‘Above all, don’t lie to yourself’

As the players in the war in Iran entangle themselves further into unpredictable disaster — “it is the most complicated zugzwang,” Alexander Smukler said — our Moscow-born, Montclair-based analyst explained his expertise, its roots, and its limitations.

First, he explained the word “zugzwang.” It’s a chess term, used to describe the unenviable position of having to make a move when every possible move necessarily would make a bad situation worse. It’s a more sophisticated version of “from the frying pan to the fire,” with the understanding that there’s no place else to go.

“Whenever I try to present information to people during the last four years” — we’ve been writing these analyses here ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 — “I always want them to know that it is my personal opinion, based on my knowledge, my experience, and my background.”

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Some readers have thought that he’s an apologist for the MAGA movement, but he is not, Mr. Smukler said. In fact, he is deeply puzzled by it, and it is that sense of befuddlement that comes clear as he talks about his background.

“I am different from a majority of our readers because I don’t know what MAGA means,” he said. He knows the literal meaning — Make America Great Again — but as an immigrant, an American by choice, he cannot understand it. “I came here 35 years ago, and I don’t understand the idea of making America great again, because I have never lived here at a time when America was not great,” he said.

He tries to describe what he sees dispassionately and objectively, he said. “I analyze the situation in Eastern Europe, on the Russian/Ukrainian front, because I was born there, I grew up there, I lived there, and I have been working there for the last 35 years. I know it well.” So he can offer opinions because they are based in fact and filtered through his own first-hand knowledge. “I try to avoid discussing my own opinion about U.S. internal politics, and especially about MAGA, Trump, and any other political movement inside the United States, because I am an immigrant. I am still learning.

“My kids grew up in this country. They view the situation differently. But I’m not an expert. I can only analyze American politics — particularly politics around American foreign policy — from the 35 years that I have been here, starting during the Clinton administration.”

He is neither dispassionate nor objective when it comes to Israel, or to Iran because of the existential threat that country is to the Jewish state. “I analyze the real events happening in the real world right now, but my heart belongs to those who are trying to stop ballistic missile and nuclear programs  in Iran,” he said. “To my mind, that was a threat not only to Israel, but also to the world. This has nothing to do with Trump or his administration or any other administration.

“When I used to live behind the Iron Curtain, we always saw the United States as a model of democracy and freedom. We always lived with the idea of breaking the wall, getting fresh air, and living in a real democracy.

“Obviously that was a very idealistic model of the United States. When I arrived here on September 20, 1991, I came as a refugee who loved this country. I came with an open heart. I was always trying to become a member of society, with love and openness. America was always a light at the end of the tunnel for us, when we lived in a socialist country with a brutal antisemitic, anti-Zionist dictatorship.

“My intention always was to break through the Iron Curtain and come to America, where I could live as a proud Jew and my children could be raised as proud Jewish kids. Where they didn’t have to hide their identity.”

There were three ways for Jews to live in the Soviet Union, Mr. Smukler said; he described them through the lens of his own family’s story.

“My family survived the Holocaust,” he said. “My father was 15 years old when he and his parents escaped from Babyn Yar.” Babi Yar, to give its Russian name, was the ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv where the Nazis had Jews march, on Yom Kippur in 1941. The Nazis told the Jews to strip naked and then shot them; their bodies conveniently fell into the ravine, sparing their murderers any need to dispose of them. In two days, 37,000 Jews were murdered, shot to death. Babyn Yar because a symbol of the Holocaust by bullets. The Soviets hid the truth about the massacre; Gorbachev opened the site.

But Mr. Smukler’s grandfather, Joseph Smukler, already had an old cart, and he bought a lame horse for two bottles of vodka. Then, instead of going in the direction of Babyn Yar, he had the horse wander in the other direction. He was able to save himself, his wife, his younger sons, and his baby daughter.

But he could not save his oldest son, Efraim, whom he could not find when the family had to leave. Efraim ended up at Babyn Yar. He was shot and left to die. For 80 years, his family thought that he had died there. “But the Russian Ministry of Defense recently put up a website with millions of names,” Mr. Smukler said. One of those names was Efraim Smukler. That’s how he learned that his uncle did not die at Babyn Yar. He had been shot and wounded; he had fallen into the ravine and corpses had rained down on him and covered him. But he survived. “He managed to escape at night from the mass grave where he was buried under dead bodies.

“And despite having been shot by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in occupied Kyiv, he was saved by a Ukrainian family who treated his wounds.

