'Antizionism Is a Hate Movement': A Conversation with Adam Louis-Klein

An anthropologist explains why antizionism gives modern Jew-hatred cover—and why Jews need new tools to confront it.

Something happened while I was writing a book about how to fight antisemitism. Forget internal arguments over hyphens or whether to call it “Jew-hate.” A new consensus is beginning to form around using the word “antizionism” instead. I always thought that, whatever you call it, this form of bigotry adapts to the times and, like a parasite, hitches a ride on whatever version of anti-Jewish hatred is socially acceptable. I’m beginning to understand that antizionism is different. It gives antisemites plausible deniability for their hatred, and we need a new set of tools to fight it.

At the forefront of this effort is anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein, who has led a push on social media to change the way we think about antizionism and to name it as a hate movement. He launched an organization, the Movement Against Antizionism to advocate for this shift.

I had many questions, so I interviewed Adam last month. I thought it best to let him speak for himself, so here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

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Howard: A little bit about me. I’ve been writing about Jewish issues and antisemitism my entire career. I’ve done journalism in other areas, too, but the throughline has always been Jewish issues. Since the rise of antisemitism, I’ve been thinking a lot harder about these issues. I’m working on a book on how to fight antisemitism, which has morphed into a kind of memoir about me and my family, but I also want to incorporate practical tips, because many Jews are feeling helpless and want practical advice. Especially now, with the election results in New York and people coming at them with, “Antizionism isn’t antisemitism,” and so on. That’s what caught my attention with your writing.

Part of what I do is make this understandable to lay readers. You come from a more academic background, so I want to translate what you’re saying into terms that are more accessible for those of us who don’t have as much education. First, can you give me a brief background on you and how you became involved with this issue?

Adam: I’m a PhD candidate in anthropology, and I was studying in the Amazon jungle in Colombia before October 7. I work with a group called the Desana people, and I focus on comparative religion and their identity as an ethno-religion, a group whose peoplehood and religion are inextricable from one another.

I had been in a small village for about three months leading up to October 7. I didn’t have any phone or internet service. I arrived in the local town—still in the Amazon, but with internet—for the first time on October 9. I opened my computer, and the first thing I saw was the images from the Nova music festival. The second thing I saw was friends and colleagues posting photos of people burning Israeli flags or professing loyalty to the resistance. From there, my entire social and professional world collapsed.

I was still in the Amazon, but I was marked as a Zionist, and then I was purged, stigmatized, and lost basically all of my professional opportunities and academic support.

Howard: When you say friends and colleagues, do you mean co-workers or lifelong friends?

Adam: I mean PhD students I would talk with, professors who had supported my work, who no longer wanted to be associated with me.

Howard: Did they already know how you felt, or was this the result of you writing about it on social media?

Adam: I did write. I tried to open up a conversation at first. I said I had actually been vaguely pro-Palestinian years before. After college, I was in a group called Socialist Alternative, a kind of Trotskyist group similar to the DSA, and I had been very pro-Palestinian. Before that, I had been pro-Israel because I went to Israel for my younger brother’s bar mitzvah and hung out with IDF soldiers.

After October 7, it was such an emotional moment, and I reconnected with my Jewish identity. I started questioning, and I wanted to open a discussion with people about Israel, Palestine, the conflict, antisemitism. I quickly learned that was futile. Just the fact that I was talking about antisemitism was enough for people to mark me as a Zionist. People told me they didn’t want to be associated with me because I was “using antisemitism to justify Israel’s genocide.”

Just talking about antisemitism was enough for people to mark me as a Zionist. That’s how I understand it today. I don’t see it as a question of my views or whether I was pro-Israel. I understand it retroactively through my evolved understanding of antizionist discrimination. When people are marked as Zionists, they’re discriminated against. People are marked as Zionists for various reasons. It’s not just political positions or beliefs. It’s a set of associations.

You’re probably more likely to be marked as a Zionist if you express certain views, but as we’ve learned, some Jews can exempt themselves. If you have an Israeli flag in your bio or your profile picture, you’ll be marked as a Zionist. It’s not really about your beliefs or political positions.

“The key is giving Jews the language to explain what they’re experiencing right now and to make antizionism recognizable as discrimination.”

Howard: So, break it down for me a little bit. I’ve studied antisemitism long enough to know that it morphs for the times. For so long in the post-Nazi era, it was associated with people in white sheets and swastika armbands. But then it leaped ideologies into the left wing. It was always there to some extent, but now it has found fertile ground to grow and prosper.

