A Forgotten Jew-Hatred: How Soviet Anti-Zionism Engineered Jewish Confusion and Western Self-Hate

In June 2024, the Munk Debate hosted an Anti-Zionism Debate with Natasha Hausdorff and Douglas Murray to resolve whether anti-Zionism “is antisemitism.” Overall, since 2019 there have been 10-15 public debates on whether anti-Zionism constitutes a form of Jew-hatred. Last year, I myself participated in such a debate on a podcast. These public forums now have a predictable choreography. They begin by defining “Zionism,” as if Zionism were the antipode of anti-Zionism, and a necessary preamble. This would be akin to insisting that we define “semites” before engaging in a serious discussion of antisemitism as a historicized 19th and 20th century movement. But what many do not know is our reflexive focus on Zionism unwittingly fulfills the very purpose for which anti-Zionism was created. 

Anti-Zionism was an invention of the Soviet Union to disguise hatred of Israel, and “Zionists” as political criticism of Israel. As early as 1903, Lenin was scribbling screeds about “Zionists.” His tokenized “Jewish Sections,” or “Yevsektsiya,” were installed in 1918 and desecrated Jewish cultural life in the nascent USSR. As late as 1963, Soviet propagandist Trofim Kichko published a classically antisemitic book titled “Judaism Without Embellishment.” It led to embarrassment internationally for being too obviously extreme and therefore earned disfavor within the Communist Party. Therefore the 1960’s became a decade in which the Soviet Union learned to moderate carefully, to “pivot” further towards anti-Zionism. Soviet media, party publications, and official speeches deliberately codified a sharp distinction between antisemitism, denounced as a “bourgeois racial ideology,” and anti-Zionism, which was framed as a “progressive political struggle.”  

Soviet media, party publications, and official speeches deliberately codified a sharp distinction between antisemitism, denounced as a “bourgeois racial ideology,” and antizionism, which was framed as a “progressive political struggle.” 

But Soviet anti-Zionism reached its pinnacle when the regime discovered that the surest way to legitimize anti-Zionism was to pair it with explicit condemnation of antisemitism. As such, in a 1971 Pravda article, “Zionism: The Weapon of Reaction,” Deputy Secretary of the editorial board Viktorovich Bolshakov declared that “struggle against Zionism must not be confused with antisemitism, which is alien to the socialist world… The Soviet Union fights against Zionism as an instrument of imperialism, not against Jews, many of whom are honest workers and patriots.” Similarly, a 1974 piece in Kommunist stated that “antisemitism is an abhorrent racist theory condemned by all progressive mankind. Zionism, however, is a political movement expressing the interests of the reactionary circles of the Jewish bourgeoisie, serving imperialism and opposing socialism.”

The Soviet Union’s deliberate bifurcation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism was more than a matter of semantics; it constituted the very foundation of one of the most formidable propaganda systems of the 20th century. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted in his introduction to “The Anti-Zionist Complex,” “this was the world’s most powerful propaganda apparatus, the Soviet Union and the dozens of governments which echo it.” The “this” that we are dealing with was and remains – 34 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union! – anti-Zionism.

Critically, anti-Zionism is perhaps the most sophisticated form of anti-Jewish bigotry precisely because it was designed to masquerade as political criticism. The Soviet propaganda machine meticulously engineered this movement, coding it in a way that invited endless focus on Israel and Israel’s actions. We know why the Soviets did this: by framing Israel as a “colonial apartheid project,” they effectively tainted Israel with the sins of the West for Western leftists, making it an effigy against which leftists could redirect their self-hate for the West. This is why, among other things, victims of actual slaughter, genocide, rape, and slavery are not seen by those who conform to anti-Zionism. Indeed, in my classes, when I reference the Uyghurs, my students ask, “The what? How do you spell that?” Because the Soviets successfully framed Zionism as racism, and more critically, as self, the Uyghurs fall entirely out of this structure of Western-ness; they are the “Other,” and thus attention is not paid to them, for they do not make us feel “better” about the “sins” of the West.

