The A-Word: On Resisting to Name Antizionism

A few days ago, I gave a talk titled “The Rise of Antizionism in America.” As I was packing up, participants came over to thank me. One man stood off to the side, visibly confused.

“Thank you for coming,” I approached him. “What did you think of the talk?”

I could tell he appreciated the invitation to dialogue. “This sure wasn’t what I thought it would be,” he said.

“Oh no? Why not?” I asked.

“I thought I came to a talk on antisemitism.”

At the time, it felt tragic. Now, it’s almost funny. Tragic, because I had just spent an hour explaining that what we are confronting today is not antisemitism, but antizionism. At first, I could sense the distressed looks of those ready to attack me for daring to distinguish the two. “No, no,” I placated their worst fears: that I was a Jew using antizionism to cloak my hatred for Jews! While some insisted that “it’s one and the same,” others muttered, “Why even make these distinctions? It’s Jew-hatred, plain and simple!”

Jews are, after all, a people of the book. We argue over language, and rightly so, because language matters. Indeed, when God spoke, the world was created. It’s even more powerful in Hebrew, where the word for “to speak,” daber, shares the same root, or shoresh, as the word for “thing,” davar. In other words, when God spoke, He literally called things into being.

There is a deep resistance within the Jewish community to using the word antizionism. There’s even debate over whether it should be written with or without a hyphen: that’s how seriously we take language. I first recognized this resistance about twenty years ago, when I was in college. I knew exactly what I was dealing with when classmates at UC Santa Cruz called me a “Zionist pig;” I knew exactly what it meant when the Departments of History, Sociology, and Modern Literary Studies co-sponsored an event featuring an imam who asked the Jewish students to stand up and identify themselves. Pointing at each one of us, he declared, “You, you, you—we will get our land back, and we do not care to spill blood!” And I knew exactly what it was when antizionist student groups like the Muslim Student Association organized “Apartheid Week” on campus. I was witnessing antizionism: a hate movement that deploys libels to cast Jews as villains.

But the Jewish community resisted. Though not all, and here I should say that, tellingly, it was Jews from the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, who understood exactly what was happening because they had experienced the repression of antizionism. American Jews, as Yossie Klein Halevi once told me, have had a vacation from history. The appearance of antizionism has forced American Jews to come back from leisure, but they were and continue to be slow to recognizing what we are dealing with. I have given much thought to why American Jews did not and continue to struggle with recognizing antizionism. I believe that properly diagnosing the resistance may help to elucidate a path forward and have thus identified three main reasons for why American Jews are resistant to using the A-word:

1. Mistaking antizionism for well-intentioned criticism of Israel:
   This is one of the most common, and most consequential, errors. It is also not accidental. As I have written elsewhere, antizionism was engineered by the Soviet Union precisely to mask hostility toward Israel and toward Jews under the guise of legitimate political critique. Its purpose was to look like X, principled criticism of a state, when in fact it was Y, a targeted hate movement. Soviet propagandists and academics spent years crafting this façade so that antizionism would appear moral, intellectual, and humanitarian. And American Jews, along with much of the West, were taken in by it. The architects of antizionism deliberately coated their message in the language of social justice, apartheid, racism, colonialism, oppression, genocide, making this hate movement appear like a human rights campaign.

The good news is that resistance to recognizing antizionism as a hate movement targeting Jews that comes from mistaking it for well-intentioned criticism is easy to rectify. Exposing its genealogy, masterfully done by Izabella Tabarovsky, will help to show its true nature.

2. Jewish value are progressive values: It is no accident that antizionism took root on the political left. After all, it was devised by the Soviet Union, a leftist totalitarian regime. Antizionism depends on the binary of oppressor versus oppressed. The Soviets understood that classical antisemitism, the caricature of “big-nosed Jews controlling the world,” would no longer be persuasive. So they code-switched: instead of Jews as global conspirators, they framed Zionists as colonizers. This was not merely a cosmetic shift. It was a deeply ideological shift, in which the Soviets exported to the West a ready-made post-colonial framework, complete with assigned roles of oppressors and oppressed.

Critically, the fear of Jewish power is traditionally associated with the political right, but the political left also has its own preoccupation with power, specifically, the belief that power inevitably produces oppression. Within this framework, holding power is itself morally suspect. By recoding Jews as the oppressors, Soviet propagandists created a narrative in which the Jew naturally appears as the villain. Because this fixation on power is central to leftist moral reasoning, many American Jews came to understand their Jewishness primarily through movements focused on challenging power, reproductive, environmental, and social justice. In these spaces, Jewish identity became tied to resisting oppression, which made it far more difficult to recognize when Jews themselves were being cast as the “oppressors.”

For this reason, American Jewish institutions that have long aligned themselves with progressive causes have struggled, and continue to struggle, to oppose antizionism. To speak out against antizionism feels, to them, like a betrayal of progressive values. Even more troubling, it feels like a betrayal of their Jewishness itself.

