About Andrey Ivanov

I was born and growing up in the South of the Soviet Ukraine, with half my family from Odessa.

Being from that melting pot of ethnicities, I have Ukrainian, German, Ashkenazi Jewish, Polish and even Romani ancestry. As most Soviet people from the late Soviet Union, I was baptized as Russian Orthodox, but I don’t belong to any religion, though I would describe myself as a mixture spiritual and agnostic; I mistrust organized religion but do believe there’s something out there.

As a teen, in mid-1990s, my parents and I immigrated to NZ, settling in West Auckland. I finished high school and my first degree in Auckland, and went to Germany to study further.

Culturally, I identify as an Auckland Westie and A late Soviet, though having strong Odessa ties, I was growing up with a connection to the Yiddish culture of South Ukraine. It’s not the strongest part of my identity by any stretch, but it does inform who I am.

My parents have many close friends who emigrated to Israel; as the vast majority of ex-Soviet Jews, my parents’ friends are strongly Zionist, though some did prefer to emigrate to Germany rather than Israel. Until October the 7th, I had only a casual understanding of Zionism, to my regret and shame… a casual and a chagrinned one. Some time in the past, I did want to go to Israel, but my mom wouldn’t let me for security reasons. But I always wanted to go to Germany, both due to my German and my Yiddish roots, because I always felt that the Yiddish and German and Slavic cultures and languages were deeply intertwined, and I wanted to reconnect with what I saw as my Ashkenazi roots. I always found it a great shame that the Jews were driven out of Europe in large numbers, and I now understand that it was done by Zionism as much as antisemitism, to the decimation of the thousands of years of Yiddish life in Europe.

After October the 7th, I started researching the Jewish anti-Zionist organisations and movements both past and present, understanding the origin of Zionism, contextualizing the history of settler colonialism. I was influenced among others by the work of the Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ) and I reached out to see how I could get involved and what I could do to educate myself further and help.

Through my study, I’ve come to the conclusion that Zionism and antisemitism have a symbiotic relationship, reinforcing each other, and unable to live one without the other. To fight antisemitism is therefore to fight Zionism. And this is on top of the genocidal, criminal settler colonialism both in general and specifically in Palestine, and the grave injustice perpetrated by Zionism against the Palestinian Arabs and also against the Palestinian anti-Zionist Jews.

I’m currently reading up on Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter-bund and Bundism, both historic and modern. Perhaps, its secularism and focus on the Yiddish culture and the “Doikayt” is what attracts me the most, as well as its socialist roots.

A sheynem dank!