By designing a hate movement to appear political, what the Soviets could not have foreseen, however, was how Jews themselves would be deceived into participating in the political debate. Critically, this is what distinguishes anti-Zionism from its antecedent, antisemitism. And while the father of modern antisemitism, Wilhelm Marr was himself a clever wordsmith, as he intentionally coined the term “anti-Semitism” in 1879 to present a scientific and thus socially acceptable language for Jew-hatred, Jews were not distracted by his appeal to recast it in scientific or racial terms because, unlike the Soviets, it was not Marr’s intention to hide or obscure the figure of Jew from his own hate movement.

In his 1879 pamphlet “Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum” (“The Victory of Judaism over Germandom”), Marr introduces the term “Antisemitismus” as part of a new “racial” vocabulary. Arguing that Jews and Germans “are now engaged in a life-and-death struggle between the Semitic and the Teutonic race,” Marr wanted to modernize Jew-hatred, not distance himself from anti-Jewish animus. In effect, the key difference between Marr’s presentation of antisemitism and the Soviet’s arrangement of anti-Zionism is one of repackaging versus deception. Marr insisted that his antisemitism was nonreligious, yet he never denied its anti-Jewish nature. The Soviet innovation, by contrast, was far more insidious: anti-Zionism was conceived as a tool of ideological subversion, designed precisely to disorient its target, Israel and Zionism, by eroding the very capacity to discern reality.

The difference becomes clear when comparing Jewish responses to Marr’s antisemitism and to the Soviet branding of anti-Zionism. Jewish satirist Julius Stettenheim’s 1879 poem “The Jew-Eater: Hope You Like It!” offers one of the earliest replies to Marr. Parodying Marr’s racial logic, Stettenheim depicts a self-proclaimed defender of Germandom who literally devours Jews to prove his ideological purity:

“I devour them, the Jewish brood,

Flesh and bone and all their blood!

I eat them up, I eat them whole —

My theology praises my soul!”

By using fressen (to eat like an animal) instead of essen (to eat like a human), Stettenheim exposes the antisemite as the true beast, revealing how demonizing Jews grants moral license to commit against them the very evils he projects onto them.

Stettenheim was not alone in his denouncement of Marr’s scientific antisemitism. Moritz Lazarus, one of the most respected German-Jewish philosophers of his generation, responded to Marr’s “The Victory of Judaism over Germandom” by discussing the antisemitic agitation as a “moral sickness within liberal society” itself. Lazarus’ student, Hermann Cohen, indirectly engaged with Marr’s accusation that Jews pose a threat to Germany by attempting to prove to German intellectuals that “if antisemitism accuses us being strangers, we must show through our moral example that Judaism is the ethical heart of Germanness itself” (1915). And while liberal Jewish newspapers in Germany may have downplayed the significance of Marr’s repackaging, what they most certainly did not do is deny its anti-Jewish essence. In sum, a critical mass of Jewish thinkers recognized that, at best, Marr had merely repackaged Judenhass, but Jew-hatred it remained, nonetheless.

The case of anti-Zionism is markedly different, for it was not conceived as a repackaging but as an ostensibly new, and, more insidiously, morally legitimate, form of Jew-hatred. This was achieved by strategically presenting anti-Zionism as a “progressive political struggle,” while casting antisemitism as a hateful ideology with no place in civil society. Moreover, to achieve its aim of ideological subversion, the Soviets recruited Jews, something Marr never did. In the early 20th century, many socialist Jews had already gravitated toward anti-Zionism as part of their rejection of national particularism, embracing Marxism’s universalist promise of human unity and equality. The renunciation of Jewish nationhood was thus not incidental but essential to the Marxist-Leninist project. Yet the Soviet innovation after 1948, the deliberate enlistment of Jews in the anti-Zionist machine they had constructed, was far more insidious. Jewish participation conferred upon anti-Zionism a veneer of authenticity and moral credibility, transforming it into one of the most effective instruments of ideological subversion in the modern age.

