Beware Those Who Condemn Antisemitism: The Relationship between Antizionism and Antisemitism

On this episode of Don’t Know Much About, Dr. Naya Lekht leads a critical conversation on how public condemnation of antisemitism often functions as cover for antizionism, the latest mutation of Jew-hatred.

Drawing on her framework of the three eras of anti-Jewish movements, anti-Judaism, antisemitism, and antizionism, Naya argues that antizionism must be understood not as a break from the past, but as its continuation. Each era, she explains, developed its own language, tropes, and libels to construct Jews as villains standing in opposition to what society defined as moral. In this way, antizionism carries forward the same civilizational project: transforming the Jew, now refracted through Israel, into a demon opposed to redemption itself.

But this episode goes beyond diagnosing the latest mutation. More urgently, it exposes how politicians and public figures strategically condemn antisemitism in order to legitimize and traffic in today’s dominant form of Jew-hatred: antizionism. This cover is further amplified by the rhetorical pairing of antisemitism and Islamophobia in a single breath, a move that appears morally balanced while quietly granting antizionist rhetoric free passage. Because these statements condemn Islamophobia, they often function as a permission slip for antizionism to go unnamed, unchallenged, and unchecked, even as its most active producers today are Islamist movements themselves.

Clarifying the complex. Step into my classroom.