Noticing lately how everyone’s talking about Soviet Cold War propaganda as the root of today’s anti-Israel and antizionist demonization — as if it’s always been obvious. It’s amazing, and satisfying. I remember researching and writing about Soviet antizionism long before it was cool, back when it often met with blank stares. But some people noticed. Good to see the rest of the world catching up. Re-upping the thread with my writings on the subject — so you can go straight to the source.

What a score for Russian propaganda. Absolute gold. How lucky for them to have found such an enthusiastic fellow traveler.

This is a genius level tweet, thank you! I've written a lot about Palestinianism; @SamuelJHyde11 writes about how antizionist fervor is rooted in acting out Christianity. It's the Omnicause, solely because Jews.

If you're Lebanese and still don't understand that your national interests are aligned with Israel and undermined by Iran, I don't know what to tell you. Now, you probably think that you hate Israel because "Palestine." But remember, Palestinians seek their own interests and so should you. Lebanese and Palestinian interest can converge or diverge. This time it happens that they diverge. No shame. No foul. Lebanon should seek its interests with the Jewish state. Be realistic. Be smart. Think of your interests, and let Palestinians (and Iranians) figure out their own.

Having had the unfortunate experience of listening to a Sarah Wilkenson's diatribe directly, I agree with this assessment.

Congratulations to American progressives for accomplishing what generations of neo-Nazis have pursued in vain: the effective exoneration of the Nazis. There is only one question left: now that we know a Totenkopf tattoo is fine but an Israeli flag isn't, what are you going to do with all those articles and prize-winning books you've written arguing that Israelis are the new Nazis? If I were you, I'd start looking for the unpublish button. You wouldn’t want to be sued by Nazis for defamation.

“Peace Not Now” Book Launch this Wednesday evening June 10 in Tel Aviv with @EylonALevy and @Jonathan_Elk! Registration link and details here (space limited to 120): sellameir.com/products/book-…

As Izabella mentions, this antisemite puts her hands on her heart and says “I saw it! I saw Gaza.” It’s a perfect example of what @AbeGreenwald from Commentary Magazine said: Gaza is precisely what the Left says it hates. And they love it more than anything in the world.

What I find riveting about this clip is not that Sarah Wilkinson doesn't see Israelis as human—it's a given for people whose entire worldview is built around a Manichean spiritual dichotomy in which Palestine/Gaza stands for good and Israel/Jews for evil. What's genuinely worth noting here are the last few seconds of the clip, where she says that she glimpsed Gaza right before the cruel Israeli monsters so abruptly ended her quest. It's that twinkle in her eye and the swelling music that reveal the real meaning of Gaza for her: Gaza as the Holy Grail, an object of longing, a source of redemption for her and for all humanity, the closest thing to a divine revelation she's ever been granted. The sense we get from those last few seconds is that, simply by glimpsing Gaza, she reached a level of spiritual transcendence that she will cherish for the rest of her life. And it's the sweetness of that moment, of redemption so tantalizingly within one’s grasp, that is going to bring her back, for one doesn’t abandon the holy quest simply because agents of Satan stand in one's way. Indeed, the greater the obstacles to redemption, the more resolutely one must persevere. @RachelMoiselle has written about Palestinianism as a replacement faith for post-Catholic Irish. @HusseinAboubakr has a tour de force of a piece out now on Palestine as a symbol whose meaning changes depending on which groups and causes attach themselves to it. This clip is an illustration of what both of them are talking about. I hope there are people out there studying Palestinianism as a psycho-spiritual phenomenon. It has to be one of the most fascinating subjects of inquiry today.

Yayyyy!!!!!!! Thank you, Izabella. This is an excellent introductory post. The following excerpt from your entry is particularly significant: "Having given countless talks to educators in an effort to equip them to teach this material themselves, I realized that many still find it difficult to do so. Teachers are unsure of their own grounding in Soviet history, while their students often lack even basic context, from authoritarianism to state-controlled media. Some students have never even heard of the Soviet Union, while others perceive it in positive terms—an educational failure whose consequences we are now grappling with. When time is short and these fundamentals are missing, it becomes very hard to convey the intricacies of Soviet antizionist ideology. Why did the Soviets invest so heavily in the erasure of Jewish culture and Jewish peoplehood? Why were they so stridently anti-Israel? Why were Soviet citizens not permitted to emigrate? I eventually concluded that the most effective way to teach this material is through personal stories. It’s one of the reasons I wrote my book, Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide. I spent years interviewing Soviet Jewish dissidents known as refuseniks, as well as young Jewish activists on American campuses today. In a surprising way, their stories echo one another, offering enduring, cross-generational lessons of Jewish courage and commitment. These stories—both historical and contemporary—have become the basis for the book. Each of the book’s six chapters—”Reclaim Your Zionism”; “Educate Yourself and Others”; “Find Your Comrades in Arms”; “Do the Unexpected”; “Reject Victimhood”; and “Lead with Jewish”—tells two stories: one historical and one contemporary. [...] Soviet antizionism is one of the foundational components of contemporary antisemitism. Without understanding it, it is difficult to grasp the origins and virulence of the antizionist demonization Jews face today. Teaching it through stories offers a way into that understanding that begins with human experience."

There is a direct link between this horrific attack and the dehumanization that Jews are subjected to daily in Western societies—on social media, in mainstream media, and in cultural and political circles. Dehumanization was one of the central forces that enabled the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The creation of a permission structure for verbal abuse and physical violence, the erosion of social solidarity, and the pushing of Jews out of the circle of empathy: these are all different aspects and stages of dehumanization. This is happening across the democratic West today. We need to understand very, very clearly what it is that we are facing. Any thinking about the community’s future needs to take into account how far the process of dehumanization has already advanced and where it leads.