“Eventually, he joined the underground resistance, the partisans, and he hid in the forest not far from Kyiv until 1944, when he was killed in a battle with Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.

“After the war, my family, like 90 percent of the Jewish families who survived, tried to assimilate. The best way to survive in the Soviet Union after the establishment of the Jewish state in 1947 and the massive antisemitic campaign Stalin started in 1949 was to assimilate and erase their Jewish identity.

“My father’s first language was Yiddish. He went to cheder. But I never heard a word of Yiddish from him. He didn’t want us to know the language. He would speak Yiddish with his father, but they’d lock the door first, so we kids didn’t hear it.

“My mother was a hardline communist.” She was a dentist who became a top hospital manager, at least in part because of the rigidity of her beliefs. “My father was an engineer working on Russian submarines.

“They believed, as my mother told me, that in 20 to 30 years, the Soviet Union will not have us be marked as Jews in their passports” — the ironically named necessary internal documents that did not allow their holders to travel but did label their ethnicity. His mother believed that “as Jews, we will disappear into history, because we will be Soviet citizens, without any connection to our Jewish roots. We will erase those roots.” That was why they had to assimilate.

“There were millions and millions of Jewish families who did that,” Mr. Smukler said.

The country was officially religion-free at the time anyway; all practice, even of the homegrown Russian Orthodox church, was forbidden.

There were two other ways for Jews to survive, Mr. Smukler said. “There was an underground secret movement, always connected with Israel, of people who didn’t want to assimilate. They wanted to learn more and more about Israel, to protect their Jewish identity, and to try to go to Israel. They were true Zionists.

“And there was another group of people who tried not to fight communism, not to assimilate, but to emigrate, break through the Iron Curtain, and bring their children to countries where they could speak Hebrew or Yiddish, go to shul, celebrate Jewish holidays, and let their kids have a brit milah and a bar mitzvah.”

Eventually history came to the rescue of many of those Soviet Jews. “The Soviet Union collapsed, many Soviet Jews came back to their roots, and about 1.2 million Russian Jews immigrated to Israel,” Mr. Smukler said.

He defined Russian Jews and Jews who came from Russia or the 15 states that had been part of the Soviet Union. Most of them spoke Russian as their native language; the language of the country where they’d lived likely was their second language. (There were some exceptions, he said; Georgian Jews spoke Georgian, and Bukharian Jews spoke Farsi, the language they’d brought with them from Persia.) Most Russian Jews are Ashkenazi — again with some exceptions — even if they are from a Central Asian country; their families likely escaped there during the war.

Assimilation meant that even those few Jews who were religiously observant looked like everyone else. There were some Chabad rabbis in Russia — Mr. Smukler learned that firsthand when he had his son circumcised there — but even that mohel wore a regular cap, no visible peyes or tzitzit, and looked like everyone else. “I never saw a person with peyes in my entirely life until 1990, when a Chabad yeshiva opened in Moscow,” he said. That was a year before he left.

The point of all this history is “I represent, in my heart and my background, those 400,000 of us who came from the Soviet Union, with completely different views of what’s going on in the world. Because our background is different, we are very different from you guys. First, because when we came here, we believed that America is great and will be great forever. We have no idea what ‘making America great again’ means.

“And second, because the existence of the state of Israel makes us completely different people. When Israel was created, it gave us strength inside our souls. It made us proud. It gave us the opportunity to reconnect to ourselves, with our souls, with our ancestors.

“We don’t speak Yiddish. We didn’t go to a synagogue. Ninety percent of the men never had a brit milah. We didn’t have bar mitzvah. We never sat at a seder. We had zero knowledge of Jewish tradition, of what it means to be a Jew. We did know that our relatives, our grandparents or great-grandparents, were raped or killed during the pogroms at the beginning of the 20th century, organized by organized by the Czar’s Black Hundreds. After the revolution, the Red Army organized pogroms.  After that, we lost millions of relatives in the Holocaust. Every Soviet Jewish family has a story about how they or their close relatives survived.

“We survived incredible persecution by Stalin’s regime. When Stalin started his antisemitic, anti-Zionist campaign in 1949, that lasted until after his death in 1953, we lived with a huge stamp on our forehead — Jew — living in a country that every day, in school or university, in the office, on the radio, tells us that Israel is the enemy, that Israel is fascist, that Zionism is fascist, and that Zionism has created the world’s imperialist power, the United States.

