Student protesters on October 7th.
Lenny Fukshansky is a professor of mathematics at Claremont McKenna. A version of this article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal.
I grew up in Soviet Russia. When I was 17 years old, my family and I immigrated to the United States as Jewish refugees. I love America for the many freedoms and opportunities that it has given me, among them the freedom to openly express my opinions and to compete on an equal basis. Above all, I have loved being in a country where my status as a Jew in no way infringed these rights and opportunities. I treasure citizenship in a country that has been blessedly free of antisemitism.
That ideal, however, has become less clear in the past year. At the Claremont Colleges, anti-Israel activists insist that we shouldn’t conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism. My Soviet experience suggests that the two are closely married. Although antisemitism underwent many transformations from the formation of the Soviet Union in 1917 to its demise in 1991, there was one near constant: anti-Zionism.
Anti-Zionism always colored the antisemitism that we, the Soviet Jews, confronted. Vladimir Lenin referred to Zionism as “bourgeois nationalism,” hence an ideology anathema to communist revolutionaries. That prejudice subsided briefly when Soviet officials thought the new state of Israel might become a member of the communist bloc. When it didn’t, Stalin returned to Lenin’s playbook.
To see this continuity, look no further than the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the main Russian language encyclopedia published from 1926 through 1990. It described Zionism as a form of racism and colonialism, with the usual conspiratorial thinking baked in. Linking Zionism to classic antisemitic stereotypes, the encyclopedia alleged that the “International Zionist Organization owns major financial funds, partly through Jewish monopolists and partly collected by Jewish mandatory charities."
This persistent antisemitism sometimes flared up into nationwide panics. In 1951, the doctors’ plot was started. It was a state-sponsored campaign accusing a group of mostly Jewish doctors of conspiring to murder prominent Soviet politicians. Many of the slogans of this campaign openly referred to the threat of Zionism and explicitly targeted doctors with Jewish surnames. In a nationally publicized trial, Soviet authorities labeled Professor M. S. Vovsi "the leader of Zionists embedded into Soviet medicine.” The official investigation materials of the Soviet Ministry of State Security (MGB) referenced the doctors’ plot as a Zionist conspiracy.
As we now know, the doctors’ plot was the first step in Stalin’s ultimate plan to eliminate and deport the majority of Russian Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Republic in Siberia. It was a terrifying time for Soviet Jews. Only Stalin’s death in 1953 averted the catastrophe and allowed my generation of Jews to be born.
During my childhood, antisemitic Soviet rhetoric continued to be framed in anti-Zionist terms. When I was 11, a special state committee produced a report alleging a criminal alliance between Nazism and Zionism. This anti-Zionist propaganda from above stirred up anti-Jewish feelings from below. I remember a schoolmate telling me: “Hitler should have burnt all of you Jews.” It was not uncommon to hear slogans like “Jews, go back to your Israel!”
And while Israel was a source of pride for us Russian Jews, we were punished for its successes. The strict university quotas which limited the number of accepted Jewish students at top universities were especially enforced just after Israel’s victory in the Arab-Israeli Six Day War in 1967, when anti-Zionist feeling was running high in the USSR. In my own field of mathematics, the use of “killer questions” given only to Jewish applicants on entrance exams became so infamous that some of them were even collected as examples of exceptionally difficult mathematical brain-teasers – an excellent way to challenge and educate yourself, but an unfair and discriminatory way of conducting an entrance exam for only one undesirable group of applicants.
All that was left behind when we came to the US, or so I thought. The rhetoric that I witnessed after October 7, 2023 on American university campuses, including the Claremont Colleges, brought back the memories of Soviet life. Much like the Soviet officials, today’s activists insist that anti-Zionism bears no connection to antisemitism. Many of the words and slogans used by activists sound painfully familiar. The slogan “Jews, go back to your Israel!” has been ironically replaced by “Jews, go back to Poland!” The word “Zionist” itself is considered derogatory by many on today’s American academic campuses, much as it had been in the USSR.
Some of the classic antisemitic tropes, including blood libel, have been picked up, dusted off, and sold as anti-Zionist. At the 5C club fair this fall, the Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) had a stack of pamphlets on its table entitled MASK UP, WE NEED YOU: Palestinian Solidarity, Covid-19, and the Struggle for Liberation. The brochure was advertised widely, including by the Claremont Colleges Staff for Palestine’s Instagram page. It pushed a conspiracy theory, reminiscent of the doctors’ plot, that Covid-19 has been purposefully introduced into the world by the US and Israel in order to commit a eugenicist genocide against Palestinians, minorities, and disabled people. It warned: “Zionists and eugenicists rely on you to be poorly informed to fall for their simplified, decontextualized, revisionist, racist and ableist takes.”
This brochure is so reminiscent of anti-Zionist propaganda from my childhood, it felt almost as if it could have been written by Soviet propagandists. It claims that “Zionist propaganda follows a parallel playbook of capitalistic distraction.” The line seems lifted from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which informed us that Zionism was spread by the “Jewish population of capitalist countries.” The student brochure is also littered with references that I recall from my youth, including talk of the predations of the “ruling class” and the suffering of “exhausted workers.” More generally, of course, today’s anti-Zionist activists refer to one another as “comrades” fighting for the “revolution.”
Of course, not all criticisms of Israel are antisemitic. But nearly all the antisemitism I have encountered, both here and in the USSR, has been mixed with anti-Zionism. The late and great Jonathan Sacks, the longtime Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, emphasized in one of his educational videos the mutating nature of antisemitism through the centuries and spoke of anti-Zionism as its most recent reincarnation.
Happily, Soviet communism is dead. Yet some of its dark legacies endure, improbably here in the United States – the nation that defeated it. As a Jew who grew up in that nightmarish regime, I hope America, my adopted home, will find a way to recognize and reject so much anti-Zionism for the blatant antisemitism it is.
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