The instrumentalization of antisemitism and the emergence of Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States

Theodore Deutscher: Many observers have described recent crackdowns on the Palestinian movement in the United States—particularly on college campuses—as a kind of ‘new McCarthyism,’ where accusations of antisemitism are being used to silence dissent. This trend has arguably accelerated under the Trump administration, which has further blurred the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism in order to delegitimize the movement for Palestine. We’re now seeing figures like Senator Marco Rubio enforcing visa suspensions for foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests and even Jewish professors being fired for expressing anti-Zionist views. How do you understand this convergence of state power and pro-Israel advocacy shaping a new era of political repression?

Sherry Wolf: Well, first, I think this is far worse than the old McCarthyism because it’s so much broader. It’s hitting people who had nothing to do with the protests, even opposed the protests, or were somewhat ecumenical about the whole question, and who are now being dragged down into this dragnet. Most of the people whose visas were suspended hadn’t even participated in the encampments. They were mostly apolitical. Typically these were people who were just getting engineering degrees but simply more often than not came from countries that are now being targeted by the administration.

But it’s been quite an effective way of terrorizing people. If you don’t know what you might have written, posted, said, winked at, etc. it could upend your entire life. It has the broad effect of terrorizing people into silence and into confusion. It encourages a certain rise of disengagement and individualism as a response.

Charlie Post: We have to start with a general move towards greater authoritarianism that we’re seeing in all of the so-called capitalist democracies. Todd Gordon and Jeff Weber, in an article several years ago that appeared in Spectre, and hopefully soon in an essay they’re going to be doing on Trump that will appear on our website, made the argument that liberal democracy, the sort of truncated form of electoral politics and representation that characterizes most capitalist regimes historically, has always had a strong authoritarian tendency, which is particularly exacerbated in periods of economic crisis and sharpened political conflict.

So we’ve seen, even before the first Trump administration, a greater move towards authoritarianism. Most people sort of conveniently forget that under the Obama administration there was a coordinated FBI working with local police to go after and clear the Occupy encampments in 2011. The current wave of repression has been tied to and justified by—even in the liberal wing of mainstream politics in the U.S., at least since 2010—a growing equation of Zionism with antisemitism. This has been very marked under both Democrats and Republicans. There has for instance been a move for more and more states and cities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism, which makes people like you and I, who are anti-Zionist Jews, anti-Semites.

Now this is exacerbated by the rise of far-right electoral politics in the U.S. and globally, where these are the same forces that have been extremely and viciously Islamophobic since the Second Gulf War and the War on Terror, and who are now posing as the champions of Jews, which for them inherently, means the champions of Zionism in the U.S. This has become particularly sharp since October 7th, because even while the equation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism has been—at least in my political lifetime for the last 50-odd years—the last line of defense for support for the Zionist state and its expropriation of the Palestinian population and its hostility to democratic and revolutionary movements in the Arab world, with October 7th, the rightward move of Zionism, the complete marginalization of the traditional social-democratic version in Israel, and the growing opposition in this country, particularly among Jews under 40, to the policies of the Israeli state, the equation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism has become the first, last, and practically only line of defense for U.S. political leaders in their defense of the Israeli state.

The increasing weaponization of antisemitism is essentially a reaction to the fact that support for the state of Israel in the United States is much weaker today than it has been at any point since the establishment of the state, and that, in fact, significant layers of Jews, particularly younger Jews, either explicitly reject Zionism or are highly critical of U.S. support for the current Israeli regime.

TD: I think that’s an important factor to consider, the connection of this new Zionist McCarthyism with the broader authoritarian turn of capitalist states of the Global North, which as you mentioned in the American context started to occur under Obama, and in France under the socialist president François Hollande. The Socialist Party paved the way for the current wave of repression we are witnessing in France—for example, our party spokesperson Anasse Kazib is currently on trial for “apologie du terrorisme” after speaking out against the genocide in Gaza. It is clearly a political trial, aimed at silencing dissent on the question of Palestinian liberation.

To switch gears a little, how do you assess that kind of instrumentalization of antisemitism in terms of its impact on the growth of actual antisemitism? It seems like the more you tell people that protesting against a genocide is antisemitic, the more they’re bound to think that antisemitism is good and wear it as a kind of badge of honor. In what way do you think that those who are presenting themselves as allies to Jews are, in fact, profoundly endangering them?

SW: Absolutely. This conflation is actually stoking real antisemitism and real antisemitic attacks on Jewish people and not just those who support the genocide. I think the way in which the genocide has been legitimized by the Zionist camp has led to an identification of Jews as such with the murderous actions of the Israeli government. And for increasing numbers of Jews, whatever political perspective they’re coming from, life in this country has become much worse and more dangerous.

