In The Last Days of Stalin, Joshua Rubenstein tells the story of the end of the Soviet dictator’s reign and his death in March 1953, a period marked by intensely anti-Semitic policies and actions. In his review, David Mikics recounts some of the grislier episodes, including the so-called Doctors Plot, while noting that Rubenstein casts doubt on one hypothesis about the anti-Semitic project:

On January 13, 1953, Tass, the Soviet news agency, dropped a bombshell. They announced in Pravda that “a terrorist group of doctors” had been killing important public figures by sabotaging their medical treatment. Nine doctors had confessed; six of them were Jewish. . . . A months-long harassment campaign began against Russian Jews, ending only with Stalin’s death. Gangs of schoolchildren hounded their Jewish classmates; irate citizens demanded that Jews be fired from their jobs, expelled from Moscow, and punished for their supposed avoidance of the front during World War II. . . . Traditional Russian anti-Semitism vastly accelerated the momentum of the Doctors’ Plot. . . .

In one crucial respect Rubenstein alters our picture of the anti-Jewish campaign. People have long thought that in 1953 Stalin was planning to transfer Soviet Jews to Birobidzhan, the Siberian Jewish “homeland” developed in 1928, just as he had earlier transferred the Chechens, the Crimean Tatars, the Ingush, and other ethnic groups. Scholars have supposed that this massive deportation failed to occur only because Stalin died before he could make it happen. But Rubenstein finds no actual evidence of a plan to transfer the Jews.

He argues that the anti-Semitic atmosphere was so intense in the months before Stalin’s death that many simply assumed such a project was in the works; the deportation swiftly became a worldwide rumor and within a few years would be reported in the Western press. [Stalin’s successor Nikita] Khrushchev later said that he himself had convinced Stalin not to deport the Jews, but he seems to have invented this story to give himself credit for undoing one of Stalin’s evil plots. . . .

One important spur for Stalin’s anti-Semitic phase was Golda Meir’s visit to Moscow in September 1948. . . . Meir, then still named Golda Meyerson, was the new Jewish state’s diplomatic representative. When she visited Moscow’s Choral Synagogue on the High Holy Days, thousands of Russian Jews crowded rapturously around her, an event that must have shaken Stalin. Here was evidence that Soviet Jews, as Rubenstein puts it, “remained Jews with longings and dreams that extended beyond the physical and spiritual borders of the Soviet state.” . . .

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.