Beware Those Who Denounce Antisemitism
In 1919, Vladimir Lenin delivered a speech titled “On Anti-Jewish Pogroms,” in which he declared that “antisemitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews.” On the surface, this sounds unequivocally condemnatory. Yet once one reads the entire speech, it becomes evident that Lenin, ever the strategic ideologue, was less interested in defending Jews than in weaponizing antisemitism to attack capitalism, the monarchy, and the bourgeoisie. As he put it, “we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital.”
In other words, the problem with antisemitism, for Lenin, was not the hatred of Jews per se; it was that such hatred diverted the masses from the true revolutionary struggle. In sum, being “against Jews” was wrong only insofar as it weakened the workers’ movement.
This makes his earlier writings all the more revealing. Just a decade prior, the same Lenin who publicly equated “enmity toward the Jews” with enmity toward the proletariat composed a scathing denunciation of Zionism. In “The Position of the Bund Party,” he accuses Zionism of being a “reactionary” movement and called for dismantling the “Zionist idea of a Jewish nation.”
This distinction, tolerating Jews as individuals while rejecting Jewish nationhood, would become foundational to the Soviet antizionist campaign and signature to antizionism in the West today. Lenin’s ideological separation of Jew from Zionist laid the groundwork for a system that could condemn antisemitism rhetorically while attacking Jewish collective identity in practice
Indeed, the Soviets perfected this maneuver. In a 1971 Pravda article titled “Zionism: The Weapon of Reaction,” Deputy Secretary of the editorial board Viktorovich Bolshakov insisted that “the struggle against Zionism must not be confused with antisemitism, which is alien to the socialist world… The Soviet Union fights against Zionism as an instrument of imperialism, not against Jews, many of whom are honest workers and patriots.” Likewise, a 1974 issue of Kommunist declared that “antisemitism is an abhorrent racist theory condemned by all progressive mankind. Zionism, however, is a political movement expressing the interests of the reactionary circles of the Jewish bourgeoisie, serving imperialism and opposing socialism.”
It is a magic trick, an extraordinarily sophisticated one: condemn antisemitism loudly while smuggling in a new form of Jew-hatred, made possible only because the virus of anti-Jewish hostility mutates. When antizionism arrived on college campuses in the early 2000s, I witnessed this sleight of hand firsthand: antizionist speakers invited by various departments almost always began with a familiar preamble: “I want to denounce antisemitism in the strongest possible terms. Antisemitism must be resisted and rejected. However, I am here to tell you that…” followed by a cascade of libels against Israel and Zionists.
A question emerged for me then: Why did they need to begin this way? What purpose did this ritualistic condemnation of antisemitism serve? It struck me as bizarre. After all, it would be unthinkable for someone to step onstage and say, “I want to begin by condemning racism in the strongest terms. However…” and then proceed to unleash invectives against the Black community.
The answer, of course, is that for contemporary Jew-haters, antizionism offers cover. It midwives a new, socially acceptable form of hatred, one that presents itself as political critique rather than animus toward Jews. A prime example is Hasan Piker, who routinely uses his platform to promote antizionism. His formula is textbook: he begins by declaring, “I abhor antisemitism,” only to follow it with the accusation that Israel is “committing genocide in Gaza”—a modern anti-Jewish libel known as the genocide libel. This pattern has become the standard playbook of today’s antizionist demagogues. It enables today’s Jew-haters to mask their racism and hostility behind a veneer of political critique.
Crucially, this strategy mirrors how Wilhelm Marr, the architect of modern antisemitism, distanced himself from the earlier era of anti-Judaism: he dismissed religiously motivated Jew-hatred as outdated and “backward,” even as he introduced a new, supposedly more sophisticated form of hostility toward Jews. As the foremost scholar on anti-Jewish movements, Robert Wistrich writes, “[Marr] wished to distance himself from Protestant Christian Jew-baiters such as Adolf Stoecker,” revealing that Marr deliberately framed his antisemitism as something different from the older, religious (Christian) anti-Judaism.
This is precisely the playbook by which antizionists function. And this is exactly what mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani does and will continue to do. He will be the first to denounce antisemitism, and when swastikas appear on streets or in schools, he will send a brigade to remove these hate symbols (see headline from The Hill: “Mamdani pledges to ‘root the scourge of antisemitism out of our city’ after Jewish day school defaced with swastika”).
He will even form a task force on antisemitism. And why not? Lenin did the same: in 1918, the Soviet government established a Komissiia po bor’be s antisemitizmom (Commission for the Struggle Against Antisemitism). It operated under the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities (Narkomnats), headed by Joseph Stalin, but the initiative was driven by Lenin’s directives. It is worth mentioning that Stalin, the same man who headed a task force against antisemitism, unleashed some of the most vicious anti-Jewish campaigns of the 20th century: he ordered the execution of Jewish poets in 1952, released the Doctors’ Plot libel, the Soviet Union’s modernized blood libel, and orchestrated the 1952 Slánský show trial, in which Rudolf Slánský, a loyal Communist, was accused of the “crime” of Zionism and executed five days later.
All of this will provide Zohran Mamdani the necessary cover to continue to hate the Jewish nation. Do not get fooled. Beware those who denounce antisemitism. Demand they denounce antizionism.
