Authoritarian states have long deployed antisemitism in their ideological warfare against democracies. During the Cold War, the USSR was the largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda and disinformation globally as it sought to undermine the US and its ally, Israel. By dressing up tropes from antisemitic conspiracy theory as "anti-Zionism," it managed to sell them to a wide variety of audiences across the globe. Today, state actors such as Russia, China, and Iran target young Americans with the same toxic tropes, presenting them as opposition to Israel.
In this talk, Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary antisemitism, suveys "anti-Zionist" antisemitism as a form of information warfare targeting democracies; discusses what specifically makes it antisemitic; and talks about why it is critical that democracies learn to resist it.
