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Does the Term Antisemitism Properly Convey People’s Hatred of Israel and Jews?
A placard equating Zionism with Nazism is displayed at an Oct. 23 pro-Hamas demonstration in the Place de la Republique in Paris. Photo: Reuters/ Valerie Dubois
Something happened while I was writing a book about how to fight antisemitism.
Forget internal arguments over hyphens or whether to call it “Jew-hate.” A new movement is beginning to form around using the word “antizionism” instead. At first, I was skeptical. Did we really need another term?
I’ve always understood that antisemitism adapts to the times and, like a parasite, hitches a ride on whatever version of anti-Jewish hatred is socially acceptable. But I’m beginning to understand that antizionism is different — and that the distinction matters. It gives antisemites plausible deniability for their hatred, and we need a new set of tools to fight it.
At the forefront of this effort to reclaim the language is anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein, who has led a push on social media to change the way we think about antizionism and to name it as a hate movement. He launched an organization, the Movement Against Antizionism, to advocate for this shift. His message is gaining traction because it offers something Jews desperately need: a framework for understanding — and fighting back.
The 32-year-old PhD candidate in anthropology was studying indigenous religion with the Desana people in the Colombian Amazon on October 7, 2023. On October 9, he arrived in a town with Internet access and opened his computer. He saw images from the Nova music festival massacre — and friends posting photos of burning Israeli flags, professing loyalty to “the resistance.”
What happened next was swift. PhD students stopped talking to him. Professors no longer wanted to be associated with him. He was marked as a “Zionist” simply for acknowledging that antisemitism existed.
Louis-Klein then launched the Movement Against Antizionism. A word about hyphens: he removes it deliberately. Without the hyphen, antizionism becomes its own ideology — a distinct hate movement rather than simply opposition to Zionism. [The Algemeiner still spells the movement anti-Zionism, but is using antizionism for the purposes of this op-ed.]
“The key is giving Jews the language to explain what they’re experiencing right now,” Louis-Klein told me recently. “Antizionists aren’t interested in debate. They create a scene of accusation — show trial — where you’re dragged into the courtroom and told to defend yourself.”
Louis-Klein’s core insight comes from studying how hatred evolves. Jew-hatred has always adapted to fit the moral codes of its era. Medieval accusations — killing Jesus, using Christian children’s blood for matzah — were rooted in religious doctrine. In the 19th century, when religious hatred seemed primitive, antisemites reframed their bigotry scientifically, casting Jews as a dangerous race. Each era’s version felt righteous because it aligned with contemporary values.
Today’s libels follow the same pattern. Louis-Klein points to three core accusations: “colonizer,” “apartheid,” “genocide.” These aren’t random insults — they’re the inverse of our civilization’s fundamental moral codes. After World War II, genocide and racism became absolute evils. Civil rights movements established racial discrimination as morally wrong. Decolonization rejected Western imperialism. When antizionists call Israel a genocidal, apartheid, settler-colonial state, they’re invoking the most powerful moral condemnations our culture recognizes.
This is why antizionists genuinely believe they’re righteous, and why Jews struggle to name what’s happening. Antizionists aren’t using classical tropes about big noses or controlling banks, so they insist, “It’s not antisemitic.”
This is where Louis-Klein’s approach becomes practical. The obvious objection: if antizionists already call themselves that, how does adopting their term help us? His answer is strategic. Jews have been trying to prove that antizionism equals antisemitism, and antizionists simply deny it. It becomes an endless, unwinnable argument. Instead, Louis-Klein says, we should take their claims at face value and demonstrate that antizionism itself is wrong. Stop defending. Start naming the hate movement for what it is.
The tool he offers is direct: “Hating Zionists is wrong. Hating Israelis is racism.”
According to this view, you can’t construct a theology in which one country is essentially evil. You can’t create a demonic worldview about a single nation and its supporters. That’s racism, full stop. And here’s the key: don’t debate the libels. Don’t let antizionists drag you into their courtroom to defend Israel’s policies or history. The moment you start arguing whether Israel meets the definition of apartheid or genocide, you’ve already lost.
Louis-Klein draws a parallel to how we treat classical antisemitism. No one today debates whether Nazism constitutes “legitimate criticism” of Jews. We recognize the ideology as evil in its totality. We should do the same with antizionism. Yes, all libels contain partial truths — there were powerful Jewish families in 19th-century Europe, there were Jews in communist movements, there are checkpoints in the West Bank. But libels aren’t critiques. They’re theological constructions designed to cast a people as intrinsically evil. Once we recognize how antizionism functions, we stop engaging with it on its own terms.
This is the practical advice Jews have been asking me about while I’ve been writing my book. Louis-Klein’s framework offers both intellectual clarity and actionable strategy — a way to understand what’s happening and how to respond. But I remain somewhat skeptical that one word can perform such a Herculean task. Changing the culture around Zionism and antizionism, with or without the hyphen, means fighting against a tsunami of hostility that has already reshaped academic institutions, social movements, and public discourse. The gaslighting is entrenched. The permission structures are firmly in place.
