In 2018, Izabella Tabarovsky walked past a campus protest and recognized the signs. Not the sentiment — the actual sentences.
Tabarovsky grew up in Soviet Siberia, in a Jewish city with no synagogues. When she saw "Zionism is racism" on an American campus, she called her father and read the signs out to him. His answer: we've heard all of this before.
So she went looking for the paper trail. She found Soviet anti-Zionist books that look like real scholarship — footnotes, endnotes, citations to Hannah Arendt and Theodor Herzl. She sat in the National Library of Israel and checked those citations one at a time.
They're fake.
Real quotes, turned on their head to mean the opposite.
The scholarship was never the point. It was the costume.
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