We’re all aware of the most influential antisemitic book in modern history, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Appearing in the early 1900s then adopted and disseminated by the A-Team of International Antisemites—Russia and the Soviet Union, the Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and so on—this famous forgery purports to be the minutes of a secret meeting held by the “Elders of Zion” behind the scenes of the First Zionist Congress in 1897. Of course there are no such Elders and there was no such meeting, and much of the text was directly plagiarized from an 1864 book sketching Machiavelli’s political philosophy, but those facts, though widely known from at least 1921 onward, didn’t stop the book from spreading around the world and directly inspiring Hitler’s genocidal Final Solution, Hamas’s jihadist Final Solution (they quote from the Protocols as if it were factual in their foundational charter), and the long, ongoing campaign of Russian-Soviet anti-Zionism. And what about this book inspires such deadly behavior? It’s that it reveals to the world the great conspiracy of the dastardly Jews to control the world and subjugate or destroy all the non-Jews, explaining in detail exactly how they will do that (by controlling the banks, the media, governments, etc.). When faced with that dastardly evildoing, who wouldn’t respond by attempting to annihilate the threat?
Of course it’s all delusional nonsense, demonstrably false nonsense, which is why all rational, clear-headed, decent people recognize in the Protocols not the documentation of a conspiracy but a conspiracy theory—one deliberately designed to justify and incentivize hate and violence against the Jews.
The irony, of course, is that all the attention paid to the Protocols—believed by tens of millions, to this very day, to be factual—obscures the increasingly apparent fact that there actually does exist a global conspiracy, albeit in precisely the opposite direction. Sometimes working together, sometimes working in parallel, sometimes centrally directed, sometimes dispersed, sometimes secretly, sometimes very much in the open, collectively there is an enormous body of individuals, organizations, and governments who have all been working toward the same inglorious end for well over a century now.
It’s not that the dastardly Jews are conspiring to subjugate or eliminate the peoples of the world. It’s that the peoples of the world (or at least enormously large constituents thereof) are actively conspiring to subjugate and (in all too many cases) to outright eliminate the Jews.
Let’s examine their protocols.
I.
Though the underlying Jew-hatred goes back millennia, ground zero for this modern conspiracy is pre-Soviet Russia, whose rampant, pervasive, and often violent antisemitism produced the original conspiracy-theory Protocols in the first place, and in so doing launched the actual conspiracy against the Jews. We might call the mysterious unknown forgers of the Protocols the original Elders of Anti-Zion.
The degree to which the Protocols then influenced Hitler and the Nazis is well-known. But in her famous work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt suggests that the Protocols didn’t merely instill in them their genocidal hatred of the Jews for their alleged plot to subjugate the world, but in fact directly inspired them to launch their own plot to subjugate the world. She quotes Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels saying, “The nations that have been the first to see through the Jew and have been the first to fight him are going to take his place in the domination of the world,” then adds her conclusion: “The delusion of an already existing Jewish world domination formed the basis for the illusion of future German world domination.” She continues: “This was what [head of the Nazi SS] Himmler had in mind when he stated that ‘we owe the art of government to the Jews,’ namely, to the Protocols which ‘the Führer [had] learned by heart’.” See the neat Nazi trick here: accuse the Jews of conspiring to world domination, which then justifies, in “self-defense,” your attempts both to destroy the Jews and to dominate the world yourself. The entire Nazi machinery, then, from its massive propaganda operations through its extermination camps, was one large conspiracy to subjugate and eliminate the Jews.
Nor may we overlook the central role played in this conspiracy by the scholars, the professors, the ones producing the ideas and arguments that motivate the leaders then become propaganda to mobilize the masses. This was “scholarship” that was intentionally weaponized to advance their political aims or, more modestly, was corrupted by their ideological commitments. That’s a fancy way of remarking that Nazi “scholarship” was directly and deliberately involved in advancing the conspiracy against the Jews. Perhaps nothing better documents that fact than Max Weinreich’s 1946 book Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People. Among the many shocking things documented here is the establishment of numerous “scholarly institutes” to study the “Jewish question,” i.e. to develop the “science” to justify, ultimately, the political program of mass extermination. Suffice merely to quote Hannah Arendt, again, in her review of the book: Dr. Weinreich’s main thesis is that ‘German scholarship provided the ideas and techniques that led to and justified unparalleled slaughter,’” ideas which included, of course, the “race science” that justified the alleged Aryan supremacy and Jewish degeneracy that in turn justify the Holocaust. Arendt then goes on to say,
It is also true, and Dr. Weinreich is right to insist thereon, that Hitler showed one of his crucial insights into the nature of modern propaganda when he asked for “scientific” arguments and refused to use the standard crack-pot ones of traditional anti-Semitic propaganda.
