The Anthropologist Deconstructing Antizionism
7 min read
15 min read
5 min read
14 min read
A Yale-trained anthropologist, Adam Louis-Klein emerged from the Amazon to find his academic world celebrating a hate movement. He is using his background in anthropology to fight antizionism.
Adam Louis-Klein was a left-wing Yale philosophy grad, conducting fieldwork among indigenous Amazonians for his PhD in anthropology. Completely cut off from the world, he finally got online, and the horrors of October 7th hit him like a freight train -- and what he saw in his own academic circles shook him even more. Today he runs one of the most effective anti-antizionism organizations in the Jewish world. This is how he got there.
Adam was born in London and grew up in Seattle. He had a Bar Mitzvah, visited Israel, and was involved in Jewish life at Yale, but after college he drifted away from Judaism entirely.
Adam in college
"I joined a far-left group called Socialist Alternative," he says. "I was very into communism." His undergraduate degree was in philosophy, and he became obsessed with Alain Badiou, a French Maoist philosopher. After Yale, he pursued a Master's in philosophy, then another in anthropology. Along the way, he discovered The Amazonian Cosmos by anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, a dense, metaphysical account of an ancient indigenous cosmology. He was hooked.
When Adam began his Ph.D. at McGill University in Montreal, he decided to dedicate his dissertation to the Desano people described in Reichel-Dolmatoff's book. Through American Christian missionaries active in the region, he found his way to a small Desano village deep in the Amazon.
Adam in the Amazon
Life there was stark. "I drank rainwater out of a huge bucket. I bathed in the river every single day." He stayed in a ramshackle health post meant for visiting medical professionals, with windows that wouldn't close and bats in the rafters. He was an outsider in every sense. "It was probably the loneliest experience of my life," he says. "I was seen as a completely alien being." Every day, he walked to the village pavilion and listened to the elders tell the stories of their people.
The Desano, it turned out, consider themselves a chosen people with a special affinity for Jews. Some indigenous tribes even claim descent from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. "When I told the Chief I was Jewish, that was how we connected," Adam says.
Spending time with the Desano gave Adam a new lens on indigeneity itself.
Spending time with the Desano gave Adam a new lens on indigeneity itself. The Desano trace their origins to a sacred homeland where they once lived under a single chief. Eventually there was conflict, dispersal, diaspora – and they even displaced another tribe in the process. "There's immigration, war, displacement," Adam says, "but no one's going to call the Desano settler colonists because immigration, displacement, and war are just history."
What defines an indigenous people, he came to understand, isn't that they never moved. It's that a sacred territory anchors their identity, history, and culture. That insight would soon become central to everything.
On October 9th, 2023, Adam connected to the internet for the first time in months. "The first thing I saw was the news of the massacre," he says. "And the second thing was how people in my left-wing academic environments were reacting. What I saw was so shocking and so immoral. I saw that this was a hate movement. It was unlike anything I'd ever witnessed in my life."
He was watching it from the inside of academia. Shortly after October 7th, his anthropology department began organizing a series of talks about genocide in Gaza, seemingly before Israel had even mounted a significant military response. Outside academia, no one was using that word yet. "Little by little, this eventually made its way to the New York Times," Adam says.
His training as an anthropologist gave him an immediate clarity that others lacked. The entire antizionist narrative, he saw, rested on a single claim: that Jews are foreign colonizers in the Land of Israel. "It's not a fringe belief," he says. "It's the foundational element of antizionist ideology."
And to someone who had spent months studying indigenous peoples, that claim made no sense. "The settler colonial reading was erasing Jewish indigeneity. Jews have migrated around the world, but Israel is their homeland – the sacred site through which Jews have defined their identity throughout history. Jews are an ethno-religious people, not simply a faith disconnected from peoplehood."
Even though his social circles dismissed anything that challenged their ideology, Adam decided to speak out. "I thought it was important to use the critical skills I had learned in the academy – post-colonialism, anthropology, indigeneity – to speak back against this hate movement."
He approached antizionism the way he would any cultural system: as a trained anthropologist analyzing an ideology. That's how he began identifying what he calls the foundational erasures and inversions on which antizionism is built.
When Adam shared his writing on social media, he was bombarded with hate mail. "Some people told me they didn't want to speak to me anymore. Some harassed me and screamed at me. Some of my mentors and intellectual heroes publicly humiliated me. Little by little, I was purged by my whole community. I don't speak to anyone in the academy anymore."
