Don't Know Much About with Naya Lekht
Don't Know Much About is a podcast hosted by Dr. Naya Lekht, a scholar and educator with a PhD from UCLA in Russian Literature. Each episode unpacks a contentious topic — from antizionism and Soviet history to Jewish identity and contemporary geopolitics — through rigorous research, personal stories, and candid conversations with leading thinkers. Clarifying the complex, one conversation at a time.
Don't Know Much About with Naya Lekht
Propaganda in the USSR, Virtue in the USA: Antizionism
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On this episode of Don’t Know Much About, Dr. Naya Lekht examines a troubling paradox: why is antizionism in the West more dangerous than in the Soviet Union, the regime that invented it? Beginning with a personal observation from her mother, the episode traces how Soviet antizionist propaganda, once widely recognized as cynical state messaging, was transformed in Western universities into a moral cause. While the Soviet Union imposed antizionism from above through state propaganda, in the West, the same framework was repackaged through postcolonial theory, anti-imperialism, and academic scholarship, eventually embedding itself within university departments and activist culture.
The episode explores how this transformation, from propaganda no one believed to an ideology many now embrace as virtue, creates a far more dangerous dynamic. When antizionism becomes framed as a moral duty rather than a political claim, dissent is treated as immorality and violence can appear justified in the name of justice. The result, Dr. Lekht argues, is a disturbing irony: ideas that required authoritarian enforcement in the Soviet Union now thrive organically within free societies.
Clarifying the complex. Step into my classroom.