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Izabella Tabarovsky

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Izabella Tabarovsky (b. 1969 or 1970)[1] is a Soviet-born writer and activist[2][3] specializing in Eastern European history and contemporary antisemitism. She is the Kennan Institute Senior Advisor on Regional Partnerships and Programming.

Early life and education

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Tabarovsky grew up in Novosibirsk, Siberia[4] and immigrated to the United States from the USSR with her family in 1990.[5] Her great-grandfather was imprisoned in Siberia by Stalin.[6]

Career

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Tabarovsky has studied the Holocaust, independent media in Russia, Stalinist repression, Soviet and contemporary left antisemitism.[7] She served as an associate producer on the PBS documentary “Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy”.[8][9] Her pieces have been published in The Forward, Newsweek, Tablet, and Fathom Journal. Tabarovsky has described the role of local populations "under the influence of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda and weary from the brutality of Soviet rule" who committed atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust.[10] She showed that Nazi propaganda was later recycled by the Soviet regime, including a cartoon depicting the Jew as an octopus dominating the world, with Russian words for aggression, provocation, terror and others on its tentacles, published in Krokodil in 1972.[11] She described how the Soviet regime used collective condemnation to silence intellectuals and cultural figures, a phenomenon later echoed in 21st century American society.[12]

Tabarovsky has examined how antisemitism has been obfuscated and delegitimized as a Zionist conspiracy.[13] Tabarovsky highlighted Moscow's comparisons between Zionism and Ukrainian nationalism on Kyiv TV as a mechanism of Soviet propaganda.[14] Jake Wallis Simons described Tabarovsky as the "most important academic" exposing the role of the Soviet propaganda apparatus and KGB in portraying Zionism as imperialist colonialism.[14] She noted the regime's connection of Zionism with racism, apartheid, and settler colonialism.[15] Tabarovsky's scholarship on how the “transfer” agreement between the Zionist movement and the Nazi regime was distorted by Soviet propagandists was reviewed favorably by Bustan.[16] Tabarovsky described how the notion of “Jewish exclusivity” was later radicalized into the dogma that “the Jews” believe in their “own racial superiority.”[17] Her work traced the origins of the Soviet propaganda campaign to the early 1940s.[18][19] Tabarovsky noted that in the late 1960s, the USSR originated the field of "Zionology" that actively discredited Zionism; for example,1969’s Beware: Zionism! by party official Yuri Ivanov sold more than 800,000 copies.[20] She coined the term "new refuseniks" to describe young Jews of Soviet origin who were filling a void in Jewish community leadership and activism in the 21st century.[21]

Tabarovsky's work on Russia's involvement in Middle East geopolitics has been cited in the literature.[22][23] She traced Russia's depiction of Ukrainians as Neo-Nazi fascists to Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea.[24] She outlined how Putin deflected attention from Russian antisemitism by declaring that the USSR ended the Holocaust.[25] She noted that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s suggestion that Volodymyr Zelenskyy "shared Hitler's Jewish blood" echoed Soviet-era antisemitic and anti-Zionist propaganda.[26]

Selected works

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The Holocaust

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  • "Putin’s New Propaganda Campaign Turns Jews into a Prop", The Forward, January 2020
  • "Most Jews Weren't Murdered in Death Camps. It's Time To Talk About The Other Holocaust", The Forward, June 2019
  • "Babi Yar: The Holocaust as a Final Solution Began Here", Newsweek, September 2016.

Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism

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  • "Ukrainian-Jewish Musical Journeys: From The Pale To The Promised Lands", The Odessa Review, November 2017[27]
  • "Senator Sanders, Fighting Anti-Semitism Requires Actions, not Just Universalist Promises", The Forward, November 2019
  • "Book Review | A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism", Fathom Journal, October 2019
  • "The Left Can No Longer Excuse Its Anti-Semitism", The Forward, August 2019
  • "Understanding the Real Origin of that New York Times Cartoon: How anti-Semitic Soviet propaganda informs contemporary left anti-Zionism", Tablet, June 2019
  • "To understand Labour antisemitism, go back to the USSR's giant anti-Zionism campaign", Jewish Chronicle, May 2019
  • "Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism", Fathom Journal, May 2019
  • "We Soviet Jews Lived Through State-Sponsored Anti-Zionism. We Know How It Is Weaponized", The Forward, March 2019
  • "Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse". Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism. 5 (1): 1–20, 2022.[28]
  • “The Soviet Origins of Contemporary Anti-Zionist Discourse”, Antisemitic Anti-Zionism: The Origins and Character of an Ideology. London: Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). 2023.[29]
  • "The Three Best Books on Soviet Anti-Zionism, recommended by Izabella Tabarovsky". Fathom, July 2024[30]
  • "Canceled ... in Finland", Tablet Magazine, February 2025.[31]
  • "Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism", Mapping the New Left Antisemitism, 2023[32]

Cold War history

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  • "What My Soviet Life Has Taught Me About Censorship and Why It Makes Us Dumb", Areo, May 2021
  • "The liberation fight for Soviet Jews was a miracle. Most of us didn't know about it", Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 2019
  • "Walking in Each Other’s Shoes: Through the Iron Curtain and Back", Wilson Quarterly, Fall 2016

Stalinist totalitarianism

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  • "How ‘The New York Times’ Helped Hide Stalin’s Mass Murders in Ukraine", Tablet, October 2020
  • "Why Are Memories of Stalin’s Terror Being Buried?", Newsweek, February 2017
  • "The Price of Silence: Family Memory of Stalin’s Repressions", Wilson Quarterly, Fall 2016

