Kovács, András. 2019. A Kádár rendszer és a zsidók (‘The Kádár Regime and the Jews’). Budapest: Corvina. 439 pp.

András Kovács has been studying the history and socio-cultural context of Hungarian Jews since the 1970s, a time when academic discourse about this topic was distorted and limited, given the country's communist regime.In fact, Kovács's 1984 article entitled "The Jewish question in today's Hungarian society" appeared in a tamizdat [Russian: 'Published There,' meaning abroad underground publication] in Paris.Since then, Kovács contributed with invaluable academic research to the study of Hungarian Jews after World War II with over one hundred and fifty publications on antisemitism, nationalism and Jewish identity.In his latest book, A Kádár rendszer és a zsidók ['The Kádár Regime and the Jews'], he returns to the same questions that he posed in his 1984 essay: why and how did antisemitism survive in Hungary after 1945 if the Jewish citizens were largely assimilated and after 1948 antisemitism was forbidden by law?Kovács identifies three areas where antisemitism survived after 1945: 1. everyday culture, 2. tensions between Jews and gentiles caused by the Holocaust, and: 3. the policies of the communist leadership in the entire Soviet bloc, the focus of this book presented through a wide array of declassified archival materials.The documents show that the recurring issues that fueled the oppression of Jews by the Hungarian Communist Party were rooted in the Soviet Union's inimical foreign relations with Israel, which prescribed anti-Zionism in the entire Soviet bloc.This relationship resulted in the surveillance and persecution of all Jewish activity that was not strictly religious and could appear as Zionist conspiracy.Yet all religious life was controlled and marginalized during the communist era, which limited the infrastructure of Hungarian Jews to a bare minimum.The eighty-five carefully chosen archival documents studied in the present volume are dated between 1957 and 1989, meaning the Kádár era, which encompasses the "softer" and longer post-Stalinist communist period in Hungary.These materials provide a view into the communist regime's Jewish policy in the making and thus contribute to a great extent to a so far understudied topic in Hungarian history.The documents are organized and examined in five thematic chapters, each starting with an introductory essay explaining the rationale of their selection, their socio-political context and offering regional comparisons with Poland and Czechoslovakia.Hungary's treatment of its Jews may be seen as an example of the most liberal Jewish policy in the entire Soviet bloc.The political leadership in Hungary after the 1956 Revolution made efforts to avoid social conflict, including in its treatment of the  eszter.

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