On a recent episode of The Editors podcast, Dominic Pino observed that there is no obvious reason why violent antisemitism should be associated with the radical, Marxian left. It is so associated because, after the Second World War, the Soviet Union promoted antisemitism and, later, anti-Zionism.

Maintaining a Jewish identity, much less seeking to preserve the existence of a sovereign homeland for the Jewish people, came to be regarded in Soviet propaganda as a form of “bourgeois nationalism.” Once it had sloughed off its origins as a left-wing state oriented around an archipelago of communitarian kibbutzim, Israel came to be seen in Moscow as an instrument wielded by (and somehow also controlling) the imperialist West. Israel’s sins against international communism became even more unignorable after it defeated a collection of Middle Eastern Soviet client states in 1967 and 1973.

The KGB took this mandate and ran with it. In an exploration of the literature surrounding Soviet “Zionology” and Moscow’s efforts to portray the Jewish experience as a conspiracy akin to Nazism, Izabella Tabarovsky described the methods by which Soviet intelligence assets operationalized antisemitism:

KGB residencies across the world were instructed to increase collection of intelligence on ‘the plans, forms and methods of Zionist subversion’ and work to ‘weaken and divide the Zionist movement.’ Obsessed with the supposedly omnipotent Zionist lobby, the KGB sought to discredit it by forging racist letters in the name of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League and sending them to Black American leaders and heads of Arab missions in New York. Believing that ‘virtually no major negative incidents’ happened in the socialist bloc without Zionist involvement, the KGB blamed Poland’s Solidarity movement on the few Jews within its ranks. At the UN, it helped engineer the passage of the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution. When the British chief rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits came to the USSR, the agency got eleven ‘highly trained’ KGB agents to talk to him under the guise of ordinary Soviet Jews to convince him that only a small minority among them wanted to emigrate.

The Soviet Union is gone, but its vestiges remain. Fortunately, vestigial Marxian anti-Zionism lacks the prudence, foresight, and cleverness that typified many of the USSR’s schemes. So we’re left with a collection of ghoulish dopes whose attachment to Leninism blinds them to best practices. That’s right: I’m talking about the Democratic Socialists of America:

Hats off to AG Hamilton for flagging that one. It is a pristine example of the devolution of Marxian thought in the absence of a center that directs and coordinates ideological agitation campaigns like Moscow’s effort to anathematize the Jewish state. In much the same way that Michael Keaton’s character in the film Multiplicity gets dumber with every new iteration, just as the Xerox of a Xerox loses its sharpness, today’s useful idiots are much less useful and far bigger idiots.

The national DSA may distinguish itself from this splinter group and its unashamed advocacy for a “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus in the DSA,” but those distinctions are hard to identify when it comes to anti-Zionism. The Democratic Socialists of America is a hate group, and its members do not seem to see the terrorization of American Jews as a departure from their mission statement. It is openly hostile toward the Jewish state. It celebrated Hamas’s bloody massacre while its fighters were still active and at large in southern Israel. Its rally-goers brandish unambiguous slogans: “I do not condemn Hamas,” read one sign. “There is only one solution: Intifada. Revolution,” the marchers chanted. Twenty days after the slaughter, DSA activists organized a demonstration they called “Flood Brooklyn for Gaza,” which seemed to take direct inspiration from the name Hamas gave to the 10/7 massacre: “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

The national DSA may not explicitly endorse this organization’s imprudent celebration of the premeditated murder of random people outside an Israeli diplomatic event in Washington, D.C., but its actions suggest otherwise. If nothing else, this episode is a reminder that Zionism and anti-communism are linked, both historically and philosophically.