The scare quotes around the word “scientific” are the key: it’s easy for decent people to reject obvious crude raw hatred but dress it up in “science” and it goes down far more easily.
So, what we have here, then, are the professors providing the intellectual ammunition in the conspiracy against the Jews.
Collectively, there is a large new cohort here of the Elders of Anti-Zion.
II.
Nor was it only the Nazis, of course: most of the countries they captured were coopted, sometimes involuntarily but often willingly, to participate in the conspiracy. Once again, Weinreich documents numerous “scholarly institutes” set up in conquered and adjacent countries as their intellectuals got in on the action against the Jews.
Nor did the conspiracy spread only to the countries captured by the Nazis. Famously the Palestinian leader, the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin collaborating with the Nazis. Photographs of him enjoying a visit with Hitler and touring concentration camps with Himmler populate the internet, these scenes being breaks perhaps from his job, which included spreading Nazi ideology to the Arab and Muslim world and recruiting Muslims to participate in the Nazi military campaign. Though the long independent history of Islamic antisemitism cannot be overlooked, neither can one overlook the explosive fuel added to that already burning fire when Nazi ideology was poured onto it. From this point onward much of the Arab and Muslim world was officially part of the now truly global conspiracy against the Jews launched by the Protocols. (For more on the prevalence of the Protocols in the Arab and Muslim world and the history of Arabic translations, see here and here, and below.)
The Nazis, fortunately, did not endure, though they bequeathed many followers even to this day. But next taking the Elders’ reins (or taking them back) were the Soviets, who, though bitter enemies of the Nazis, shared the relevant ideology that they themselves had launched some decades earlier—and then literally shared it around the globe.
III.
Here the work of Izabella Tabarovsky is essential. In several articles—“Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism” (2019), “The Cult of Antizionism” (2023), and “Zombie Anti-Zionism” (2024)—she documents the gargantuan ceaseless effort the Soviet Union made to attack the Jews particularly by delegitimizing the newly born State of Israel. Lest you think this was merely “anti-Zionism,” not “antisemitism,” the effort itself (she explains) was rooted in the antisemitic Protocols, and some of the original Soviet propagandists were “admirers of Hitler and Nazism” (2019). Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, “anti-Zionism” derives for many directly from their antisemitism. If you start with the antisemitic delusion that the dastardly Jews are conspiring to subjugate the globe, then “anti-Zionism” follows both logically and psychologically: the State of Israel will just be for you the mechanism through which the Jews advance their diabolical scheme. Thus, with the Soviets began another organized campaign, a veritable industry—a conspiracy—which in time produced “hundreds of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles,” published in the USSR, with “millions of copies entering circulation in the country” (2019).
But the campaign wasn’t restricted to the already vast-in-itself USSR. “Many were translated into foreign languages—English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and numerous others,” to be disseminated all over the globe through the Soviet Union’s powerful state-owned media apparatus, “whose goal was to ‘spread the truth about the USSR in all the continents’” (2019). This “truth” was thereby spread to the many Third World nations becoming “decolonized” within the Soviet orbit. (See Tabarovsky’s discussion of the many international conferences the Soviets organized to inculcate the ideology and advance the conspiracy to these many countries (2024).)
