How anti-Zionism emerged as a modern ideology [The Jewish Angle]

While Ellin and her team prepare new stories for the new year, we're bringing you an episode from another podcast by The CJN, The Jewish Angle_, hosted by Phoebe Maltz Bovy. She recent sat down with Montreal-based academic and writer Adam Louis-Klein, who founded the Movement Against Antizionism._

Anti-Zionism is often presented as simply a political critique of Israel. But in reality, it frames Zionists as a hostile, genocidal group, while often collapsing Jews and Israelis into the same stereotype due to their support for the Jewish State. From that perspective, anti-Zionists can quickly fall into racist tropes against Israelis, flattening identities into caricatures and seeing scapegoating Israel in broadly conspiratorial ways.

The consequences ripple outward. Some anti-Zionists end up sidelining Muslim and Palestinian voices that don’t fit a rigid ideological script, diverting attention from corruption and repression elsewhere in the Middle East. It also reshapes identity politics, excluding Jews from multicultural events, and turning “Zionist” into a charged label that Jews are pressured either to renounce or wear as provocation.

On this week’s episode of The Jewish Angle, Phoebe Maltz Bovy sits down with Adam Louis-Klein, a writer and academic currently completing his PhD in Anthropology at McGill University. He is the founder of the Movement Against Antizionism and a pundit who covers this topic in the media. As he explains, by creating an activist organization with academic roots, Louis-Klein is on a mission to help Zionists prepare responses to public anti-Zionist claims while reframing the discussion entirely.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman

• Music: " Gypsy Waltz " by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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