This is harder to resolve than the simple confusion between criticism of Israel and antizionism. For Jews who understand their Jewish identity primarily through progressive commitments, recognizing antizionism as a hate movement is especially difficult because Israel is powerful. Despite being relentlessly targeted and delegitimized since 1948, Israel is no longer the underdog. It holds military, economic, and geopolitical strength. For Jews whose Jewish identity is rooted on the political Left, acknowledging antizionism as a form of anti-Jewish hatred is therefore not only difficult, it may be nearly impossible.

3. Antisemitism Awareness Acts: problem is, we no longer live in the era of antisemitism: On October 10, The Free Press ran the headline: “Is the ADL Inadvertently Making Antisemitism Worse?” The answer is no, the ADL is not making antisemitism worse. What it is doing, however, is making antizionism worse by continuing to frame everything through the language of antisemitism, thus eclipsing antizionism. The history of anti-Jewish movements can be understood as a three-act play:

Act I: Antijudaism: Jews were cast as evil through accusations of deicide (Christ-killers) and blood libel.

Act II: Antisemitism: Jews were cast as evil through race-pollution, dual loyalty, and conspiracy libels. This is the era in which Jews were seen as contaminating societies and secretly controlling the world.

Act III: Antizionism: Jews, through Israel and Zionism, are cast as villains through the libels of colonizer, apartheid state, ethnostate, and genocide.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks noted back in 2017 that Jew-hatred functions like a virus: it mutates. Each era takes a different form. And because language shapes reality, Jewish institutions that continue to use the word “antisemitism” are effectively locking themselves into Act II, even though that is not the act we are living in anymore. We are now firmly in Act III, the era of antizionism. Jews are rarely portrayed as controlling the world or as racially impure. Instead, Israel and Jews are accused of committing crimes against humanity.

Curricula that frame Jew-hatred through the lens of antisemitism will therefore continue to teach students how terrible it is to scapegoat Jews and treat them as “other.” The irony is: everyone already knows this. No one wants to be called an antisemite. In fact, the contemporary antizionist almost always begins by declaring: “I’m not an antisemite.” That is evidence that our cultural immune system has learned to recognize and reject Act II Jew-hatred.

But the immune system has no protection against Act III. We are using the wrong vaccine. To extend the virus analogy: imaging fighting the 2025 flu with a vaccine from 2021.

As long as Jewish organizations continue to respond to antizionism using the language and frameworks of antisemitism, they will remain outdated, ineffective, and unprepared for the current variant of anti-Jewish hatred. Significantly, even those who teach about antisemitism, gloss over the critical role that libels play as delivery mechanism of the virus. Instead, they talk about the dangers of othering and scapegoating and racism. But Jews found themselves in death camps and killing fields in Ukraine not because they were “othered,” but because they were vilified through the race-polluter and world domination libels.

This final reason for avoiding the word antizionism is a combination of the first two factors. Some Jewish organizations simply do not know the Soviet origins of antizionism; others lack a deep understanding of the complexity of this hatred and its ability to mutate. Still others fail to recognize that the delivery mechanism of this “virus,” whether in its antijudaic or antizionist variant, is the libel, and therefore do not teach about libels at all. And finally, some have a strained relationship with Israel itself, because Israel’s power conflicts with their progressive discomfort with power.

***

It has been 23 years since I stood at UC Santa Cruz and was called a “Zionist pig,” and 23 years since I walked to class hearing students chant, “Hey hey! Ho ho! Zionists have got to go.” That marks 23 years of missed opportunity to recognize antizionism as a hate movement aimed at the annihilation of Jews, missed because of a lack of awareness of its Soviet origins, because many see Zionism as clashing with their progressive discomfort with power, and because Jewish hatred has been taught in a flattened, superficial way, reduced to generic “othering” and “bigoting.”

So when I read the 54-page First Circuit decision that ruled that Jewish students were not experiencing bigotry, because as noted on page 30 of the affidavit, there is an “absence of consensus [around antizionism as a hate movement] reflects ongoing debate as to the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism — debate that our constitutional scheme resolves through discourse, not judicial fiat,” how could I be upset?

That’s right: there is an absence of consensus. We have refused to recognize that antizionism is the phantom haunting us on the streets, in schools, the United Nations, and in the media. We have no business filing lawsuits because we are using language that in no way sets us up for successfully dealing with the current variant.

Why am I writing this piece? Yesterday, I met with a fellow writer and journalist. She and her family are leacing Italy, driven out by antizionism. Read her story. How can history repeat itself so precisely? This is exactly why my own family left the Soviet Union. They were simply done. And when she said those same words to me, “We were just done. Done,” I shuddered.

So why am I writing this piece? Because when you read it, I want you to shudder at the fact that someone dropped the ball for 23 years. I know we can do better. We are a brilliant people. We know how to treat the most aggressive cancers with robotic pills; we know how to pull water from air; we designed a weapon whose very purpose is to defend, not to attack. We can figure out how to confront antizionism.

Our brilliance is not the problem. The problem is our resistance to naming and confronting this hatred. And the first step is simple: it begins with language. “This week,” I told the audience at the end of my talk on the rise of antizionism in America, “use the word antizionism.”