“That’s the reason why our parents never told us about our grandparents, our great-grandparents, and our ancestors. So when we came to this country — I’m speaking for myself, but also on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of people who came to the United States from the Soviet Union — we came with the idea that our children will be raised freely. That they could have a bar mitzvah. That we could sit around the seder table with our children. That we could give them the option not only to be proud Jews, but to go back to religion if they want to.

“We could give them an organic connection to the state of Israel, where lots of our relatives live. We still live in galut, in the diaspora, but we have the option to be Jews.

“And the reason that I’m saying this now” — and this is the hard part, so attention must be paid — “is that I am thinking that the situation for Jews in the United States today, for me, as a person who grew up in the Soviet Union, reminds me of living in the Soviet Union.

“I have the sick feeling that the Jewish community in the United States is entering a very difficult time. There ae so many things that remind me of the place where I used to live, the place I devoted a huge part of my life trying to get out of.

“I don’t want to lie to myself. We have to tell the truth to ourselves. Most of my Jewish friends have the same question — how do we survive in the United States under the enormous pressure of the anti-Zionist movement? It was not created by the KGB, it is not supported by the government — not yet — but it has a huge impact on our lives.”

By now, Mr. Smukler has many relatives in the United States. He and his wife have children; he has a sister who lives locally, and she has children; he also has cousins. They are all close; in the Russian style, he considers his cousins’ children his own nieces and nephews. Many of them are college age now.

“I was surprised to learn that one of the major considerations in their choice of college is not the quality of the university, or its reputation, but if there is a safe environment for Jews there,” he said. “If they can wear a kippah freely.”

He talked about Tessa Veksler, the young Russian-American Jewish activist who “is my huge hero.” When he heard Ms. Veksler use the term “conditional Jew” — a term he’d never heard before — he asked his nieces and nephews about it.

“They all knew it,” he said. “Gen Z kids all know that term.

“It means that if you want to become a member of a student group, a fraternity, if it’s not a Jewish fraternity, you have to become a conditional Jew.

“That means that you are allowed to say that you’re Jewish, but you have to condemn Israel. You have to recognize Israel as an apartheid, oppressive state. Basically, you have to betray everything that your parents, who came from the Soviet Union, told you about the state of Israel.

“So in order to have friends, as my niece just told me, you have to stand up and say, ‘I’m a Jew, but I hate Israel. I hate Bibi. I think that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. I condemn everything that Israel has done in Lebanon against Hezbollah, and in Gaza against Hamas.’”

Mr. Smukler made the connection to his life in the Soviet Union. “I also grew up in an environment where most Jews were conditional Jews,” he said. “We were forced to stand and condemn Israel as an apartheid state.

“In Soviet propaganda, Israel was called the Zionist aircraft carrier.”

What????

“It means that Israel isn’t really a state. It’s just a military base created by the imperialists to protect their best interests and control the oil trade.”

In this worldview, “Israel has nothing to do with Jewish history. Or Jews. There’s no connection to the Jews who used to live there, thousands of years ago.” According to this theory, he continued, Israel was a postwar imperialist creation, the demon spawn of NATO, and especially of the United States.” It is not what he expected in the United States, and it is not what he found here.

When Russian Jews arrived in the United States, their goal was to become Americans. “Despite the fact that our English is broken, our education was different, we always tried to contribute to this country, to pay taxes, to be loyal citizens.

“When we came to this country, we came with love — love of democracy, and of America.

“So now, when our children do not want to go to a college where they will not feel comfortable, where they will be conditional Jews, it reminds me of the time when I joined the underground Jewish movement to fight for my identity and my freedom.

“I’m afraid that now American Jews, and especially Jewish leadership, do not understand the danger of the situation that we are in right now in the United States. And I’m afraid that the golden age for American Jews is over. We always have to think of what we’re going to do next.

“It’s not happened yet, but it could happen very soon. In a blink of an eye, we could once again be thinking about where we have to move, like we did in Spain in 1492, from Germany in the sixteenth century, from czarist Russia, obviously during the Holocaust, and so many other times. Our history is full of examples.”

What to do?

“We have to unite. We have to stay strong against the antisemitic, anti-Zionist movement that is growing so rapidly here.

“It doesn’t matter if you support Trump. Some people hate him. Some people admire him. My message is simple. I don’t care who you are or what party you belong to, but understand that we live in a dangerous time.

“The state of Israel is a main pillar of Jewish identity. Whether you are religious or atheist, it makes you a proud Jew. If we lose that feeling, we will disappear in history.”

That quote that’s the headline of our story — “above all, don’t lie to yourself” — is from Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov.” This is the full quote:

“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And, having no respect, he ceases to love.”