How Anti-Semitic Soviet Propaganda Informs Contemporary Left Anti-Zionism in Cartoons
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The April cartoon that appeared in the New York Times International Edition
continues to elicit response and conversation.
What makes more sense is the possibility that the cartoon made it into print because the paper’s staff—whether singular or plural—saw it as “a political issue and not religious,”…
Yet the conventional wisdom on the left that anti-Zionism is easily distinguishable from anti-Semitism has run into some obvious practical difficulties in recent month…
So if anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not the same, why is the left doing such a poor job of distinguishing between the two?
The left would be less confused if it were able to soften temporarily its ahistorical, ideologically driven focus on the right as the sole source of anti-Semitism and devote some time to studying its own rich history of the same.
Izabella Tabarovsky, for Tablet, examines anti-Semitic cartoons of the Cold War Soviet Union
and connects them to present-day anti-Zionism cartoons of the left.
But perhaps the most disturbing and consequential set of Soviet anti-Zionist cartoons were ones that sought to tie Zionism and Nazism together—a link that remains alive and well on today’s anti-Zionist left. While the comparison itself dates back to the 1930s, it wasn’t until the Soviets launched their post-1967 anti-Zionist campaign that it became truly developed and popularized at home and abroad.
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