survived Hitler’s and Stalin’s pogroms.” The transformation of Socialists into Jews in the United States had coincided with the transformation of Socialists into Jews in the Soviet Union, but whereas in the United States it had marked the Jewish entry into the elite, in the Soviet Union it had accompanied the growing Jewish alienation. (Only a minority of American Jews had been Socialists, of course, but there is little doubt that Protestantized Judaism had supplanted Socialism as the dominant nontraditional Jewish ideology.) The poor relations of the 1930s had metamorphosed into the rich uncles of the 1970s, and after Israel had vanquished its enemies and begun to lose some of its luster and innocence, the exodus of the Soviet Jewry had become—briefly—the American Jewry’s most urgent, emotional, and unifying cause. By 1974, a broad coalition of Jewish organizations and politicians had managed to thwart the Nixon-Kissinger “détente” designs by assuring congressional adoption of the “Jackson-Vanik amendment,” which linked U.S.-Soviet trade to Jewish emigration from the USSR. As J. J. Goldberg put it, “Jewish activists had taken on the Nixon administration and the Kremlin and won. Jews had proven to the world and to themselves that they could stand up and fight for themselves. The stain of Holocaust abandonment had finally been removed.” 212 Although the Jackson-Vanik amendment (initiated and guided through Congress by Senator Jackson’s chief of staff, Richard Perle, and Senator Ribicoff’s chief of staff, Morris Amitay) referred to the freedom of emigration in general, it was applied only to the Jews. The exclusive right to request an exit visa resulted in ever greater alienation: all ethnic Jews became would-be émigrés, and thus potential traitors. It also led to the creation of an ever growing group of pseudo-Zionists and pseudo-Jews: the only way to leave the Soviet Union was to claim a desire to go to Israel. The late twentieth-century exodus was similar to the early twentieth-century one in that the overwhelming majority of émigrés preferred America to Palestine; the main difference was that the only way to go to America (or anywhere else) was by applying to go to Palestine. The question of where to go mattered to some more than to others, but what mattered to all of Hodl’s grandchildren was that they had the opportunity to leave the Soviet Union. The late twentieth-century exodus had much more to do with the perception that Hodl had chosen incorrectly than with the discovery that Chava and Beilke had chosen correctly. Everyone seemed to agree that Hodl’s path—socialism—had been a tragic mistake, and that the only real question was whether to do now what Hodl should have done then: emigrate from a false paradise. Many of them did—both before and after the Soviet state finally agreed that