But you’re separating antizionism from classical antisemitism. Can you explain that to me like I’m in third grade, which I sort of am when it comes to this concept?

Adam: I think we’re in this strange moment where many people have learned about how antisemitism, or anti-Jewish hate, mutates. We learned there was medieval anti-Jewish hate with accusations about using the blood of Christian children to make matzah, or killing Jesus, which is the most symbolically significant one.

Once we got to the modern era in the nineteenth century, it was readapted. These anti-Jewish haters—these antisemites, as they would call themselves—no longer thought their hatred was based on religion. Hating someone on the basis of religion at that time was seen as primitive, outdated, and barbaric. The new lingua franca was science. So hating people on the basis of race could have a scientific justification, and it fit seamlessly into the moral codes of the day.

Many people know that story, but sometimes find it hard to place ourselves in history and realize we’re living through the exact same thing.

If we think about the core libels of antizionism today—colonizer, apartheid, and genocide—they’re really just the inverse values of the moral codes of our time. After World War II, we learned that Nazism was the absolute evil because it was based on genocide and racism. Then the US overcame segregation and had civil rights, so racism became the fundamental moral wrong here. And then there was apartheid South Africa, and a wave of nation-states decolonizing from Western European empires.

So when we think about those three libels—colonizer, apartheid, genocide—they’re just expressions of the key moral codes of our civilization today. And that is why antizionists think they aren’t doing anything wrong. What they’re saying fits seamlessly into the assumed moral order we’re all living in.

It’s two things. One, they don’t always use classical antisemitic tropes. They’re not necessarily talking about Jews having big noses or controlling the banks. Some do, but they don’t have to. So they say, “Well, it’s not antisemitic,” and their intuition is somewhat justified as long as we’re associating antisemitism only with its older forms.

Second, they believe they’re doing something righteous because it fits the moral codes of the day.

The key is getting people to see that we’re in that era again. Because if we keep insisting that antizionism must be legible only in terms of the older forms of antisemitism, then we’re actually complicit with antizionists. We share the same assumption: they say antizionism isn’t like the older forms, so it’s not antisemitic. And all we can do is say, “But we know you hate Jews,” because we do have that intuition as Jews, but we don’t have the language.

That’s what thematizing antizionism can do—give us the language to validate what Jews are experiencing right now and explain it to non-Jews.

Howard: An antizionist would say, “Yes, I’m an antizionist,” so I don’t see how changing it from antisemitism to antizionism does us any good. Here’s where I’m having a hard time making the leap. Maybe something’s not clicking in my brain.

Adam: Yes, antizionists call themselves that, and that’s why you can catch them red-handed. That’s one way to look at it.

Another way is to look at antisemitism itself. Antisemitism emerged as a term that antisemites used to describe themselves. They were against “Semitism.” They had a movement. They had a League of Antisemites that Wilhelm Marr created. It was a political ideology.

What was needed—and what only happened very late—was to thematize antisemitism as something wrong in itself, and to oppose it as wrong.

So the problem is, if we just say antizionism is the same as antisemitism, they’ll deny it, and then we’re trying to prove something we can’t prove. If we thematize antizionism as wrong, we take their claims at face value and show how it is a hate movement.

“Antizionism isn’t a critique. It’s a theology that casts one country as intrinsically evil.”

Howard: I think I formed the connection now.

Adam: Right. It’s a new way of thinking, and it creates some resistance, because we hear antizionists say, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m antizionist.” It’s a way of legitimizing what they’re doing, and it’s a way of gaslighting Jews about the fact that they’re doing Jew-hate.

So, when a Jew says, “Let’s call it antizionism,” sometimes it can sound a little like that same move, but it’s actually the opposite. It’s about delegitimizing what they believe is legitimate.

Howard: Okay. So, it’s Jews saying, “Fine, you’re antizionist. Let me tell you why that’s a bad thing and not a good thing.”

Adam: Yeah. Antizionism is anti-Israeli racism. It spreads libels about Israel. It claims that a single nation is essentially evil. Just as violence against innocent people is wrong, antizionists have their own slurs. They stigmatize and discriminate against people they mark as Zionists. And you can also say antizionism evolved from the older forms of Jew-hate. It evolved from classical antisemitism.

Howard: You have to look at the history of the Soviet Union—Jews who, in many cases, never practiced, were targeted for being Jewish, but they were called Zionists. Is this another form of Soviet Jew-hate, or is this the next step?

Adam: It is one hundred percent derived from Soviet propaganda, which went into full operation after 1967. But many of the core themes of Soviet propaganda had already been bubbling within the Soviet Union.

