Peter Golden is an award-winning journalist, biographer, novelist, and historian. Some of his work has appeared in the Detroit Free Press Magazine, Albany Times Union, New Jersey Monthly, Beyond Computing, Midstream, and the Forward. Golden s Quiet Diplomat, a biography of industrialist and political insider Max M. Fisher, was widely reviewed and was translated into Hebrew. With J. Stanley Shaw, Golden wrote I Rest My Case, a memoir of Shaw s childhood years under the supervision of the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum and his career as a preeminent bankruptcy lawyer. Golden s most recent novel, Comeback Love, is published by Atria Books. He lives outside Albany, New York, with his wife and son.
"An extensively researched history of the impact of the Cold War on Soviet Jews, Golden's book is largely concerned with the American Jewish community's efforts to help their Soviet counterparts emigrate from the flagrantly anti-Semitic U.S.S.R. under Stalin and his successors. Arguing that American Jews, in the wake of the Holocaust, feared they were abandoning Soviet Jews in the same way they had supposedly abandoned European Jews to Hitler (thus suffering from what "Dr Mortimer Ostow diagnosed as a kind of survivor guilt"), Golden guides the reader through a history of activism, from the formation of groups such as the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry to the militarisation of the Jewish Defense League. As the plight of Soviet Jewry eventually becomes inextricably linked to Cold War, Golden illustrates how activists attempted to navigate the counterproductive goals of Nixon's policy and Kissinger's realpolitik, as well as the efforts of Israel and the U.S.S.R. to undermine the movement. Given its politically-charged subject matter, Golden (The Quiet Diplomat) is remarkably even-handed (he proves equally critical of Israel, America, and the U.S.S.R.), but his narrative -- based on thorough research and interviews with Gorbachev, Reagan, Nixon, Kissinger, and others -- can be tangential and disorganised, tending to follow a single figure or movement for a while before backtracking in a manner that only muddies the already complex Cold War history he is trying to illuminate." (Mar.) --Publishers Weekly
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