Why Antisemitism Cannot Solve the Antizionism Problem

By Natasha H. Pein

Over the past several decades, Jewish communities worldwide have faced a sharp and unprecedented rise in anti-Jewish hostility—classrooms turning hostile, campuses erupting, Jewish identity becoming increasingly vulnerable again. We name these incidents antisemitic and expect protection. Yet protection rarely comes.

Each time, we respond the same way: we label the incidents as antisemitism, invoke existing legal tools, and we expect protection. But the strategies that once safeguarded Jewish life are no longer working.

In 2025, two landmark cases at MIT and Haverford College exposed this crisis with painful clarity. In both rulings, the courts held that anti-Zionism was political criticism—not Jew-hatred. As the First Circuit wrote in the StandWithUs case against MIT:

“We therefore reject plaintiffs’ claimed right to stifle anti-Zionist speech by labeling it inherently antisemitic.”

These words should shake every Jewish institution to its core.

Jewish students—targeted, intimidated, and isolated—were not protected under antisemitism law. The message was unmistakable: if hatred comes through “anti-Zionism,” the system will not protect you.

This is not a failure of the courts. The courts did not see antizionism as hate; they saw it as politics. It is a failure of our communal understanding.

So what went wrong?

For decades, we assumed that antisemitism law could defend us. But today’s hostility is not driven by the older racial framework of antisemitism. Antizionism is now the dominant engine of anti-Jewish hatred—and the Jewish community has not yet adapted to this historic shift.

Why did our protections fail?

Why are Jews still unsafe even after decades of fighting antisemitism?

And what must change if we want safety in the antizionist era?

To answer these questions, we must finally identify the core problem we have been unable to name.

The Fashionable Hate: When Antisemitism Became the Trend That Cost Millions

Antisemitism emerged in 1879 as a modern racial-ideological hate movement when Wilhelm Marr coined the term to frame Jews as an existential racial threat to German society. Marr believed that only the triumph of one people—and the destruction of the other—could resolve the supposed struggle between Jews and Germans. He created the League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga), the first political organization expressly devoted to excluding and removing Jews from Germany. Although the League formally adopted racial doctrine only in 1912, Marr’s writings laid the ideological groundwork that later fed directly into the racialized antisemitism of Nazism and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

For more than sixty years after Marr coined the term “antisemitism” in 1879, much of European Jewry underestimated the danger of this new racial ideology. Many believed that emancipation, cultural integration, or the promises of European liberalism would protect them. Marr’s agitation was disturbing but widely dismissed as marginal noise rather than an existential program. Nevertheless, across these decades, antisemitic libels hardened and spread, political movements radicalized, and the ideological scaffolding of Nazism quietly took shape. What had seemed like fringe rhetoric became the architecture of genocide.

Only after the Holocaust did the world finally condemn antisemitism as a racist hate movement—through the Nuremberg Trials, the founding of the United Nations, and later international legal and definitional frameworks (1948–2016). However, by then, about two-thirds of the European Jewry had been destroyed.

This historical lesson raises an essential question: If antisemitism is already a universally recognized hate movement, why can’t it solve the problem of antizionism?

To answer this, we must examine the evolution of Jew-hatred itself.

Three Eras, One Mother: How Jew-Hatred Mutated Across History

Antijudaism, antisemitism, and antizionism are distinct ideological formations. All arise from a single “mother”—Jew-hatred—but each has a different “father,” shaped by the dominant intellectual and political paradigms of its time. Jew-hatred reinvented itself repeatedly by attaching itself to new ideological systems that maximized its cultural reach and relevance.

1. Antijudaism (Religious Hate)

   Born of theological hostility, antijudaism depicted Jews as Christ-killers or Muhammad-killers and justified persecution on spiritual grounds.

2. Antisemitism (Racial Hate)

   Forged in the age of pseudo-science and racial theory, antisemitism cast Jews as racial pollutants and biologically inferior—a framing that culminated in Nazi genocide.

3. Antizionism (National-Marxist Hate)

   Antizionism emerged from Marxist–Leninist ideology. It rejected Jewish peoplehood, denied Jewish self-determination, severed the Jewish connection to the ancestral land, and demonized Jews as colonizers, imperialists, and racist oppressors.

   
   

Each era attacked the Jew from a different angle—religious, racial, and national—creating a comprehensive system of delegitimization.

Antisemitism: Origins and Global Dissemination

Antisemitism originated in Europe and was grounded in excluding Jews from equal civic participation. It spread to the Middle East and North Africa through Nazi propaganda prior and during World War II. After the war, as former Nazis and extremist ideologues influenced the U.S. and U.K., modern white supremacy absorbed antisemitic conspiracies such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Bolshevism myth.