There was Trofim Kitchko. Even in the late fifties, he was already writing that Zionism is racism because Jews believe they’re the chosen people, that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, and that Zionists are the new Nazis. These are classic tropes of Soviet propaganda that are so common today. An antizionist slur you see all the time is “ZioNazi.” But no one recognizes that as a slur today. People say, “Show that it’s antisemitic.” No. We should recognize it the way we’d recognize any racist slur. It’s antizionist racism.

Much of this goes back to Soviet propaganda. Kitchko wrote a book in 1963, and there was a big affair around it because he used classically antisemitic depictions of Jews with hooked noses. Even Western communists had to intervene and say, “What are you doing?” The Soviet Union claimed it was against antisemitism and racism, and that was when it started refining antizionism—removing the classically antisemitic, or at least the obvious, depictions.

So the Soviet Union created much of this. But it continued to evolve. In the late ‘70s and ‘80s ‘90s, you get Edward Said developing a sort of postcolonial, high-theory version of antizionism, treating Zionism as an extension of Western power and discourse. Then you get postcolonial antizionism. You get the emergence of settler-colonial theory, which had already been developed by PLO propagandists working with the Soviet Union.

But in the 2000s there’s a revival, a new form, largely through an Australian scholar, Patrick Wolfe. He turns it into a potent weapon. His argument is that some states are settler-colonial states and are intrinsically genocidal. So, if you mark a state as settler-colonial, it will commit genocide.

All the people spreading the genocide libel today invariably use this theory. Invariably, it’s: Israel is settler-colonial; therefore, it has been genocidal since its existence. It’s not about analyzing conduct. And of course, the public has no idea this is the argument behind it. It’s really a kind of theology, essentially evil in its structure.

Howard: You know, many Jews aren’t even aware of this history, especially progressive Jews. I started out—and I still consider myself—progressive. I guess they would call me “PEP,” progressive except for Palestine. But many aren’t even aware of the history of all this. History starts whenever they began to pay attention, I guess.

So, what can a Jew have in his toolbox, especially now after the New York election, when they’re going to be gaslit a lot about what Zionism is and isn’t? The colonizer libel, the apartheid libel, the genocide libel. And when they’re told, “Oh, I don’t hate you as a Jew. I only hate Zionists.” How do you turn that into, “Okay, fine, you’re antizionist, and here’s how and why that’s wrong”?

Adam: I would respond by saying, “Hating Zionists is wrong. Hating Israelis is racism.” You can’t construct a theology in which one country is essentially evil. You can’t create a demonic worldview about a single country. That’s racism. That would be my immediate response.

I think we should not debate these libels, because antizionists aren’t interested in debate. What anti-zionists are interested in is creating a scene of accusation—a kind of show trial—where they’ve hurled you into the courtroom. That’s the intrinsic violence of antizionism. It goes beyond spreading false claims. It’s the act of dragging you into the courtroom against your will and demanding that you defend yourself.

So, we make this phase shift, which is also a psychological leap, where we simply say no to these libels. We don’t validate them.

Howard: Don’t validate it by arguing. Right.

Adam: Of course, all libels have partial truths. There’s a belief today that antizionist libels are somehow more plausible than the antisemitic or anti-Judaic libels of the past—that they’re closer to critiques. Even many Jews feel this way. The apartheid libel: okay, there are checkpoints, IDs, access roads. The genocide libel: a lot of people have died in Gaza, there’s a lot of infrastructure destruction. The colonizer libel: Jews mass-migrated at a certain point, many were culturally European, maybe some absorbed certain colonial ways of thinking.

All of that is true. But there were also tons of partial truths in classical antisemitism. One of the big libels was Judeo-Bolshevism—the idea that Jews were behind communism, that communism threatened Germany, and Jews were invading Germany. There were millions of Eastern European Jews arriving in Germany who weren’t well-assimilated. There were even liberal, reform, assimilated German Jews who shared some of those German racist ideas. So there were plausibilities. Was the Rothschild family extremely powerful? Yes. Did they have international connections? Yes.

So you had Jews in communism, Jews streaming into Germany, Jews with international connections. And the classical antisemite says, “There’s a world Jewish conspiracy.” That’s not true, but it’s built out of partial truths.

It’s the same thing with antizionism. Once we recognize how it functions—as libel—we see they’re not interested in truth, nuance, or complexity, and we move beyond it. And we did that with classical antisemitism. No one today debates whether Nazism can be a “legitimate criticism.” We see the ideology as a whole as evil. We should do the same with antizionism.

