New group works to expose anti-Zionism as Jew-hatred

“We need to name anti-Zionism as a form of libel,” Adam Louis-Klein said. “We’re talking about colonizer libel, apartheid libel, genocide libel.”

Louis-Klein is a cofounder of the new group Movement Against Antizionism. Its mission, according to its website, is to confront “a rapidly escalating antizionist hate movement that is actively endangering” Jewish communities worldwide through “education, advocacy and coalition-building.”

An anthropology doctoral candidate, Louis-Klein was working in the Amazon on Oct. 7, 2023. The self-described “Jew who was fairly disconnected from my Jewish identity,” had no access to the internet or phone service at the time.

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“When I got back on Oct. 9, I saw the images from the Nova Music Festival. The reactions from my friends and colleagues in my social networks very quickly ostracized me. I was marked as a Zionist and the whole academic career I was building as an up-and-coming young person collapsed at that moment,” he said.

Louis-Klein said he had a decision to make: He could either be quiet or begin speaking out. He chose not to be silent.

“I started writing and applying my philosophy of anthropology to thinking about anti-Zionism and the explosion of Jewish hate since Oct. 7,” he said.

Louis-Klein put his thoughts into words, including in a blog he published on The Times of Israel’s website. At the same time, he found others — in Pittsburgh and Canada — who were speaking out as well.

“They were describing anti-Zionism as a functional, institutionalized system with a matrix of libels and defamation that stigmatizes people as ‘Zionists,’” he said.

The group, he said, decided to seize the moment and create the Movement Against Antizionism.

Part of MAAZ’s mission, he explained, is to shift the paradigm, which often maintains that anti-Zionism doesn’t count as Jew-hatred until it crosses the line into classic antisemitism.

History, he said, is replete with examples of anti-Zionism that begin with blood libels.

“We only use ‘blood libel’ for something that was this medieval, primitive thing and not something that exists today,” he said. “These conspiracy theories of Jews being communists who are going to invade Central Europe, those are blood libels, as well. They cause people to hate Jews because they make people believe claims about Jews as if they are true.”

MAAZ aims to “identify antizionism through its constitutive libels, which are distinct from libels of the past: colonizer libel, apartheid libel, genocide libel,” he said.

The intention is for institutions to define anti-Zionism as hate and identify the libels it’s premised on. By naming it and explaining what it is, Louis-Klein said, anti-Zionist discourse will collapse.

Attacking anti-Zionism this way, he said, will win the argument that groups like Jewish Voice for Peace can’t be antisemitic because they are Jewish and simply opposed to Zionists and Israel.

“When you recognize it as its own form of anti-Jewish hate — it’s hatred of the Jewish state, the Jewish nation — it’s quite logical to see it as a hate movement that is trying to recruit individual Jews, to disconnect them from that peoplehood and collective identity,” Louis-Klein said.

MAAZ, he said, is nonpartisan and welcomes progressives, who can stay in their political lane, care about the fate of Palestinians and still take a stand against anti-Zionist hate.

Rona Kaufman, a law professor at Duquesne University, said it’s been clear to her since Oct. 7 that anti-Zionism is a form of Jew-hatred. That is not a new idea, she said, but it was one she didn’t believe would gain momentum.

“I didn’t take it seriously,” Kaufman said. “I didn’t believe that so many people would be seduced by the movement.”

In the days immediately following Oct. 7, she thought the world would recognize the danger of Hamas and its ideology.

“No respectable person would ally themselves with a hate movement,” she said. “This was not just hate — there was burning and mutilation and rape, more vicious than we’ve ever seen before.”

Sadly, Kaufman said, she was wrong and anti-Zionism has been on the rise since Oct. 7. The term “anti-Zionism” is meant to differ from “antisemitism,” which-Zionists typically describe as a specific form of anti-Jewish bias, largely connected to post-World War II hatred.

As an example, Kaufman pointed to Rep. Summer Lee, who represents Squirrel Hill. Lee, Kaufman said, has attended some Jewish community events, like the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting commemoration, and has condemned “antisemitism,” but is anti-Zionist.

Anti-Zionists differ from those who genuinely want to learn about what’s happening in Israel and are willing to discuss whether there’s a famine in Gaza, for example, and why that is, Kaufman said. Instead, anti-Zionism is based on libels, such as “Israel is a colonizer,” “Israel is an apartheid state,” “Israel commits genocide.”

At the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University, Kaufman teaches constitutional law, employment discrimination, family law and gender discrimination.

She said the best evidence in a discrimination case demonstrates that two people are treated differently based on a trait.

“As soon as you point out to an anti-Zionist that they’re treating Israel differently, they revert to ‘whataboutisms,’” she said.

Becoming involved with MAAZ was an easy choice for Kaufman, who said she wants to be a part of “intellectually honest discourse.”

“Anti-Zionists have been very successful in selling the idea that anti-Zionism is a legitimate political movement. It’s not. It’s a form of Jew hatred. It’s libel that stigmatizes Jew, ultimately justifying violence against them, followed by a denial and then a new libel,” she said.

Kaufman has co-founded the Center for Jewish Law and Policy, which will ground the fight against Jewish hatred in the law.

Pittsburgh, which has seen more than its share of Jew-hatred, including the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, anti-Israel encampments, vandalism and plots by those who identify with Hamas and other terrorist groups, will host the first MAAZ conference in the summer of 2026.

For Louis-Klein, the goal is to build a non-partisan movement to combat Jewish-hatred.

“We’re ready,” he said, “to create an energetic movement and create a new paradigm.” PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.