In his landmark essay, Klehr traces Jewish anti-Zionism to directives from Stalin himself. He shows how the American Communist party first trained Jewish members to justify violence against their own people, beginning with the 1929 Hebron massacre. That pattern continues today.
On February 24, Klehr was joined by two leading writers, Eli Lake and Izabella Tabarovsky, for a live conversation on Zoom to discuss the essay and the development of Jewish anti-Zionism in the 20th century and today. This conversation was moderated by Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. You can watch the video, or read the transcript, below.
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Jonathan Silver:
On January 1 of this year, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as the mayor of New York City. He is, of course, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an unapologetic critic of Israel, a founder of his college chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. And, of course, you don’t have love Israel to be an American. You can be an American who doesn’t like Israel. There’s nothing remotely inconsistent with that view, in and of itself. But in a democratic society, the views of the elected tend to reflect and inspire the views of the electors. And our focus today is not so much on what Mayor Mamdani thinks. It’s instead on the roughly one-third of Jewish New Yorkers who voted for him.
Mosaic exists to engage serious questions facing the Jewish people with a capacious approach that those questions deserve. The election of Mayor Mamdani in the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel by a coalition that included a third of Jewish New Yorkers is a fact that confronted us with a question we felt we could not responsibly leave unanswered. How did we get here? How did Jewish anti-Zionism become a respected and even celebrated political identity within American progressive culture? We wanted to answer that question—to go to the roots of it—and that’s why we’re here, today.
Answering that question meant going back a century to the directives of the Soviet government and their effect on the American Jewish left. It meant doing the kind of historically serious work that Mosaic aspires to publish. Harvey Klehr is one of the only scholars in America who can write that kind of piece from a position of genuine authority. He is a professor emeritus at Emory University who spent decades in the archives establishing with precision that the American Communist party was an instrument of Moscow. And in our February essay, “How the Communist Party Created Jewish Anti-Zionism,” he argues that Jewish anti-Zionism has deep roots in the American left, going back at least a century, and that those roots were planted by directives from the Soviet government.
Joining him is Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary left-wing anti-Semitism. She has spent years tracing the specific machinery by which Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda was manufactured and exported. She came to the United States from the Soviet Union as a young immigrant, which means that she’s also going to bring to this conversation not only her own analysis, but also her experience of the system that produced the ideology that we’re discussing.
And of course, the eminent Eli Lake, veteran journalist covering foreign affairs and national security, contributing editor at Commentary and host of the Breaking History podcast at the Free Press. Eli has covered the DSA’s radicalization and Mamdani’s rise, and he has written about a pattern he traces across centuries: the recurring figure of the Jew who lends their identity in order to credential attacks on the Jewish people.
Professor Klehr, I’d like to start by asking you to take us through the main lines of your argument.
Harvey Klehr:
Thank you very much, Jonathan. I’m delighted to be here.
The impetus for this article came from my reading a newly published book called Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left by a man named Benjamin Balthaser, who’s an English professor. He proudly states that he is a red-diaper grandbaby, meaning that he’s at the end of three generations of Communism in his family. He’s also a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
And his book is a paean to the American Communist party, which he says really established the roots of anti-Zionism on the American left, and he thinks had the most sensible and committed approach to anti-Zionism. And he says that the Communist party’s position on Zionism is one that all young activists should emulate. So, my essay traces one particular strain of anti-Zionism. Of course, there are a number of strains, but this straing of Jewish anti-Zionism, has exploded over the past several years. And that is something that’s very distressing, I think, to most members of the American Jewish community.
Jonathan Silver:
Let me interrupt you for just a moment and make clear, as a kind of caveat, that of course we’re aware of various strains of religious Jewish anti-Zionism. The Neturei Karta and the Satmar Hasidim, as well as other groups, all who have their own reasons for opposing Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish state. That’s not what we’re talking about, we’re sort of leaving that off the table here.
Harvey Klehr:
Correct. I say at the beginning of the essay that religious anti-Zionism is one strain of anti-Zionism. But it’s left-wing anti-Zionism which is really the subject of my essay. And it has its origins, I argue, in the writings of the founder of Communism, Karl Marx. Marx was an anti-Semite, an unapologetic anti-Semite.
He argued that Jews were, in a way, the symbol of capitalist society that he thought would be destroyed by Communism. Their supposedly greedy pursuit of money and materialism was the very essence of capitalism. And with the destruction of capitalism, he said Jews would disappear. He didn’t put it in terms of extermination: they would assimilate, they would blend into the population of the workers of the world.
