Izabella Tabarovsky
Senior advisor at the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC
| Website: | Izabella Tabarovsky profile page |
Izabella Tabarovsky on Soviet Antizionism & Contemporary Antisemitism:
Where does contemporary antizionist ideology come from? Who first began to demonize Israel as an “apartheid” state or smear Zionism as a reincarnation of Nazi Germany? Who emptied the term Zionism of its original meaning and associated it with humanity’s worst evils?
Many view these ideas as a product of contemporary social justice activism and Western academic thought. But the history of these ideas goes back over half a century. That’s when the Soviet Union began to treat Zionism as though it was its primary ideological enemy, to develop an elaborate international propaganda effort against it, and to try to win over the global left and the developing world to its antizionist project.
In her work, Izabella Tabarovsky argues that we can’t understand contemporary antizionism (yes, the no-hyphen spelling is intentional) without this history. She says that this history matters as much for our understanding of contemporary antisemitism as the history of Nazi antisemitism.
The antizionist slogans we are hearing today were once weaponized against millions of Soviet Jews. They are already weaponized today against Jews in North America (though, thankfully, without an all-powerful apparatus of state repression behind them). One of the main lessons of Soviet antizionism, Tabarovsky argues, is that whenever an institution or a society embraces antizionist antisemitism, Jews suffer. This history helps us analyze contemporary antizionist antisemitism correctly and improve our ability to forecast the effects it may have on Jewish life today. Her work aims to bring this history to contemporary audiences.
Izabella Tabarovsky is a senior advisor at the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. She is a research fellow at ISGAP and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. She is a contributing writer at Tablet. She is based in Jerusalem, Israel.