The Soviet Jew: A Weaponized Immigrant’s Tale

A serialized book by Yasha Levine

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The Soviet Jew: A Weaponized Immigrant's Tale

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The family visiting the Vatican on a day trip from our refugee camp, 1989.

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Announcement

1. Gonna serialize a book about Soviet Jews and my family's weaponized immigrant story

Chapter One: Why?

1. Victims of Communism

2. The Personal is Political

3. An immigrant living through American decline

Chapter Two: Ancestors

1. The Old Country

2. Lev Trotsky and the forgotten Jews

3. Fixing the czar’s carriage

4. A boy from Belarus

5. My Ukrainian grandma and our lost history of pogroms

6. Parallel realities: Nabokov and what the Russian aristocracy was doing during those Civil War pogroms

7. Lenin: Respect Ukrainian peasants, treat the Jews with an iron rod

8. White Russian “saviors”

9. The Holodomor and the erasure of Jewish victims

10. “To the kikes, flow the riches. And the peasants, they’re treated like bitches.”

11. Working the GULAGs: A brief, depressing outline of my grandfather’s life

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Notes and various bits and pieces, reverse chronological order:

• “Who am I? Well, I was born in Ukraine, so I am Ukrainian. But I am from the Donbas, and we’ve always been something different..."

• A short ethnic history of Ukraine...courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

• Farting on Lenin…and some notes on nationalism in the Soviet Union

• From Russian revolutionary to CIA agent in one generation

• Outer Richmond Life

• The Soviet Union and the Great Industrial God

• A few victims

• Moving out

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• Operation: Save the Jews

• Court Russians and Soviet Emigres

• Russiagate: A coming of age moment for Soviet immigrants

• Weaponizing Fascism for Democracy

• Weaponized Immigrants and the History of America's Imperial Propaganda Machine

• Part One: portrait of a Soviet CIA propagandist as a Nazi collaborator young

• Part Two: Radio Liberation from Bolshevism

• Part Three: The schizoid world of a Soviet anti-communist propagandist.”

• Rare 1960s propaganda film about the CIA's “Radio Liberation”

• Georgetown's Russian language program was run by a weaponized Russian fascist immigrant group

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So I’m finally rebooting this book after months of inactivity. Turns out I needed time, sleep, and some personal space to do this kind of work — and those are precisely the things I haven’t had have since my daughter showed up and we got booted out of our place in Los Angeles and went on the road. Now that we’re a bit settled in San Francisco and getting some help from grandma, I think I can start to write again and get deep into the this thing. So keep a look out for an update in the next week or so.

Since this book is only gonna grow and grow and get more chaotic, I figure it needs a permanent table of contents. So this is what this page is gonna to be — that, and a place where I can keep some of more disorganized notes and thoughts and earlier writings on the topic of weaponized immigrants. So bookmark it for future reading.

Have a great New Year’s Eve. See you in 2022.

—Yasha Levine

December 31, 2021

The cover

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