Antizionism as a Distinct Anti-Jewish Bigotry with Adam Louis-Klein

Thank you so much.

It's a real pleasure to be here.

Adam, what first convinced you that anti-Zionism needed to be studied as its own phenomenon?

So my work on this topic emerged from lived experience.

So I was doing my PhD in anthropology with an indigenous tribe in the Amazon, actually.

And I was thinking about somewhat related themes.

I was thinking about their character as an ethno-religious people, their struggle to preserve their peoplehood.

And then it was October 7th that really actually had to reorient my work when I saw how the same critical tools that were being used to sort of claim to defend the Dasana people who I worked with or indigenous people's cultural autonomy against erasure, colonialism, were now being used against the Jewish people.

So it was that kind of inversion where Jews as a people were now being erased by these very same frameworks that were supposed to do the opposite that forced me to confront anti-Zionism really directly because it completely contradicted the ethical... approach of my field work and my own experience being attacked and being told that Jews were not a people, being denied the right to speak back to anti-Zionist oppression in the academy and in left-wing academic and activist spaces.

So it was really that that forced me to confront anti-Zionism directly.

Now, at first, of course, I used the language of anti-Semitism.

I knew I was being targeted as a Jew.

I saw other Jews being targeted.

And that is the usual word we have.

That is the conventional term for all forms of Jew hatred.

But the more I honed in on anti-Zionism and the more I saw that attempts to call anti-Zionist anti-Semitic were ineffective, I...

I considered more deeply, you know, what really was the difference between anti-Zionism and classical anti-Semitism.

And when we're using this term anti-Semitism, much of the time we are actually relying on mapping it back onto classical anti-Semitism.

And that is creating this ongoing dynamic in which anti-Zionism continues to flourish.

It continues to be permissible in much of society because people are calling it antisemitic, but there is actually a plausible case that it's not classical antisemitism.

Now, where my position is different than the usual antisemitism, not antisemitism, is that I still think it is bad.

I still think it is a bigotry.

I think it's based on certain stereotypes and libels.

It's actually a new way of imagining and stigmatizing Jews as evil, but it needs to be clearly identified as its own category.

So what question were you trying to answer that existing scholarship wasn't addressing?