And this argument about the disappearance of Jews and the Jews as the essence of capitalism was mixed with vicious anti-Semitic slurs that were directed at other Jews and the Jewish people. He argued that the Exodus from Egypt was actually Moses leading a group of lepers out of slavery. Marx’s followers, including Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, shared his contempt for Jews. They were manifestations of capitalism, they were not a real people, and they would vanish from history with the abolition of capitalism.
Now, there were Jewish Marxists and Jewish Marxist parties that were not anti-Semitic in any sense of the word. The Jewish Bund was the most obvious example, but they certainly were anti-Zionist. Anti-Zionism was a fundamental part of Communist ideology because it was argued that it differentiated Jews from other workers and thus it could not be allowed. Even so, in 1903, Lenin and Trotsky led a campaign to oust the Bund from the Russian socialist movement.
Now, the bulk of the essay focuses on the Communist Party of the United States, and Jews were a significant presence in that party from the 1920s through the 1950s. From its formation, the Communist party praised the Soviet Union for criminalizing anti-Semitism. That was certainly one aspect of the attraction for many Jews to the Soviet state. Compared to Tsarism, compared to the forces of the White Armies, the Bolsheviks were seen as relatively friendly to Jews.
Relatively is the operative word there. But I talk mostly about several episodes which illustrate how Soviet hostility to Zionism was mixed with anti-Semitism, which had been a part of the Communist state from its beginnings. And the most egregious example took place in 1929 when Arab riots in Hebron and Safed led to the murder of a number of Jews—around 100 I think in total. Most of those who were killed were not Zionists; they were religious Jews.
And at first the Freiheit, which was the Communist party’s Yiddish-language newspaper, denounced the attacks as a pogrom. It was criticized by the Soviet Union and ordered by the Communist Party of the United States to change course because the Soviets said, and the American party reiterated, that the Arab riots were not a manifestation of anti-Semitism but were an example of anti-Zionism, that the riots were an uprising by the Arab peasants against colonialism and imperialism symbolized not only by Great Britain but also by their Jewish co-conspirators. The Freiheit was edited by a former Bundist, a man named Moissaye Olgin, and he embarked on a campaign to demonize those Jews that were killed. The paper called the massacre part of a class war and insisted that thousands of Arabs, particularly women and children, had been murdered, which was utter nonsense.
It was only the beginning of a very long Communist campaign against Jews that characterized them as imperialists and Zionists who were oppressing these poor peasants. Then, in 1939 when Adolf Hitler made his pact with Stalin, the Freiheit applauded it. It abandoned its previous opposition to fascism and argued that the pact was actually saving Jewish lives because it meant that Jews in the Baltic states and in Eastern Poland would be brought under the protective umbrella of the Soviet Union and saved from imperialism. Remember the famous statement by Prime Minister Molotov that fascism was a matter of taste.
The only major Soviet action supporting Zionism of course was the Soviet Union’s support for the partition of Palestine, which was kind of a big one. It certainly was not prompted by any appreciation for Zionism—rather, it was a cynical effort to undermine the British empire in the Middle East. The Soviets thought that it would create chaos. It turned out to be a spectacular miscalculation by Stalin because he had had a faint hope that the new state of Israel, led by socialists, and particularly socialists who had originated in the Soviet Union and Poland, might be sympathetic to the USSR.
They were not. And he was horrified by the large crowds of Jews that greeted Golda Meir, the first ambassador of Israel to the Soviet Union, when she showed up at a synagogue in Moscow for the High Holy Days. He soon embarked on a large-scale, anti-Semitic campaign camouflaged as anti-Zionism. There were several aspects to it that I talk about in the essay, such as the arrests of the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and their subsequent murders. Many of them, of course, were prominent Yiddish writers. Then there was the campaign that began in the late 1940s against “rootless cosmopolitans,” whom everybody understood were Jews. And then the arrest of a number of Jewish doctors between 1948 and 1953 on charges that they had poisoned leaders of the Soviet Union. There were episodes in the satellite countries, the most notorious being Czechoslovakia, where the Slansky purge trials of the early 1950s led to the murder of a large number of Jewish party leaders who were accused of spying on behalf of the United States, Great Britain, and international Zionism.