What kept him going was knowing exactly how the narrative had been constructed. "It wasn't the way the war progressed that made it inevitable that people would conclude genocide was happening. The narrative was already there. Academia granted it authority, and mainstream media picked it up and exploited it."
Adam speaking outside of the New York Times at the protest MAAZ helped organize after the Kristof dog rape libel
At first he felt like he was speaking into the void. Then he reconnected with the broader Jewish community, and his writing started spreading. It resonated because it used the language of the antizionist academy to dismantle antizionism from within. Some pieces went viral.
When I was marked as an evil Zionist, which I knew was a way of targeting my Jewish identity… I returned to a much more active and observant Judaism.
At the same time, Adam was reconnecting with Judaism. “My Jewish identity was really forced on me,” he says. “I felt a lot of solidarity with Israelis in the wake of October 7th, and my support for Israel became more explicit. But when I was marked as an evil Zionist, which I knew was a way of targeting my Jewish identity, it was a reckoning and return, which I ended up embracing. I returned to a much more active and observant Judaism.”
Back in Montreal, he started attending synagogue regularly. Today he studies Torah daily. “I find it important to root myself in Torah, and the moral and ethical values, and the mystical and Kabbalistic dimension, which also helps me understand what I'm doing, and what is the purpose of all of this. Why was I called by God to do this work? I'm trying to understand that through studying Torah. The religious element is actually the center of it all, and then one has to bring that outward and try to improve and fix the world on the basis of that firm grounding in the Torah.”
As his following grew, he began publishing in larger outlets like the Free Press and The Atlantic. A group of activists who had been reading his work reached out. They saw in Adam's framework something they hadn't found elsewhere: a direct, coherent focus on antizionism – not classical antisemitism – as the dominant form of Jew hatred today. They wanted to build a movement that incorporated Adam’s deconstruction of antizionism.
In October 2025, Adam and other activists founded the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ). "We want to build a language that ordinary people can use," says Adam. "We really try to educate the public, the Jewish community and beyond, on what antizionism really is."
Until recently, the Jewish community has focused its energy on fighting classical antisemitism, which comes primarily from the right – and has largely succeeded. Antizionism is a different beast. "It comes from the Nazi-Islamist axis, but was truly crystallized in the Soviet Union and Arab nationalism, and then in Western settler colonial theory. It has its own lineage, its own aesthetics, its own tropes. It is now the hegemonic form of Jew hatred – the systemic problem. Classical antisemitism is not really systemic. It is coming back, but antizionism has created the permission structure on the right for it to return."
MAAZ is laser-focused on combating antizionism: "the normalized bigotry, the permanent accusation and criticism of Israel." Their goal is to get the Jewish community to shift its fight –from classical antisemitism to exposing antizionism as a hate movement. "The Jewish community needs to put all hands on deck and make antizionism the central focus," says Adam.
Behind MAAZ is a grassroots network of academics, lawyers, teachers, and activists working to make that cultural shift happen. They conduct trainings for people on college campuses, in the corporate world, and anyone else who wants to know how to push back. "When people take the training, they suddenly see the whole issue in a new way and feel empowered to speak directly back to antizionism."
Six months in, he's seeing results. Major Jewish influencers have started adopting the language. Ordinary Jews are speaking more directly and effectively. Antizionists are getting back-footed. "Our next stage is institutional," he says. Major Jewish organizations need to get on board for the culture shift to take hold. "We're in discussions with the Jewish legacy organizations, encouraging them to name antizionism explicitly and allow it to stand as its own category."
Antizionism, Adam explains, rests on three core libels: colonizer, apartheid, and genocide.
"They form a simple narrative," he says. "The colonizer libel says Jews were foreign Europeans who arrived in a land that wasn't their own. Since they had no claim to it, they had to be racists to justify displacing the native population. That leads to the apartheid libel – that Jews built a racist state to subjugate that population. And when the population resisted, the colonizers had to eliminate them completely. That's the genocide libel. Each one leads logically to the next, and they escalate in intensity."
The libels spread deliberately, but they also fit naturally into the moral framework of the progressive left.
What made the colonizer libel so devious when applied to Israel is that Zionism looked nothing like actual colonialism. "It wasn't about extracting resources. No slaves, no gold mining, no missionizing, as happened everywhere else colonialism occurred. It was just people immigrating and building a community. So they changed the meaning of colonialism. It became really just xenophobic sentiment: these people are foreign and don't belong."
The libels spread deliberately, but they also fit naturally into the moral framework of the progressive left. "When you tell someone there's a white colonial apartheid state committing genocide of indigenous people, anyone on a college campus is immediately going to say, I'm against that, I need to show up to this protest. There are deliberate propaganda agents, but there's also a larger cultural current carrying it forward."