And the translation into Arabic, in particular? The Soviet Union, allied with the Arab countries for many decades, widely propagated its conspiracy all over the Arab world as well. But in this case, it involved more than just the translation and dissemination of virulently antisemitic, anti-Zionist tracts, important as those were.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Communist official to defect from the Soviet bloc, offered some striking revelations in a 2003 Wall Street Journal article and subsequent interview. According to him, it was the infamous Soviet spy service, the KGB, that “dreamed up” the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), including hand-picking and training Yasser Arafat, its most important leader, a task in the service of which “the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.” Through their training of Arafat, they gave him “an ideology and an image … remold[ing] him as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a ‘personal hero’ for him—the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz … and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews.” The KGB continued to finance and to guide the PLO over decades in its violent campaign against the Jews—in addition, of course, to being the primarily military backer of the Arab countries engaged in their ongoing war on Israel. In a later 2006 article, Pacepa states:
In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel … As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me … We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel …
Mission accomplished, one can only say. And naturally a key role in accomplishing that mission was played by everybody’s favorite antisemitic forgery:
In the mid 1970s, the KGB ordered my service … to scour the country for trusted party activists belonging to various Islamic ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist operations, and infiltrate them into the countries of our ‘sphere of influence’ … Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, my [service] had dispatched around 500 undercover agents to Islamic countries … [B]y 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world. In the mid-1970s we also started showering the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion …
And lest you think this Soviet-driven conspiracy against the Jews is all in the past, consider current President of the Palestinian Authority (itself an outgrowth of the PLO), Mahmoud Abbas, currently serving the 21st year of his four-year term. In 2016 the New York Times reported that Abbas had served as a KGB spy in Damascus in the early 1980s. This was entirely plausible given that he had earned the equivalent of a Ph.D. degree in 1982 in Moscow, with a dissertation that both cast doubt on the Holocaust and, in one of many common anti-Zionist talking points, attempted to prove that Zionists were closely affiliated with the Nazis. If you are wondering where he got these antisemitic ideas, Tabarovsky describes the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, which awarded him his degree, as “the linchpin of Soviet ‘Zionology’” (2023), the latter word in square quotes to indicate that the enormous slew of “scholars” producing the onslaught of antisemitic anti-Zionist propaganda saw themselves as engaged in a “scientific” endeavor.
Just as “Hitler’s professors” had produced antisemitic “science” then disseminated it wherever they conquered and into the Arab and Muslim world, so too the Soviet “scientists” (call them “Brezhnev’s professors”) did exactly the same—with the Soviets going even further to establish the PLO, “educate” and train its leaders, and finance and guide its virulent anti-Jewish activities (including terrorism) for decades. Needless to say, their quest to fuse the long history of intense Islamic antisemitism in those regions with the more modern Protocols-conspiracy antisemitism was enormously successful, thus producing the intense Arab and Muslim Jew-hatred, with its concomitant desire to subjugate and eliminate the Jews, we see today.
Needless to say, too, with the Soviet campaign above the Elders of Anti-Zion grew in number dramatically.
Two items of particular note concerning the campaign.
First, it was carefully and intentionally crafted. The goal was to delegitimize Zionism, so deliberate efforts were made to link that movement to and identify it with Nazism, to identify it with all terrible things (racism, imperialism, colonialism, etc.), and accuse it of assorted horrible crimes (genocide, apartheid, etc.). In service to that end, it shared the relaxed attitude toward “truth” of the Protocols, to say the least. Particular impetus to the effort was given by Israel’s stunning victory over the Soviet-backed Arabs in the 1967 Six-Day War, which motivated the Soviets to shift from the military war against the Jews and their national endeavor toward the “cognitive war” instead. This they did as guided by their “scientists,” the “Zionologists,” by going all in with their newly created “Palestinian” identity led by their newly created PLO. The plan now became to reconceive the entire conflict in the region. Prior to 1967 most understood it as a conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, the minority Jews against the more powerful majority Arabs, the Jews a David v. the Arabs’ Goliath. But after 1967 the Soviets began stressing the same propaganda terms they had been using in their more general battle against the West. During much of the Cold War and the period of global decolonization they proclaimed themselves to be “anti-colonialists” supporting “national liberation movements” against the “imperialist” West, so now the Middle East conflict was deliberately reframed as one in which the indigenous (newly invented) “Palestinian people” were fighting the “imperialist-colonialism” of the invading Jews. Overnight the “Jewish-Arab” conflict became the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, where the Israelis looked big and strong and the Palestinians puny and weak, thus instantly reversing the “David-Goliath” framing. Some say that the very “Palestinian” identity was formed or crafted in this period precisely to play this role, with the Soviets, via their work with the PLO and Arafat, being the central agent.
The whole thing was a psy-op, in other words—an extremely successful one that, to this day (as we’ll see), brings the global political left into the global conspiracy against the Jews.