The response to all of this among Jewish American Communists was to defend the Soviet Union, to assert that the real example of anti-Semitism were the judicial murders of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. That, they claimed, was anti-Semitism, not what happened in Czechoslovakia or what was happening in the Soviet Union. Jewish Life, which was an English-language Communist magazine, argued that the Jewish defendants in the Slansky trial had to be guilty or they would not have confessed. And, in response to the Jewish Yiddish writers disappeared in 1948 and 1949—they were not actually executed until 1951 or 1952—they argued that they were working on new books and that’s why they were out of touch.
It was only in 1956 when a Polish Communist Yiddish newspaper published a report on the murder of those Yiddish writers that the Freiheit admitted what had been blindingly obvious for years. The Soviet Union had engaged in a horrific campaign of anti-Semitism that was disguised as anti-Zionism. And just as the broader American Communist movement had apologized for Soviet terror and Soviet actions for decades until those crimes were confirmed by Nikita Khrushchev in his 1956 speech, Jewish Communists had to have anti-Semitism confirmed for them by the Soviet Union or by official Communist publications before they accepted it.
There were many Jewish Communists in the United States, and there were differences among them. The biggest difference was the difference between the Yiddish-speaking Communists clustered around the Freiheit and the garment unions in New York, and the more assimilated Jewish Communists, many of them born in the United States, who had relatively little to do with Jewish affairs and for whom it was not a major focus. By 1967, the revelations about Soviet anti-Semitism had even penetrated to those Yiddish-speaking Communists; Paul Novick, who was long-time the editor of the Freiheit, was devastated by the news of the murder of the Yiddish writers.
He had known a number of them personally. He supported Israel in the 1967 war, and that began an effort by the Communist party of the United States to expel him and oust him as editor of the Freiheit. He was finally expelled in 1972. Then, in 1975, it’s the Soviet Union that pushes through the “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations.
And my essay concludes with a brief account of the ways in which the New Left of the 1960s and 70s and today’s supporters of Palestine, including Mamdani’s DSA and the deceptively named Jewish Voice for Peace, repeat traditional Soviet anti-Semitic tropes dressed up as mere anti-Zionism. So that’s the broad outlines of the essay, essentially arguing that today’s anti-Zionism is rooted in the anti-Semitism promoted by the Communist party of the United States and originating in the Soviet Union.
Jonathan Silver:
Harvey, I want to focus on that critical moment in 1929—the Freiheit reversal—and what that reversal reveals, because it was the moment when Jewish Communists in America first learned to justify violence against their own people. What actually happened inside the editorial room? What does that reversal tell us about the psychology of ideological loyalty like that?
Harvey Klehr:
Well, it created an uproar. The editors were shocked, and one of them, Mel Epstein—who later defected at the time of the pact in 1939—wrote that their faith in the Soviet Union was simply so strong that they felt they could not defy it. It had an enormous impact on the Freiheit itself.
A gigantic boycott ensued. Advertisers withdrew their ads from the paper. A number of prominent writers vowed never again to write for it. News dealers refused to handle the paper. It cost them dearly. But they were devoted Communists, and they could not break away, they could not defy the Soviet Union. They were religious true believers.
Jonathan Silver:
So let me just ask you one more question and then, Izabella, I’ll invite you to join us. But Harvey, you do draw a line from the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), through SDS, through the Weathermen, to today’s DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America.
I suppose my question is about how straight that line is. Are there ruptures along the way, places where that transmission was broken and then reconstructed? How continuous was it?
Harvey Klehr:
There are twists and turns because the party line twisted and turned over the years. In the middle of the 1930s, as Stalin was becoming more concerned about Nazism and the dangers of fascism, he ordered the implementation of what came to be called the Popular Front. And this was to be an alliance of all democratic forces against fascism.
After that, the Communist party and the party in the United States softened their position on Zionism. Israel Amter, who was a prominent figure in the party, wrote an essay for its theoretical magazine in which he said, “A good Communist can also be a good Jew and even a good Zionist.” The Soviets created a kind of ersatz Zionism in Birobidzhan, which was to be a homeland for Jews in Siberia, but it never attracted more than a few thousand Jews. Not perfect but, even so, they softened their position. Then they hardened it again at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
And then in World War II, when we’re allies, they soften it again. They sent representatives from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on a fundraising tour of the United States, where they drew very large crowds. As a symbol of just how far the party was willing to go, Earl Browder, the leader of the Communist party—though he didn’t specifically mention Zionism—said, “In the interests of building a united front against fascism, I’m even willing to shake hands with J.P. Morgan.” Now, there was something a little bit gruesome about that because Morgan had been dead for two years when Browder said that, but it was the symbolism: we’re all in this together. That ends by 1947.
