[A] splendid work...Nora Levin's study combines admirable mastery of the material with deep sympathy for the people whose history it chronicles.
--Richard Pipes
Commentary
[A]n exceptional work, the best general history of the Jewish people in the Soviet Union to date. She painstakingly but vivdly explains the troubled history of the Jews, from the Bolshevik revolution and WWII to emigration and Gorbachev's advent.--Choice
Holocaust historian Nora Levin's book on Soviet Jewry offers the reader urgently need knowledge about a most remarkable chapter in Jewish history.--Elie Weisel
[Levin] has done a remarkably comprehensive and conscientious job of surveying the secondary literature on Soviet Jewry and supplements it intelligently with oral histories and unpublished manuscript . ...Levin writes well and captures human drama played out in the often great expectations and equally profound disappointments that have characterized Soviet Jewry since 1917.--Zvi Gitelman, America
A comprehensive and well-documented survey of Soviet Jewry up to the Gorbachev era....[T]hese volumes hform a highly detailed and readable account for a wide audience....An unmatched review of a people and era; for all collections of Jewish history and most general ones.-- Library Journal
Indeed, this is Nora Levin's greatest achievement; her sober. scholarly account of Jewish life in the Soviet Union helps guarantee that the martyrs will not be forgotten.
--Woodford McClellan, Virginia Quarterly Review
A weeping, encompassing history of the lives of Jews in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, Nora Levin's last work offers a compelling portrait of Soviet Jewry from the overthrow of the tsarist regime by the bolsheviks and takes the reader through pogroms, resettlements, World War II, the Stalin Era, to thte present-day refueniks.
In compiling this seminal and important work, Nora Levin author of the critifally acclaimed The Holocaust has painstakingly researched a massive amount of first-person reports and documents, as well as secondary resources. She offers an extraordinarily detailed and well written history - one that presents in an animated and vivid fashion the personal descriptions of the individual struggles for freedom against the backdrop of sweeping political and economic upheavals both within the Soviet Union and in the international area.
In scope and readability this work cannot be rivaled. For those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history, Jewish history, and modern religious history, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917 stands alone as an essential source book.