Book Review - "Be A Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide" by Izabella Tabarovsky

There are two kinds of books written for Jewish students on campus. 

The first kind tries to comfort them. It tells them they are not alone. It offers reassurance, moral clarity, and a few talking points they can deploy in a seminar.

The second kind does something rarer. It treats Jewish students as agents, not patients. It assumes they are capable of intellectual seriousness, strategic discipline, and public leadership. It does not flatten the terrain for them. It hands them better tools.

Izabella Tabarovsky’s Be A Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide is firmly in the second category.

I have read a lot of campus advocacy books. Most have at least one chapter that makes me want to throw the book across the room. Either because the author is trading in slogans. Or because they misunderstand what campus life actually feels like. Or because they keep giving advice that only works if you are already the kind of student who never doubts themselves, never gets tired, and never has to write midterms.

This one was different. I kept catching myself having an embarrassingly specific reaction: Yes. Exactly. Thank you. Finally. Who told you what’s in my notes app.

Tabarovsky’s organising choice is also part of what makes the book land. She builds each chapter around a refusenik, or a cluster of refuseniks, and pairs that story with a case study of a Jewish campus advocate from the last decade on an American campus. The result is a book that is not only philosophical, but tactically grounded. It is not nostalgia. It is transfer learning.

And most importantly, the book is not trying to turn Jewish students into better debaters. It is trying to turn them into a movement.

What Tabarovsky is really doing

The superficial pitch is straightforward: learn from the Soviet Jewry movement, then apply those lessons to campus now.

But what she is actually offering is something sharper: a framework for refusing the story your campus wants Jews to play inside.

The Soviet system did not merely oppress Jews materially. It tried to rewire what Jews were allowed to be in public. It punished Jewish particularity, ridiculed Jewish solidarity, and branded Jewish self determination as moral contamination. That story has not disappeared. It has been repackaged in campus language.

Tabarovsky’s “refusenik” is not just the Soviet Jew who applied for an exit visa and paid for that audacity with years of harassment. It is also the Jewish student who refuses to internalise the rules of the campus moral economy.

Refuse the demand that your peoplehood must be translated into someone else’s categories to be legitimate.

Refuse the demand that Jewish self determination is uniquely suspicious.

Refuse the demand that you must prove your worthiness by performing fragility or contrition.

In other words, refuse the script.

The five principles, and why they hit so hard

In her conclusion, Tabarovsky distils the book into five principles:

1. Reclaim your Zionism

2. Educate yourself and others

3. Find your comrades in arms

4. Reject victimhood

5. Lead with Jewish

Even just reading that list, you can see why I felt so aligned. Because whether she intended it or not, those five map cleanly onto the three pillar framework I laid out in my first essay: Pride, Partnership, Power.

This is the part of the review where I could pretend to be neutral. I will not. The alignment is real, and it matters.

1. Reclaim your Zionism

Tabarovsky is blunt: treat the anti Israel propaganda ecosystem for what it is, and stop conceding language that belongs to you.

That has been my position for years, and I said it publicly long before October 7 turned “Zionist” into the campus version of a scarlet letter. Back in 2018, when I was serving as Chairperson of WUJS, I told The Times of Israel that the move away from the word “Zionism” because it “doesn’t poll well” was strategically and philosophically backwards.

My view then, and now: if a word names your people’s liberation story, you do not abandon it because your opponents ran a branding campaign against it. You reclaim it. You deepen it. You teach it better.

Tabarovsky is doing that work here. Not by romanticising Zionism, but by insisting it is a serious ideology with internal diversity and a coherent moral claim. That is exactly how you stop students from getting trapped in defensive apology loops.

2. Educate yourself and others

This is where the book becomes quietly ruthless, because a lot of campus Jews are still operating with a model of advocacy that looks like this: get a training, memorise a few facts, then go out and “counter misinformation.” It is a strategy built for arguments, not for ecosystems.

Tabarovsky pushes something closer to what I actually want for students: intellectual formation. Learn Jewish history as continuity, not trauma trivia. Learn the political history of Soviet anti Zionism, not just the emotional reality of being targeted. Learn how ideologies migrate and adapt.

And yes, this is exactly why I keep telling students to read more than they think they need to. You cannot outwork propaganda with pamphlets. You outgrow it with literacy.

Together, “reclaim Zionism” and “educate yourself and others” sit squarely inside Pride as I use the term. Not pride as vibe. Pride as rootedness and competence.

3. Find your comrades in arms

This is the principle I think too many professionals say they value, while building systems that make it structurally harder.

Tabarovsky is right that the Soviet Jewry movement was strong not only because it had moral clarity, but because it had cross campus coherence. Students did not merely “do activism” on their own campus. They saw themselves as nodes in a broader movement.