I will never, ever, ever in my life, again, identify myself as Jewish without qualifying that with, I am an anti-Zionist Jew or I am a Jewish anti-fascist, because to me, to say one is Jewish in this country right now is to immediately raise the question, are you a supporter of the genocide? And I don’t want to ever be conflated with that.

CP: We have to be clear that while I think there has been, particularly among the less organized and less politicized layers of Muslim youth in the U.S., some but limited growth of actual antisemitism, of anti-Jewish sentiment and politics, this has remained very limited. In terms of the actual organized movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, for the arms embargo, for the ceasefire that we’ve seen in the last two years, there’s a sufficient layer of politicized militants who have forcefully rejected the conflation of Zionism and Judaism. And the existence of Jewish Voice for Peace, which we’ll get to later, has been a powerful counterweight to that.

But I do believe that the instrumentalization of antisemitism has, in fact, emboldened traditionally antisemitic but pro-Zionist currents in the United States. Whenever I hear that opposition to Zionism is antisemitic, I have to point out that the largest group of militant supporters of Zionism in the U.S. is an organization of anti-Semites. It’s called Christians United for Israel, which has 11 million members, which is a lot more than there are Jews in the U.S. anymore.

The Christian Zionists are quite open anti-Semites. Ilan Pappé, in his 10 Myths About Israel, talks about how, from the beginning, the first Zionists—modern Zionists—were Christian Zionists in Britain. And for them, the idea of the Jews returning to Palestine had all sorts of benefits. You could get a stable pro-European ally in the midst of the Arab world, and at the same time, you have a place to send all these annoying Jews that you don’t want in your own country. And we see in the U.S. the growth of these Christian Zionist groups, whose vision of why they support the state of Israel is so that Jews will go to Palestine and be pawns in this apocalyptic war where there will be mutual destruction of both Arabs and Jews, and thus this will bring the Second Coming. So there, I think, we see that the greatest growth of antisemitism has been among people who are pro-Zionist, at least in the U.S.

There have been disturbing examples of people on our side who are anti-Zionist adopting antisemitic tropes. But I think that’s been fairly rare and quite limited given the attempt of mainstream politics, liberal and conservative, to equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

TD: Yes, I agree. Having been a Jew participating in the movement in France for the past year and a half, the care the movement has taken to clearly differentiate the policies of the Israeli government from the Israeli population and from Jews as such, is immense. Yet as you mentioned, I think one of the issues with this kind of weaponization by the far right is that it can function as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where it begins as a purely ideological mystification but with time becomes descriptive of the reality. So, we are actually seeing empirically a rise of antisemitic acts, which in turn justifies the increasing instrumentalization of antisemitism against figures of the Left or of the Palestinian liberation movement, which are entirely spurious.

Earlier, you briefly touched on the history of Zionism and how it had actually been embraced by a significant number of anti-Semites as a means to expel Jews from the West. But I was wondering if you could speak to this kind of longer, more contested history of the relationship of Jews and Zionism, particularly in Europe. Many American Jews or French Jews today would assume that Jewish support for Zionism was always widespread, but historically that was not the case. Could you describe these debates among different political traditions of Jews in Europe and talk about the tensions between them?

CP: Zionism among European Jews, among both Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews and the more assimilated German and pre–World War I French and English Jewish populations, was always pretty marginal. This was because they saw Zionism as accentuating their Jewishness and as an obstacle to full assimilation and being considered Germans or French or English.

The most consistent and radical rejection of Zionism comes from the Yiddish-speaking Jewish Left in Eastern Europe. The Bund, the Jewish Workers League, which was the largest Marxist organization in the Russian Empire prior to 1905, was always explicitly anti-Zionist. And what they put forward is something that the Zionists are very hesitant to acknowledge, which is that Zionism is essentially a capitulation to antisemitism.

Theodor Herzl is explicit about this in The Jewish State, the first major document of modern political Zionism. He said that it was the Dreyfus Affair that lifted the veil from his eyes. He saw that antisemitism is simply a reality and that the anti-Semites were right: Jews and non-Jews cannot and should not live together as political and social equals in any society. The solution was separation, to retreat from struggling against antisemitism and instead create a Jewish state, which would then require the support of the various great powers, the imperial powers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Bund and most of the Jewish, working-class Left, basically said: this is a capitulation. We want nothing to do with this. The struggle against antisemitism is a struggle here in Europe. And importantly, in order to defeat antisemitism, we have to defeat capital and the forces of reaction. This was their politics.

