Jewish Education Failed to Prepare Us for Antizionism

For decades, mainstream Jewish education has failed to prepare younger generations for the ideological terrain we now face. We taught the Holocaust as trauma and spectacle, not as a political process—focusing on camps and corpses rather than the propaganda, psychological warfare, and mass mobilization that preceded them. We universalized the Shoah into metaphor, abstracting it into a symbol of “evil” so thoroughly that when antizionists began inverting it—casting Jews as the new Nazis and Gaza as the new Warsaw—there were no conceptual defenses left. In our institutions, we centered Der Stürmer but not Soviet disinformation, Eichmann but not the Farhud, antisemitism but not antizionism. We taught about death, but not about the ideological operations that made that death possible—or thinkable.

This section does not lay out these failures to assign blame, but to clarify the urgency. The dominant form of Jew-hatred in the West today is antizionism, and we have built almost no infrastructure to name it, track it, or teach it. We neglected Mizrahi history, ignored the MENA expulsions, and erased Soviet Jewry from public memory. We failed to treat antizionism as an object of study, much less a threat. The tools offered here are a corrective. They deliberately decenter the Holocaust and classical antisemitism—not to deny their importance, but to address the vacuum we now face.  

Learn the top 5 things you can do to fight antizionism.