Howard: Do you think the word Zionism, even though we know what it means, comes with too many negative associations in the general public? Should we just call it something else? I’ve heard that argument before.

Adam: I never identified as a Zionist growing up. I don’t even think I knew what it was. But I started identifying as a Zionist a little after October 7. That was a reaction.

If we think about really existing Zionism, it arguably ended in 1948. Why do Jews today call themselves Zionists? You could argue it’s a result of the antizionist movement. If there were no movement to annihilate Israel or treat Israel as an exception to the human order—a contingent state that should eventually disappear—why would we call ourselves Zionists?

“Antizionists aren’t interested in debate. They create a scene of accusation—a show trial—where you’re dragged into the courtroom and told to defend yourself.”

Howard: Right. It’s like you’re arguing over the Teapot Dome scandal. It’s already been settled. It’s settled history after 1948.

Adam: It’s possible to argue that identification as Zionist in the Jewish community is largely a reaction to antizionism.

Howard: Yeah. But does that mean we have to use the same term? Do you think you’re climbing a bit of an uphill battle calling this antizionism rather than antisemitism, rather than inventing a new term?

Adam: Inventing a new term—I mean, I think there are some other terms that work well. One has to think about the terms one uses. “Anti-Israel hatred” is a decent term because it directly names what it’s doing. “Anti-Israeli racism” is important to promulgate.

I also think our scholarship—our scholars of contemporary antisemitism like David Hirsch, Izabella Tabarovsky, David Seymour—that body of scholarship has already been calling this antizionism for a while, and removing the hyphen. So I would advocate building on that scholarship. A lot of scholarship is still within the antisemitism frame, arguably, but it has laid the groundwork for understanding antizionism as its own ideology.

Howard: What about Jews who are very assimilated and don’t really identify with Israel? Why should they care about antizionism?

Adam: I think shifting the object of concern to antizionism—not as an opposition to Zionism, but as its own ideology—can really help. The Jewish community can shift from trying to defend Israel and Zionism and convincing people to be Zionists, which is kind of meaningless, especially for non-Jews. What does it mean for a non-Jew to be a Zionist? It’s kind of absurd. It would be like me identifying with Armenian nationalism—I don’t know what that means beyond some kind of philosemitic act. And it’s only necessary as long as Israel is being attacked. It’s a statement of allyship.

Instead of doing that, we get people to see that antizionism is wrong on its own terms. It doesn’t matter if one is a Zionist or not. Just like it doesn’t matter if I’m Israeli or not to oppose anti-Israeli racism. It doesn’t matter if I’m Black or not to oppose anti-Black racism. And so it doesn’t matter if I’m a Zionist or not to oppose antizionist racism.

Howard: What are your goals for the organization you founded? What kind of organization is it? Nonprofit? Academic? What do you hope to achieve?

Adam: It’s a grassroots organization, and we hope to change culture and help the Jewish community develop the language needed to speak back to antizionism. We’re going to organize protests as well, and we’re building a discourse and an ecosystem of scholars who speak about antizionism and thematize antizionism.

Eventually, we want administrative and legal shifts that recognize antizionism as a form of discrimination, but that requires a cultural shift first. We saw this in the MIT case—StandWithUs versus MIT. StandWithUs brought a legal case against MIT for the antizionist rioters on campus. The judge shut down the case and repeated the typical antizionist formulaic permission structure for Jew-hate: “Criticism of Israel isn’t antisemitism. Antisemitism is when you hate Jews as such, and therefore all Jews. Some Jews are antizionist, therefore antizionism can’t be antisemitism.” You can’t assume these people are antisemitic.

The one case where he said there was antisemitism was when someone wrote “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in a font he thought looked like the font of Mein Kampf. It shows the notion that Jew-hate is only recognizable when it looks like the older form. If it looks like Nazism, then it’s Jew-hate. If it doesn’t, it’s assumed to be good. It’s always the same argument.

The reason we lost that case is because we don’t have a culture and a discourse that bypasses that argument. They hacked our antisemitism accusation by creating that criticism-of-Israel argument. We need to hack their argument and make it culturally recognizable. That’s what the organization is doing.

Howard: That’s great. Wonderful. Real quick—personal question, how old are you?

Adam: Thirty-two.

Howard: Good to see young people involved in this. I know at thirty-two you probably see yourself as old, but I just turned sixty, so everybody’s young to me.

Thank you, Adam. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me.

Adam: Thank you. Yeah, I enjoyed it.