Adam Louis-Klein is an anthropologist and PhD candidate at McGill University. His research focuses on Indigenous cosmologies in the Colombian Amazon and comparative forms of peoplehood. He is the founder of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ), which challenges antizionist ideology as a distinct form of anti-Jewish hatred. His writing and advocacy explore the intersection of academic discourse, identity, and political propaganda.

Editor's note: This transcript was generated automatically using voice-to-text software and edited for clarity and flow. While every effort has been made to preserve the speakers’ original intent and wording, there may be minor discrepancies.

Transcript

Zoe Booth: Could you talk a little bit about why you founded MAAZ?

Adam Louis-Klein: Yes. I started in the Amazon, basically. I was in the middle of the jungle with an Indigenous people, doing something that wasn’t directly related to this, on October 7th. I’d been without internet or phone for months. I returned to a local town on October 9th, opened my computer, and the images from the Nova Music Festival were the first thing I saw.

The second thing that happened was that I started to be purged from my academic world—essentially because I stood in solidarity with Israelis and spoke up against what was happening. What emerged immediately was a kind of anti-Jewish environment. At the time, I understood that as antisemitism. That was the language I had: this was antisemitic. These were people claiming they were engaged in political critique, but they were clearly extremely hateful.

The way they talked about Israel was something I’d never seen before—the visceral rage they had, the fact they were saying these things just after a massacre had been committed against Israeli civilians. That was really stunning. I’d never witnessed anything like it.

Over the next two years, I tried to make sense of my experience using the tools I’d learned in the academy—critical academic tools from anthropology and philosophy—to understand what I was witnessing. As I thought and wrote about it more, I came to understand that what I was seeing was a coherent ideology: antizionism. I began to see it as important to highlight antizionism as its own ideology—a violent ideology, and an anti-Jewish one.

I then connected with a group of activists who were also moving in that direction. They wanted to see a transformation within the Jewish community, and within public culture more broadly—naming antizionism, speaking about it, and developing a language to fight back against it. That’s how I founded the Movement Against Antizionism.

ZB: Fascinating. The language you’ve developed around antizionism—would you say it’s directly influenced by the language you’ve encountered in academia, which has been used to demonise Zionism? Is it a mirror? Are you essentially doing what they’re doing—parroting it back to them—or is it a whole new language?

ALK: There’s definitely an element of that. I studied how to critique structures of oppression, power, and discrimination. I’m in the humanities—left academia—and that’s essentially what it does. I work with Indigenous people, so I’ve studied how European colonialism plays out, and I’ve seen it playing out in the present. South America is one of the few places where European colonialism arguably still exists. In many other parts of the world it’s over, and now we see non-European colonialism.

We don’t have to go into all of that—although maybe we should. It’s important to understanding the genocide libel and how that became normalised, because it grew out of Australian scholars who tried to apply settler colonialism theory to Israel.

I learned that language and that way of thinking. And I saw that what antizionism is doing to Jews is a mirror inversion of reality.

You have Jews—people indigenous to the land of Israel, who were exiled, a diasporic people, oppressed for thousands of years, and still under attack today through violence, wars, and attempts to annihilate them. And yet antizionism constructs Jews as the opposite: not indigenous, but settler-colonial oppressors. Not victims, but perpetrators.

So when we see genocidal aggression against Jews—from Hamas, from Iranian proxies like the Houthis and Hezbollah—it’s inverted into a narrative in which Jews or Israelis are committing genocide.

There are a lot of these inversions that need to be undone. You do, in a sense, need to invert the inversion.

ZB: It’s so intellectually challenging—even for well-read people with some grounding in linguistics or political science. Even I find it hard to identify or push back against the linguistic manipulation I’m faced with every day.

It’s destabilising, because you can’t determine what’s true and what’s false. The manipulation runs so deep that you end up questioning yourself. Even just saying something like, “I don’t believe this is a genocide”—that took me a long time. It’s such a taboo.

ALK: Exactly. They’ve hijacked language. That’s part of their power as a majority, essentially. They spread libels by extracting terms—coloniser, apartheid, genocide, racist, baby killer. That’s the power of libel: you’re not concerned with truth; you’re using language as a blunt weapon to stigmatise a group.

I can call you a genocider. I can call you a racist. Not because it’s true, but because I have the power to say it—and a mass of people ready to form a lynch mob and repeat the accusation. Violence is then encouraged on that basis.

That hijacking of language is something I experienced in the academy as well. It became difficult to speak the truth, because these libels have been repeated so often that they start to feel like basic assumptions of the discourse. There’s no space left to say anything else.

That’s why it’s so important to have our own language to speak back to antizionism. And we have to reappropriate the language of the academy. The academy stole that language and now says: “You don’t have a right to use critical academic frameworks to talk about antizionism—because you’re the oppressor and we’re the ones judging you.”

So we have to take that language back.

ZB: Working at Quillette, and having moved from the far left to what some call a centre-right space—I don’t consider myself right-wing, but many would cast Quillette that way—I’m used to being called a bigot, a Nazi. I’m used to these terms being thrown around, and it never really affected me before October 7th, because it wasn’t about Jewish issues.

But something about the discourse since October 7th—the way it's been weaponised against Jews—it’s different. It feels like it has more traction. People believe it now.

Before, people rolled their eyes at the Left’s overuse of “Nazi”—everyone was a Nazi, and it was almost a joke. But now people seem to really believe it, especially in the context of the Israel–Palestine conflict. I don’t understand why.

ALK: You’re right. They had already started abusing language. We saw the term “genocide” being misused even before October 7th. There were attempts to say that trans people were experiencing a genocide, or that Indigenous people in Canada were still undergoing a genocide. Now, both of those communities do face serious challenges and forms of oppression, but those claims stretched the term into something polemical.