This week I spoke at a conference on anti-Zionism at the European Parliament—an old hatred in fashionable new garb. Here's my speech, titled “A Spiral of Silence: How Academia Enforces Anti-Zionist Orthodoxy”. It examines the increasingly hostile and suffocating environment in Western academia for those who hold dissenting views on Israel and the Gaza war, as well as the manufactured consensus around the obscene accusation of “genocide”—a narrative that is unraveling more with each passing day. No other form of fake news has garnered such widespread assent in academia and among cultural elites despite a total lack of evidence and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And almost none of the usual "misinformation" experts has expressed the slightest interest. It really is the blood libel of our age. My thanks again to @eurojewcong, @BnaiBrith, and @alicemedce for hosting this important conference.

The New Refusniks educational approach to teaching about antizionism created by Izabella Tabarovsky👇🇮🇱🫶

The EJC, together with the Working Group Against Antisemitism (WGAS), the @EPPGroup and @BnaiBrith, organised the conference "Anti-Zionism: The Accepted Face of Antisemitism in Europe?" at the European Parliament in Brussels. Hosted by WGAS Chair MEP @alicemedce, the event shed light on the rise of anti-Zionism as a form of hate speech in Europe and explored how criticism of Israel has increasingly become a disguise for antisemitism, as well as its impact on those who have had the courage to speak out. During the conference, which was attended by Members of the European Parliament, EU officials, diplomatic representatives, civil society organisations, and members of the Jewish community, the speakers addressed the historical origins of anti-Zionism as a propaganda tool, examined how it operates and circulates across political, academic, and digital spaces, and explored the relationship between anti-Zionist rhetoric and contemporary manifestations of antisemitism. In her opening remarks, MEP Alice Teodorescu Måwe reflected on the normalisation of anti-Zionism in society, and how it has become increasingly accepted, contributing to Jews across Europe feeling unsafe in expressing their Jewish identity and their connection to Israel, in ways that stand at odds with democratic values, pluralism, and human dignity. Afterwards, EJC Executive VP @rayakalenova delivered a powerful address, strongly denouncing the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. She warned that antisemitism in its latest incarnation, anti-Zionist activism, does not offer a world in which Jews can live in peace, but rather one in which Jews have nowhere they are truly welcome. She stressed that denying the right to self-determination uniquely to the Jewish people, while recognising it for every other nation, constitutes discrimination, noting that the use of “Zionism” as a substitute for “Jew” enables the collective targeting of Jews while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy and that, in stark contrast to rhetoric often heard in public discourse, she emphasised that Zionism is, above all, an anti-colonial movement par excellence. Concluding the opening remarks, @AlinaBricman, Director of EU Affairs at B’nai B’rith International, noted that what makes anti-Zionism particularly challenging is that those who promote it often believe they are acting in pursuit of a noble cause and therefore do not perceive themselves as prejudiced. The conference continued with a panel discussion moderated by EJC Director of European Affairs @AriellaWoit, featuring renowned scholars and academics, including Dr @mboudry, Independent Scholar; Dr Christer Mattsson, Director of the Segerstedt Institute at the University of Gothenburg and Senior Lecturer in Pedagogy; and @IzaTabaro, Fellow at @TheWilsonCenter and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism- @centre_as and Senior Fellow at the Z3 Institute. Ms Tabarovsky addressed how Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda helped shape many of the narratives and conceptual frameworks that continue to influence discourse today, connecting contemporary manifestations of anti-Zionism to their broader historical context. For his part, Dr Boudry presented an intervention titled “A Spiral of Silence: How Academia Enforces Anti-Zionist Orthodoxy”, reflecting on the intellectual climate surrounding debates on Israel and Zionism within academic and cultural institutions, as well as the pressures, silences, and forms of conformity that shape public discourse on these issues. Finally, Dr Mattsson, whose research focuses on antisemitism, radicalisation, and democratic education, presented findings from his recent study examining the measurable relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, as well as the methodological challenges in identifying and quantifying Israel-related antisemitism in contemporary societies. In her closing remarks, MEP Alice Teodorescu Måwe thanked the speakers for their contributions and the audience for their engagement, underlining the importance of raising one’s voice to confront these challenges in everyday life. She stressed that responsibility does not rest solely with politicians but with society as a whole, noting that without civic courage nothing will change.

Kara Jesella knows things the rest of us don’t — or have only a vague sense of. Follow her if you don’t already. I really can’t wait for her new book to come out. @karajesella

“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” is one of the most famous lines in the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 Black Feminist Statement that also popularized the idea of “identity politics” and “interlocking oppressions.” T’ruah has repeatedly referenced the manifesto, a document I always think gets to exactly what is wrong about ideas like “collective liberation” that don’t seem very liberatory for Jews. Different groups have different needs, and politics is about negotiating them, not always centering any one group according to a hierarchy of oppressions. It doesn’t help that Barbara Smith, the most well-known member of the Combahee River Collective, said in a different famous essay, “I am anti-Semitic” and has since become an icon of young antizionists.

Not very impressed with those who present themselves as the guardians of journalistic integrity when they describe Bari Weiss as an opinion journalist as opposed to an entrepreneur & business executive. I mean, do they care about factual rigour or not?

I second this.

I really want to know what they mean by collective liberation. What exactly are they planning to liberate the Jews from collectively? Somebody please ask that question the next time you run into someone who throws this at you. Signed, A Jew whose experience has taught her to be very nervous whenever revolutionaries start offering to liberate her