| A taste: |
Adam Louis-Klein was a left-wing Yale philosophy grad, conducting fieldwork among indigenous Amazonians for his PhD in anthropology. Completely cut off from the world, he finally got online, and the horrors of October 7th hit him like a freight train -- and what he saw in his own academic circles shook him even more. Today he runs one of the most effective anti-antizionism organizations in the Jewish world. This is how he got there.
Adam was born in London and grew up in Seattle. He had a Bar Mitzvah, visited Israel, and was involved in Jewish life at Yale, but after college he drifted away from Judaism entirely.
| The entire antizionist narrative, he saw, rested on a single claim: that Jews are foreign colonizers in the Land of Israel. |
When Adam began his Ph.D. at McGill University in Montreal, he decided to dedicate his dissertation to the Desano people described in Reichel-Dolmatoff''s book. Through American Christian missionaries active in the region, he found his way to a small Desano village deep in the Amazon.
Life there was stark. "I drank rainwater out of a huge bucket. I bathed in the river every single day." He stayed in a ramshackle health post meant for visiting medical professionals, with windows that wouldn''t close and bats in the rafters. He was an outsider in every sense. "It was probably the loneliest experience of my life," he says. "I was seen as a completely alien being." Every day, he walked to the village pavilion and listened to the elders tell the stories of their people.
The Desano, it turned out, consider themselves a chosen people with a special affinity for Jews. Some indigenous tribes even claim descent from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. "When I told the Chief I was Jewish, that was how we connected," Adam says.
Spending time with the Desano gave Adam a new lens on indigeneity itself. The Desano trace their origins to a sacred homeland where they once lived under a single chief. Eventually there was conflict, dispersal, diaspora — and they even displaced another tribe in the process. "There''s immigration, war, displacement," Adam says, "but no one''s going to call the Desano settler colonists because immigration, displacement, and war are just history."
What defines an indigenous people, he came to understand, isn''t that they never moved. It''s that a sacred territory anchors their identity, history, and culture. That insight would soon become central to everything.
RETURN TO CIVILIZATION
On October 9th, 2023, Adam connected to the internet for the first time in months. "The first thing I saw was the news of the massacre," he says. "And the second thing was how people in my left-wing academic environments were reacting. What I saw was so shocking and so immoral. I saw that this was a hate movement. It was unlike anything I''d ever witnessed in my life."
He was watching it from the inside of academia. Shortly after October 7th, his anthropology department began organizing a series of talks about genocide in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
, seemingly before Israel had even mounted a significant military response.
| There was no seemingly about it. There I was, in the middle of a massage even as Hamas was rampaging through the kibbutzes, and my gentle, sweet massage therapist of a decade — who’d long since become the kind personal friend with whom I discussed comparative religion and history, and who worried about my mother — was fretting about those poor Palestinians who were going to suffer unfairly when the Israelis eventually took vengeance… without the slightest concern about the Jewish babies who were at that moment being cooked on the stove while their sisters were roped so hard their pelvises broke before they died. She was completely flabbergasted that I became so upset that I walked out and haven’t been back. Here at Rantburg we discovered that the pro-Palestinian student groups were ordered to prepare for action shortly before 10/7 |
...which still proudly claims Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
," Adam says.
His training as an anthropologist gave him an immediate clarity that others lacked. The entire antizionist narrative, he saw, rested on a single claim: that Jews are foreign colonizers in the Land of Israel. "It's not a fringe belief," he says. "It's the foundational element of antizionist ideology."
And to someone who had spent months studying indigenous peoples, that claim made no sense. "The settler colonial reading was erasing Jewish indigeneity. Jews have migrated around the world, but Israel is their homeland — the sacred site through which Jews have defined their identity throughout history. Jews are an ethno-religious people, not simply a faith disconnected from peoplehood."
TAKING A STAND
Even though his social circles dismissed anything that challenged their ideology, Adam decided to speak out. "I thought it was important to use the critical skills I had learned in the academy — post-colonialism, anthropology, indigeneity — to speak back against this hate movement."
He approached antizionism the way he would any cultural system: as a trained anthropologist analyzing an ideology. That's how he began identifying what he calls the foundational erasures and inversions on which antizionism is built.
When Adam shared his writing on social media, he was bombarded with hate mail. "Some people told me they didn't want to speak to me anymore. Some harassed me and screamed at me. Some of my mentors and intellectual heroes publicly humiliated me. Little by little, I was purged by my whole community. I don't speak to anyone in the academy anymore."
What kept him going was knowing exactly how the narrative had been constructed. "It wasn't the way the war progressed that made it inevitable that people would conclude genocide was happening. The narrative was already there. Academia granted it authority, and mainstream media picked it up and exploited it."