Anti-cosmopolitan campaign

After World War II, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) grew increasingly influential to the post-Holocaust Soviet Jewry, and was accepted as its representative in the West.

The Central Auditing Commission of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union concluded that instead of focusing its attention on the "struggle against forces of international reaction", the JAC continued the line of the Bund—a dangerous designation, since former Bund members were to be "purged".

[5]In 1946 and 1947, the new campaign against cosmopolitanism affected Soviet scientists, such as the physicist Pyotr Kapitsa and the president of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR, Anton Romanovich Zhebrak, neither of whom were Jewish.

[7] In January 1948, the JAC's head, the popular actor and world-famous public figure Solomon Mikhoels, was killed; his murder was framed as a car accident where a truck ran over him as he was taking a walk on a narrow road.

The USSR voted for the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and in May 1948, it recognized the establishment of the state of Israel there, subsequently supporting it with weapons (via Czechoslovakia, in defiance of the embargo) in the 1948 Arab–Israeli war.

These events corresponded in time with a visible upsurge of Russian nationalism orchestrated by official propaganda, the increasingly hostile Cold War and the realization by the Soviet leadership that Israel had chosen the Western option.

With the United States becoming the opponent of the Soviet Union by the end of 1948, the USSR switched sides in the Arab–Israeli conflict and began supporting the Arabs against Israel, first politically and later also militarily.

[9]The campaign included a crusade in the state-controlled mass media to expose literary pseudonyms of Jewish writers by putting their real names in parentheses in order to reveal to the public that they were ethnic Jews.

[17] American historian Walter Laqueur noted: "When, in the 1950s under Stalin, the Jews of the Soviet Union came under severe attack and scores were executed, it was under the banner of anti-Zionism rather than anti-Semitism, which had been given a bad name by Adolf Hitler.