Jonathan Silver:
Izabella, you’ve been toiling in these salt mines yourself for years and looking specifically at the exportation of Soviet propaganda and the ways in which it penetrated the American imagination. Let me just invite you to bring your perspective to bear as you engage in what Harvey has laid out, here.
Izabella Tabarovsky:
To start, there is absolutely nothing I can object to in what Harvey has laid out. My own work picks up from 1967, which I see as a turning point for a number of reasons. As Harvey said, the Soviets, the Bolsheviks, the Communists in the USSR were always anti-Zionist. But the quality of their anti-Zionism changed over the years. In 1967 we see the real proliferation and internationalization of the slogans that the Soviets are developing at this time to demonize Zionism and to demonize and denounce Israel.
And this is when you really start to see Zionism being equated with all of humanity’s evils—with racism and fascism and Nazism and colonialism and imperialism. Of course, this kind of scapegoating of the Jews has gone on throughout history, but this is when it becomes concentrated and this is when it gets translated into multiple languages and gets transmitted to the world. In the UN, we have the “Zionism is racism” resolution, which was adopted in 1975, but the first time the Soviets introduced that language at the UN was actually 1965. So 1975 is a culmination of an effort that actually went on for a whole decade. And throughout that whole time, and especially after 1967, you see forum after forum that the UN organizes—a women’s forum or a meeting of foreign ministers of member states, for example—and every time they adopt a resolution, there is a line there condemning Zionism or condemning Israel in these specific terms that the Soviets are propagating.
The global left starts adopting this language already by the early 70s. There is actually an article in the New York Times in 1971, by Seymour Martin Lipset, who observes that in 1971 anti-Zionism is the predominant form of anti-Semitism. So I think it’s important to understand that this was an ongoing effort.
I want to give you three specific examples of these channels of transmission, because this has really been the focus of my work. How do you inculcate these ideas? Because it takes a while. You have to work on behalf of ideas in order for them to become widely adopted. And the Soviets used multiple channels to do that.
Channel number one, which is very relevant to our conversation today, is that the Soviet government used Soviet Jews themselves to denounce Zionism and Israel to the world because they understood the moral authority of Jews who denounce Zionism. Whenever they are organizing press conferences at home and abroad, they haul out Jewish celebrities and get them to denounce Zionism and Israel and to say that “We are Soviet Jews and our life in the Soviet Union is so great and we don’t want to emigrate.” This is in the early 1970s. And when you look at how this was covered by Western left-wing press, including the Jewish press, a lot of them really took it at face value.
They really said, “Look, of course the Soviet Jews themselves denounce Zionism, so why wouldn’t we? Clearly they’re doing fine, and there is no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and any claims to the contrary are just right-wing propaganda.” So, that’s one effective channel.
Example number two is their use of diplomatic channels. And we have this really fascinating correspondence between the long-serving Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, and his superiors at the Moscow Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from 1970 to 1971, where his superiors are telling him, “Make sure that when you’re in Washington you tell the American political class, both Democrats and Republicans, how damaging Zionism is to America and how Zionist Jews are more loyal to Israel than they are to America. And you should go and establish contacts with progressive Jews and essentially create a wedge between them and Zionist Jews and tell non-Jews how Zionist Jews are dangerous.”
The third channel is truly fascinating because it really brings us right into the current moment. There is a memo that surfaces from the Soviet period that’s dated I think 1971 or so (maybe 1970) from which we learn that a CPUSA political operative who worked for Political Affairs, Hyman Lumer, was coming to Moscow for a congress on Trotskyism. And he writes to his handlers at the Central Committee at the International Department and says, “I am coming to Moscow and I would like to for you to introduce me to people who can explain to me the right way to think about Zionism. That is, why Zionism is so damaging, why it is so dangerous for the socialist cause.”
The memo concludes that they would of course introduce him to people who can articulate these things for him, and he promises to write a series of articles and a book. The memo ends there, but then you go to Political Affairs and you see that in fact he comes back and he writes articles about Zionism that are written in this Soviet idiom, albeit a little bit less inflammatory because I think he understood that he needed to tone it down for an American audience because the Soviet language was really vitriolic. And then he writes a book that comes out in 1973, called Zionism: Its Role in World Politics.
