In 1952, hardly a decade after the Holocaust, Communist Czechoslovakia staged one of the post-WWII era’s most blatant acts of state-sponsored anti-Semitism. The Prague Political Purges put on trial fourteen defendants. Eleven of the fourteen were of Jewish origin. All were found guilty, and eleven of the fourteen were condemned to death. The remaining three were sentenced to life imprisonment. All of the defendants were devoted Communists, having shed any religious, ethnic, or national identity in their pursuit of a socialist utopia. Yet, the trial’s main ideological thrust was anti-Semitism. The Slansky Trial of 1952 came as a sharp blow to Jews across a spectrum of political, religious, and national affiliations. The Purge Trials forced many Jews to reexamine their positions vis-à-vis Zionism, Communism, and the Left as a traditionally popular choice for Jews. The trial held unique significance as Jews sought to redefine what it meant to be Jewish in a post-Holocaust world. Despite the trial’s overt use of anti-Semitic tropes, historians have yet to properly explore how Jews, both within and beyond the Iron Curtain, experienced the trial. The impact of the Slansky affair remains a glaring omission both in the history of post-war Jewry as well as post-war Eastern Europe. I will explore how Jews, in a post-Holocaust era, experienced and reacted to officially sanctioned acts of anti-Semitism.

In this study, I examine how Jews in the United States, Western Europe, and Israel reacted to the Slansky Affair, the Doctors' Plot, and the general wave of overt Soviet antisemitism which took shape in late 1952 until Stalin's death in early March 1953. I explore how the Holocaust, the creation of a Jewish state, and the Cold War affected Jewish conceptions of antisemitism as well as the nature and character of Jewish collective action on both the global and the domestic stage. After investigating the ways in which Jews understood and reacted to the trial culturally, religiously, organizationally, nationally, and politically, I assert that in the early 1950s, Jews were in a process of redefinition. The role of Israel in diasporic Jewish affairs, the relationship between Jews and the Left, the position of Jews in the Cold War, and the nature and character of Jewish central leadership figured prominently in the lives of individual Jews and Jewish communities in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. This is not an investigation of the Slansky Trial itself. Rather, through examining how Jews understood and made sense of the Trial, I construct a narrative of Jewish identity politics in the early 1950s.