When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry

A New Yorker Reviewers' Favorites

"Beckerman recounts the historic trajectory of this grand assertion of human rights with passionate clarity and pellucid conviction."—Cynthia Ozick

AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, NEARLY THREE MILLION JEWS WERE TRAPPED INSIDE THE SOVIET UNION. They lived a paradox—unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone is the astonishing and inspiring story of their rescue. Drawing on newly released Soviet government documents and hundreds of interviews, Beckerman shows how the movement led to a mass exodus in 1989 and forced human rights into the center of American foreign policy. In cinematic detail, this multigenerational saga, filled with suspense and revelations, provides an essential missing piece of Cold War and Jewish history.

"Fresh, surprising and exceedingly well-researched."—Anne Applebaum, Washington Post Best Nonfiction 2010

"A riveting work of reporting and a magisterial history of one of the twentieth century’s great dramas of liberation."—Commentary

Gal Beckerman is a reporter at The Forward. He was a longtime editor and staff writer at the Columbia Journalism Review and has also written for the New York Times Book Review, Jerusalem Post, and Utne Reader, among other publications. He was a Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin and the recipient of a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.