Antizionism: A Soviet-Born Hate Movement

Unlike antisemitism, antizionism did not emerge from racial theory but from Soviet Marxist doctrine. V. I. Lenin introduced the first antizionist libels—“Zionism is imperialism” (1903) and “Zionism is bourgeois nationalism” (1916)—casting Zionism as a reactionary force incompatible with Marxist ideology and an enemy of socialist revolution.

These were the conceptual seeds of the modern “colonizer” libel. Stalin expanded antizionism into a complete ideological system, declaring Jews unfit for national self-determination under Marxist theory.

Although Stalin publicly criminalized antisemitism, he simultaneously destroyed Jewish culture: shutting down Jewish institutions, executing Jewish writers and intellectuals—including members of my own family—and preparing mass deportations of Jews before his death halted the plan. By the 1960s, the Soviets had replaced the word “Jew” with “Zionist,” enabling them to cloak Jew-hatred as “political critique.”

Antizionism functions as the ideological mechanism that legitimizes antisemitic Jew-hatred. It turns hostility toward Jews into a moralized political virtue, effectively creating an open season on Jews with no social, cultural, or institutional limits. In practice, antizionism operates as a “free-for-all” framework that sanctions Jew-hatred under the guise of liberation, justice, or decolonization. This is possible because, while antisemitism has been formally condemned as a hate movement since 1945, antizionism was simultaneously elevated—paradoxically—as a fashionable “liberation” ideology. As a result, the very framework designed to protect Jews from racial hatred was circumvented by rebranding that hatred as moral activism.

Antizionism thus became a state-engineered global hate movement, exported throughout the Arab world and later the West.

Are Antizionism and Antisemitism the Same? Yes—and No.

The 2023 research by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) demonstrates that although both movements share goals and outcomes, they operate through different political triggers:

• Antisemitism is associated historically with the right and triggered by domestic crises.

• Antizionism is associated with the left and triggered by Middle East conflicts.

  
  

Yet despite these differences, both produce identical effects: demonization, libels, conspiracy theories, dehumanization, and ultimately violence against Jews—whether targeting individuals or the Jewish collective. Dr. Naya Lekht demonstrates how each era generated a different “Jewish villain” to justify persecution; Izabella Tabarovsky similarly shows how antizionism functions as antisemitism in practice.

But antizionism has two crucial advantages that make it far more difficult to confront than classical antisemitism:

1. Antizionism is culturally legitimized and rebranded in the language of social justice.

Global institutions, NGOs, universities, and activist networks have embraced antizionism as a moral cause masquerading under the language of “liberation,” “decolonization,” and “human rights.” This rebranding obscures its antisemitic core and turns hostility toward Jews into a seemingly principled stance.

2. Antizionism has no legal definition, no binding status, and no recognition as hate.

Unlike antisemitism—which is widely codified following 1945—antizionism exists in a complete legal vacuum. There is no statutory category requiring institutions or courts to treat antizionist hostility as discrimination. This legal gap became unmistakable in the 2025 MIT ruling, in which the First Circuit held that anti-Zionist expression is political speech, not antisemitism. Jewish students who were targeted and isolated through antizionist hostility therefore received no protection under existing antisemitism frameworks.

The courts did not see antizionism as hate; they saw it as politics. And because antizionism is not recognized in law, antisemitism statutes cannot address it.

Together, these two advantages—cultural legitimacy and legal invisibility—make antizionism uniquely potent and uniquely dangerous.

It carries the moral veneer of justice, enjoys the protections of political speech, and remains completely outside the reach of legal mechanisms designed to address hate.

Why Antisemitism Cannot Solve the Antizionism Problem

From 1879 until the Holocaust—a span of six decades from the moment Marr coined the term “antisemitism”—much of European Jewry underestimated the danger of this new racial ideology. Many believed that emancipation, cultural integration, or the promises of European liberalism would protect them. Marr’s antisemitic agitation was disturbing but widely dismissed as marginal noise rather than an existential program. Yet across these decades, the racial libels hardened, spread, and fused into radical political movements; the ideological scaffolding of Nazism quietly took shape. What had once seemed like fringe rhetoric and background noise became, in time, the very architecture of genocide.

Today, antizionism occupies the same cultural position antisemitism did in the 1930s—except it spreads faster, digitally, and with global institutional support.

Antisemitism and antizionism are not interchangeable, and one cannot “solve” the other. Antizionism requires its own conceptual recognition because:

1. They are triggered by different political, ideological, and geopolitical conditions. Antisemitism is racial; antizionism is national-Marxist and post-colonial. Thus, responses tailored to one cannot automatically address the other.

2. Antizionism has institutional legitimacy—antisemitism does not. Antisemitism is morally condemned and widely understood as hate. Antizionism is treated and celebrated as a virtue. 