The second point is once again to emphasize the role of propaganda—as produced by the “scientists,” the “professors”—in advancing this conspiracy. In addition to the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies Tabarovsky also discusses the “KGB-supervised Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public” (2019), itself producing the literature then translated into other languages and distributed abroad by the Novosti Press Agency, “a news service and an important arm of Soviet foreign propaganda.” But now to get a more “vivid picture of Moscow’s approach to solving its Zionist problem” we can glance at just one example of the many Tabarovsky (2019) examines, an article from 1969 or 1970 entitled “Anatomy of Israeli Aggression.” Written by Yevgeny Yevseyev, “one of the key ideologues of … Soviet anti-Zionism—the so-called Zionologists,” the article reports on yet another Soviet conference, the “Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples” occurring in Cairo in 1969. Protocols-style, the article frames Zionism as an imperialist global conspiracy against national liberation movements and communism, a continuation of Nazism, and inevitably engaged in “genocide, racism, perfidy, duplicity, aggression, annexation,” and therefore an enemy of most of the globe. The goal was thus to mobilize “world public opinion” by disseminating information about alleged “Israeli atrocities.” If all that sounds familiar it is because you are aware how the anti-Zionist progressive world approaches Israel to this very day, only it was all hatched quite deliberately over the past five decades. What we see in this article is literally a sketch of the playbook—the protocols—of the campaign to destroy the Jews and their national endeavor. And just as we saw with the Nazis, this campaign against the Jews would borrow many of the methods allegedly laid out by the Jews themselves in the fabricated Protocols—while being motivated by (falsely) accusing the Jews of being guilty of them!
And lest you underestimate the true scale of this campaign, note that this article was published in the “‘World Marxist Review’—the English edition of the Prague-based Soviet theoretical journal ‘Problems of Peace and Socialism.’ Published in 40 languages and distributed in 145 countries, the journal reached an estimated half million of the most committed leftists around the globe” (2019). It wasn’t just the Soviet Union in other words—it was the Soviet Union, the entire Arab and Muslim worlds, and most of the Third World. We have here an actual mammoth global campaign to subjugate the Jews and destroy their national endeavor, all based on the fabricated allegation of that tiny population’s conspiracy to subjugate the behemoth instead.
IV.
And we haven’t even gotten to the Western leftists themselves, the “progressives.”
As Tabarovsky puts it,
It was at the Soviet-sponsored conferences that the Western left got to rub shoulders with its Third World revolutionary heroes. It was here that Moscow worked to inculcate its brand of conspiracist anti-Zionism by tying it to every progressive cause of the time (2024).
Space limits prohibit looking at the “continuous flow of international events increasingly entrench[ing] the idea of Zionism as the enemy of all progressive causes across the Third World” (2024) that consumed the 1970s and 1980s. Nor can we look at the extensive similar data presented in Tabarovsky’s 2022 article, “Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse.” Instead, we’ll jump ahead into the present to see that the conspiracy against the Jews—whose playbook was hatched in the Protocols, advanced by the Nazis, then launched across the globe by the Soviets—continues without skipping a beat to this very day, primarily under the umbrella of leftist “progressivism.” Elsewhere I examine some of the methods of the progressive left, including “idea-laundering,” “Big Lies” (including “genocide”), the use of double standards, and weaponized omissions of facts; here we’ll focus on its ideology.
(1) Consider the conception of the Jew that they have been developing under various names (Critical Race Theory, DEI, Social Justice, Wokeness, etc.; we’ll just call it all “progressivism”). As Pamela Paresky notes in “Critical Race Theory and the Hyper-White Jew” (2021), “CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privileged, and hidden power—themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.” Their official primary target is “Whiteness,” White Supremacy, White Privilege, etc. But next thing you know Jews are accused of passing for White and acquiring or exploiting that supremacy and privilege, notwithstanding the fact that actual White Supremacists revile the Jews for not being White. Similarly, the fact that Jews are, on average, “successful,” ends up working against them on the progressive worldview. Never mind that many Jews are not particularly successful; that Jews had to overcome enormous prejudice to earn what success they have earned. Rather than see the fact that Jews are “disproportionately” represented in some fields as a reflection of that success, of literally overcoming oppression, that disproportion instead is labeled “inequity,” then interpreted as a matter of unearned privilege, of the Jews operating as an oppressor class that has kept more marginalized people down. In effect, on their view, Jews collude with White Supremacy to obtain and perpetuate their higher status, to the detriment of the marginalized identity groups (women, persons of color, LGBTQ, the disabled, etc.); Jews, in other words, are responsible for oppressing nearly everybody. The more “successful” Jews are, the more evil they turn out to be. The Protocols couldn’t describe it any better.
