The Honest Take

In 2018, Izabella Tabarovsky walked past a protest on an American campus and recognized the signs. Not the sentiment — the sentences. She called her father in Russian and read them out. His answer: we've heard all of this before.

She grew up in Soviet Siberia, in a Jewish city with no synagogues, where the word "Jew" was a line on an internal passport and Jewish applicants to math departments were handed problems known as "coffin problems," because they would bury you. So she went looking for the paper trail — and found one. The Soviet Union didn't merely dislike Israel. It assigned the problem to research institutes and told them to build a scientific-sounding case against Zionism. The volumes they produced look like scholarship. They have footnotes, endnotes, citations to Hannah Arendt and to Herzl.

Tabarovsky sat in the National Library of Israel and checked those citations one at a time. They're fake. Real quotes turned to mean the opposite of what they meant.

From there the trail runs out of Moscow and into a UN resolution, into Mahmoud Abbas's Soviet dissertation, and into an American Communist Party book that a successor organization quietly serialized "for our young readers" one month after October 7th.

A conversation about where the vocabulary came from, why it outlived the state that built it, and what a nineteen-year-old is supposed to do about it now.

Her book is Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide, with a foreword by Natan Sharansky.

Related episode: Shai Davidai, "Elite, Educated, Antisemitic: How Academia Fosters Jew Hate." Tabarovsky traces where this vocabulary was manufactured; Davidai traces how the American university taught a generation to hear it as justice.

The guest