Canceled … in Finland
Izabella Tabarovsky
Students protest at Finland’s Helsinki University, May 6, 2024 / Alessandro Rampazzo/Anadolu via Getty Images
Turns out that Finnish academics are just as grossly lazy, airheaded, pompous, and self-serving—and just as eager to censor Jews—as their American counterparts
In recent days, two Finnish universities canceled my scheduled appearances on their campuses, turning me briefly into a minor celebrity in the country. Åbo Akademi University, in Turku, barred me from delivering my keynote address at an international conference on antisemitism set to take place on its campus. The University of Helsinki killed what was supposed to be a public talk. The title of both lectures: “From the Cold War to University Campuses Today: The USSR, the Third World, and Contemporary Antizionist Discourse.” The two schools caved to a smear campaign orchestrated by a “pro-Palestinian” Instagram account that weaponized my pro-Israel social media posts for the purpose.
In the U.S., the censorship of “wrong-thinking” speakers, including Jews who hold Zionist beliefs, has become so commonplace that it’s practically a nonevent. But this was Finland’s first major controversy of this kind, and my photo got splashed across the local press. It was also a first for me, forcing me to confront head-on the same cowardice, hypocrisy, and stupidity that the American academy has displayed for years—especially in the wake of Oct. 7.
That the incident took place in Finland was particularly ironic for me, given the topic of my lecture and my background as an ex-Soviet Jew. For former Soviet citizens, Finland is indelibly linked to the history of the Bolshevik revolution. Not only did Lenin spend extended periods of time there, but also he and Stalin first met at a 1905 Bolshevik conference in the Finnish city of Tampere.
During the Cold War, Finland—forced to maneuver to retain its independence in the shadow of the neighboring USSR (see: Finlandization)—adopted a servile stance toward the communist superpower. Criticism of the USSR was taboo and self-censorship was rife—all of which Finnish media helped to enforce. Soviet influence extended to the country’s intellectual, political, and cultural elites. In the 1970s, a scandal broke out when one of Finland’s municipalities successfully inserted materials from the Finnish-Soviet Friendship Society—a branch of the USSR’s global “friendship societies” influence network—as well as from Soviet textbooks into the school curriculum for grades 1-9, teaching Finnish children that there was no pollution in the USSR and that socialist central planning was superior to capitalism.
The cancellation of my lectures by the two Finnish universities echoed in a weird way some of their country’s Cold War history. Finland has yet to fully come to terms with that past.
When Moscow launched its rabid anti-Israel propaganda campaign in 1967 and started building its “Anti-Zionist International,” Finnish intellectuals were drawn in as well. In 1975, Finnish writer Matti Larni, whose book castigating the U.S. made him popular in the USSR, published a piece about Israel in the Literary Newspaper—the Soviet Union’s most influential cultural publication. Larni’s article echoed key Soviet talking points, branding Israel a Jewish supremacist, racist state and depicting Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel as miserable, regretful traitors longing to return to their Soviet motherland. In 1980, the article was republished in Zionism: Truth and Fiction, a collection edited by Yevgeny Yevseyev—one of the USSR’s most viciously antisemitic ideologues with close ties to the KGB, who played a pivotal role in shaping the key tropes of Soviet “anti-Zionist” ideology.
Another Finnish name appears in the Soviet 1984 propaganda pamphlet Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism. The pamphlet recounts, in English, a press conference staged by the “Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public”—a notorious KGB front designed to vilify Israel and Zionism to foreign audiences under the guise of representing Soviet Jews. The entire event was dedicated to spreading the toxic equation of Zionism with Nazism—a cornerstone of Soviet anti-Israel propaganda—to international audiences. Known as Holocaust inversion, this false equivalence is widely viewed by scholars of antisemitism as a potent tool of incitement against Jews, used by both the far right and the far left. As Deborah Lipstadt has noted, the trope contains a grain of Holocaust denial, exaggerating “by a factor of zillion any wrongdoings Israel might have done,” while simultaneously diminishing, by the same factor, the acts of the Germans. The USSR and its Western enablers—including, it seems, the Finnish ones—played a significant role in embedding this inversion among the global left.
The cancellation of my lectures by the two Finnish universities, then, echoed in a weird way some of their country’s Cold War history. One of my Finnish contacts may have been right when she told me that Finland has yet to fully come to terms with that past.
It replayed some long-forgotten past experiences for me as well. For ex-Soviet Jews, the anti-Israel campaigns that have permeated university campuses in recent years serve as a stark reminder of what we endured under the USSR. Maxim Shrayer, a refusenik and professor at Boston College, recalls how in the 1970s and ’80s, all “expressions of Jewish pride and Jewish spiritual and intellectual self-awareness” were dubbed “‘Zionist’ and targeted for public ostracism and vilification.” Under the pretense of combatting Zionism, “brainwashed Soviet young people acted on their antisemitic urges. A non-Jewish teenager at my Soviet school tried to beat up a Jewish kid because ‘the Zionists have taken over the Golan Heights.’”
For us, Soviet Jews, the state’s obsession with Zionism led to relentless discrimination, barring us from certain universities, careers, and professions. This lived experience taught us that while “anti-Zionism” doesn’t have to be antisemitic in theory, it inevitably produces antisemitic outcomes in real life. In the wake of Oct. 7, Jews around the world are learning what we knew decades ago: Whether school bullies call us “kikes” or “Zios,” the outcome is the same.
