Masha Gessen’s Gross Betrayal of the Russian-Jewish Legacy

This guest post by

Liza Libes

author of Illicit Kingdom and Other Poems.

All future stories written by Reuben Salsa (every Thursday, 8 am Auckland time) will be for paid subscribers only. Guest posts will remain free and posted every Sunday (8 am Auckland time).

For more articles by Jewish authors, subscribe to the JPF on Medium (click on the image below).

For more Jewish authors, click on the image to follow the JPF on Medium.

---

Masha Gessen’s Gross Betrayal of the Russian-Jewish Legacy

On the morning of October 8th, my dad sent a text to our family group chat:

Kids. I never emphasized our Jewish identity, not until today. Jews are not always right, but millennium after millennium, they followed the light and their convictions. I want you to be proud of who you are, and remember that you are part of a small group of people who left a big mark on the world. And, no matter what you hear, have faith in thousands of years of tradition.

On the morning of October 8th, I was puzzled. Israel had just seen the largest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The world was still reeling from the aftermath of the brutal Hamas attacks that even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez begrudgingly acknowledged, and, naively, I expected the world to be on Israel’s side. What was my dad on about with this cryptic text, this “no matter what you hear” paranoia?

My dad, a former citizen of the USSR, saw it coming. In less than 24 hours after the Hamas attacks, the media began to blame the Jews.

It is no secret that the Jews have been subject to profound historical discrimination. From blood libel to the Dreyfus affair, we have suffered more acutely than perhaps any other ethnoreligious group on the planet. And, aside from the Holocaust, the most egregious incidence of antisemitism in recent history occurred in the Soviet Union.

The Bolshevik Revolution initially promised emancipation to Jews facing persecution under Tsarist Russia, but widespread support of the Revolution among Jewish families waned as Jews quickly became second-class Soviet citizens. On Soviet passports, for instance, Jews were identified by ethnicity rather than nationality and forced to disclose their Jewish identity, which frequently set them up to be thwarted by employment quotas and other instances of workplace discrimination. Joseph Stalin’s infamous yet somewhat nebulous Doctor’s Plot accused a handful of Jewish doctors of attempting to poison Soviet authorities, giving an eerie new life to the “Jews as poisoners” narrative of the medieval era. My own family suffered through three generations of anti-Jewish discrimination: my great-grandfather was beaten to death by the KGB after being framed for stealing government money, my grandfather was barred from holding certain positions in the Soviet army despite his military prowess, and my father was wrongfully imprisoned after being accused of fraud by a group of antisemitic officials.

In the 1980s, a new wave of antisemitism swept through the country, inciting a mass wave of Soviet-Jewish emigration to both Israel and America. My own parents fled to America during this particular exodus, and other members of my extended family settled in Israel. Because of my family’s trauma in the Soviet Union, I was not raised explicitly Jewish, but the values my parents and grandparents passed on to me—resilience, optimism, and faith in tradition—are directly informed by the Russian-Jewish legacy. As a first-generation American, I have been lucky enough to meet a diverse group of Russian-speaking Jews, each coming from unique circumstances and backgrounds, yet each caring poignantly about the Jewish tradition.

Because Russian Jews are often united by shared experience and resilience in the face of an oppressive system, they typically have three things in common: faith in meritocracy, an aversion to socialist practices, and a discerning empathy for the Jewish people and their traditions. The Soviet Union’s systemic failures—famines, economic stagnation, political purges, and Jewish cultural erasure—left an indelible mark on the Russian-Jewish psyche, and for those lucky enough to escape to the West, an economic system that rewarded hard work, innovation, and individual freedom was not an abstract concept but a lifeline. Given the Russian-Jewish skepticism of utopian promises and collectivist ideologies, the luxury of freedom—specifically with respect to free-market capitalism and freedom of religion—became a cornerstone of the Russian-Jewish worldview. Taken together, these values might be categorized today under a conservative or libertarian umbrella, though they have little overlap with the values of, say, rural Trump voters. The Russian-Jewish mindset emphasizes freedom and a special commitment to tradition. It is no accident that the world’s most famous libertarian thinker—Ayn Rand—was a Russian Jew.

This commitment to freedom and tradition led Russian Jews to develop staunch Zionist convictions. Today, nearly 15% of Israel’s population is composed of Russian Jews who fled from the Soviet Union. As the symbol of Jewish safety and actualization, Israel is dear to Russian Jews—both those who call the country home and those who admire it from abroad. Because of their experiences with antisemitism, Russian Jews like my dad were keenly affected by the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th and see Israel’s retaliation against a terrorist-ruled Palestine as fully justified. Indeed, the Jewish people—persecuted for centuries—have every right to defend themselves against a future terrorist attack and must do everything it takes to eliminate the hostile force of Hamas in order to forge long-lasting peace in the Middle East. Given everything we have lived through, I do not see this as a radically backwards view—it is, in fact, necessary if we are to build a brighter future.

