Overview

The British Campaign for Soviet Jewry 1966-1991: Human Rights and Exit Permits is the first full length study of the movement based on primary sources. The book tells the story of one of the three or four most significant events of twentieth century Jewish history. Almost 1.5 million Jews left the Soviet Union mainly for Israel and the United States. According to Natan Sharansky, the international human rights campaign was the most successful such movement in history. It was one of the principal props of the Soviet dissidents campaigning, and an important factor that led to the humbling of the regime and the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Empire. It was also a rare example of the reversal of an attempt at Cultural Genocide, that the Soviet Union had intended to inflict on its Jewish citizens. The book attempts to weave the exciting story of the British movement in its international context in a fluent and readable manner. It focusses on its various components – the women and students and the National Council for Soviet Jewry; and differentiating it from its American counterparts, and the Israeli government, which attempted to guide its over-all strategy. While it covers the changing attitude of the British government to human rights from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher, it also details the trials and tribulations of a countless number of Jewish and other dissidents and their supporters overseas. They bravely defied not only Stalin and his successors but the secret police and enabled the mass migration of Soviet Jewry to happen.

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9781914933462

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Author Information

Dr John Cooper is a social historian, specialising in Jewish history and is the author of several books. His subjects have included Jewish food, Jewish childhood, Jewish professionals and also biographies of Raphael Lemkin and the first Lord Rothschild. He also wrote a book on the origins of the Welfare State. He has contributed a chapter to David Solly Sandler, ‘The Pinsker Orphans’ (2013). He contributed entries on Jewish sexual attitudes, Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz and Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs to the De Gruyter Encyclopaedia of Religion. He practised as a solicitor, after studying history at Balliol College Oxford. He received a PhD from Buckingham University in 2021. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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