1932–
A historian linking Soviet social and Jewish histories
He argued that the war's long-term domestic impact was far more far-reaching than its international implications.
Yaacov Ro'i is an Israeli historian of Soviet Jews, Islam, Middle Eastern policy, and Soviet society. Combining documentary research with social surveys, he traced how state policy shaped national communities and popular political consciousness. The Bleeding Wound analyzes the domestic costs and legacies of the Soviet-Afghan War, using differences between Central Asian and Russian respondents to add evidence to the debate over how far the war contributed to the Soviet collapse.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1954B.A. in History, University of Cambridge
- 1960–1965Research worker, Weizmann Archives
- 1972–1974Lecturer in Russian History, Tel Aviv University
- 1977–1982Director, Russian and East European Research Center, Tel Aviv University
- 1982–1990Associate Professor of Russian History, Tel Aviv University
- 1990–2003Full Professor of Russian History, Tel Aviv University
- 2001–2002Director, Cummings Center, Tel Aviv University
- 2003–Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University
Related historical events
The social history of Soviet Jewish emigration
In The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948–1967, published in 1991, Ro’i analyzed the emigration movement in its cultural, social, political, and international contexts. Drawing on oral testimony, he examined how the Holocaust, the founding of Israel, popular antisemitism, and Soviet policy shaped Jewish self-awareness, and traced the work of local groups that sustained Jewish cultural interests under clandestine conditions. He also discussed Western campaigning for Soviet Jewish rights and emigration. The book describes how, by 1967, many Jews had come to see even a minimal Jewish life in the Soviet Union as persistently frustrated and emigration as the means of fulfilling their aspirations.
Ro’i extended this account of individual and local experiences into a history of a broader collective movement by editing The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union. The volume combines archival work, interviews, and secondary research, with movement participants and scholars from different generations examining the movement’s origins and Soviet and international contexts. According to the Wilson Center’s description, about a quarter of a million Jews had left the Soviet Union before the mass emigration of Gorbachev’s final years. The movement unfolded amid the Soviet dissident and human-rights movements, Israel’s 1967 victory, Soviet society’s contradictory attitude toward nationalism, and underlying antisemitism.