I understand that Louis-Klein is trying to get us to fight antizionism as a separate animal from antisemitism, but it’s also important to remember the ancient roots of the “colonizer,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” libels. They are the grandchildren of antisemitic tropes involving Jewish money and power, and there is value in pointing out that they are modern manifestations of ancient antisemitism. They’re how antizionism rings familiar to most Jews.
Still, Louis-Klein is right about one thing: Jews need new tools for a new form of hatred. The old vocabulary isn’t working. We can’t keep trying to prove that what we’re experiencing is “really” antisemitism when our accusers have built an entire ideology designed to deny that claim. At minimum, naming antizionism as its own hate movement gives Jews language to describe their reality and a framework to push back. It’s a place to begin.
Howard Lovy is a Michigan-based author and book editor who specializes in Jewish issues. His work can be found on his Substack newsletter, Emet-Truth. He is also the author of Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story and is currently writing a book on fighting antisemitism.
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Bamba blankets NYC after Park Slope Food Coop vote to boycott Israeli products. What’s next?
(JTA) — Jewish institutions are responding to a boycott of Israeli products at a Brooklyn grocery store by buying up Bamba.
Four thousand free bags of the Israeli peanut butter-flavored snack made their way Sunday along the Celebrate Israel Day Parade route up Fifth Avenue, passed around by volunteers with UJA-Federation of New York.
It was the organization’s first response to a contentious election result at the Park Slope Food Coop, the members-only Brooklyn grocery store that last week voted to boycott Israeli products. Bamba is one of the products no longer sold at the coop as a result of the boycott and a symbol of the Israeli snack food industry.
The Bamba distribution was coordinated by UJA, which was a sponsor of the parade, and the nonprofit group Met Council, which will also be distributing bags across their network of food pantries. (An initial purchase of 20,000 bags was made by UJA in the wake of the coop vote last week.) The snacks were brought to UJA’s office by truck on Friday.
The Met Council will distribute the remaining Bamba to the hundreds of food pantries who receive its food deliveries, including the 14 it owns and operates, by next week, CEO David Greenfield told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They smartly decided to make lemonade out of lemons,” Greenfield said of the UJA initiative. (Some of the pantries, he noted, may decline the Bamba anticipating clients with peanut allergies.)
The Bamba will be added as an additional free snack item to pantry clients’ usual takeaways. Some of it will also be delivered directly to Holocaust survivors within the Met Council’s network.
Sunday’s parade was a respite for members of the Jewish community who say they felt alienated in the wake of the coop vote Tuesday night. But it was also controversial due to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision not to attend — a mayoral first — and the surprise appearance of far-right Israeli Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich.
But why purchase the popular Israeli snack in bulk, as opposed to encouraging local grocery stores to stock up on it and other Israeli items?
“There are a bunch of ideas on the table,” Hindy Poupko, senior vice president of the UJA-Federation told JTA. “We wanted to do something in the immediate aftermath of the boycott to demonstrate solidarity with the anti-boycott members of the coop, and all the work that they put into it. We wanted to immediately demonstrate to our community that we are able to respond quickly when these things happen, and also demonstrate that we will always be on the side of coops working together — not engaging in boycotts.”
One option UJA is floating, Poupko said, is an Israeli fair at a number of Jewish community centers where visitors can purchase Israeli goods.
Some advocates have even begun taking legal action against the coop, hoping to see the items restored to the shelves.
A group of pro-Israel activists filed a cease and desist motion in response to the boycott, alleging that the boycott itself is illegal and discriminatory.
CUNY law professor Jeffrey Lax announced in a post on X Wednesday that he had filed a New York State Division of Human Rights complaint on behalf of his Jewish advocacy group alleging that the boycott violates a state law that prevents the boycott or blacklist of products based on protected classes, including national origin.
“Instead of bringing neighbors together, this community institution chose to alienate many of its longtime Jewish members and their allies by banning a handful of Israeli products,” the ADL of New York/New Jersey said in a Thursday statement on X. “This move does nothing to advance peace in the Middle East; instead, the heinous rhetoric about Israel and Jews invoked in the process to ban these products contributes to the intense climate of antisemitism in NYC.”
The coop itself has not responded to JTA’s requests for comment. Activists aligned with the boycott, which passed with a 67% majority, referred JTA back to a press release distributed immediately following the vote last week.
“Tonight’s win is proof that cooperative movements are powerful models for exercising solidarity and participatory democracy,” coop board candidate Taylor Pate said in the May 26 statement.
In addition to Bamba, a variety of bell pepper sold only in the winter, persimmons, olive oil, sesame products, and Dorot frozen herb cubes are affected by the Park Slope Food Coop boycott. Two of the brands, Al Arz Tahini and Equal Exchange olive oil, are made at least in part by Arab-Israelis.
Asked for comment in regards to the coop vote results, Jewish Community Relations Council CEO Mark Treyger, through a spokesperson, referred JTA to a May 9 sermon by Congregation Beth Elohim senior Rabbi Rachel Timoner, in which she called it “the hyper local example of a proxy war.”
“If the boycott was designed to change Israel’s policies or to create a Palestinian state, or if it had the goal of safety, freedom, and equality for both Israelis and Palestinians, many of us would support it,” Timoner added. “But the BDS movement is not that.”