Therefore, when the Soviets established the “Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public” in 1983, composed largely of Jews, it was done with the stated goal of delegitimizing anti-Zionism as a hate movement. After all, how could Jews participate in the hate of their own people? The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public was a fait accompli. Who could ever imagine enlisting victims of a hate movement to perpetuate the hate against them? If anyone could, it was the Soviets. To be sure, the majority of Soviet Jews understood exactly what anti-Zionism represented, as the refusenik movement attests. Yet by assembling even a small number of token Jewish voices to front the campaign, the Soviets executed a masterstroke of ideological manipulation, granting their project a veneer of authenticity and moral credibility while deepening its power of deception. 

In addition to recruiting Jews, the Soviets designed anti-Zionist ideology to be exported to the West, burdened by guilt over its racist past, as a new way to hate itself. Disguised as opposition to Zionism, this new form of Jew-hatred became the Soviet Union’s preferred tool for attacking the democratic world, beginning with Israel, but “ultimately targeting the entire West, including the United States” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan). Crucially, anti-Zionism blinds the West to atrocities occurring across the globe. While over eight million Africans are currently enslaved on the African continent and Christians are being slaughtered daily in Nigeria, these realities remain largely unseen because anti-Zionism demands total fixation. It leaves no space for acknowledging suffering elsewhere. Instead, it compels many in the West to see only what has been constructed for them: the figure of “big, bad Israel,” a vessel through which the West projects and defuses its own self-hatred. Indeed, obsession with Jews, as it was in the historic “Jewish Question,” is a defining feature of Jew-hatred and thus a clear sign that anti-Zionism is, in truth, hatred of the Jew, reformulated as the hatred of Israel.

Because Soviet anti-Zionism was designed to deliberately confuse the public, it wants us to remain trapped within an endless discussion about Israel, and Israel alone. Jews have colluded with this in part by upholding their end of the fruitless debate, but anti-Zionists also succeeded by strategically trying to separate anti-Zionism from Jew-hatred and by enlisting a small number of vocal token Jews to lend legitimacy to it. Therefore, there is no point in debating whether Israel is right or whether anti-Zionism “is antisemitism” as such debate fulfills its very purpose. The controversy over Israel is itself the trap, as is the failure to reclaim and redefine anti-Zionism as a hatred. This is the precise arena in which Soviet anti-Zionism intended its opponents to remain trapped. Those who continue to dispute Israel’s “true nature” are, knowingly or not, participating in the strategy crafted by one of the most sophisticated propaganda apparatuses of the twentieth century.

There is no point in debating whether Israel is right or whether antizionism “is antisemitism” as such debate fulfills its very purpose. The controversy over Israel is itself the trap, as is the failure to reclaim and redefine antizionism as a hatred. 

But there is another reason for why there is no point in debating whether anti-Zionism constitutes a Jew-hatred and here the answer lies not in abstract theory but in the plain record of history, which shows what happens when anti-Zionism is allowed to take root in educational, media, and governmental institutions: Jews become targets of harassment and discrimination, often forced to flee. The evidence is clear: 2 million Jews from the Soviet Union endured such severe persecution under anti-Zionist policies that they emigrated; 700,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa were ethnically cleansed by Arab states that had adopted anti-Zionist ideology.

Its DNA is undeniable: from its inception, anti-Zionism was designed as a hate movement targeting Jews, recast as “Zionists,” for discrimination, harassment, and physical assault. As Adam Louis-Klein and others have duly noted, anti-Zionism, like all forms of anti-Jewish hatred, is built upon a cycle of popular libels. The evidence is abundant: once an antisemitic libel, or an anti-Zionist libel is introduced, it follows a predictable cycle in which the targeted minority becomes stigmatized, and spaces are gradually purged of those labeled “evil” by the libel. Tracing this trajectory reveals that in its final stage, the targeted community faces not only social exclusion and harassment but also physical violence. Yet the cycle of libel continues to go unnamed and unaddressed in education, advocacy, and public policy. “Debunking” the content of these libels has not helped and will not help. Arguing may even make the problem worse. Only calling out the cycle of libel itself will raise awareness and make that crucial difference. 

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.