Watch & Listen
Podcast interviews, recorded lectures, and public conversations on antizionism, the Soviet Jewry movement, and American Jewish life.
Featured
The Story of American Antizionism
Call Me Back with Dan Senor
January 2026
Dan Senor interviews Prof. Kelner on the rarely-told history of antizionism — how a framework designed to deny Jewish life under Soviet rule has resurfaced in the West long before October 7, and why many American Jews were unprepared for its scale and intensity.
Featured
Open Up the Gates
The Wreckage, Season 3 — American Jewish Historical Society
2025
Producer & Writer
The final season of the AJHS narrative podcast chronicles how Soviet Jews struggled to leave the USSR — and how a grassroots movement among American Jews grew to secure their release, shaping the political identity of the American Jewish community as we know it today. Hosted by Broadway's Rebecca Naomi Jones.
Podcasts & Lectures
February 2026
Cold War Ghosts: The American Afterlife of Soviet Antizionism
Don't Know Much About with Naya Lekht
What does antizionism look like in the American context? How has it embedded itself in civic, academic, and Jewish institutional spaces? And why has there been so little education or clarity about it within American Jewish institutions themselves?
January 2026
Antizionism and the American Left's Jewish Problem
Identity/Crisis (Shalom Hartman Institute)
Antizionism has become a badge of belonging—and a tool of exclusion. On this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer speaks with Shaul Kelner about how anti-Zionism operates not only as an argument but as a movement culture—shaping who belongs on the American left and what counts as 'moral.'
December 2025
January 2025
January 2025
Voices of Defiance: Soviet Jewry and the Refuseniks
Wende Museum
Prof. Kelner joins distinguished historians of the Soviet Jewry movement to discuss the state of research on the topic. With Michael Beizer, Nadia Iermakov, and Ann Komaromi. Panel moderated by David N. Myers.
February 2025
Mobilizing for Freedom: Lessons from the Soviet Jewry Movement
ANU Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv
The grassroots strategies that united a global Jewish community in the fight for freedom — and what lessons we can learn today.
September 2024
A Cold War Exodus: Book Talk
American Jewish Historical Society
Prof. Kelner discusses A Cold War Exodus — the story of how American Jewish activists built the most effective human rights campaign of the Cold War. A conversation with The Atlantic's Gal Beckerman.
September 2024
How American Activists Helped Free Soviet Jews
Brandeis University — Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education
The story of Soviet Jewry activism in Jewish American educational spaces—bar and bat mitzvah twinning, school field trips to rallies, summer camp programming, and much more.
April 2023
Elie Wiesel Goes to Moscow: On the (In)visibility of Systemic Antisemitism
Vanderbilt Law School — Dean's Lecture Series on Race and Discrimination
How Elie Wiesel helped Westerners recognize antisemitism as a systemic force in Soviet society — and what that means for recognizing it today.
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