A Jewish Response to a Flawed Antisemitism Framework in the NYT

July 7, 2025

The New York Times didn't print our rebuttal to a dangerous and misleading opinion piece about antisemitism, so we decided to share it with you directly. The stakes are too high—and the distortions too harmful—for silence.

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A New Understanding of Antisemitism Must Start Here
by Vlad Khaykin, EVP of Social Impact and Partnerships, North America

Masha Gessen's latest piece, "We Need a New Understanding of Antisemitism," stumbles right out of the gate. Yes, we desperately do need a new understanding, but not one conjured from intellectual gymnastics that reduce Jewish experience to an abstract parlor game. We need an understanding grounded in the abiding, blood-streaked experience of Jews who have borne the consequences of antisemitism parading as anti-Zionism.

What does it mean, after all, to define antisemitism as "animus against Jews as Jews," as Gessen suggests? Most modern antisemites have no quarrel with Jews as an abstract faith or heritage. They see Jews as sinister puppet masters orchestrating the world's woes—a malignant cabal behind all manner of ills. They don't hate "Jews as Jews"; they hate the villainous caricatures they've constructed of Jews.

When one of the white supremacist organizers of Charlottesville's "Unite the Right" rally—where fascists howled "Jews will not replace us"—was pressed in court on whether he hated Jews, he replied: "No, only the Jewish community as a political vehicle," Gessen mentions the chant, but misses the dodge.

And the reality is plain: Since October 7, Jewish students have barricaded themselves in campus halls while mobs outside bellow for intifada—a call to violence. Synagogues and Jewish businesses have been defaced with "Death to Israel" graffiti. Rallies bristle with placards likening Zionists to Nazis and chants to "gas the Jews." Holocaust survivors are spat on in the street. The man charged with trying to burn down Governor Josh Shapiro's home was reportedly driven by anti-Israel rage. Whether the word "Jew" or some euphemism appeared in his manifesto is irrelevant. The pattern is unmistakable: anti-Zionist violence pursues ideological phantoms, even as it fixates on real Jews.

Gessen even casts doubt on the antisemitic motivation behind recent murders of Jews, speculating—without a shred of evidence—that the killer of two young Jews in DC targeted them solely as Israeli embassy employees, not as Jews exiting a Jewish event at a Jewish museum. The intellectual contortions verge on the grotesque.

Gessen and their fellow travelers keep asking if anti-Zionism is really antisemitism. They might start by listening to those who know antisemitism personally: not from textbooks, but from brutal lived experience. Instead, Jews who speak up are derided for "pulling the antisemitism card," a classic example of the pernicious Livingstone Formulation—the vile claim that Jews cynically deploy accusations of antisemitism to silence criticism. The slur is as old as antisemitism itself, a rhetorical sibling of telling women they're "playing the sexism card" or Black Americans the "race card." It is exceedingly unoriginal—and invokes centuries-old characterizations of Jews as deceivers, manipulators, and scions of the "Prince of Lies."

Gessen also props up this flimsy strawman: that Jews conflate every criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Let it be repeated once more for the cheap seats: criticizing Israeli policy is not inherently antisemitic, but denying Israel's very right to exist—the essential creed of anti-Zionism—most certainly is. Why? Because it denies Jews the only reliable means of refuge, rescue, and self-defense we have in a world still beset by genocidal antisemitism. And because, as Jewish history unerringly shows, anti-Zionism never remains a civil debate about lines on a map; it metastasizes into anti-Jewish violence and purges wherever it takes hold.

It is deeply ironic that Gessen invokes Stalin to argue against recognizing anti-Zionism as antisemitism, when it was Stalin's own regime that created the very template for modern radical anti-Zionism: recasting Jewish national aspirations as imperialism, portraying Zionists as global conspirators, denying Jewish peoplehood, and cloaking antisemitic narratives in the language of anti-racism. The USSR didn't merely denounce Zionism; it enshrined conspiratorial, demonological anti-Zionism as state dogma, meticulously refined in KGB laboratories and exported worldwide like ideological contraband. Moscow even assembled the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, staffed with decorated Jewish veterans and literary figures, to lend a kosher seal to this antisemitic propaganda. These Soviet ideas seeded themselves in Western intellectual circles, where they continue to echo today on college campuses, in activist slogans, and in popular discourse.

Here's a glaring—and tragic—irony: Gessen, a Jew who, like me, fled the Soviet Union, has admirably made a career unmasking Putin's despotism and yet is blind to how the very methods they rightly condemn in Putin's Russia were perfected by the Soviet anti-Zionist machine of which Putin himself was once an eager apparatchik.

But don't take my word for it: ask the vanished Jewish communities from Baghdad to Cairo to Damascus whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Jews of every background—Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Bukharian, and beyond—have borne the brunt of anti-Zionism's violent consequences. Before 1948, Baghdad was over a quarter Jewish—today, the community is a ghost. Egypt's 75,000 Jews have dwindled to a handful of souls. The same macabre story unfolds wherever anti-Zionism has triumphed, from Poland to Syria to Tunisia to the Soviet Union: harassment, dispossession, and sanctioned terror—enacted with the righteous zeal reserved for those convinced they stand on the side of virtue.

So yes, we do need a new understanding of antisemitism—one that doesn't cast Jews as paranoid, traumatized, hysterical, terrified, and incapable of understanding their own history. One that recognizes anti-Zionism not on the terms of its own conceit, but as the engine of discrimination, disenfranchisement, dispossession, displacement, and violence against Jews it has always been—up to and including today. And the encouraging news, inconvenient though it may be for Gessen, is that the American public largely agrees. A recent American Jewish Committee survey found 85% of American Jews believe saying "Israel has no right to exist" is antisemitic—and 85% of Americans concur.

Millions of Jews in your midst have lived the grim reality of anti-Zionism in practice. If you truly want to understand, ask us. We already know how this all plays out.

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an international Jewish human rights organization. It holds consultative status at the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, the OAS, and the Latin American Parliament (PARLATINO).