So in the wake of October 7th, I was shocked and disheartened to learn that one of Israel’s most vocal opponents was a Russian Jew.

In December 2023, just two months after the attacks of October 7th, Masha Gessen, a trans and non-binary journalist of Russian-Jewish descent who has recently adopted the moniker “M,” published a piece in The New Yorker called “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.” In the past, Gessen has used her background to position herself as an opponent of authoritarianism and has often levied rightful criticism on Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russia. In more recent years, however, Gessen has sacrificed her more nuanced, discerning eye to ally herself with the woke left, critiquing the institution of marriage and adopting a non-standard identity. This radical shift leftward has also led her to embrace the post-October-7th wave of antisemitism coming from the left: despite having family members who lived through both the Holocaust and the antisemitic purges in Soviet Russia, Gessen believes that Israel, a supposed apartheid state, is to blame for October 7th.

“In the Shadow of the Holocaust” is a heartbreaking read for any Jew whose family has suffered through the Holocaust or lived through any sort of antisemitism. While Gessen’s entire essay is predicated on a variation of Norman Finkelstein’s “Holocaust Industry”—the disturbingly antisemitic assertion that Jews exploit the memory of the Holocaust for political and financial gain—Gessen’s most egregious claim in the piece is that the IDF response to Hamas mirrors the Nazi persecution of Jews during World War II. By likening Gaza to a Nazi ghetto, Gessen engages in a rhetorical sleight of hand that falsely equates a nation defending itself against terrorism with a truly genocidal, bloodthirsty regime; such a comparison not only trivializes the unique horrors of the Holocaust but also ignores Hamas’s role as a terrorist organization that deliberately endangers Palestinian civilians. It is unclear why Gessen would peddle such an antisemitic narrative—though she likely stands to gain financially from the ideologues over at The New Yorker—but what is clearly apparent is that Gessen’s framework not only erases the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also portrays the Jewish state as a perpetrator of the very atrocities it was founded to prevent.

Gessen didn’t stop there. Several months later, she was back with another antisemitic—and, this time, anti-feminist—Saturday morning New Yorker exposé. At first glance, her clunky title “What We Know About the Weaponization of Sexual Violence on October 7th” might appear to belong to a piece that condemns Hamas’s use of sexual violence against innocent Jewish women. Instead, Gessen launches into a diatribe against the Israeli government and accuses the State of Israel of fabricating rape allegations and exaggerating the atrocities of October 7th for political purposes. The irony of a supposed intersectional feminist demanding additional verification of Hamas’s sexual violence despite overwhelming testimony from survivors and documented evidence from human rights organizations has, of course, been pointed out on countless occassions—that does not stop Gessen from attempting to downplay the atrocities of October 7th in order to advance her political narrative. By framing these acts of violence as potential tools of propaganda, Gessen shifts the focus away from the perpetrators and further fuels a narrative that delegitimizes Israel’s justified response to the October 7th attacks.

Gessen pushes her antisemitic framework in the academic sphere as well. Writing for The New York Times about an incident at Brooklyn College where Jewish organizations lobbied to cancel a pro-Palestinian event, Gessen criticizes university administrators for shutting down “nuanced” perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and frames the event cancellation as an infringement of free speech. What Gessen does not mention is that such events often contribute to the rise of antisemitic fervor at American universities—the very same fervor that, masquerading as “anti-Zionism,” led to the wave of pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses across the United States. Gessen is dismissive of Jewish student safety, adopting a snide tone in her remark that “some Jewish students complained that the off-campus protests made them feel unsafe.” Instead, she embraces the pro-Palestinian cause, lamenting the dismissal of university administrators who refused to condemn violence against Jewish students in a December 2023 congressional hearing and framing their testimonies as “nuanced” and “respectful.” And as Jewish students across the country feel increasingly unsafe on college campuses, Gessen’s defense of such “nuanced” positions ignores the very real harm caused by this rhetoric, effectively dismissing the fears and experiences of Jewish students who are increasingly isolated in academic spaces.

Despite her fascination with supposedly nuanced voices, Gessen herself does not have one. Whatever her motivations may be for turning a blind eye to the suffering of the Jewish people, by adopting and amplifying narratives that undermine the Jewish state, trivialize Jewish suffering, and embolden antisemitic voices, Gessen betrays not only the values of her heritage but also the convictions that have defined the Russian-Jewish experience for generations.

Today, I think back to my dad’s words—I want you to be proud of who you are—and wonder where Gessen would be today if she had had someone similar to tell her to be proud of her Jewish identity. Maybe she would be compelled to reconsider.