It’s also very clear that all the wings of Zionism ended up in their capitulation to antisemitism reinventing antisemitic tropes. Hertzl talks about how the project of Zionism in its state-building project will require the abolition of the Yid—the Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking, working-class scum—and their replacement with the Hebrew, the manly colonial settler who will establish civilization in the Arab East.

The right-wing Zionists echoed the same stuff. They were completely and utterly contemptuous of Eastern European Jews as effeminate, weak, etc. And even the left-wing Zionists—the so-called Poale Zion—echoed much of this in a sort of semi-Marxified language, saying that we really don’t have a Jewish working class because Jewish workers are all in light industry, there’s no machinery. What we need in order for the Jewish working class to fully be a working class is our own state and our own capitalist class.

Before World War II in the U.S., no significant segment of the working-class movement was pro-Zionist. The first indications of former Marxists becoming pro-Zionist is in the 1930s—some of the leadership, the right-wing social democratic leadership of the needle trades unions of the U.S. David Dubinsky, who ended up the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and Sidney Hillman, who leads the men’s clothing industry, begin to be more sympathetic to Zionism. But they get pushback from the more politicized elements of their own membership, many of whom were either formed in the Bund or formed in the pre-war Socialist Party and rejected Zionism.

This turn to Zionism encourages the leadership to ally themselves with the so-called labor Zionist currents—whether it was the mainstream that becomes Ben-Gurion’s Labor Party or Mapam, which comes out of the more left wing of Poale Zion and Hashomer Hatzair, which basically adopt pro-Stalinist politics.

But the real shift on the Left comes after the Holocaust and after the Second World War. There we see the almost wholesale move of Jewish social democrats towards embracing the Zionist project, which was establishing a Jewish-only colonial society that excluded Arab labor. They saw many of their former comrades running the new state and therefore supported it.

At the same time, the communist parties, which had been consistently anti-Zionist until the war—because of shifts in Soviet foreign policy—started embracing Zionism. The worst of it, the U.S. Communist Party was putting out pro-Zionist pamphlets like The Wall Street Conspiracy Against Israel. This goes until the mid-50s, when Soviet foreign policy shifts from a hope for some sort of alliance with the labor Zionists to an alliance with the Arab nationalists. This remains their line throughout the period and disorients a huge layer of Jewish communists.

Another factor that—at least in the U.S.— plays a role in the shift towards Zionism, which comes through the 1950s and 1960s, was the tremendous transformation of the social structure of the Eastern European Jewish population in the U.S. It’s well known that after the Second World War, a considerable minority of working-class youth are able to go to college and enter, at worst, the pseudo-professions like high school teaching and social work, or actually become attorneys, physicians, etc. And a large number of Jews, you know, become successful small business people, etc. And this, I think, also fuels a growing attachment to the Zionist project.

But prior to the late 1940s-early 1950s, very small minorities of Jews in Europe or in the U.S. were actively Zionist.

TD: Could you explain that a little more? In what way was the upward social mobility of previously immigrant Jews in the United States connected to their increasing attachment to the Zionist state?

CP: Because it goes along with a change in their racial categorization in the U.S. One of the best books I think David Roediger ever wrote was Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs, where he looks at the process by which Southern and Eastern European immigrants prior to World War II were not considered white people in the United States. They were maybe a step above African Americans, but they were definitely not white people.

You see, directly after in the post-war period, Jews become white people. They move to the suburbs, there’s greater levels of intermarriage etc. Consequently, their organizational ties to the Jewish labor movement, which could keep reproducing the political ideas that would be counter to that of Zionism—universalism, anti-racism, etc.—get weaker and weaker.

It’s only after 1967, with the growth of the Six Days’ War and the growth of a new far left, both Maoist and Trotskyist in the U.S., that you begin to see the revival of a Jewish anti-Zionism. And in this, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which was the largest and in many ways—I was a member at one point—a rather problematic formation, were very important in producing educational material on the history of Zionism, the history of Palestine, and the history of Jewish anti-Zionism.

TD: Could you address the kind of broader relationship of Jews to the radical Left and to Marxism in the United States?

CP: Because working class American Jews came to the U.S. with strong political organization and traditions from Eastern Europe, they played an outsized role on the Left in the U.S. from basically the early 20th century to the 1970s and 1980s. Being working class and growing up surrounded by these traditions created among U.S. Jews a default towards the Left. This was also the case in the New Left: young Jewish activists, radicalized through the civil rights movement, begin to participate in the Vietnam war movement and become key players in almost all the New Left organizations.

