Introducing Izabella Tabarovsky
A collection of essays and a webinar from an expert on the origins of modern-day antisemitism
It is our immense pleasure to introduce the author and scholar Izabella Tabarovsky. Izabella studies Soviet Jewry, Soviet-era antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the Holocaust, and above all, contemporary antisemitism. Born and raised in the USSR, she experienced the life of a Soviet Jew first hand. Here is her professional profile:
Izabella Tabarovsky is a Senior Program Associate at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, and a contributing writer at Tablet Magazine. Her research and writing focus on Soviet antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism, Soviet Jewry, Holocaust in the USSR, Stalin’s repressions, and politics of historical memory.
She oversees the Institute’s Historical Memory research and programming, manages its Russia File and Focus Ukraine blogs, and coordinates its U.S.-Israel working group on Russia in the Middle East. Her expertise includes the politics of historical memory in the post-communist space, the Holocaust, Stalin’s repressions, and Soviet and contemporary left antisemitism.
Her previous engagements include the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; and Cambridge Energy Research Associates. She has served as an associate producer on the critically acclaimed PBS documentary “Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy,” and worked on PBS/Frontline documentary “The Age of AIDS” and at “On Point,” an acclaimed NPR talk-show.
Izabella holds a Master of Arts degree in Russian History from Harvard University and Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Colorado in Boulder. She is a native Russian speaker with working knowledge of Hebrew, Spanish, French, and German. Her writings have been published in Newsweek, The National Interest, Tablet, Forward, Times of Israel, Fathom, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and others.
Izabella Tabarovsky is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute and a fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and ISGAP.
In 2024, Izabella gave a fascinating lecture hosted by the USC Shoah foundation on the Soviet roots of present-day antisemitism. Unfortunately, the recording of the webinar was never published. We asked Izabella if she could rerecord the talk, and in response she shared with us a similar webinar she had given at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at the University of Indiana. We are happy to share this recording with our readers:
Izabella is often invited to speak on these topics, but not everyone is thrilled to hear the truth. Recently, she was cancelled in Finland—that is, she was not allowed to deliver her keynote lecture at an academic conference on antisemitism (in addition, her public talk at another Finnish university was cancelled). Reasoned objections to the cancellation by the conference organizers were dismissed by higher-ups, who sided with the cancellation mob. Deprived of the lecture, the conference organizers read Izabella’s essay “What My Soviet Life Taught Me About Censorship” to the audience. The essay, published on Quillette (archived version here), offers a glimpse into what it was like for people who grew up behind the Iron Curtain to experience Western culture and freedom for the first time:
A few years into my American life, I took a class on Western thought. The only philosopher on the syllabus familiar to me was Karl Marx, and he wasn’t why I’d signed up: I’d had enough of him in the USSR. Over the next two semesters, I read Adam Smith and Frederick Douglass, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Arthur Koestler. I read American feminists whom the Soviet propaganda had mocked mercilessly, and black writers whom it had ignored completely. One day, as I walked out of class in possession of yet another eye-opening piece of knowledge, I caught myself thinking: how dare they have hidden all this from me! If I’d encountered these ideas earlier in life, I would have been a different person.
They, of course, were the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its armies of censors, brainwashers, and propagandists—at work in the media, in schools, in publishing houses—who simultaneously vaunted Soviet education and left us Soviet citizens devastatingly ignorant. I spent my first years as an American catching up on everything that generations of faceless bureaucrats had purged from our lives, deeming it harmful to the Soviet people’s communist consciousness (and to the Party’s hold on power).
It wasn’t only massive chunks of philosophy, literature, religion, history, and the social sciences, but half a century of Western popular culture that had been erased from our lives: arriving in the US in 1990 as a 20-year-old, I for the first time began to encounter Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, Johnny Cash and Billy Holiday, Miles Davis and Bruce Springsteen. I spent countless evenings at a small independent movie theatre, watching retrospectives on Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Orson Wells, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa and the French New Wave. Then there was American television to catch up on: The Brady Bunch, I Love Lucy, Star Trek, The Cosby Show, The Wheel of Fortune, soap operas—lower brow fare, to be sure, but crucial to understanding my new American friends’ and colleagues’ jokes.