Jumping forward, in November 2023, a month after October 7, I suddenly come across a publication on a website about that book. This is a publication called People’s World and it is essentially serializing Hyman Lumer’s book. Of course, nothing there explains who he is or where he got his information. This is really an amazing example of how Soviet propaganda continues to circulate today and to influence us today. There are people who seek to bring this to young people today. As Harvey said, and I completely agree, we are recycling Soviet anti-Zionist language and with it all of the anti-Semitic tropes that are inherent in it.
Jonathan Silver:
I want to come now to the dean of As-a-Jew studies, Eli Lake. What we have heard is both Harvey and Izabella make a persuasive presentation of how having Jewish anti-Zionists serves Soviet interests. The obvious question is: why would Jewish anti-Zionists be complicit in that? Why does it serve their interests to try to advance the Soviet arguments?
Eli Lake:
First of all, this was a masterful essay, Harvey, and as an aside I can’t believe that anyone wants to revive the reputation of the American Communist party. And not just because it’s associated with the horrific failed experiment of the Soviet Union, but because the American Communist party was a failure in itself, and it was penetrated by the FBI from the very beginning. It’s like somebody in 2026 writing a book about the wonders of phrenology.
To get to your question, Jon, if you go back to the era of Gutenberg and the Middle Ages, what you find is that there were a series of religious panics about the Talmud at around the time of the introduction of movable type. The Jews were stateless in this period; the Talmud was a text that kept the Jewish people together. There was a pattern, then, of Jews—the two most famous are Nicholas Donin and Johannes Pfefferkorn—who converted to Catholicism and then became testimonial witnesses against the evils of the Talmud. In the case of Johannes Pfefferkorn, I think about 80 or 100 years after Gutenberg, he started what are known historically as Pamphlet Wars in Germany. There were some Christian theologians—perhaps most importantly, Johannes Reuchlin, who was a great friend of the Jews and a very righteous Gentile—who refuted point by point a lot of the slanders about the Talmud, but there was also a campaign to try to round up all of the Talmuds of Germany and burn them.
This pattern exemplified by Donin and Pfefferkorn I think carries on today. First of all, they were mediocrities—Pfefferkorn was a petty thief who got an opportunity to have a station in life that he clearly couldn’t have earned except by converting and then providing this expert testimony about the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism. I think that this is very similar to what we see today with groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, which might as well merge with Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jews who gain prominence and clout by leveraging their association with Judaism as a cudgel for anti-Semites. Students for Justice in Palestine, of course, is a direct outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts to try to establish mainstream groups in the United States. You can trace it back to the original meetings in Philadelphia in the early 1990s. I think the parallel with Donin and Pfefferkorn is really on point, and it’s a clear example of what individual Jews might gain by being complicit with anti-Semites.
What I find very interesting is that you’re seeing an echo of these Soviet arguments against Israel that we’ve been talking about, but now they are coming from Students for Justice in Palestine. If you add to that the Qatari money that is used to purchase influence in universities and media, you’re seeing the old Soviet anti-Zionist arguments except now they’re being leveraged for the sake of Islamism or political Islam.
It’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen what we might call the red-green alliance—that was, of course, a major animating force in the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran where you had the international left carrying a great deal of water for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But this time, it’s a little bit different because, during the cold war, the Islamists were the junior partners globally. Now it seems that the money is on the side of political Islam, and that’s something I hope people will come to their senses about.
Now, it’s very difficult to understand how a “good Marxist” can reconcile his ideology with an organization like Hamas. If we go back to Yasir Arafat and Fatah and the PLO, these were ostensibly socialist organizations. There was a commitment to secularism in the Soviet sense. Hamas, by contrast, is very explicit about what it has planned for Palestine, and that it is part of a wider movement to restore the caliphate and political Islam in general. That’s the part of it that to me is remarkable—as you point out at the end of the essay, groups like the Democratic Socialists of America were basically providing cover for religious fanatics.
It’s not an accident that October 7 was called “al-Aqsa flood” by Hamas. That goes back to lies about Zionist intentions to rebuild a third temple and destroy al-Aqsa Mosque. This is the stuff of religious fanaticism and, again, I don’t see how committed Marxists can just gloss over the contradiction there. So a difference in what we’re seeing today is this cooperation between Soviet anti-Zionism and Islamist anti-Zionism where the Islamist side seems to be taking a larger place in the cultural discussion in the West than it did previously. And the philosophical inconsistencies between those positions, to me, is a weakness in this project, but we’ll see.