Now, I think the high point of that, prior to the emergence of Jewish Voice for Peace as an anti-Zionist group in the last few years, was the late 1960s-early 1970s. I think there was a significant shift to the right among Jews in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. We also see the complete and utter collapse of all the groups that came out of the New Left in the United States. By the mid-1980s, Maoism, which had become the dominant current on the far left in the U.S. in the late 1960s, had all but disappeared—and disappeared either into an increasingly tepid social democracy, maybe aligning with left-wing trade union officials, etc., or into private life and becoming conservative.

And as a result, I think by the mid-1980s, you see a very different ethnic composition of left activists in the U.S. where Jews do not play the outsized role they had played previously.

TD: Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has emerged as one of the most prominent American Jewish anti-Zionist organizations in the U.S. How has JVP’s position evolved over time—from its early focus on human rights and a two-state framework to a more openly anti-Zionist stance? To what extent has this evolution been shaped by broader ideological, generational, and political shifts within the  Jewish community in the U.S., including disillusionment with liberal Zionism?

SW: JVP initially comes out of an alliance of a bunch of leftists—mostly anarchists, some socialist-inflected queers in San Francisco—and becomes a national movement in the early 2000s. By 2005, with the launch of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, JVP already existed in cities like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Austin, Texas: the big cities and towns with considerable concentrations of Jewish leftists.

It immediately gets involved with BDS, which was the reason I got so involved with JVP even before its 2018 national vote to formally become an anti-Zionist organization. JVP had not been formally anti-Zionist until about seven years ago. That said, most of its leadership would have defined themselves and identified as anti-Zionist, but their practice as a non-governmental organization, as opposed to a movement with an elected leadership among a collective, did not reflect that. Eventually the leadership of the group went through a years-long debate, deliberation, discussion, education, while they were involved in the activism of BDS, and managed to win over wider and wider circles of people to taking a stance against Zionism full stop and not just being critical of Zionism or the occupation or defining themselves as “non-Zionist.”

I think their transformation over not just these last 20 months but this last sort of half decade has been incredibly important in terms of attracting huge numbers of younger, queer activists, including many Jews of color who are coming from all over the world, whether Mizrahim or, you know, Sephardim, people from the Arab world who identify as Jewish, and have started to become more and more part of the group and part of its leadership as well.

And so it’s also become a more multiracial organization, which is not usually the case for a Jewish-identified group in the U.S. given that the overwhelming majority of Jews in the U.S. are Ashkenazi European white Jews. So it has moved further and further left, and has affiliated itself more and more with the Palestinian and U.S. Left over these years.

The group has grown enormously. There’s at least 40,000 members of JVP. That makes it really the largest far left organization in the United States in practice in terms of its active participants, with even higher levels of participation in many cities than the Democratic Socialists of America. In New York City alone, there are at least a couple of thousand active members who organize on a regular basis. That is a very new development since the genocide that began in October of 2023.

Before that, they would have made calls to action and drawn a few hundred people. But you wouldn’t have had—as we just had—a national membership meeting of well over 2,000 people. You wouldn’t have had calls to action that could draw thousands of people in multiple cities on the same day to have Seders in the streets.

We have taken bold actions in the last couple years. The occupation of Grand Central Station was the first of the big bold actions that people saw probably across the world because images were quite dramatic and they spread. It was a thrilling thing to help organize. I’m very proud of that action.

The blocking of bridges and the mass Seders in the streets have put on the map for people who aren’t even particularly political and don’t necessarily pay close attention to these things the fact that there is Jewish dissent. Even in the mainstream, we cannot any longer be ignored.

Now, after decades of ignoring JVP and ignoring Jewish anti-Zionism, even mainstream press—the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC—has been forced to give time to this reality of Jewish anti-Zionism. It has raised the reality that there’s a debate among Jews and this is not a settled question among us. And that’s new.

It used to be that the only Jews in this country who were anti-Zionist were Jewish Marxists. That’s it. And there weren’t that many of us. And I knew them all! One of the most thrilling things to me is going to a protest and knowing absolutely nobody or knowing one or two people.

So the idea that to be Jewish equals Zionist is no longer an automatic equation among anybody with even a vague level of education about these things.

CP: I agree. The only time in my long political activity that I have emphasized my Jewish identity is when I’ve done anti-Zionist organizing, Palestine solidarity. But I think that today, more than ever, with the weaponization of antisemitism, the existence of an organization of 50,000 to 60,000 Jewish members that is explicitly anti-Zionist, is an incredibly important development. It creates the sort of space for younger Jews to actually organize and take action.