Once you see the libel structure, the entire narrative unravels. "Every major iteration of the genocide libel since October 7th, from Francesca Albanese, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Journal of Genocide Research, they all depend on settler colonial theory and the colonizer libel. It's not a factual claim. It's built on the erasure of Jews."
View this post on Instagram
Antizionism is not new. It began, Adam explains, with the alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and the Nazis.
The Nazis had portrayed Jews as invaders on European soil – foreign Orientals, Asiatic hordes from the East. When that ideology traveled to the Middle East, it got inverted. Now the Jews were foreign Europeans colonizing Arab land. Same libel, flipped direction. The historian Jeffrey Herf documented Nazi Arab propaganda radio broadcasts across the Middle East during World War II that repeated these exact claims – Jews planning to eliminate and commit genocide against the Arabs. The libels were seeded early.
Antizionism as an organized ideology crystallized with the alliance between the Soviet Union and Arab nationalism. By 1956, the Soviets had thrown their weight behind Nasserism and Arab nationalism, framing it as a socialist fight against the imperialist West. Zionism was cast as the spearhead of that imperialism. "The Arab nationalists were not truly communist," Adam notes. "It was really about opposition to the West, and the Soviet Union took on antizionist ideology as part of its agitation against the United States."
The critical turning point came in 1965, when Fayez Sayegh, a PLO operative working with the Soviets, founded the Palestine Research Center and coined the term "settler colonial theory." In his writing, he argued that Jews are inherently foreign to the land, that Zionism is racist because Jews believe they are a chosen people, and that Zionism intends to annihilate the Arabs. The three libels, fully formed.
The secular left picked them up readily. Sayegh himself drafted the 1975 UN resolution declaring "Zionism is racism", the crystallization of Soviet-Arab antizionism repackaged as left-wing human rights ideology.
The Oslo Accords brought a lull. Antizionism lost steam when peace seemed possible. But when the peace process collapsed and the Second Intifada erupted, it came roaring back. The 2001 Durban Conference re-injected Soviet-era antizionist libels into the West with more force than ever. The BDS movement followed, embedding antizionism into progressive culture. Then came October 7th. "The antizionist complex detonated," Adam says. "Now it's part of mainstream Western culture. It's the dominant ambience in which we live."
Through all of it, the Jewish community was caught off guard. There was no organized response, no counter-language, no framework. "The public was never really taught what antizionism was," Adam says. "So that's what we need to do now."
Adam's tips for fighting back are practical and direct. Say the word "antizionism" and write it without a hyphen. Don't get pulled into debates about Israeli history. "It is not a factual debate," he says. "Recognize it as abuse, as libel intended to harm you. Shut it down. If someone starts in on you, just say: antizionism is a hate movement."
Don't justify yourself. Keep the focus on them. "Their power comes from always placing Israel on trial. Ignore what they say about Israel and flip the attention back onto antizionism."
The goal, he says, is to morally shame them because that's exactly what they're trying to do to Jews. "They're trying to put the moral status of Jews into question. Our goal is to question their moral status. Don't be afraid to call them out directly, because they can't process guilt and shame very well. It takes away the entire incentive structure."
"They would just rant: this is a white, racist Zionist, he supports killing Palestinian children, why is he a student at McGill?" Despite the pressure, the McGill administration stood by him.
Adam is still a Ph.D. student finishing his dissertation, and the fact that he wasn't expelled is, in his words, "a miracle." People called his advisor and wrote to his department chair, sometimes copying Adam directly so he'd see it. "They would just rant: this is a white, racist Zionist, he supports killing Palestinian children, why is he a student at McGill?"
What struck him most was their confidence. "They really thought they were on the high ground. Within certain spaces, their position is legitimized by experts, so they feel emboldened to do things that are unimaginable."
Despite the pressure, the McGill administration stood by him. He expects to finish his dissertation in early 2027. He knows he was lucky – many others weren't. "There are Israelis who were straightforwardly boycotted and couldn't finish their PhDs, lost their advisors. I was fortunate."
He looks ahead with a clear vision. Antizionism, he believes, will eventually be stigmatized the way other hate movements have been, through public education, cultural pressure, and institutional change. He wants to see museums built to the victims of antizionism: Jews expelled from Arab countries, Jews persecuted in the Soviet Union, victims of terror attacks around the world. "That's where I would want to see the Jewish community in 10 years," he says.
