Cockford Ollie

Let’s talk about anti-Zionism and Zionism seriously then, Zack I was born in the USSR six years before it collapsed, in the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East – the place Stalin set up as his “alternative” to Zionism. My grandparents were sent there from Ukraine in the late 1940s. They had already survived the Holodomor and the Purge. They had already survived the Holocaust, while their parents and many of their relatives did not. Then Stalin’s anti-Zionist campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitans” finished the job of scattering what was left of their world. As a kid in Khabarovsk I had to hide that I was Jewish. Being Jewish was for some “curious” reason “problematic” among my peers. After the Soviet collapse we lived through our own mini-famine in the Far East in 1992, then the wild 1990s (something closer to 1930s Chicago than any Western European imagines when they picture the post-Soviet years) What actually saved us and hundreds of thousands of other Jews? A few things of course. But one of them (and perhaps the most important one) was Zionism: concrete help from Jewish organizations, and the simple idea that Jews had a right to self-determination somewhere we wouldn’t have to hide or beg for our survival. For my family, Zionism wasn’t an abstract ideology or self identity, it was a program that saved us. It was the difference between getting out and staying trapped in the same cycle of state-sponsored anti-Jewish policy that had already killed so many of our relatives. And what your fancy anti-Zionist Jews and non-Jews in the West were doing back then, when vast majority of Soviet Jews desperately needed any help? Ah, yes, how could I forget it. They sided with the oppressing Soviet regime, of course So when a champagne socialist, who was born in the first world country and personally saw the oppression of Jews only through the pictures in a couple of historical books, tells me the entire national self-determination project was illegitimate and that I (and people like me) were somehow wrong to survive because of it, I would prefer a direct answer. Not fancy and sassy slogans he drops. Just tell me, Zack, why I and my family deserved to die or remain permanently vulnerable instead of using the one mechanism that worked when every other one failed? I’m genuinely curious