disproportionate number of its students were not Jewish. By 1990, the community numbered between 30,000 and 40,000. Although the Jewish community of Germany did not have the same impact as the pre-1933 community, some Jews were prominent in German public life, including Hamburg mayor Herbert Weichmann; Schleswig-Holstein Minister of Justice (and Deputy Chief Justice of the Federal Constitutional Court) Rudolf Katz; Hesse Attorney General Fritz Bauer; former Hesse Minister of Economics Heinz-Herbert Karry; West Berlin politician Jeanette Wolff; television personalities Hugo Egon Balder, Hans Rosenthal, Ilja Richter, Inge Meysel, and Michel Friedman; Jewish communal leaders Heinz Galinski, Ignatz Bubis, Paul Spiegel, and Charlotte Knobloch (see: Central Council of Jews in Germany), and Germany's most influential literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Jews of East Germany The Jewish community of communist East Germany numbered only a few hundred active members. Most Jews who settled in East Germany did so either because their pre-1933 homes had been there or because they had been politically leftist before the Nazi seizure of power and, after 1945, wished to build an antifascist, socialist Germany. Most such politically engaged Jews were not religious or active in the official Jewish community. They included writers such as Anna Seghers, Stefan Heym, Stephan Hermlin, Jurek Becker, Stasi Colonel General Markus Wolf, singer Lin Jaldati, composer Hanns Eisler, and politician Gregor Gysi. However, from the 1950s to early 1980s, the State Security Service (the Stasi) persecuted the surviving small Jewish communities in East Germany. This was in keeping with the treatment of religious groups in general, who were often persecuted for their belief systems being considered contrary to socialist values and for having contact with the West. However, in the case of the Jewish population, this persecution was also related to Soviet hostility to Israel, which the Soviet state considered imperialist and capitalist. This hostility was also reflected in the media. Jewish community leaders criticized the media for "provoking popular anti-semitism by the negative portrayal of Israel and Jews". According to the historian Mike Dennis, 'Already decimated by the Holocaust, East German Jewry reeled from the shock of the SED’s (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) antisemitic campaigns.' Persecution methods ranged from the more brutal repression methods found in the Stalinist era of the 1940s and 50s, to the more subtle decomposition methods which were utilised extensively in the 70s and 80s. In the 1980s there was a reprieve, in general, of such