in 1973:<\/p>\n

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of
\nAmerican foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the
\nSoviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian
\nconcern.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here is his post-facto “contextualization”:<\/p>\n

The quotations ascribed to me in the transcript of the conversation
\nwith President Nixon must be viewed in the context of the time.
\nPresident Nixon and I had raised the issue of Jewish emigration from the
\nSoviet Union early in his Administration. In order to avoid questions
\nof sovereignty, we dealt with it as a humanitarian matter separate from
\nthe foreign policy issues since, in the aftermath of the invasion of
\nCzechoslovakia, normal diplomatic channels were substantially closed.
\nBy this method and the persistent private representation at the highest
\nlevel we managed to raise emigration from 700 per year to close to
\n40,000 in 1972. We disagreed with the Jackson Amendment, which made
\nJewish emigration a foreign policy issue. We feared that the Amendment
\nwould reduce emigration, which is exactly what happened. Jewish
\nemigration never reached the level of 40,000 again until the Soviet
\nUnion collapsed. The conversation between Nixon and me must be seen in
\nthe context of that dispute and of our distinction between a foreign
\npolicy and a humanitarian approach.<\/em>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What Kissinger is trying to claim in his apologia is that
\nthe emigration of Jews from the USSR was in fact an objective of
\nAmerican foreign policy–i.e. that the reason the Nixon Administration
\nopposed the Jackson Amendment was that it would be counterproductive<\/i>, reducing the number of Jewish emigrants by making Jewish emigration a (public) foreign policy goal. <\/p>\n

But that’s not the point he was making to Nixon. To his anti-Semitic
\nboss he was simply declaring that that it was not an American
\npolicy goal to facilitate Jewish emigration (or to prevent Jewish
\ngenocide)–irrespective of how such a goal might or might not be
\nconveyed to anyone. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Kissinger’s attempt to weasel out of the appalling comments he is now revealed to have made regarding U.S. policy on Soviet Jewry is not, shall we say, convincing. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}