Of course, plenty of Americans never engage with the giants of philosophy and literature, and few lose sleep over their inability to list Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpieces: what infuriated me was that I hadn’t had any choice in the matter. Instead, others had decided which pages of world literature I would read, what music I would listen to, what style of clothes I would wear. Anything not on the approved list remained unpublished, or was buried, destroyed or ridiculed. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.
Izabella describes her shock and disbelief as she observed the rise of Cancel Culture and censorship in America around 2020:
As a new, dogmatic, far-left ideology poured rapidly into our cultural mainstream, calls for censorship were now coming from my end of the spectrum. Academics who failed to align with the most radical far-left ideas suddenly feared for their academic freedom. Newsrooms found themselves in upheaval as previously legitimate, if provocative, opinions now became unpublishable. The liberal media establishment went full Pravda on some of the crucial stories of the year, such as electoral politics, the handling of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests—to the point where David Satter and Matt Taibbi, long-time observers of the Soviet Union, drew parallels with that country’s ideologically captured, propagandistic press.
I watch these developments in disbelief. As a member of the last Soviet generation, having come of age in the era of perestroika, I remember what it was like when censorship began to lift. Literary journals competed to publish Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—books written decades earlier that were only now reaching us, their intended readers. Soviet rock music emerged from underground with songs that we hadn’t known we needed to hear, songs that nailed the state of our souls. Truth was perestroika’s drug, and we were getting high on it. …
It feels weird to be explaining the perils of censorship to Americans. It was they who taught me about the absolute value of free speech. It was their readiness—so cool, so confident—to entertain the most heterodox ideas that had made me understand why the Soviet Union never stood a chance against their country. Do I really need to be telling Americans that censorship makes us dumb? That it limits our ability to assess reality and to make the decisions that are best for us, both as individuals and as a society? Do I really need to be telling progressives that progress is impossible without the freedom to think, speak and argue? And do I really need to be telling social justice warriors that social justice is a mere pipe dream in any society that hews to a single, rigid ideological narrative—or that unfreedom of expression oppresses the oppressed and empowers the powerful?
I [Anna] felt exactly the same—as I described here and here—and I was thrilled when I later discover Izabella’s essays.
In another essay, The American Soviet Mentality (Tablet, 2020), Izabella highlights the parallels between today’s Woke ideology and Cancel Culture and the ideological control of society by the Soviet regime. She begins by highlighting the role of the complicit ordinary citizen:
Russians are fond of quoting Sergei Dovlatov, a dissident Soviet writer who emigrated to the United States in 1979: “We continuously curse Comrade Stalin, and, naturally, with good reason. And yet I want to ask: who wrote four million denunciations?” It wasn’t the fearsome heads of Soviet secret police who did that, he said. It was ordinary people.
Indeed, indeed… We made similar points here.
Izabella compares the mob’s role in the cancellation of Soviet dissidents with the role of today’s Twitter mobs in the cancellation of modern dissidents. She illustrates the striking similarity between the mentality, ethos, and even rituals of the mobs then and now:
The mobs that perform the unanimous condemnation rituals of today do not follow orders from above. But that does not diminish their power to exert pressure on those under their influence. Those of us who came out of the collectivist Soviet culture understand these dynamics instinctively. You invoked the “didn’t read, but disapprove” mantra not only to protect yourself from suspicions about your reading choices but also to communicate an eagerness to be part of the kollektiv—no matter what destructive action was next on the kollektiv’s agenda. You preemptively surrendered your personal agency in order to be in unison with the group. And this is understandable in a way: Merging with the crowd feels much better than standing alone.
