Although many assume it to be one of the paradigmatic human rights movements of the late twentieth century, the Soviet Jewry movement did not begin as an organic manifestation of outrage and only incorporated human rights claims belatedly. Israel set the discursive parameters for the movement, which was initially conceived of in terms of the reunion of families, an idiom consistent with Soviet thinking on emigration. Since the movement sought to make the treatment of Soviet Jews an issue in bilateral American-Soviet relations rather than a matter of international law or global public opinion, grassroots activists operating at the domestic level in the United States sidelined Jewish internationalists to its margins. The post-1968 breakthrough of human rights furnished the campaign with new symbols, strategies, and language, but an insistence on the right to leave rather than a focus on state-sanctioned torture and unlawful imprisonment marked the Soviet Jewry movement as distinct as it began to expand in the 1970s. The chapter also illuminates how both American campaigners and Soviet dissidents more frequently appealed to domestic than international sources of law in their entreaties.