This is a bit of a digression, but to understand what’s happening on college campuses and on the left today, I think you have to look beyond the Soviet Union. I think that another thinker that plays an important role is Frantz Fanon and how he starts this anti-colonialism wave that became a big thing starting in the 1960s alongside the deification of people like Che Guevara and of the FLN in Algeria. That’s not something to get into today, but I really think it has to be understood as something different.
Jonathan Silver:
Harvey, let me just ask you to respond in turn to Izabella and Eli, and the suggestions that they’ve raised.
Harvey Klehr:
Well, I’m delighted that they both found merit in my argument. It is interesting, Izabella’s comment about why the Soviets have paid so much attention to the Jewish question—I think it is significant. Part of it, I think, comes from the fact that there is a notion, a conspiratorial notion, that lies at the heart of Marxism, that there’s been this gigantic conspiracy that has been undertaken by the capitalist world, the bourgeois world, to hold down the working class and to deceive it and so on. And a significant number of Marxist-Leninists, not all of them certainly, but a significant number, have looked for the source of this conspiracy and, as with most conspiracies: it’s the Jews.
And you can see this response to the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing—this is part of a Jewish plot. The Soviets played that record repeatedly, and the Arab world has played it as well. Why is the Muslim world, why is the Arab world relatively so underdeveloped? Why has it failed so badly? The answer: it’s not anything internal, it’s because of Jews and a Jewish conspiracy to oppress these other peoples.
Eli Lake:
Yes, but there’s also an element of Islamism which offers its own response to centuries of failure and subjugation. I think it’s an incredibly valuable essay that you’ve written and, if I were teaching a course, I would assign it. But I respect political Islam enough to say that it’s a real ideological vision. And that ideological vision is completely at odds with dialectical materialism. There are a number of credentialed professors in our universities right now who will talk about Hamas as if it is just simply a third-world anti-colonial group without talking about what its real agenda is or anything about the oppression of Palestinians living in Gaza under Hamas rule. To me it’s extraordinary.
Harvey Klehr:
Well, I think you’re absolutely correct. Towards the end of the essay, I said that Jewish anti-Zionism was not based on a misguided idealism but purposeful self-deception. And I think that answers that question. Because if you look at Judith Butler—who’s a leading figure in Jewish Voice for Peace—a couple years ago, she talked about Hamas and Hizballah as part of the international left.
Eli Lake:
That was twenty years ago, but then right after October 7, as you point out, she actually said—to her credit—she said that it is depriving the Palestinians of their own agency to absolve them of moral responsibility in the murders of that day.
Harvey Klehr:
Indeed. There’s an unwillingness to confront what Hamas and Hizballah say that they’re going to do on the part of the Jewish anti-Zionists. Judith Butler and Jewish Voice for Peace have been very critical of Israel as an allegedly discriminatory society. They say Israelis discriminate against black people, and Ethiopian Jews are discriminated against. But why are Ethiopian Jews in Israel? Because of Zionism. And what are Hamas and Hizballah’s plans for Ethiopian Jews if their fondest wishes are carried out? They don’t think that Hamas and Hizballah mean what they say.
And it goes to your point that Islamism is an ideology, but Jewish anti-Zionists are unwilling to accept them at their word.
Jonathan Silver:
I want to put our accent more heavily on this psychology of the Jewish anti-Zionists and what motivates them. In your essay, Harvey, you quote Mark Rudd who has this marvelous formulation that radicalism would somehow allow for Jewish self-abnegation, it would allow him to escape his Jewishness.
What is happening in the Jew who puts on a tallit and sits at a Passover seder in order to undermine and corrode support for the Jewish state and the safe haven for more Jews than any other single place on earth? What are such Jews thinking? Can you give voice to that?
Harvey Klehr:
It’s hard because it seems so illogical. A couple years ago, David Evanier and I wrote an article for Commentary about Jewish anti-Zionists and we interviewed one particular fellow—we gave him a pseudonym in the article—and he was going on and on about how much he supported the Palestinian cause, and how his campaign in the United States was to de-Zionize the pulpit and Jewish religion, and how he felt at home in Gaza when he was there.
And we asked him, “What do you think would happen to you if you went to live in Gaza?” And he said, “Well, they’d kill me probably.” And that didn’t seem to bother him. I think maybe you need a degree in abnormal psychology to explain that kind of behavior.
Eli Lake:
If I can take a stab at it, let’s steelman the argument.
