Abstract
The period of late Stalinism witnessed a sharp rise of anti-Jewish discrimination on the part of the Soviet regime, often labeled "official" or "state anti-Semitism," accompanied by an increase in public anti-Jewish animosity. This paper gives an overview of the existing primary and secondary sources on the topic and, building upon them, it outlines the political background and the consequences of this shift in the relations between the Soviet government and the Jewish minority.
It concentrates on three main milestones: the trial of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, the campaign against cosmopolitism, and the so-called "Doctors ' Plot." It reveals to which extent these anti-Jewish tensions reflected larger shifts in both the internal situation and the international environment. It concludes that compared to other forms of Anti-Jewish animosity, the anti-Semitism of the period of late Stalinism had a clear political character, and therefore it also had a strong propagandistic significance.