“Soviet Jews would be released because the Soviet empire was in tatters. That was certainly my view, one that I had developed over the previous decade through telling conversations. In 1979, at the first Jonathan Institute conference in Jerusalem, I had spoken with the great Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. “Benjamin,” he had said, “please understand, the Soviet regime is desperate. Everything is rotten inside. Nothing works. It’s one big rotten core held together by the façade of invincibility provided by nuclear ICBMs parading in Red Square.” He predicted that within a decade the Soviet Union as we knew it would collapse. He was right on the”