Izabella describes what we lose when we choose complicity over resistance:
Americans have discovered the way in which fear of collective disapproval breeds self-censorship and silence, which impoverish public life and creative work. The double life one ends up leading—one where there is a growing gap between one’s public and private selves—eventually begins to feel oppressive. For a significant portion of Soviet intelligentsia (artists, doctors, scientists), the burden of leading this double life played an important role in their deciding to emigrate.
Those who join in the hounding face their own hazards. The more loyalty you pledge to a group that expects you to participate in rituals of collective demonization, the more it will ask of you and the more you, too, will feel controlled. How much of your own autonomy as a thinking, feeling person are you willing to sacrifice to the collective? What inner compromises are you willing to make for the sake of being part of the group? Which personal relationships are you willing to give up?
From my vantage point, this cultural moment in these United States feels incredibly precarious. The practice of collective condemnation feels like an assertion of a culture that ultimately tramples on the individual and creates an oppressive society. Whether that society looks like Soviet Russia, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Castro’s Cuba, or today’s China, or something uniquely 21st-century American, the failure of institutions and individuals to stand up to mob rule is no longer an option we can afford.
On the Origins of Woke Antisemitism
Izabella’s main body of work focuses on the ideological foundations of modern antisemitism. In her essays, she meticulously documents the evolution of “the Jewish question” within the Communist Party, the government’s policy of antisemitism, and its massive propaganda campaigns to demonize Jews and the State of Israel. She explains how this propaganda was propagated to the West—through fellow travelers, sister communist parties, labor unions, cultural exchanges, and the financial support of Western leaders and public intellectuals (we wrote about other authors who documented this phenomenon here and here).
In a previous newsletter, we discussed Izabella’s article, Zombie Anti-Zionism, on the Soviet roots of antisemitism. Readers may recall the imaginary from Izabella’s essays that we used to illustrate the connection between Soviet propaganda and Woke anti-Zionism (see, for example, here).
Below we highlight several of Izabella’s essays on the topic.
Understanding the Real Origin of that New York Times Cartoon, Tablet, June 5, 2019
The Language of Soviet Propaganda, Quillette, January 11, 2024 (archived version here)
Izabella explains the origin of antisemitic tropes promulgated today and provides a rich collection of Soviet-era cartoons.
The Cult of ‘Antizionism’, Tablet, September 19, 2023
The essay begins with a specific case of academic anti-Zionism:
A group of anti-Israel academics and BDS activists have taken a new step toward rebuilding the long-forgotten Soviet discipline of “scientific antizionism” on American campuses. The “founding collective” of 10 has established an Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which aims “to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies” and “to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism.” The new institute defines Zionism as a “political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.” This October, ICSZ will hold its inaugural conference titled “Battling the ‘IHRA Definition’: Theory and Activism.”
Izabella then exposes the provenance of these ideas—which can be easily recognized as lightly repackaged Soviet propaganda. She also explains the impact of modern progressive antisemitism on American Jews, many of whom—sadly—are still in denial about about the existential danger that Woke ideology poses to liberal society. This is a critically important message (that our Substack attempts to broadcast):
What American Jews are experiencing today, as the ideology of antizionism spreads in left-of-center spaces, looks eerily familiar to anyone who came of age in the 1970s-80s USSR. American Jews increasingly find themselves under pressure to disavow their connection to Israel and lower their Jewish profiles. They are excluded from progressive groups. They are losing professional and educational opportunities. Some were physically attacked during the 2021 flare-up of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Nearly 60% of American Jewish college students report being targeted by antisemitism directed against them, personally. Even more alarming than this explosion of anti-Jewish bigotry is the blanket silence with which it has been greeted by institutions whose reactions to even a handful of such incidents targeting other social groups is easy to imagine.
More for Your Reading List
We conclude with two more reading suggestions:
Russian Lessons for American Jews (Sapir, November 2021)
The Three Best Books on Soviet Anti-Zionism, recommended by Izabella Tabarovsky (Fathom, July 2024)
You can find some of Izabella’s writings listed here, here, and here.