We have lost some of that. Not everywhere, and not completely, but enough that many student leaders default to a lonely model of advocacy: one campus, one WhatsApp group, one exhausted president, one crisis at a time.

There is a bigger historical story here about the decline of independent Jewish student organising and the rise of professionalised campus advocacy in North America from the 1990s onward, but this is a story for a future essay.

For now, what matters is that Tabarovsky is re teaching a muscle we need again: Partnership as movement infrastructure, not as occasional coalition theatre. For Jewish student activists to succeed, they need to find their people.

4. Reject victimhood

This chapter is where a lot of campus professionals get nervous, because they confuse “reject victimhood” with “pretend nothing hurts.” That is not what is being argued. The argument is about identity posture.

If Jewish students are taught, implicitly, that their history starts with Auschwitz and ends with “awareness,” then they will show up to campus conflict as haunted guests, not as co owners of the future. That posture is psychologically corrosive and strategically disastrous. You can preserve memory without building identity around defeat.

This is also where the book connects directly to the problem I named in my recent Holocaust education-focused essay: remembrance that becomes moral theatre does not build durable responsibility. It often builds symbolic pity, which is the least useful currency on campus. Rejecting victimhood is not a denial of vulnerability. It is the insistence that vulnerability is not the whole story.

That is Power.

5. Lead with Jewish

This is the part I loved most, because it goes beyond messaging into aesthetic and ritual strategy. Tabarovsky highlights the “religiously inflected guerrilla theatre” of the Soviet Jewry student movement. Prison uniforms. Shofars. Subversive iconography. Humour. Symbolism that refuses to be diluted into generic “human rights week” language.

That matters because Jewish student activism has become, in many places, visually timid. We have absorbed the campus demand to make ourselves legible by making ourselves smaller. Bringing Jewishness back into public protest is not just about authenticity. It is about narrative control. It signals that Jewish public life is not an apologetic footnote. It is a civilisation showing up in full colour.

I have seen that play out in real time. When I brought a large shofar to a 2024 rally at Queen’s marking 150 days since October 7 and blew it as we walked through campus, some students told me afterwards it was one of the most grounding and emotionally clarifying parts of the entire action. Not because it was loud, although it was. Because it was Jewish.

It wasn’t a gimmick. It was an attempt to show leadership through a powerful Jewish symbol. It was a demonstration of what Jewish Power is all about.

Where I would push the book further

If I have one critique, it is this: the book is very American.

That is not a moral complaint. It is a scope limitation. Tabarovsky often addresses “American Jewish students” in ways that could easily be broadened to “diaspora Jewish students,” and doing so would make the book more usable for the Jewish students I have been privileged to work with over the years: in Canada, the UK, Australia, South Africa, France, Germany, Chile, Mexico and elsewhere, where campus dynamics share a common architecture while differing in execution and constraints.

Canadian campuses, for example, have their own ecosystem: different student politics, different institutional reflexes, different relationships to multiculturalism, and different legal frameworks around speech and discrimination. The survival strategies are similar, but the pressure points differ.

This is not a reason to dismiss the book. It is a plea for the next edition to go global, and honestly, it is a reason for diaspora educators to build supplements: case studies and adaptations that translate the refusenik principles into local context.

How to use this book as a tool, not just a read

If you are a student leader, here is a practical way to turn Be A Refusenik into an organising asset:

1. Make it a six week leadership track.

One principle per week. One chapter discussion. One applied campus action.

2. Pair each principle with a skill.

Reclaim Zionism: A narrative framing exercise to help you tell your story better.

Educate yourself: Build a shared reading and media list for your team based on your different roles.

Comrades in arms: Have each team member set up three one on ones with potential new Jewish students to join your group OR with potential campus allies. Then spend time mapping your coalition.

Reject victimhood: Building on earlier narrative framing exercises, run a follow up exercise for the group on telling your Jewish story, then plan a public presence action for the next month.

Lead with Jewish: Spend time with your team designing a symbolic action on your campus that is unmistakably Jewish, and discuss why this matters.

3. End with a movement plan, not a reflection circle.

The book is not asking you to process. It is asking you to build.

If you are a professional, use it differently: 

Run it as staff training for how to think, not what to say.

And then ask the harder question: what in your institutional model makes it easier for students to stay isolated, reactive, and dependent on professional infrastructure?

If that question stings, good. It means you are touching something real.

Why I am recommending it so strongly

Tabarovsky has written something that feels rare right now: a book that treats Jewish students as capable of seriousness without turning them into mascots for communal anxiety.

It is not perfect. But it is clean in its thinking, disciplined in its posture, and deeply respectful of student agency. Most of all, it refuses the reduction of Jewish campus life into a cycle of fear, apology, and reaction.

It offers another option: refusal as leadership.

And in the current campus climate, that might be the most hopeful thing you can teach.