High school students in northern Virginia often asked Jim Rose why the words “genocide” and “apartheid” were being used to describe Israel.
“Students would ask me about the rhetoric,” the Great Falls resident said. “They were confused to hear these terms applied to Israel — to them, it did not jive with anything they had known or learned.”
Rose, who launched the grassroots nonprofit NoVaChai in 2024, said he lacked a good answer for these students. As he began researching, he stumbled upon the work of Izabella Tabarovsky, a writer and activist who specializes in the Soviet Jewish experience.
Tabarovsky contends that the “rhetoric of today that is used to isolate and vilify and demonize Israel is all distilled from the work of the KGB, [the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security], during the Cold War in the ’60s and ’70s,” according to Rose.
“What they did is they took these antisemitic tropes that have been around for ages and used to justify violence against Jews for centuries, they modernized it into a campaign of propaganda that is, as I like to call it, perhaps the most successful political campaign in history, because it still works today,” Rose said.
One example of such “propaganda” is the claim that Israel is an apartheid state — a system of institutionalized racial segregation. “We know that apartheid concept was developed and amplified by the Soviet Union, so we need to have that as a starting point,” Rose said.
The Jewish Policy Center asserts that “Israel apartheid” originated in Moscow during the Cold War and spread via a “relentless” Soviet propaganda campaign until it was adopted by the United Nations and across the Middle East and the West.
In September 2024, Rose had the idea to create a film on the history of Soviet antisemitism and how it impacts people today. Rose began the filming process that winter as the producer. “A Special Russian Truth” was released in January and has since been selected for several film festivals and even nominated by one as Best Documentary.
Geared toward young adults, the 25-minute film features Tabarovsky and another historian, as well as political analyst Dalia Ziada, civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis, Vladislav Khaykin of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and other academics and college professors.
“It just came together in a very, very powerful story of propaganda and what it can do to institutions, to societies, if it is left unchecked and unchallenged,” Rose said.
He worked with an academic advisory board that helped guide him through the filming process and an archivist who helped compile historical footage and images. The film’s director, Jonathan Gruber, said he was enthusiastic about working on “A Special Russian Truth” because the subject matter was largely “under the surface” of the public’s knowledge.
“Apart from some pretty specialized college courses, this is a story that’s not being told; it’s not being taught,” Rose said.
The film’s credibility was a priority for Gruber. “One of the things that was really important for me is to not have a film about Soviet propaganda be looked at as propaganda on the other side,” he said.
“My background is as a journalist, and so I want any of my projects to hold up to scholarly rigor and be fact-based,” Gruber said. “I feel pretty good about where we’ve landed.”
He acknowledged that no matter how well-researched a piece of media, there will always be skeptics.
“We can’t make the film bulletproof in terms of how people perceive it, but it is well-researched and there’s very well-respected people [featured in the film], not just from the Jewish side,” Gruber said.
Ziada is an Egyptian human rights activist and Chavis is an African American civil rights activist who served as a youth leader at Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“These are people who are not necessarily from a Jewish point of view, the usual cast of characters,” Gruber said. “And I think that makes the film more powerful.”
Though it debuted at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia in February, “A Special Russian Truth” is a true DMV-area production. The film was produced and edited in Bethesda and three of the six featured interviews were filmed at music venues in Southwest D.C.
“A lot of the research was done right here in D.C.,” Rose said.
Gruber said he’s seen mentions of contemporary anti-Zionism’s roots in Cold War propaganda on social media. But never a thorough account.
“This [film] is a little more scholarly; it’s a little more in-depth that kind of traces the history,” Gruber said. “And if people are able to have a longer attention span than 90 seconds, then this is probably something that would be very educational [and] enlightening.”
“A Special Russian Truth” isn’t meant to be an “exhaustive exploration” of the topic, but a conversation starter.
“The only thing that we really wanted to present, in a definitive sense, was that antisemitic, anti-Zionist propaganda is a thing,” Rose said. “How do we know it’s a thing? The KGB told us. It’s documented. It’s all right there.”
Rose will screen the film at the University of Maryland on April 27, followed by a conversation between Tabarovsky and a local journalist. He hopes the film will prompt questions when students encounter certain anti-Zionist talking points.
“We hope projects like this will help people be a little more critical, have a little more [of a] critical eye, a little more caution and specificity around the words they use to criticize Israel, to protest war [and] protect innocent lives that need and deserve protection,” Rose said.
