Kelner believes the anti-Zionism that grips many academic institutions cannot be understood without grappling with its Soviet roots.
In the USSR, he explained, the state was ideologically committed to opposing antisemitism, which it associated with fascism, Nazism and German nationalism, but it wanted to target the Jews. “They were fighting against the Nazis, so they could not embrace this Nazi ideology. And yet they wanted to persecute Jews – so they needed to find other justifications to do that.”
The solution was linguistic. “They framed it as not opposing Jews but opposing Zionism.”
Jews who identified as Jewish were accused of being Zionist nationalists and enemies of the state while those who assimilated or downplayed their Jewish identity were condemned as “rootless cosmopolitans”.
“You were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t,” Kelner said. “You embrace your Jewishness; you were a Zionist. You deny it; you were a cosmopolitan. Nowadays they would say ‘globalist’.”
Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology, Shaul Kelner (Photo: Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN) Photo: Anne RaynerAnne Rayner Photography
For Kelner, this history matters because the language used today mirrors that of this period. “Both the rhetoric we hear from the left about Zionists, and from the right about globalists, has roots in 20th-century Soviet politics,” he said.
What feels different now though, Kelner went on, is in the Soviet Union anti-Zionism was imposed from above by a government people often distrusted, whereas the US and parts of Europe today, it is “a bottom-up mass movement, populated by true believers”.
“You pick your poison,” he said.
One of his key points is that Jews have been responding to anti-Zionism in the wrong way – and too often letting the debate become trapped in arguments about Israel.
“This is part of the anti-Zionist playbook. They shift the focus onto conversations about Israel, rather than keeping attention on how anti-Zionists are treating Jews here,” he said. But this is flawed. “You don’t accept the premises of the group doing the othering. You study the group itself: its motivations, its practices, and its effects.”
That approach becomes particularly important when confronting anti-Zionist Jews, who present themselves as moral or ideological critics of Israel rather than participants in a movement that has adopted antagonist practices against most Jews.
Kelner does not deny that many Jews enter these anti-Israel spaces through genuine concern about the Jewish state and its policies.
“Often it begins with a critique of Israel,” he said. “But once people enter those spaces, something shifts. They find a movement that gives them language, that gives them community.”
At protests, rituals have evolved that sometimes fill a void left by declining religious and communal life. There are rules and regulations – the vast Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) list of rules is just one such example.
At Vanderbilt, Kelner notes that a major football victory for the university was an unlikely factor that helped defuse a potential encampment erupting.
“For students looking for ritual and belonging, they found it – it just happened to be around football rather than politics.”
When it comes to Jews joining in anti-Israel protests, Kelner said: “Any system of oppression creates incentives to participate in it, and I think that anti-Zionist oppession is no different. “Look at racism, sexism and homophobia. You will always find members of that community who for a variety of reasons will participate in the othering of their own group.”
Social pressure plays a powerful role, particularly among young progressive Jews. “There are real social costs to standing up against anti-Zionism when it becomes the dominant political culture of your peers,” he added.
Education, Kelner believes, is a crucial missing piece. “If everyone knew the historical costs of Soviet anti-Zionism – when Jews were harassed, surveilled and imprisoned in its name – they would be less likely to pick up the mantle. We tend to frame all anti-Jewish politics as antisemitism. So when Jews are involved in anti-Zionist movements the rest can say, truthfully, ‘I don’t hate Jews. Why are you calling me antisemitic?’
“If they knew what had been done to Jews in the name of anti-Zionism, they would be far less eager to embrace that label,” Kelner wagered. Perhaps then the word “Zio” would not be bandied about so casually, as if a shorthand for evil incarnate.