I mean, when I talk to younger comrades—and to my own children for that matter—who are clearly anti-Zionist, I point out that in 1973, I was a sophomore in college, and we were organizing against the Yom Kippur War. You literally took your life in your hands on any American campus. You could be attacked by the Jewish Defense League, which was a Jewish fascist organization. Others who were not JDLers would try to disrupt meetings. Any time between the 1973 war and then the 1982–1983 invasion of Lebanon, when you did any anti-Zionist organizing, one of the key questions was security. How do we make sure that this meeting is not physically disrupted?

Today, it’s not as dangerous physically to be an anti-Zionist Jew in the U.S. as it was then. Now, clearly, there are right-wing proto-fascists and fascist groupings on campuses—Jews and non-Jews—who will physically attack anti-Zionist demonstrators. But increasingly, pro-Zionist political forces of the U.S. have a much more powerful ally from the state, and the greatest threat of repression is not coming from physical disruption by organized Zionists—it’s coming from the capitalist state.

TD: So how and why did this transformation in JVP occur? What are the economic, political, sociological conditions for this move away from Zionism? Or does it have to do more with the current genocidal behavior of the Israeli state?

SW: The genocide killed default Zionism. And by that I mean that for generations people, myself included, were raised with a certain understanding of Israel as, you know, a broadly democratic, broadly progressive country.

And I don’t believe anybody under the age of 40—who are the widest consumers of social media and get their news primarily off of TikTok and Instagram, not from CNN and MSNBC and what have you—believes that anymore.

And as a result, the unraveling of support, and this of course is the crucial nation to be supporting it because both the financial and even more importantly ideological and military support that the U.S. provides for Israel, the cover, you know, is coming undone. And that could be the undoing of the state of Israel.

This is an existential crisis for them and the only weapon they have is to try to tie our protests, our dissent to the thing that is odious to almost everyone and that is antisemitism and the Holocaust. So they have to play that card. And so this is a desperation move. It’s uglier in its death throes than ever in my life.

CP: I think the primary factor is the changing character of the Zionist leadership. My father and his brothers were good working-class Jewish social democrats. But they didn’t simply support unions. They were anti-racist. They opposed the Vietnam War. But for them, Israel was a social democratic utopia. As a friend of mine put it, it was Sweden on the Mediterranean. So, until I was a teenager, I grew up believing that not only was Israel on the defensive, it was the only democracy in the Middle East, and was a progressive social democratic state. You could justify Zionism. You could easily spin Zionism in Israel as the culmination of Jewish national liberation and point to the history, point to the kibbutzim, point to the level of state ownership of industry, etc. And young Jews who were left liberals or soft radicals could embrace Zionism and maintain their progressive politics in the U.S.

With the global economic crisis, with the rise of neoliberalism, with the shift to the right first by Israeli social democracy and then its complete decline, and now you have a regime that is run by people whose political ancestors marched through Tel Aviv chanting, “Germany for Hitler, Italy for Mussolini, Palestine for us,” and who are allied with openly reactionary religious parties that are militantly homophobic, militantly and blatantly racist, etc. So maintaining any sort of sense of being a Jewish progressive is difficult in that context. If you’re going to oppose Trump, how can you support Israel?

Additionally, with this generation, you’re also seeing more limited opportunities for upward mobility. Since the 2008 recession, growing wage and salary stagnation, growing inequality is affecting some of these young Jewish kids as well. And their prospects for upward mobility are now more limited than they had been.

So I think that may be feeding into it as well.

TD: Bringing them to the Left, and then while they’re on the left, they’re acquiring these more universalistic, anti-racist, anti-Zionist values…

CP: Exactly.

TD: Final question on political strategy: What role do you think that Jews and Jewish socialists should play in the struggle against this international tendency for the right and the far right to instrumentalize antisemitism?

CP: Well, I think that for Jewish leftists in the diaspora, where we’re strongest, our role is to be openly organized as Jews against Zionism. This is one of the few times I would advocate organizing as Jews. Because of the weaponization of antisemitism in the West, it is crucial that there are groups of publicly identified Jews who say: “No, this is not—these people do not speak in my name. We oppose this. We stand with the Palestinians.”

So I think that’s the key role of Jewish socialists: to not retreat from our consistent anti-Zionism, but also to argue for democratic, open membership organizations, where people come together, can learn their politics, develop strategy, etc., so that they can build organizations that can last between the ups and downs of the struggle, and where we can also argue for the need to align with others in solidarity with other political struggles.

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Featured Image credit: Marcywinograd; modified by Tempest.