Mapping a Blindspot
Since October 7th, historians and educators have lamented that Holocaust education, particularly as it is taught in public schools, seems to have profoundly failed. In the effort to universalize the Holocaust, we diluted its message to fit within a broader anti-racism framework – one that, as it turns out, did not survive its first major stress test. After all, if one can take the lessons of the Shoah and conclude that Anne Frank would have worn a keffiyeh and been a vocal antizionist, what does that demonstrate other than failure? If her Jewish identity, the particular Jewishness that forced her into hiding and led to her murder, can be stripped away so easily, then she is just a girl who spent years hiding in a glorified closet, and who would apparently cheer for those who seek to murder her people anew.
As we pass the third anniversary of October 7th, I am struck by how often we circle around a communal educational blind spot that keeps growing: the history and evolution of Soviet antizionism, and what it means for us today. Historians and educators – in whose number I count myself – constantly navigate the tension between teaching history for its own sake and teaching it to help young people meet the world they actually live in. On that second count, I would argue, we may have failed.
We have spent much of the last 50 years studying the Holocaust and its particular brand of antisemitism. The problem is that the anti-Jewish hatred we face today does not closely resemble it. When we hold up the racialized hatred that led to the murder of six million Jews as the ultimate example of antisemitism’s dangers, we make it easy for antizionists to point to the differences in doctrinal roots and public expression between the two ideologies as “proof” that the latter has nothing to do with the former. As public hatred of Jews becomes increasingly acceptable, and as antizionism expressed by Jews themselves rises, the cost of our blind spot rises with it.
As the internet is fond of pointing out, it is a bad time to have a history degree and pattern-recognition skills. Educated Jews may be able to look at antizionism and see the familiar tropes and patterns of antisemitism, but we are mistaken if we assume most of our young people can. I often think of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who admitted he could not define obscenity but said, “I know it when I see it.” Increasingly, that is the lot of Jewish youth today: they may sense that something is antisemitic, but they lack the vocabulary and historical context to explain why, to themselves or to anyone else.
Few schools offer mandatory Jewish history throughout a student’s entire school career, and many struggle with what they have the capacity to teach. More and more, we find ourselves debating how much to prioritize the epoch-defining chapters of 20th-century Jewish history: the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As someone who teaches only these two subjects, you will never find me downplaying their importance. But as the world continues to change, I feel obligated to consider that our students are missing an understanding of one of the three major sources of anti-Jewish hatred.
Through studying the Holocaust, they understand what antisemitism from the far-right looks like. Through learning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in depth, they understand the context of Islamist anti-Judaism. But the third source, and perhaps now the most dominant – the antizionism that is the provenance of the far-left – remains largely opaque to them. They lack the tools to understand Stalinist views of Zionism and nationalism, or how the Soviet propaganda machine, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, developed much of the “Israelis are Nazis” rhetoric now so common on social media and university campuses. They can watch footage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally on YouTube and recognize “blood and soil” as a modern revival of a Nazi slogan, but they would struggle to decode a Marxist-Leninist antizionist rally and explain why it tells the same story in different words. They have read Christopher Browning, but they have probably never heard of Izabella Tabarovsky or the scholars doing similar work.
Let this serve as a starting point for rethinking how Jewish history curriculum must change to meet our community’s needs in 2026, needs that are very different from those of the moment when white nationalists carried tiki torches across the University of Virginia campus chanting that Jews would not replace them. Antizionism’s ability to hide in plain sight, its cloaking of anti-Jewish hatred in the language of morality, its framing of prejudice in political terminology is perhaps our greatest social danger. The Soviets may have not committed mass genocide, but antizionism was eliminationist as well, albeit more in terms of limiting Jewish participation in civil society. And when it comes to its very public manifestations today, our students need to do more than know it when they see it. They need to be able to define it and explain it for themselves.