Timoner clarified her stance on the boycott at the coop in a sermon days after the vote.
“I do think that there is a lot of antisemitism threaded through the entire conversation about Israel,” Timoner said in the May 29 sermon. “But the vast majority of people who voted for that boycott were simply trying to say that what is happening to the Palestinians is wrong.”
A representative for Nestlé, the parent company of Osem, which manufactures Bamba, did not respond to a request for comment about the boycott.
The boycott means Brooklynites will have one fewer place to buy Bamba, the now ubiquitous snack that has been sold at Trader Joe’s for the last decade and is credited with reducing the prevalence of peanut allergies in Israel.
There’s at least one other place in New York City where Bamba was once available and no longer is. In March 2021, at the opening of baseball season, Bamba and the New York Mets announced a partnership in which the snack would be sold at the stadium in the main snack kiosks. The following year, the baseball team and the snack launched a sweepstakes for children to win free tickets to a game.
Since a March 2023 announcement that the brands would partner again for the season, Bamba has not publicly commented on their partnership. The Mets did not respond to a request for comment.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Bamba blankets NYC after Park Slope Food Coop vote to boycott Israeli products. What’s next? appeared first on The Forward.
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Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel
(JTA) — Hezbollah appears to have rejected a ceasefire that the United States brokered between Israel and Lebanon, where the Iranian proxy is based.
The deal reportedly would have allowed Israel to remain in southern Lebanon, where it has established a buffer zone, but not permit any attacks in Beirut unless Hezbollah attacked Israel within its own borders. It would also have required Hezbollah fighters to leave the buffer zone.
A top Hezbollah leader said accepting a demand to leave southern Lebanon would amount to “surrender” for the group.
“What we are concerned about is an end to the aggression, ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal,” Secretary-General Naim Qassem said in a televised statement on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. “We did not make any commitment to any party to stop resisting as long as there is occupation.”
Dozens of Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, which Hezbollah is increasingly prosecuting with the use of drones.
The rejection comes as the U.S. House of Representatives voted to rebuke President Donald Trump and his war on Iran on Wednesday, narrowly passing a resolution that limits Trump’s power to continue the war without congressional approval.
Four Republicans voted with Democrats on the bill, in a sign of how opposition to the war, which Trump launched jointly with Israel in February, is crossing party lines ahead of high-stakes midterm elections in the United States.
The bill would not require presidential signoff but is seen as unlikely to substantively change Trump’s handling of the war, which he has insisted does not require congressional approval.
Trump called the vote “meaningless” in a post on Truth Social on Thursday morning.
“Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing.”
The bill now goes to the Senate, where a similar measure has advanced in recent weeks, also with support from a handful of Republicans. It comes at a delicate time, as an uncertain ceasefire struck in early April has now stretched on without a resolution for longer than active hostilities unfolded. Trump has failed to achieve the terms for a deal to permanently end the war that he said he wanted, and this week said he thought the constant negotiations had grown “very boring.” Hezbollah’s apparent rejection of a ceasefire deal is another setback.
Iran has continued to battle during its ceasefire with the United States, though not against Israel: On Wednesday, it struck Kuwait’s main airport, killing one and injuring 60.
Also on Wednesday, Trump confirmed reports that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “f—ing crazy” during a call on Monday in which Trump pressed Netanyahu to strike a ceasefire with Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Trump told a New York Post podcast that he was “a little perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon” but that he liked Netanyahu and worked well with him.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York
Each year around this time, the Social Security Administration releases a list of the most popular baby names for the past year. This year, New York state’s list includes the Yiddish name Gitty, as well as five other traditional Ashkenazi names: Chana, Chaya, Rivka, Chaim and Moshe.
According to this interactive list in the Times Union, 43 of every million babies in the U.S. were given the name Gitty in the past six years.
The vast majority of these babies were apparently born in either Yiddish-speaking Hasidic families or in non-Yiddish speaking Haredi families (often referred to as “Yeshivish”) who maintain the tradition of giving their children Biblical and other traditional Jewish names, often after a deceased relative.
Although some people may be surprised to hear a Yiddish name like Gitty making the list, it lines up with the most recent statistics on language use. According to this study, in households with children aged 5 and under, Yiddish ranks as the third most common home language in New York (spoken by roughly 3% of young children), trailing only English and Spanish.
It also makes sense in light of the most recent demographic breakdown of Jewish families in the New York area. According to this 2023 UJA study, Orthodox families represent about 19% of Jewish households (approx. 430,000 individuals, including children) — a group that’s growing rapidly due to higher birth rates and younger average ages, with about two-thirds identifying as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and the rest as Modern Orthodox.
The name Gitty is a variant of the name Gitl, which means “good” in Yiddish. Why then are these babies called Gitty instead of Gitl? This is part of a trend that began years ago, when Haredi children’s names adopted a “y” at the end, apparently mimicking the old American tradition of ending children’s names with a “y” (think Tommy instead of Thomas). As a result, Rivka became Rivky; Moshe (or Moishe) became Moishy and Gitl became Gitty.
The post A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York appeared first on The Forward.