Statement from Jim Berk, SWC CEO on Glastonbury Festival and BBC Broadcasting Antisemitic Incitement
What happened on the stages of Glastonbury yesterday was not just disgraceful; it was sickening, dangerous, and chillinglyreminiscent of a...
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 tooharmful—for silence.
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A New Understanding of Antisemitism Must StartHere
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, wedesperately 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 theabiding, 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 antisemiteshave 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 notreplace 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 forintifada—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 theJews." 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" orsome 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—thatthe 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 thegrotesque.
Gessen and their fellow travelers keep asking if anti-Zionism is really antisemitism. They might start by listening to those whoknow 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 perniciousLivingstone 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 tellingwomen 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 scionsof the "Prince of Lies."
Gessen also props up this flimsy strawman: that Jews conflate every criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Let it be repeated oncemore 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 itdenies 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-Zionismnever 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 ownregime 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, meticulouslyrefined 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 andliterary 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 collegecampuses, 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'sdespotism 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 eagerapparatchik.
But don't take my word for it: ask the vanished Jewish communities from Baghdad to Cairo to Damascus whether anti-Zionism isantisemitism. 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 quarterJewish—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 toTunisia 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 largelyagrees. 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. Wealready know how this all plays out.
For further information, please email Erik Simon at esimon@wiesenthal.com, Deborah Camiel at dcamiel@wiesenthal.com, join the Center on Facebook, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent directly to your X feed.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an international Jewish human rightsorganization. It holds consultative status at the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, the OAS, and the Latin American Parliament (PARLATINO).
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