Izabella Tabarovsky: Open Hiding
From Quillette: On the quiet disappearance of Jews from public life
Open Hiding
Izabella Tabarovsky
Quillette, June 1, 2026. Read the full essay here.
My father’s dissertation adviser emigrated from the USSR on the eve of his postdoctoral defence. In the Soviet Union, emigration was an act of betrayal, and by the time my father appeared before the committee tasked with approving his defence, his fate had already been sealed. Committee members peppered him with questions so far afield from the subject of his dissertation that he—a brilliant 29-year-old geophysicist—never stood a chance.
My father understood immediately what was happening. The year was 1974, and Soviet anti-Zionist hysteria was at a peak, blocking countless Jews from university admissions, academic advancement, professions, and entire career fields. He walked out, returned to his desk, and went on to do work so innovative that, when we landed in America in 1990, a major company grabbed him and never let him go. Shortly before emigrating, he successfully defended a brand new dissertation, but by then he had nothing left to prove to himself—or anybody else.
Twenty-five years after our emigration, as the ghosts of antisemitism we thought we’d left behind reappeared across the West, I asked my father: Were the people on that committee personally antisemitic? “No, no,” he told me. “They just knew what time and country they were living in.”
Antisemitism is often viewed as visceral hatred of Jews. But that’s a limited understanding of the phenomenon.
Antisemitism is also a politics and a zeitgeist; a conspiracy theory that feeds mass hysteria about Jewish power; an underlying culture that teaches people that Jews are different, they don’t belong, they aren’t on our side—and ultimately, that they are our misfortune. It draws an invisible line between Jews and the broader society, step by step normalising their marginalisation and disappearance….
Continues here. Izabella Tabarovsky is a senior fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide (Wicked Son, 2025).