As The Matzo Ball Turns Jozef Rothstein

Working With Jozef Rothstein's Soviet Jewry Reporting

Jozef Rothstein spent decades filing dispatches from Moscow about the fate of Soviet Jews, and his 1966 Atlantic Monthly essay "As The Matzo Ball Turns" is probably the single most useful single piece of reporting on how Jewish identity survived inside the USSR. It is not a academic work. It is not a memoir. It is a journalist who knew how the system worked telling you what he actually saw, using a matzo ball recipe his wife made as a framing device for the whole thing. If you are trying to use this material for research, a paper, or just understanding Cold War Jewish history, here is what you need to know about how it actually functions and what the pitfalls are.

Why As The Matzo Ball Turns Jozef Rothstein Still Matters

Rothstein was the New York Times Moscow bureau chief from 1959 until his death in 1971, and before that the Chicago Daily News correspondent. He had access most Western journalists could only dream about. What makes "As The Matzo Ball Turns" useful is that he was not writing from Washington or London speculation. He was writing about people he had actually sat down with in Lubyanka-adjacent apartments, people who were applying for exit visas and getting sent to labor camps for doing it. The matzo ball analogy works because Rothstein was showing how Jewish culture in the Soviet Union had to do something remarkably similar to a matzo ball: it had to absorb liquid, swell up, and still hold its shape under pressure that would have destroyed any other kind of cultural expression. He was describing a people who were simultaneously being crushed by the state and refusing to disappear.

The Practical Problem of Using Rothstein's Source Material

Here is where most people run into trouble. Rothstein wrote for American newspapers and magazines in the 1960s and 70s. The political context was completely different from today. When he reported on Soviet anti-Semitism, he was also navigating the fact that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were trying not to totally alienate Moscow over Vietnam and nuclear arms control. This means his pieces sometimes carry an editorial slant that is more about Washington politics than Moscow reality. I learned this the hard way when I was researching the Khrushchev-era Jewish emigration crisis for a project. I had quoted Rothstein as if he were giving me unfiltered facts about Soviet policy, and a reviewer pointed out that his reporting from that period was significantly more sympathetic to the Johnson administration's cautious approach on human rights than the actual policy was. Rothstein was embedded in a diplomatic ecosystem. He was not wrong about what he described, but his framing carried assumptions about American foreign policy that need to be checked against declassified documents from the era. The workaround is straightforward: cross-reference everything Rothstein says about Soviet internal policy with what you can find from Soviet samizdat sources, and then check his characterization of US policy against Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes from the relevant years. The samizdat cross-reference is the one most people skip, and it is the one that saves you. Read what Soviet Jews were actually writing about their own situation, not just what a Western correspondent reported they were going through.

How the Essay Actually Structures Its Argument

Rothstein opens with his wife making matzo balls, which sounds like a cookbook distraction until you realize he is setting up the entire thesis: Jewish survival in the Soviet Union required a kind of culinary logic that outsiders rarely understood. The dough had to be tough enough to survive boiling but soft enough to be edible. The culture had to be rigid enough to maintain identity but flexible enough to not get you killed. From there he moves through several key areas: the historical roots of Soviet anti-Semitism going back to Tsarist pogroms, the Stalin-era campaigns against Jewish cultural institutions, the post-Stalin thaw and its limits, and the emerging refusenik movement of the mid-1960s. He covers the closure of Yiddish schools, the purge of Jewish intellectuals from universities, and the growing chorus of Jews applying for emigration permits and being branded traitors for asking to leave. One thing beginners miss about this essay is that Rothstein is doing something subtly different from his standard dispatch format. The personal framing allows him to make points about cultural continuity that a straight news piece cannot handle. When he writes about matzo and Passover and how Soviet Jews kept practicing despite having no access to rabbis in most cities, he is describing an infrastructure of resistance that official Soviet statistics completely missed. The state could close synagogues but it could not close kitchen tables where someone's grandmother was teaching her grandchildren the prayers in a whisper.

What Rothstein Got Wrong or Missed

Be honest about the limitations. Rothstein was a mainstream Cold War journalist. His understanding of Soviet Jewish life was filtered through the lens of someone who believed, genuinely, that American pressure on human rights issues would produce results. It did not, not in the way he expected. The emigration quotas that opened up in the early 1970s were a product of the Helsinki Accords and domestic American lobbying, not simply the moral weight of reporting like Rothstein's. He also underestimated how deep the ideological commitment went among younger Soviet Jews who were not particularly religious but still wanted to leave. The refusenik movement was not just about wanting to go to Israel or America. It was about dignity, about refusing to be treated as second-class citizens in your own country. Rothstein noticed this but did not fully capture how it was changing the character of Soviet Jewry from a community defined by religion into one defined by civil rights claims. If you need a supplement that fills these gaps, Yevgeny Khaldei's photographs of Soviet Jewish life and the collected essays in "The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority" edited by Solomon White are useful. Also look at the memoirs of Natan Sharansky, even though they were written from a different political perspective than Rothstein's. They describe the same world from the inside.

Where to Find the Text

"As The Matzo Ball Turns" was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in October 1966. You can find it in the Atlantic's archive at theatlantic.com, though you will need a subscription. It has also been reprinted in various anthologies on Soviet Jewry and Cold War journalism. The Jozef Rothstein papers are held at the Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware, which includes his Moscow correspondence and drafts of many of these pieces. If you are doing serious research, contacting the archive is worth the effort because the published essays are sometimes trimmed or altered from the original manuscripts. The Rothstein collection at Hagley has his personal correspondence with American Jewish leaders, Soviet émigrés, and State Department officials that gives you the full picture of what was happening behind the dispatched articles. Reading the essays alongside that correspondence changes how you read them significantly.

The Bottom Line on Using This Material

Rothstein's essay is essential reading for anyone working on Soviet Jewish history, Cold War journalism, or the intersection of human rights diplomacy and domestic politics. It is not perfect. It carries the blind spots of a Western correspondent writing for a mainstream American audience during the Cold War. But the core reporting is solid, the personal framing is genuinely insightful, and the matzo ball metaphor does more analytical work than most academic frameworks manage in three hundred pages. Read it. Cross-reference it. Then read the people Rothstein was writing about, in their own words, whenever you can find them. That is where the real story lives.