Foreign Influence on American Campuses - with Izabella Tabarovsky

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Host Aviva Klompas sits down with Izabella Tabarovsky to unpack how foreign funding and Soviet-era propaganda have shaped the crisis unfolding on American campuses.

Universities once seen as bastions of free thought are now flooded with billions of dollars from authoritarian regimes like Qatar and China — and the effects are plain to see. Students rally in support of terrorist groups. Jewish students are harassed without consequence.

Izabella explains how Soviet disinformation campaigns against Zionism laid the ideological groundwork for today’s anti-Israel narratives, why Jewish identity has been systematically distorted in academic discourse, and how foreign money buys influence over what students are taught and believe.

We also explore the broader impact of this infiltration beyond the university gates — on American democracy, civic culture, and the future of Jewish life — and ask what can be done to push back against it.

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Referenced in this episode:
Qatar and China Are Pouring Billions Into Elite American Universities in The Free Press

Guest Bio:

Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary antisemitism. She is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities in Palo Alto, CA and a Fellow with several prominent academic and policy centers, including the Comper Center for Contemporary Antisemitism at Haifa University; the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, and ISGAP. She is a contributing writer at Tablet magazine. Her writings have appeared in Newsweek, Sapir, Quillette, The National Interest, Fathom, Forward, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, as well as several essay collections, including The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21stCentury: From the Academic Boycott Campaign into the Mainstream;Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays; and Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People.