The smear campaign against me began on Instagram on Wednesday, Jan. 22—one week before my scheduled appearance at a conference titled “Dialogue on Antisemitism: A Path Towards Understanding and Action.” Organized by the Antisemitism Undermining Democracy Project at the Polin Institute of Åbo Akademi University, the conference was meant to launch a conversation that, the organizers felt, had long been overdue in Finland. It was the first major international conference dedicated to contemporary antisemitism in the country. Leading the effort was Mercédesz Czimbalmos, a scholar with a an extensive body of research on antisemitism and Jewish life in Finland.
The campaign branded me a “genocide denier” who legitimizes a “settler-colonial apartheid state” and is an all-around dangerous extremist guilty of the ultimate transgression—equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It also seized on a mistake by a conference team member, who had erroneously added “Ph.D.” next to my name on the conference site. The error was quickly fixed, but not before my detractors took notice and claimed I misrepresented my academic credentials. Angry calls and emails to university administrations followed. By Friday it was over.
Czimbalmos and her team fought hard, arguing on the merits: My lecture was not going to be about the Israel-Gaza conflict; diversity of opinions was important for stimulating dialogue; my expertise was widely known and acknowledged; the Ph.D. blunder wasn’t my fault. They were ultimately overruled. Still, they chose a gesture of defiance: Rather than officially cancel my keynote or replace me with another speaker, they asked me for an article to read aloud to the participants in place of my speech. I couldn’t think of a better piece for the occasion than “What My Soviet Life Taught Me About Censorship,” published in Quillette.
As a student of anti-Zionist propaganda, who has closely watched the rise of anti-Israel demonization on American campuses and its impact on Jewish students and faculty, I understood exactly what had happened. Still, I thought the decision-makers owed me an explanation. I sent an identical email to Åbo Akademi, addressing Rector Mikael Lindfelt and Dean Peter Nynäs of the Faculty of Arts, Psychology, and Theology, and to the University of Helsinki, addressing Rector Sari Lindblom and Dean Pirjo Hiidenmaa of the Faculty of Humanities. I explained my scholarly credentials and added that I was bringing my lived experience to the lectures. I also asked them, slightly tongue in cheek, for the reason behind the cancellation of my talks.
The correspondence that followed astonished me. It turned out that the learned men charged with deciding whether my talk could proceed hadn’t even bothered to check the facts, censoring me on the basis of hearsay and slander. When I came around asking questions, they stammered and came up with dubious excuses. They were fearful, and it showed.
Writing to me on behalf of the University of Helsinki was Hannu Juusola, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and the head of the university’s Department of Cultures. In a rambling response, Juusola blamed procedural faults but also stressed he knew nothing about my academic background—only that I didn’t have a Ph.D. More to the point, he’d been told that I had “strong political opinions”—a fact he clearly found objectionable. He also hoped I understood that the topic of my research was “currently very politicized.”
To me, this was hogwash. Information about my scholarly background had been sent to the university months before, and I had personally sent another bio in early December, further detailing my credentials. Universities regularly invite speakers with strong political opinions and no Ph.D.s, and the University of Helsinki is no exception. When Juusola later referred to my lecture as “controversial,” it became an open-and-shut case of political censorship by a faculty member whose own strong anti-Israel political opinions are well known.
In contrast to Juusola’s verbose and self-contradictory explanations, Nynäs at Åbo Akademi opted for evasion as a strategy. “The decision was based on an overall assessment where no single argument in itself was decisive for this,” he wrote. “Rather, as Dean, I felt that there were several difficult questions and that there was obvious uncertainty and lack of clarity around these. Furthermore, these posed risks to both individuals and other stakeholders that could not be clearly assessed or adequately addressed prior to the event.”
Obviously defensive, he added: “In light of this, I felt that the best solution for all was to proceed in this way so that the seminar could be held. We see great value in the seminar and in contributing to the understanding of anti-Semitism and to dialogue about it, a topic that should be more widely known and understood.” I couldn’t resist pointing out that my keynote, of course, would have made a significant contribution to the “understanding of antisemitism” and to “dialogue about it” among conference participants. Censoring a recognized expert in the field—who also brought firsthand experience of antisemitism to the conversation—was hardly the path to reach the stated goal.
In the end, the conference at Åbo Akademi went on without a hitch. No one showed up to protest or disrupt it. Was it only because my talk had been canceled? I’m certain the outcome would have been the same had it gone ahead. And even if some protesters had shown up—so what? After the first day of the event, a Finnish academic wrote a venomous thread on X, celebrating my cancellation and attacking two other speakers at the conference. It got six likes. The media storm sparked by the censorship was undoubtedly far bigger than anything my actual presentation could have generated.
Now that the news cycle is moving on, the two universities may be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief, but that would be a mistake. Their cowardice and failure to uphold their own values (truth, freedom, inclusivity, yada, yada, yada) should prompt them to take some time to contemplate their raison d’être.
There were additional bad optics here. In this story, men in authority, who were not subject-matter experts, overruled their female subordinates—women who had organized the conference, were experts in their field and knew exactly who they were inviting and why. These men also thought it appropriate to censor a female speaker whose expertise had earned her an international reputation. The fact that three out of the four women affected were Jewish, and all were of Eastern European background, only worsened the optics.
In the end, the Finnish public missed out on a lecture I’ve presented at countless universities and academic centers around the world. But the leadership of the two universities shouldn’t see this as a barrier to their own learning. My articles and talks are available online and are an excellent place for the esteemed professors, deans, and rectors to expand their knowledge about antisemitism. Not the type that denies the Holocaust but the one that makes a show of commemorating dead Jews while refusing to hear those who are still alive.
Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary left antisemitism. She is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities and a Research Fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and ISGAP. Follow her on Twitter @IzaTabaro.
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