Since the early 1960s, some 1.3 million Jews from the Soviet Union and its successor states have immigrated to the West, primarily to Israel and the US. Largely due to the imaginative and skillful mobilization efforts of Jews and their friends throughout the world this great exodus had important ramifications for US relations with the Soviet Union/Russia and Israel. In addition, the success of American Jews in mounting and sustaining this lobbying effort represented a coming of age for the community, which on a few decades before had been unable to extricate millions of Jews from Europe and the Nazis. This book, part history, part celebration, combines essays by scholars with memoirs and first hand accounts to chronicle this extraordinary rescue mission.