Limmud NY 2016

What happened when the Soviet Jewry movement sent thousands of American tourists into the USSR to contact refuseniks in the 1970s and 80s? The movement became an unintentional leader in the burgeoning field of Eastern European Jewish tourism, playing quasi-travel agent and writing some of the first guidebooks for Jewish heritage tours of Russia. It also spawned a new genre of Jewish travel writing, in which ordinary citizens wrote themselves as characters into stories of Cold War espionage.