Back in the USSA: the Afterlife of Soviet Antizionism

Why do city councils in America often have on their agendas Israel and Gaza, places that are thousands of miles away? What about improving local roads, schools, and transportation?

Cherchez l’Union soviétique:

Recently, my mother shared with me that when she lived in the Soviet Union, workers were mandated to attend weekly politinformatsiya briefings, loosely translated as “political information sessions or briefings.” At such meetings:

they spoke about how we [the workers] should understand international events from a communist perspective. And many times, at such briefings, America and Israel would come up. In fact, almost always Israel. They urged Jews to come forward and denounce Zionism as a form of racism. And many times, there were Jews at such meetings who did just that.

I was confused about this when she told me, because usually work meetings, even the ones that could have been an email, are almost always about work. My mother was a lab technician at a hospital. Why was it necessary to talk about Israel at a hospital?

A few words about my mother. She is a feisty woman who never lets a lie go unchallenged. So when I asked her if she spoke up, my heart dipped when she replied, “are you kidding? No one could challenge the narrative.”

When we came to America, my mother was a full-time mother, full-time immigrant, and full-time student. Between taking English classes and retaking all the required university courses to earn her license as a laboratory scientist, she always found time to talk to me. In car rides from school or to afterschool activities, she would tell me all about Soviet antisemitism, known as antizionism, and how she never bought into those lies. She told me how she would often hear Ukrainians, for we lived in Soviet Ukraine, shout at  Jews: “go back to Palestine!” Or the time when she was on a metro and “it was Yom Kippur. The weather that day was particularly nasty. I was sitting minding my business and the Ukrainian lady told me ‘Look outside. Look at the ugly weather that falls on YOUR people’s holiday!’” Or the time a co-worker accused her of turning the workplace into a “Zionist nest,” a revival of the age-old antisemitic libel popularized by Martin Luther in his 1543 book On the Jews and Their Lies, which claimed that Jews dwelt with serpents in the devil’s nest.

At these work meetings, I imagined my mother and perhaps all the Jews in those work meetings silently taking it—taking the abuse because “if we said anything, we would lose our jobs or worse, go to jail.” They must have bowed their heads in submission or worse, nodded in consent to perform the correct party line.

“And Jews participated in this?” I asked.

“Yes, many knew it was all lies but wanted to further their careers, so they stood up and denounced Israel a racist state.”

Reflecting now, I believe that when I was younger, I passively listened to the stories of how my parents lived in the Soviet Union. Passively because who would have ever thought their experience would become my experience and the experience of American Jews forced to flee schools, campuses, or workplaces that practice Soviet-style antizionism.

But just a few years ago my mother told me “Naya, who could have ever imagined that we escaped from that to confront it here again?” I have heard this same sentiment echoed in many Jewish families who left the Soviet Union due to antizionism. Most recently, singer Regina Spektor was hackled by antizionists screaming “Free Palestine.” The disruption was so great that she had to stop and confront it: “You’re just yelling at a Jew… The only reason I even speak English is because I came here to escape this shit. I came from a country where people were treating Jews as others, and now I’m being othered here, and it sucks. It’ll be nice if one of my family’s generations didn’t have to go to a new country and learn a new language.”

So I ask again, why was it necessary to discuss Israel at a work meeting where the workers are lab scientists? Why is it necessary to put on a city council’s agenda Israel or Gaza that exists thousands of miles away? Silly me, why ask such foolish questions: It was necessary to talk about Israel in a Soviet hospital for the same reason it’s deemed necessary to talk about Israel at a [insert] city council meeting: to unleash that age-old hatred—you know the one I’m talking about.

In his 1946 essay Réflexions sur la question juive (translated as Anti-Semite and Jew), Jean-Paul Sartre observed that “if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Antisemitism is not a reaction the Jew’s actual traits or behaviors, but a psychological and ideological construction of the antisemite himself. The antisemite needs the Jew as a symbol on which to project his own fears, hatreds, and insecurities. For this reason, I have long believed that antisemitism is not a Jewish problem.

Why, then, did the Soviets feel the need to construct Israel as a villain? Were they motivated by classical antisemitism? While there are various interpretations, at its core, the Jew, vis-à-vis Israel, became the central figure in a play titled “Cold War Politics.” The portrayal of the Jew as a villain is, of course, a recurring theme throughout history. Yet, in the Soviet case, Israel served a distinct purpose: it became an essential ingredient in the larger strategy to undermine the West broadly, and America in particular.

The Soviets engineered antizionism as a weapon of destabilization, recognizing a deep vulnerability in the West: that it cannot forgive in itself racism, colonialism, and power. Through Israel, the Soviets offered Westerners a tangible way to atone for the sins of America’s past, a vessel through which guilt could be both expressed and redirected.

And that is precisely what is happening at [insert] city council meetings, where people bring dolls painted red to symbolize blood—something that actually took place in Irvine, California—while demanding a ceasefire. That is also precisely why white young Americans are participating in antizionist rallies chanting “free Palestine,” for the Palestine cause has given them a way to atone for years of k-12 education that demonizes America for the greatest sin of our time: having too much power.