The Shadow of Babi Yar: How the Soviets Taught the West to Erase the Jews

In the 1944 official report of the Extraordinary State Commission on Babi Yar—the site of a Holocaust massacre of Jews—Soviet documents stated that “the Hitlerist butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, and shot them.” Although it was widely understood that “them” meant Jews, the wording reflects a deliberate, state-sponsored effort to obscure the identity of the Holocaust’s primary victims. Soviet-Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko confronted this absence in his 1962 poem Babi Yar, opening with the line “No monument stands over Babi Yar”—a statement that both acknowledged the obvious and exposed the regime’s intentional distortion of Holocaust memory. Even when a state monument was finally erected in 1976 at Babi Yar, the inscription honored the “peaceful Soviet people,” thus continuing the systemic erasure of Jews from historical memory.

And though the Soviets played a central role in defeating fascism and winning the Second World War, the government turned vehemently against its own Jews in a sophisticated antizionism campaign that now finds renewed life in the West, and more disturbingly, within a discipline whose aim is to “champion justice and excellence in public education:” the discipline of teaching. What then does the national teachers’ union in 2025 that represents over 3 million public school teachers, staff, and faculty at colleges and universities, have in common with a brutal country that no longer exists? Everything it seems, as this week the National Education Association (NEA) published a 2025 handbook for teachers with resources on the Holocaust. 

Describing the Holocaust as having “12 million victims from different faiths, genders, and religions,” the NEA faultlessly repeated a tactic of erasure and inversion practiced in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Soviet genealogy of this type of Holocaust perversion reveals how on the political left, unlike the political right, the Holocaust is not denied but rather purged from reference to Jews. Because the NEA’s framing of the Holocaust is not a misstep but the echo of a Soviet blueprint, it is also the reason why antizionism, a Soviet invention, thrives in left-wing spaces, and why in the 2025 handbook the NEA “will use existing digital communication tools to educate members about the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”  

Describing the Holocaust as having “12 million victims from different faiths, genders, and religions,” the National Education Association faultlessly repeated a tactic of erasure and inversion practiced in the Soviet Union.

Although this destructive Holocaust education material was eventually scrubbed from NEA’s official website, understanding why and how the Soviets turned against their Jewish population in the immediate postwar years sheds light on current and emerging patterns of Jew-hatred within left-wing spaces. The first question we must ask, therefore, is why did the Soviets turn on their Jews so soon after the Holocaust? Given the global backlash against Jews following Hamas’ brutal massacre and kidnappings on October 7, this question feels less perplexing today. While there is never a justification for inciting hatred, especially against a people who have just suffered immense trauma, the history of Soviet antisemitism—antizionism—offers critical insight into what we are witnessing today in our educational institutions.

The history of postwar Jew-hatred in the Soviet Union drew not only on longstanding antisemitic attitudes among the Russian-speaking population, but more significantly, on a combination of Joseph Stalin’s paranoia and the Soviet Union’s growing anti-Western and anti-American campaign. Regardless of which factor played the dominant role, one thing is certain: postwar antisemitism had to be concealed and carefully repackaged. After all, it would be difficult to openly attack a people who had just emerged from gas chambers, ovens, and mass shooting fields of the Holocaust. To do so required crafting a campaign that bore no resemblance to medieval or Nazi antisemitism, but instead took the form of a political struggle framed as a defense of a higher cause—namely, the preservation of Soviet Marxism, Stalinism, and, after 1967, the protection of Soviet geopolitical power. Because at its core, Jew-hatred is not simply about viewing Jews as the “other,” but as the mega-villain—an obstacle to one’s own pursuit of moral righteousness.This is what makes it both seductive and so difficult to eradicate. 

Soviet antizionism, which began with erasing Jews from Holocaust memory, paved the way for one of the most pernicious lies: that Zionists are Nazis. Understanding that accusing Jews of being Nazis would not only be poorly received but ultimately self-defeating, Soviet propaganda masters shifted the terminology from “Jew” to “Zionist,” and reframed their accusation—branding Zionists as fascists instead. A reproduction of a 1970 poster, titled “Zionism is the Fascism Today,” depicts a swastika sign consisting of an Israeli general with bomb and ax, chopping up Arabs in lockstep with the skeleton of Hitler.

Indeed, the equation of Zionism with fascism was a frequent leitmotif in official Soviet media. Articles such as Vladimir Bolshakov’s “Fascism and Zionism: the Roots of Kinship” which appeared in a January 1984 issue of Pravda provided the necessary imprimatur to enact a libelous campaign against the Jewish people. 

Critically, what Soviet antizionism teaches us is that erasure of Jews from the Holocaust is the necessary precondition to then turn against Jews by accusing them of the very crimes committed against them. And this, of course, is exactly what has already been unfolding in higher education and on our streets: accusing Israel of Nazi crimes. 

But today’s antizionists in the West have outdone their Soviet progenitors as they not only repeat the lies and libels in order to demonize Jews and Israel, but divorce antizionism from antisemitism. In fact, the NEA’s teachers’ resource, the very same document that erased Jews as the primary victims of the Nazi genocide, included a paragraph in which NEA “will be using existing… tools to educate members about the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.” This tactic of disconnecting Zionism from Judaism is another form of erasure: erasing Jewish collective memory for the Jewish people have, for centuries, longed to return to Zion, Israel. 

And like erasing Jews from the Holocaust is the necessary perquisite to then wage the accusation of genocide and Nazism against Zionism and Israel, so too divorcing Zionism from Judaism is a key ingredient to not only providing legitimacy to the argument that antizionism is not antisemitism but continuing to practice institutional Jew-hatred. This the Soviets did not do perhaps because, unlike antizionists in the West, they felt no need to convince their citizens that they weren’t anti-Jewish. To be sure, no one in the Soviet Union wondered whether antizionism was antisemitism. Everyone knew. 

Nothing is sacred anymore. If before we could not believe that Israel was being erased on world maps and replaced by Palestine instead of “Israel,” now the Jew is being erased from the Holocaust itself. But it makes sense. The reason the NEA is able to erase Jews from the Holocaust is that, for the past two decades, if not more, there has been a concerted effort to demonize Jews. It does not, of course, begin with demonization. It begins with lies, libels, and erasure, all of which leads to demonization. This final step, the stage of demonizing, allows the world to dispense with the Jew—to do unto the Jewish people what you accuse them of doing. And make no mistake about it: the final stage, always, is annihilation. 

How to fight a hatred crafted by a regime that no longer exists? Significantly, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the phantom legs of antizionism likewise disappeared, thus proving that this hatred largely depends on certain conditions. What are these conditions? As I have written elsewhere, antizionism thrives in left-wing spaces and discourse. To effectively counter antizionism, a two-pronged strategy is essential. First, directly challenge the intellectual foundations that sustain it—namely the Frankfurt School, post-colonial theory, and spaces that elevate intersectional identity as the primary mode of existing. Second, reject the impulse to apologize for Jewish power. 

These two components are deeply interconnected. While the ideological left often demonizes power and casts Zionists as its ultimate embodiment, capitulating to this framework only reinforces its premises. We must not be ashamed of Israel’s strength. Yes, Israel is a military and economic superpower in the Middle East. Yes, it possesses a functioning state and a standing army, while the Palestinian Arabs do not. Attempts to recast Israel as an underdog—through rhetoric such as “Jews of color” or “Israel is made up of brown Jews”—fail because they operate within the same victimhood paradigm that antizionism exploits. Appeasing that narrative only strengthens it.

Naya Lekht is currently the Education Editor for White Rose Magazine and a Research Fellow for the Institute for Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.