A founder's story

I know what antizionism really looks like — I lived it

A personal message from our founder - Natasha Pein

The Fifth Line: Soviet passports listed your "nationality." For Jews, that single line closed doors to entire professions, university departments, and careers — silently, and without appeal.

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I grew up in the Soviet Union, where the state's official "antizionism" was in every newspaper and every classroom. The authorities called it ideology. They never called it what it was: Jew-hatred.

"The other children had a word for me. Zhidovka. A vicious slur for a Jewish girl, and that was antizionism in practice."

To survive in a system built to exclude us, we had to be exceptional — outwork, outstudy, and outperform everyone else just to be seen as valuable.

In the Soviet Union, every citizen carried an internal passport, and on the Fifth Line, it recorded your nationality, ethnic identity. For Jews, that single word, Evrei, followed them everywhere. Countless professions were systematically closed to Jews, not by written law, but by that one stamped word. It was enough to end a career before it began.

Antizionism does not stay in speeches. It moves into schoolyards, workplaces, and lives. Today it carries new names — but the pattern is identical: Jews excluded, marginalized, and made to feel they do not belong. I have lived this before. I recognize it. That is why Dr. Naya Lekht and I founded this organization.

"The words have changed. The hate has not."

In the Soviet Union, Jews were called a zhyd and rootless cosmopolitans, which meant foreign, disloyal, not truly belonging anywhere. Today, in Western universities, city squares, and government institutions, the same Jews are called colonizers, apartheid enforcers, and genociders. The slurs are dressed in the language of human rights, but the target is identical: the Jewish people, their identity, and their right to exist as a nation.

What makes today's Western antizionism more dangerous than the Soviet version is that it wears a moral costume. Soviet propaganda was crude and state-driven, and people knew it was propaganda. Western antizionism has infiltrated academia, media, and progressive movements, giving Jew-hatred a veneer of righteousness. It is harder to name, harder to fight, and far more seductive to those who have never heard a child called zhidovka in a schoolyard.

Dr. Naya Lekht and I built this organization because we both have lived both worlds. And I know that silence, at any stage of this history, has never protected Jewish people.