The Palestinians have less power than Israel. And if you see the world through the dynamics of the powerful versus the powerless, then your inclination is going to be to side with people with less power. And there are lots of people who would say, leaving the Israel question out of it, that the essence of Judaism is tikkun olam. I can understand especially when you’re bombarded with images on social media of a horrific war—even though it was started by Hamas—that you would say “This is evil, and I don’t think it’s Jewish to support the military that has so much more power than this resistance. And so, I’m on the side of the little guy.”
I think that there’s a lot of that. And I think when it comes to the actual Jewish intellectuals, they’re coming at it from that perspective that the Palestinians are stateless and deserve a state and Israel has deprived them of it and that’s really where they end the thinking. But that’s where I think it’s coming from.
Jonathan Silver:
It’s just for this reason, Eli, that I think your example of Pfefferkorn is so valuable. Just as there is an opportunity to insinuate oneself into the ambient dominant ethic of that time—Catholicism—so here is an opportunity to put yourself in a position of favor in the ambient ethic of our time, which is this view which elevates the powerlessness above the powerful.
And as a Jew, the only option you have is to do this judo move and use the very identity into which you’re born as the springboard for criticizing the Jewish state as an attempt to get status in this larger culture.
Eli Lake:
Yes, that does seem to be a big part of the psychology. And what’s more is that you constantly see Jews on the left getting these wake-up calls. You mentioned in the essay, Harvey, the DSA statement made after October 7 which doesn’t mention Hamas and blames Israel for the horrible pogrom against it.
That was enough for some of the original founders of the DSA to leave in protest, saying that they couldn’t be associated with the organization anymore. And I would imagine that you’ll find other people constantly leaving because at a certain point I think the conscience does get pricked.
Jonathan Silver:
My friends, there are many questions from the audience, so let me just ask a couple of them. Can you say something, briefly, Izabella, Harvey, Eli, why you think that Marxism and the forms of anti-Zionism associated with it have found such resonance among academics?
Eli Lake:
Well, Joe McCarthy did a very good job—well I shouldn’t say Joe McCarthy, he was a bit of a clown—but I would say that Richard Nixon and the anti-Communists at the beginning of the cold war did a very good job of keeping Communists out of the U.S. government. And Lane Kirkland did a heroic job of keeping Communists out of the mainstream labor movement. But the universities became the safe haven for all of those mid-century Communists and my theory of it—not being an academic—is that it’s become a hothouse. They’ve taken over, which of course is what Marxists and Communists and socialist leftists do when they get their hooks into any organization.
Harvey Klehr:
Well, it’s certainly true that, with the collapse of the New Left in the 1970s, a lot of disappointed activists went back to graduate school and they began to reflect on what had gone wrong in their movement, which had imploded. And they began to look back at the Communist party, which among all American radical groups was probably the most successful and so that was an attractive point.
And the academy in the 1970s was dominated by liberals—most academics were liberals and they were tolerant liberals and they did not hold the views of many of these New Leftists to be disqualifying for academic jobs. And as these people moved into the academy and moved up the ranks of the academy, it turned out that they were fundamentally illiberal. They would not hire people that disagreed with them and so, as that older generation retired and died, the academy—particularly in the humanities and the social sciences—began to form into a monoculture that was more and more sympathetic to the left and to Communism, and hostile to Israel.
Izabella Tabarovsky:
I’ll add that I think that, specifically, the anti-Zionism that we see on the left and in the academy has really become part of the package from the early 1970s, once that language penetrated the various factions of the left. Now, it’s really extraordinary to see how fractious the left actually is. If you put a Trotskyist and somebody from the New Left together in one room, they’ll agree probably on very little, but they’ll speak the same language about Zionism and Israel. And they’re all speaking this language. I think when you look, for example, at the way in which the Soviets were building this international socialist ecosystem—and it was a whole ecosystem of which people like Angela Davis were a part as well as people who went on to advise Jeremy Corbyn and even Corbyn himself—where you accept that capitalism is bad, imperialism is bad, colonialism is bad, and as part of that you also have to accept that Zionism is bad. It just becomes part of the package. And from then on, it’s transferred down the lines. If you’re on the left, this is simply part of how you think.
Eli Lake:
That’s very interesting. And now, anti-Zionism, hating Israel, is kind of the last game in town. If you were an anti-colonialist in 1965, you had a number of causes to attach yourself to. In 2026, sure, you can hate America and you can be against what you consider to be the American hegemon, but good luck with that. The one place where you might succeed is against Israel, where it’s just the “little Satan.” I think that they think that this is the one struggle where they might actually have a chance, and I think all of these professors want to leave their thumbprint on the university.
