In this gripping and profoundly informative conversation, I sit down with Izabella Tabarovsky, a leading scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary left antisemitism. Tabarovsky is a Senior Fellow at the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities and a Research Fellow at both the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and ISGAP.

Drawing from her years of research on Soviet propaganda and its legacy, Tabarovsky unpacks how virulently antisemitic forms of "anti-Zionism" were central to Cold War-era Communist ideology—and how many of these same tropes and tactics have re-emerged in today’s far-left discourse. From the Soviet Union’s deployment of conspiracy theories linking Zionism to Nazism to the global campaign that culminated in the infamous 1975 UN Resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism, we trace how these narratives were manufactured, exported, and normalized.

Tabarovsky argues that, to quote William Faulkner, “the past is not dead, it is not even past.” Soviet-era antisemitic anti-Zionism, she shows, has left behind a “toxic ideological brew” that still shapes public conversations, academic discourse, and political movements in the West.

Topics discussed:

• The Soviet Union’s anti-Zionist propaganda machine and the role of the KGB
• How antisemitism was masked as political critique
• The use of prominent Soviet Jews in anti-Zionist campaigns
• The parallels between Cold War-era propaganda and modern leftist antisemitism
• The ideological roots of contemporary far-left anti-Zionist rhetoric

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z3project.org

https://fathomjournal.org/soviet-anti-zionism-and-contemporary-left-antisemitism/

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/mahmoud-abbas-soviet-dissertation

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