Anti-Zionist

As Jews were hounded out of German universities in the 1930s, where would you have stood? Many of us would like to think we would have found the moral and if necessary physical courage to stand up for our fellow students rather than see them persecuted, bullied, abused and thrown out. Well, now we can actually put our courage to the test as before our eyes we see a re-run of an almost identical pattern of antisemitism — this time at American colleges, with a similar picture at universities in Britain and elsewhere in the West.

A new study by the antisemitism watchdog Amcha Initiative documents a pervasive, relentless assault on Jewish identity at US universities.

Four-fifths of self-identified “progressive” and “very liberal” likely voters in the U.S. believe Jewish Americans have “unfair advantages” that need to be addressed, according to Jewish Institute for Liberal Values survey.

On college campuses, in progressive organizing spaces, in some professional contexts, and even among friends, Americans are increasingly being told their Zionism is disqualifying. For many Jews, that means an aspect of their own identity makes them persona non grata in spaces where left-wing views are paramount. For non-Jews, maintaining until-recently mainstream, pro-Israel opinions means risking social stigmatization and professional harm. Although this problem has begun to gain some visibility, it’s time Americans understood the extent of the social pressure to self-censor or else face the mob.

Today’s haters of Israel are heirs to one of the longest and most effective anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns in modern history.

(JNS) Kennan Institute scholar Izabella Tabarovsky wrote in a 2019 essay for Fathom that the Soviet Union’s campaign against Zionism and Jews “succeeded at emptying Zionism of its meaning as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people and associating it instead with racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism and apartheid.” Not surprisingly, students on college and university campuses across the United States often hear similar if not identical rhetoric from anti-Zionist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Solidary for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

The Soviets’ decades-long anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist campaign was multi-faceted and not limited to statements from the Soviet government itself. Anywhere that Communist cells were active, on any radio broadcast controlled by Moscow, in any printing house receiving instructions from the Kremlin, the demonization of Zionism featured prominently and was always related to specific current events in order to keep the embers of the world’s oldest hatred aglow.

Some of us have been screaming for several years now about the urgency of awakening a slumbering Jewish world as to the dangers of dismissing, excusing, and normalizing anti-Zionism.

“You think it’s over? It’s not o-ver,” my Great-Aunt Lee used to warn me, in a singsong voice, her forced smile wrapped up with some sort of awful knowing. “Antisemitism isn’t over. It’s never o-ver.”

My dear Aunt Lee was clearly crazy, I’d think. Superstitiously spitting-after-compliments crazy. What antisemitism?

After being forced by Covid-19 restrictions to celebrate Passover alone last year, like their Israeli brethren, American Jews were by and large able to celebrate the Passover seder with their friends and families this year. And as in Israel, American Jewish families reveled in their deliverance from loneliness on the Jewish festival of deliverance.