Jonathan Silver:
Maybe a different way of saying that, Eli, but in a more political sense, is that for all of the disagreements, between the Trotskyite and the new leftist who were put into a room together, in fact the one thing that they definitely agree on, the organizing apex of their political unity, happens to be opposition to the Jews and Israel.
Izabella Tabarovsky:
Exactly. And I think it’s part of the reason why they keep holding on to it. When you look, for example, at how the Soviets run this international anti-Zionist campaign for 25 years. At some point, they start to get that they’re being called anti-Semitic.
They reject it of course. They say, “We’re just being anti-Zionist, we’re not being anti-Semitic.” But there are internal debates, they’re asking themselves if there is something to it. “Why are they calling us this?” And then, towards the late 1970s, early 1980s, you start to see some recognition inside that “Yes, actually, some of these things we’re saying are anti-Semitic.” But they continue with the campaign despite the fact that they’re so conscious about their image. Why do they continue? They continue because it works.
On a pragmatic level, it unites all these disparate groups; it unites all these genocidal dictators in Africa with the Arab states and with people who are obsessed with the national liberation movements and people who are pining for Che Guevara. Like magic, it unites all of them and it works. And I think this is partly why we see the left working with the Islamists today—because it works. Politically, it’s a very useful alliance for them and so they set aside some of their ideological disagreements and they say, “We’ll just keep working together to bring down imperialism and capitalism and colonialism and Zionism.”
Jonathan Silver:
So Izabella, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, how did its beliefs about Zionism survive despite not having the same kind of state apparatus and institutional support?
Izabella Tabarovsky:
You know, I get this question a lot and I want to pose another question in response. The Soviet Union hasn’t been around for 30 years approximately, maybe 35 years. Nazi Germany hasn’t been around for 80 years. How is it that Nazi ideas survive? Ideas survive because there are groups of people who keep espousing them, and who keep developing them and expressing them.
Of course, things have changed and new money has come in, as Eli was saying about Qatari money, and new groups come in like Students for Justice in Palestine, etc. So, there is a new edge to it. But the language remains. The language survives. Look, for example, at that website I referred to at the end of my comments—the language is there for anyone to use, for everyone to take on. Right in front of you is the possibility of creating these kinds of operations that let you unleash a lie on the world, knowing that the world will believe the lie and that the truth will take a while to catch on and that even then the truth will never gain the same kind of headlines as your lie. And now, all of that is available to everyone.
Jonathan Silver:
Before we end, Harvey, I want to give you the last word, and I’d like to do so by referring to something you’ve already brought up in our discussion here, which is that the essay that you wrote, which is full of careful, measured historical evidence, nevertheless ends with a moral judgment. You write that Jewish anti-Zionism is not misguided idealism but harmful and purposeful self-deception. Can you defend that and just amplify what you mean?
Harvey Klehr:
I don’t want to paint with a too broad a brush, because I’m sure there are Jewish anti-Zionists who have other sorts of motives. But I think that for an awful lot of Jewish anti-Zionists, they are unwilling to confront the fact that the people that say that they wish to destroy Israel really do mean what they say. They have an agenda that, as Eli has said, is deeply rooted in a strongly held ideological system. And being nice and pretending that we can reach some kind of compromise with that is often self-delusion.
It goes back to a point that Eli made as well, that in the 1980s, what was the forerunner of DSA—Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee—merged with the New American Movement, which came out of the New Left. Michael Harrington was a firm anti-Communist for most of his life, and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee was strongly committed to Israel. But Harrington wanted to build what he thought would be an effective socialist movement in the United States and he needed that young energy from the New American Movement, which was mostly survivors of the New Left.
So, he admitted them, and what he got was a number of red-diaper babies who had been imbued with anti-Zionism and people like Mark Rudd and other veterans of the New Left who were fanatically anti-Israel. And Zohran Mamdani is the result. These people have now taken over the DSA.
If you look at the DSA caucuses—they have a number of different caucuses—a bunch of them are explicitly Communist. They proclaim themselves Marxist-Leninists, Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. The idea that they’re democratic socialists is a joke because they’re not. They’re authoritarian socialists, or maybe even totalitarian socialists.
That’s what I meant by this idea that there’s a self-deception involved. These people don’t take politics very seriously. They think that you can pose a certain way, and the world is filled with people who are posers. But that’s not true, as we learned when we fought Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s or when we fought Communism.
There are people who really believe this stuff and you have to take them seriously.
