The Assembly Line of Antizionism: Soviet Roots of Today’s Progressive Antizionism

This lecture is part of Antizionism: The History of an Ideology, a six-part series hosted by Chai Mitzvah. The series examines the historical origins, evolution, and contemporary manifestations of antizionism. Sponsored by the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism.

The Soviet Union did not merely criticize Zionism; it engineered a decades-long, state-sponsored ideological project designed to repackage antisemitism as antizionism. This talk traces that campaign from its origins to its global afterlife: how it began, how it evolved, and how it succeeded in transforming Jew-hatred into a morally sanctioned political language. The talk will map the ideological relay system through which Soviet antizionism migrated into global circulation, revealing its explicit entanglements with Nazi antisemitism, Arab nationalist and Islamist movements, and Western progressive frameworks. What emerged was not a critique of Israeli policy, but a coherent and portable ideology of Jewish demonization — the blueprint for contemporary antizionism.

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Dr. Naya Lekht is a scholar, educator, and writer known for bringing urgency and clarity to the study of anti-Jewish hatred. She earned her PhD in Russian Literature from UCLA, where her dissertation examined Holocaust literature with a focus on Babi Yar as a site of collective memory for Russian-speakers. Her research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union informs her work on Soviet antizionism, linking historical patterns of repression to contemporary forms of anti-Jewish hatred.

Today, Dr. Lekht partners with Jewish and non-Jewish private schools to develop rigorous, historically grounded curricula on Israel, the Middle East, and Jewish identity, empowering students to think critically and engage confidently with one of the defining issues of our time. In 2024, she was named one of the Jerusalem Post and JNF’s Top 25 Zionist “ViZionaries.” She is the co-founder of Stop Antizionism, an educational initiative addressing the realities students face in K–12 and higher education through a declaration that names antizionism as today’s antisemitism. Her writing has appeared in the Jerusalem Post, Tablet, Jewish Journal, Algemeiner, and Times of Israel, and she regularly lectures in schools, community institutions, and public forums on the history of anti-Jewish movements and how to teach this material with clarity and moral courage.