n 1948 Stalin launched a murderous campaign to destroy all Jewish intellectual and cultural activity in the Soviet Union. He and others feared the perceived political disloyalty of Soviet Jewry after the establishment of the State of Israel, and were motivated by unrestrained anti-Semitism. In the Jewish Autonomous Region itself, prominent Jewish officials and cultural figures were arrested and imprisoned. In perhaps the most serious attack, some 30,000 books from the Judaica collection of the public library were burned. The anti-Jewish assault in Stalin's last years delivered a mortal blow to the Birobidzhan experiment.