Paresky doesn’t specifically address the Israel aspect beyond observing that the progressive left “use[s] the latent antisemitic themes of CRT to propagate a false narrative about Israel.” But the application of this ideology to what I prefer to call the “Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim-Iran Conflict” (because it’s at least as complicated as that acronym and in fact more) is quite straightforward. Notwithstanding the actual facts, Israelis are seen as White Supremacist oppressors of the Palestinians, who are seen as oppressed people of color. Because group identity trumps individual identity, it amounts, roughly, to asserting that every single Israeli is a White Supremacist (even the dark-skinned ones) oppressing every single Palestinian, who are all persons of color (even the fair-skinned ones). With group identity trumping individual, and with the (false) narrative that the Israelis have been engaging in an ethnic-cleansing, genocidal, subjugation campaign against the Palestinians, then every single Palestinian (even ones who might be doing quite well in life) is justified in “resisting” every single Israeli (even ones who might be doing quite poorly). Therefore, no Israeli can ever be a victim, and no Palestinian can ever be an aggressor or perpetrator—even when Palestinians invade Israel, torture, rape, dismember, behead, and massacre nearly 1200 mostly Jewish civilians and snatch another 250 away as hostages. That’s not a barbaric mass terrorist atrocity on the progressive worldview, but a national liberation movement of the oppressed against their oppressors.
I would add that this point also partly explains the widespread phenomenon of progressive anti-Zionists tearing down hostage posters. No Israeli can be a victim in their worldview, so those posters either cannot be true or must be part of some deceptive Zionist propaganda strategy. This point may also provide a partial explanation of the also widespread phenomenon of progressive anti-Zionists denying the sexual violence of the October 7 massacre. Their overall worldview isn’t merely opposition to “White Supremacy” but specifically “Patriarchal White Supremacy,” so in their mind, in effect, all Israelis are White Supremacist Men—even the women. But then Israelis can only be perpetrators of rape and never its victims.
Never mind again the utter disconnect from factual reality in this entire narrative, and the fact that Zionism was and is a national liberation movement of an oppressed people par excellence that these very people should be celebrating. On the progressive worldview that now dominates campuses and so many of our meaning-making institutions (the media, the law, the corporate world, entertainment, etc.), Jews are not only White Supremacists oppressing non-Whites, but worse: since Jews are, on average, more “successful” than the norm, Jews are actually “uber-White” or “hyper-White,” the Whitest of the White—the worst of the worst, the most evil, conspiring to subjugate the globe.
There is ultimately, literally, then, no difference between the progressive worldview and that of the original Protocols: they both allege that the Jews are conspiring to subjugate the globe and other races, and they use that as a basis to marginalize Jews and attack their national endeavor. In actual fact, to the contrary, it is the progressive worldview that (exactly like the Nazis) weaponizes this delusional conception, invented and propagated by its “scholars,” to perpetrate its own actually global conspiracy to subjugate and eliminate the Jews.
The Protocols are alive and well, then, on our progressive campuses and in the progressive infosphere—and continue to justify the ongoing systemic oppression of the Jews.
(2) Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
There were Hitler’s professors, there were Brezhnev’s professors, and we close with Hamas’s professors.
We now return eerily full circle. As Tabarovsky puts it in “The Cult of ‘Antizionism’” (2023)—published just three weeks before the October 7 massacre—“A group of anti-Israel academics and BDS activists have taken a new step toward rebuilding the long-forgotten Soviet discipline of ‘scientific anti-Zionism’ on American campuses. The ‘founding collective’ of 10 has established an Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), 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.’” Indeed, the professors are back—not that they ever left.
