Adam Louis-Klein: Why anti-Zionism is the newest hate movement
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2026
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to The Times of Israel's Lazar Focus. Each Friday, join host diplomatic correspondent Lazar Berman for a deep dive into what's behind the news that spins the globe.
Since October 7, 2023, there has been a focused and intense campaign to paint Zionism as a supremacist, racist, and inherently violent movement that has no place in academia, popular culture, or public life in the West.
Jews and supporters of Israel usually label such attacks as antisemitism, since they often take old tropes about Jews and apply them to Israel.
Anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein, who emerged from the Colombian jungle on October 9 and found himself under attack from colleagues for his support of Israel, is leading the effort to cast anti-Zionism as a hate movement that seeks to deny Jews a place in the public square on their own terms by portraying Zionism as the root of much of the world's evil and violence.
Louis-Klein applies his critical lens to anti-Zionism, examining its roots in Nazism, Islamist ideology, and Soviet propaganda. He unpacks terms like "settler-colonialism," "genocide," and " apartheid," and explains why the anti-Zionists chose those loaded words in their attack on the Jewish state.
Lazar Focus can be found on all podcast platforms. This episode was produced by Ari Schlacht.
IMAGE: Adam Louis-Klein (courtesy) / Demonstrators gather on the UCLA campus, June 12, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to the Laser Focus. |
| 0:07.7 | I am your host, Laser Berman. |
| 0:09.3 | Amanda Borscheldan is here, taking care of all the production in the background. |
| 0:14.1 | Do not worry, she is here with us listening to everything we say. |
| 0:18.9 | And you will get to hear her next week as well, I'm sure, during the daily |
| 0:24.2 | briefing and our other podcasts. Now, if, like me, you've been a Jew online or an online Jew |
| 0:30.3 | any time in the past two years or any time since October 7th, I'm sure you've come across |
| 0:34.9 | some of the following posts, some of the following |
| 0:37.7 | comments on anything you've posted, that as a Zionist, you lack humanity, that Zionists are |
| 0:43.8 | quote-unquote demonic and they're all like this. They're all demonic or they're all like |
| 0:48.4 | some sort of description. That as a Zionist, you steal things that aren't yours. I'm sure you've |
| 0:53.2 | heard that accusation that Israeli food is not really Israeli, |
| 0:56.8 | but it's just stolen Palestinian food, |
| 0:58.9 | that modern-day Jews have no connection to the Jews or the Israelites of the Bible, |
| 1:03.3 | that you are just a European medieval convert who should be back in Europe. |
| 1:08.1 | You've probably heard that any issue dominating the headlines in the |
| 1:11.5 | West, whether it's ICE arrests, whether it's inflation, even climate change is somehow connected |
| 1:16.7 | to Israel and to Zionism. And I'm sure that you've noticed that the people who are so obsessed |
| 1:22.6 | talking about Israel and its purported crimes, its inherent awfulness, think they have this kind of |
| 1:28.4 | get out of jail free card that they'll say, oh, I'm just talking about the Zionists, not the Jews, |
| 1:33.4 | and it might even say that real Jews oppose Zionism and they know a Jew who's an anti-Zionist. |
| 1:38.3 | Here at the laser focus, we try to take a half hour to dive deeper into events, into headlines, |
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