#but learn she didn't have a baller tattoo from auschwitz™

[deadpanwalking]

i was born here but my dad emigrated from the ukraine with his brother in 1987 and says when they got to rome their aplications got rejected twice for not having enough proof, and so his brother got sick of waiting and went to israel 😔

Oh, until the Lautenberg Amendment, refugee status for Russian Jews who wanted to come to America was entirely predicated on who, if anyone, pissed in the INS official’s Cheerios that morning.  They'd have you go to the U.S. Embassy on Via Veneto with every member of your grubby family and interview you to establish you had a well-founded fear of persecution and specific evidence to back up your claim. Those guys (and the HIAS people who helped us prepare lol)  were so sick of us by the 1980s because there was a huge backlog of immigrants in Rome waiting to be approved, and every fucking day we’d pour in their offices, take all the candy in the bowls, and get weirded out by the compulsive American smiling.

Like, maybe they really were expecting some American Tail shit in the beginning, where we’d talk about huddling in our little mouse kitchen with our forbidden matchstick menorah or whatever. The reality was that after 70 or so years of cultural genocide, most of us were secular atheists entirely disconnected from what Americans understood to be Judaism. Our evidence of religious persecution?  Promotions we didn’t get, schools that rejected us, relocation applications that never got approved, name-calling.  By the mid-80s, the KGB was using the Lubyanka prison as a cafeteria, and not everyone was lucky enough to be thrown in a gulag and tortured. Unless you were #privileged enough to have an arrest record or a paper trail of dissidence, your immediate future was in the hands of a guy who couldn't pronounce your last name and rolled his eyes when you wasted his time describing “unofficial quotas”.

Ask any INS officer, Israeli Zionist, or tankie on Tumblr.edu: a lot of refuseniks were whiny kikes who played the victim instead of staying in the Soviet Union and taking some antisemitism for the team (or going to Israel, where we clearly belong).