There is so much that is objectionable about this Institute that a separate article (in addition to Tabarovsky’s detailed critique) would be required to deal with it. Let me just note here that, beneath the guise of a “respectable” academic enterprise, and no doubt protected under the umbrella of “academic freedom,” the ICSZ will be a propaganda machine churning out “research” making the very same allegations (conspiratorial globe domination, colonialism, genocide, etc.) against the Jews as the Nazi “scholars” and Soviet Zionologists said and did decades earlier. This “research” will not only influence generations of students going through their classes but flood the academy, serve as the citational basis for further “research,” then make its inevitable way into NGO reports, the UN, and international lawfare. It also trickles downward, as they prepare curricula for secondary and primary schools. The ICSZ has already had its first conference, has already produced a journal and podcasts, is already flooding social media with its wares.
Hitler’s method of dressing the hate up in “science,” in other words, is also alive and well.
And they don’t even hide it. Its website identifies the “points of unity” that every member of their organization, and indeed every attendee at their conferences, must share, including that “Zionism is a settler colonial racial project.” Just like that, a basic fact, like 2+3=5. Affirming that fact is the price of admission to their society, exactly the opposite strategy from any serious scholarly endeavor that aims at the “truth,” because the truth cannot be known in advance. Another “point of unity” is the proposition that “academic research is not politically or morally neutral.” Lots could be debated there, but they make it clear what they mean: “The Institute’s research aims to interrogate and intervene in racism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and the appropriation of liberatory rhetoric by repressive political forces, among other harms.” In other words, they are not doing scholarly research but engaged in political activism. Like the “critical theory” that is their forebear, like Marx their ideological ancestor, their point is not to interpret the world but to change it. What they seek to change is the existence of the Jewish national endeavor, and with it the security and welfare of the Jewish people. Their scholarship, aimed at the end, will no doubt end up working “by any means necessary” to obtain that end—including fabrication, double standards, essential omissions etc. We’ve seen it all before, we have been seeing it since the Protocols first launched, and we are seeing it all again, in real time.
This is not scholarship—it is propaganda, designed to be disseminated through all the meaning-making institutions, and bring about the end of the Jewish national project and, with it, ultimately, the end of the Jewish people.
Like the Nazis, like the Soviets, the Western progressive movement has now aligned seamlessly with the long history of Islamic antisemitism in a large-scale, overall coordinated campaign, to subjugate and ultimately eliminate the Jews.
Needless to say, Hamas’s October 7 massacre for them is not a terrorist atrocity but an inspiration—and their scholarship will be filled with all the many theoretical ways of justifying it.
And there are so many of these people—they are all over the academy. Not only has the ICSZ formed, already produced conferences, workshops, and a journal, but in February 2025 Brown University held a conference on “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions” which turned out to be, of course, an anti-Zionist hatefest where numerous speakers said many antisemitic things and where they already announced next year’s conference on a similar theme; Columbia had a similar conference called “Zionism and Its Critics” in March 2025; in April 2025 Princeton hosted a two-day hatefest called “The Anti-Zionist Idea: History, Theory, and Practice” which is billed as a follow-up to a University of Toronto conference of the same name this past November 2024; and Connecticut College had, as of April 2025, hosted a thirteen-lecture (and counting!) Hate Series, because apparently twelve lectures repeatedly alleging that Israel is evil, evil, evil (and therefore so are the Jews who support Israel) were not enough to make their point.
Hamas’s professors indeed.
V.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion generated a cornucopia of conspiracy theory goodness, delusionally alleging a Jewish conspiracy to subjugate the globe and eliminate many of its peoples. That in turn led to mass violence, including genocide, against the Jews. Meanwhile for much of the past century and reaching an absolute fever pitch in the past several decades and boiling over into a literally violent frenzy since the October 7 massacre, the Elders of Anti-Zion have been propagating an actual conspiracy to subjugate, and ultimately eliminate, the Jews.
These are their protocols.
This monthly series is presented by George Violin
Andrew Pessin is a philosophy professor at Connecticut College and Campus Bureau Editor for the Algemeiner. Over the past decade the hostility to Israel across college campuses has led him to focus on Jewish and Israel Studies. His recent books include Anti-Zionism on Campus, documenting and analyzing the phenomenon, and Poisoning the Wells: Antisemitism in Contemporary America which, unfortunately, is compellingly timely. He has also published four novels, including Nevergreen, a satirical account of campus cancel culture and its deleterious impact on the Jews, which alas has proven prophetic post-October 7. His most recent novel is Bright College Years (about how college used to be before they all went crazy). He once portrayed “The Genius” on the David Letterman show.