"On The Frontlines of Progressive Antisemitism," the post-mortem.

No violence is needed for an atmosphere of intense uniformity to squeeze Judaism to the brink of extinction.

Young people march in protest of Soviet state-sponsored anti-Zionism, 1960s.

Joyous May Day, comrades! Workers and students of the world, paying $80k a year to learn about Marx, unite!

Below is a piece that I wrote as a response to my 2019 piece: “On the Frontlines of Progressive Antisemitism” published in The New York Times. Unfortunately, I’ve heard from folks on the inside that the Times is refusing most if not all pro-Israel content these days, so perhaps this piece never stood a chance. In any event, I’m not an entitled Gen Z-er, otherwise I’d be wearing a keffiyeh (A type of Orientalist fetishism that would make Said question his life’s work) and demanding a Sweetgreen Harvest Bowl, excuse me —“humanitarian aid”— in the throes of my revolution, so I’m happy to publish this essay here. You guys are much cooler than the Times readership, anyway. More to come soon.

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In the autumn of 2019, I penned a piece for this paper’s opinion section entitled “On the Frontlines of Progressive Antisemitism,” detailing my experience as a liberal, Jewish college student at George Washington University. I was called a “baby killer” by fellow classmates. A student was caught on camera saying “We’re going to bomb Israel, you Jewish pieces of shit.” Several student organizations were incorporating calls to liberate Palestine “from the river to the sea” in their environmental, racial justice, and labor rights activism. I described my gnawing feelings of social isolation, and argued that by parroting the words of some of the world’s most depraved bigots, today’s young people on our college campuses were putting the future of America in danger.  

It brings me no pleasure to say that I and my fellow Jewish young people were correct in our warnings. Yet most refused to listen. Consequently, America today finds itself in a mess — a mess that is not going to go away, because the opportunity to kill this cancer before it became malignant was missed. Instead, our concerns were called “hysterical,” or worse – “partisan.”  

What is newsworthy to many Americans is that what we are seeing on campuses today is not new. Far from it. The video circling around social media as we speak of students blocking another student’s entry into the UCLA library, on behalf of their classmate identifying as a “Zionist,” harkens back to the heyday of the Soviet Union when Joseph Stalin’s obsession with “Zionist” plotting led to the arrest and execution of thirteen Jewish writers in 1952. Each comrade was accused of conspiracy and espionage, the supreme irony of the episode being that one would be hard-pressed to find more loyal Soviet citizens than those executed in “The Night of the Murdered Poets.”  

But the most crucial aspect of Soviet antisemitism is not its periodic violence. Contrary to the understanding of too many that for antisemitism to truly be antisemitism, Jewish people need to be getting attacked in the street or in their synagogues, state-sanctioned antisemitism persisted in Russia long after Stalin’s death and without the spilling of Jewish blood. No violence was necessary for the atmosphere of intense uniformity to squeeze Judaism to the brink of extinction, in which Jewish religious worship, the speaking of Hebrew, and any form of Jewish collective solidarity was identified as an unlawful threat. Hundreds of thousands of Jews migrated to Israel in the years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, not seeking physical safety, but personal and political freedom.  

This is precisely the phenomenon happening within American left-wing circles today, particularly on the college campus. Radicals will scream “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” thinking this wordplay absolves them of any moral failing, unaware that the term “anti-Zionism” itself was manufactured by the Soviets to place a mask of respectability on the same campaign of lies and conspiracies that has been waged against the Jewish people for millennia.  

The person who has written about this dynamic most incisively is Izabella Tabarovsky, herself a former Soviet Jew now living in Israel. Several years ago in Tablet Magazine, Tabarovsky published images from the Moscow May Day parade, where a spider with a Star of David cap and a hooked nose hangs above a sign that reads: “Zionism is the weapon of imperialism!” Later we see an image in a Soviet newspaper of a stereotypical antisemitic idea of a Jewish man, gluttonous with a hooked nose, holding an axe dripping with blood, his shadow taking the form of Adolf Hitler. Tabarovsky notes: “The history of Soviet anti-Zionist cartoons makes obvious that separating anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism can be a challenging if not impossible task.” 

What is the equivalent of Soviet cartoons today? Look no further than my alma mater, where students hung a poster outside the “anti-Zionist” encampment last week reading: “Students will leave when Israelis go back to Europe,” winking to tropes of the “wandering Jew” who doesn’t belong, the “rootless cosmopolitan.” Or look at Columbia, where students hung a banner with the word “Intifada” over a lecture hall, which refers only to the indiscriminate murder of Israeli civilians on buses and in nightclubs. Or look to Princeton, where a photo of a hipster-looking youth playing guitar over the flag of terrorist organization Hezbollah, which is responsible for the murder of not just Israelis but Palestinians and Syrians as well, recently went viral.  

As I concluded my article five years ago, what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. We have every reason to believe that the students trafficking in this outright hatred, of which they would never tolerate against another minority, will go on to heavily influence our politics, media, and wider culture. That means that at this moment, we can expect a massive emigration of American Jews from the United States in the coming decades.  

There will be those who assimilate – who bow to the pressure of a movement that calls Jewish nationalism an inherent affront to human rights, and having little religious belief themselves, they will cease to be Jewish, apart from maybe a bagel and lox and a twenty-minute Passover seder once a year. But I have hope that there will be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of others, who take a look around and understand that America was not as exceptional as our grandparents had once presumed, and that perhaps the society we had done so well to shape and advance was not immune to the virus that has ceaselessly stalked our people across the globe. 

I moved to Israel a few years after my dispatch from GW. After connecting with thousands of Jewish college students across the country suffering the same angst, I realized that the problem was overwhelming, and after educating myself on the historical precedent of all that I was hearing, I understood the gravity of the movement.  

In Israel, I find I am a Jew who is faced with more serious and threatening dangers, like Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran, but ultimately, I am a Jew who is not afraid. I am a Jew who feels strong and assured, because my people’s right to equality and protection is our modus operandi, a principle we are willing to sacrifice a great deal for, and if America was unable to live up to the same promise, so be it.