References

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  1. ^ Tabarovsky, Izabella (2019-04-24). "The liberation fight for Soviet Jews was a miracle. Most of us didn't know about it". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  2. ^ Alekseyeva, Julia; Benjamin, Tova; Mironova, Oksana; Senderovich, Sasha (March 28, 2022). "We Need New Stories of Post-Soviet Jews". Jewish Currents. Winter/Spring 2022.
  3. ^ Sales, Ben (2021-06-28). "Social media companies say they ban Holocaust denial. Are they also blocking education?". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  4. ^ Tabarovsky, Izabella (2019-03-07). "We Soviet Jews Lived Through State-Sponsored Anti-Zionism. We Know How It Is Weaponized". The Forward. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  5. ^ Paresky, Pamela (2024-02-13). "Izabella Tabarovsky on the Soviet Roots of Anti-Zionist Discourse". Quillette. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  6. ^ "The Price of Silence: Family Memory of Stalin's Repressions". www.wilsonquarterly.com. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  7. ^ Geran Pilon, Juliana (2023-12-27). "Anti-Zionism and the Bolshevik Jihad". Baltimore Jewish Times. Archived from the original on 2024-05-26. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  8. ^ "Commanding Heights : Episode Two Credits | on PBS". www.pbs.org. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  9. ^ "Commanding Heights : Episode Three Credits | on PBS". www.pbs.org. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  10. ^ Foretek, Jared (October 5, 2017). "Holocaust in USSR is a story asking to be told". Washington Jewish Week. 53 (40): 6. ISSN 0746-9373.
  11. ^ Topor, Lev (2025-05-02). "3. Memetic antisemitism: How memes teach age-old hatred". Imagery of Hate Online. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers. p. 39. doi:10.11647/obp.0447.03. ISBN 978-1-80511-500-7.
  12. ^ Lutzer, Erwin W. (2020-10-13). We Will Not Be Silenced: Responding Courageously to Our Culture's Assault on Christianity. Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers. p. 140. ISBN 978-0-7369-8180-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  13. ^ Suissa, David (2024-06-20). "As antisemitism rises, a campaign heats up to discredit the term". Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  14. ^ a b Simons, Jake Wallis (2023-09-07). "The Soviet spin doctors who sowed the seeds of left-wing Israelophobia". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  15. ^ Jikeli, Günther (2024-05-16). "Rain of Ashes Over Elite American Universities". Responses to 7 October: Universities. London: Routledge. p. 71. doi:10.4324/9781003497424-7. ISBN 978-1-003-49742-4.
  16. ^ Spoerl, Joseph S. (2025-06-18). "Antizionism and Antisemitism". Bustan: The Middle East Book Review. 16 (1): 22–43. doi:10.5325/bustan.16.1.0022. ISSN 1878-5301.
  17. ^ Seymour, David (2019-08-01). "Continuity and Discontinuity: From Antisemitism to Antizionism and the Reconfiguration of the Jewish Question". Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism. 2 (2): 11–24. doi:10.26613/jca/2.2.30. ISSN 2472-9906.
  18. ^ Bolton, Matthew (2024), Becker, Matthias J.; Troschke, Hagen; Bolton, Matthew; Chapelan, Alexis (eds.), "Apartheid Analogy/Racist State", Decoding Antisemitism: Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, pp. 389–406, ISBN 978-3-031-49237-2, retrieved 2025-06-26
  19. ^ Aliberti, Davide (2024-09-01). "'From the river to the sea': The weaponization of the concept of anti-Semitism in Vox's discourse". International Journal of Iberian Studies. 37 (3): 256. doi:10.1386/ijis_00145_1. ISSN 1364-971X. Retrieved 2025-06-27.
  20. ^ Bernstein, David (2024). "College Campuses as a Strategic Threat to the West". inFOCUS. 18 (1): 17.
  21. ^ Shrayer, Maxim D. (2021-08-13). "The Lonely American Refusenik". Jewish Journal. Retrieved 2025-06-29.
  22. ^ Katz, Mark N. (2021). PUTIN’S MEDITERRANEAN GAMBIT: Endgame Unclear (Technical report). Atlantic Council. p. 8–11. JSTOR resrep30707.5. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  23. ^ Mankoff, Jeffrey (2024). "The Middle East and the Ukraine War: Between Fear and Opportunity". Middle East Policy. 31 (2): 56. doi:10.1111/mepo.12738. ISSN 1061-1924. Retrieved 2025-06-27.
  24. ^ Farley, Robert (April 3, 2022). "'De-Nazification' claims overstate far-right's power in Ukraine". The Plain Dealer. Cleveland, OH. pp. E5.
  25. ^ Wagenheim, Mike (2024-01-31). "State Department releases report on a century-plus of Kremlin antisemitism". Sun Sentinel. p. 7. Retrieved 2025-06-29.
  26. ^ Maya Margit (2022-05-06). "Russian FM's Hitler remarks echo Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda". ynetnews. Retrieved 2025-06-29.
  27. ^ Tabarovsky, Izabella (2017-11-17). "Ukrainian-Jewish Musical Journeys: From The Pale To The Promised Lands". Odessa Review. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  28. ^ Tabarovsky, Izabella (2022-03-01). "Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse". Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism. 5 (1): 1–20. doi:10.26613/jca/5.1.97. ISSN 2472-9906.
  29. ^ "Antisemitic Anti-Zionism: The Origins and Character of an Ideology". Labour Friends of Israel. 2023-07-05. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  30. ^ "The Three Best Books on Soviet Anti-Zionism, recommended by Izabella Tabarovsky". Fathom. July 2024. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  31. ^ "Canceled ... in Finland". Tablet Magazine. 2025-02-11. Retrieved 2025-06-26.
  32. ^ Tabarovsky, Izabella (2023-08-16). "Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism". Mapping the New Left Antisemitism. London: Routledge. p. 109–121. doi:10.4324/9781003322320-16. ISBN 978-1-003-32232-0.
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Wilson Center bio

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