Description:

The Spring 2025 Colloquium in International Security Studies continues with a presentation by Henry Chauncey ‘57 Postdoctoral Fellow Daniel Chardell. A historian specializing in the history of U.S. foreign relations, the Cold War, and the Middle East, Chardell will present “Let my People Go—Where? Soviet Jewish Emigration and the End of the Cold War in the Middle East.”

Chardell’s paper traces how the coincidence of perestroika and U.S. refugee restrictions in the late 1980s redirected the flow of Soviet Jewish emigrants away from their preferred destination, the United States, and toward Israel. The consequent wave of immigration to Israel engendered a discourse across the Arabic-speaking Middle East that Palestinians were paying the price for Soviet human rights reforms. Thus, the abrupt success of the Cold War-era American campaign for Soviet Jewish emigration inadvertently became entangled in, and altered the course of, the U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace process into the post-Cold War era.

This event is open to the Yale community; lunch will be provided. Please email kaete.oconnell@yale.edu to receive the reading materials for this colloquium.