{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Honest Take","title":"The Soviet Factory That Built Modern Anti-Zionism | With Izabella Tabarovsky","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":5836,"description":"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.\nShe 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.\nTabarovsky 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.\nFrom 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.\nA 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.\nHer book is Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide, with a foreword by Natan Sharansky.\nRelated 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.\nThe guest\n\nIzabella Tabarovsky — X/Twitter · Substack, The New Refuseniks · Tablet contributor page · Wilson Center · London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism\nBook — Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide (Wicked Son, Nov 20 2025, foreword by...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/MWvudMeeQbLLprkXao5bQURkY3G_5oMcfe3JeW4xoBg/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Nzg1/NjYxZjIyMzBiODU5/OTczZmQzNjUzMmZi/YWIwNC5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}