3. Antizionism weaponizes Marxist and post-colonial frameworks unavailable to classical antisemitism. Its intellectual defences are different, and so must be the strategies that confront it.

4. Antizionism hides behind “political critique.” Antizionism wears the mask of “political critique,” “human rights,” or “decolonization.” As Dr. Lekht writes, it is “the most sophisticated form of anti-Jewish bigotry because it was designed to masquerade as political criticism.”

5. Antisemitism is recognized in law and legally codified; antizionism is not. Legal and policy frameworks cannot be invoked against a phenomenon or threat society refuses to recognize and name. 

6. The Jewish community failed to recognize antizionism’s ideological nature for three generations. Silence allowed it to institutionalize itself as a moral virtue and grow into a global liberation “cause.”

Because Jews never defined antizionism as a hate movement—and because it masqueraded as social justice—its ideological infrastructure grew for more than 75 years, it became embedded in:

• In UN bodies (especially UNHRC)

• In academia and DEI bureaucracies

• In NGOs

• Through tokenized Jewish voices

• In progressive and intersectional movements

• Through the Red–Green alliance (Soviet Marxism + Islamist ideology)

• Social justice rhetoric

The Antizionist Era: A New Phase of Jew-Hatred

Dr. Naya Lekht argues persuasively that we are no longer in the antisemitism era but in the antizionist era—a period in which Jews are targeted because of their peoplehood, their indigeneity, their connection to Israel, and their right to self-determination.

Since antizionist genealogy is rooted in communism, any environment shaped by Marxist, anti-colonial, or intersectional frameworks becomes fertile ground for its spread. This ideological lineage helps explain why antizionism has moved so swiftly and deeply across Western institutions over the past several decades.

Crucially, antizionism was institutionalized through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) frameworks, which adopt ideological assumptions drawn from these same traditions. DEI programs, along with token Jews who lend them internal legitimacy, have served as powerful delivery mechanisms for disseminating antizionist narratives. Through DEI training, curricular design, and identity-hierarchy models, antizionism spread rapidly across academia, educational institutions, government agencies, NGOs, and corporate environments, where Jewish identity is often recast through distorted power analyses rather than historical and indigenous context.

This institutionalization was reinforced by global bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which amplified antizionist narratives through biased reports and resolutions, and by activist networks and social media ecosystems that recycled Soviet-era libels in contemporary language.

This diffusion explains why antizionism has become fashionable across Western institutions for more than fifty years—especially since the “Zionism is Racism” resolution (UN 3379) in 1975.

As long as antizionism remains misclassified as political critique rather than a hate movement, Jewish communities will continue to face escalating danger.

Why Naming Antizionism Is Essential

A hate movement cannot be confronted and defeated unless it is:

1. Recognized

2. Named

3. Understood

4. Opposed through law and policy

So long as antizionism is misclassified as “critique of Israeli policy,” Jewish communities will remain unsafe. Once elites and institutions explicitly recognize antizionism as Jew-hatred and as a racist ideology, only then can enforcement mechanisms be activated just as they were for antisemitism. This mirrors the pre-Holocaust era, when Jewish communities failed to grasp the danger of antisemitism until catastrophe had already unfolded.

Jews cannot afford to repeat history and wait for another existential catastrophe before naming the threat plainly.

The Moral Model: Becoming Refuseniks Again

Izabella Tabarovsky’s Be a Refusenik highlights that a refusenik is someone who refuses to abandon truth, identity, or moral clarity—even under pressure. Tabarovsky writes that Soviet Jews did not defeat the Soviet Union through force; they defeated it morally by reclaiming identity, resilience, spiritual clarity, and connection to Israel. Their victory was internal before it became political.

To confront antizionism today, Jews and allies worldwide must reclaim that same moral clarity and publicly declare: The first step is unity: a bold declaration that Antizionism is Jew-Hatred and that it is a racist, ideological hate movement.

Israel as Strength, Identity, and Survival

In Genesis 32:29, Jacob wrestles the angel and receives the name Israel: “For you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.” In Hebrew, Israel resonates with sar-El—“strength from God.” Jewish identity is defined by struggle, resilience, and perseverance in the face of adversity.

The modern rebirth of the State of Israel mirrors this ancient meaning: a people who wrestle, endure, and prevail despite every era of hatred.

To protect that identity—and ensure Jewish survival—the world must name the threat clearly:  Antizionism is Jew-Hatred, and antisemitism alone cannot solve it.

Readers seeking a deeper understanding of the distinction between antisemitism and antizionism, and the case for defining antizionism as a modern hate movement, may consult the Global Declaration that Antizionism is Jew-Hatred, which elaborates on this framework:  https://www.stopaz.org/declaration