After the foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923) and the suppression of the Sheikh Said (1925) and the Ararat Rebellions (1928-1931), Damascus, Beirut, and the Kurdish territories in northern Syria became new centers of the Kurdish nationalist movement. Many former Ottoman Kurdish elites who opposed the Kemalist nationalist vision of Turkey took refuge in and sought political exile to the Levant still under the French mandate. There, they initiated a Kurdish cultural movement following their failure to free Kurdish territories from the control of the Turkish Republic. One such cultural endeavor involved the publishing of Kurdish periodicals and books in Kurmanji Kurdish in the 1930s and 1940s to which leading Kurdish intellectuals, writers, and poets contributed, with the aim of educating, awakening, and mobilizing the Kurds of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. These nationalists not only contributed to the development of the Kurdish written language, re-writing of Kurdish history, collection of the Kurdish folklore, and definitions of Kurdistan, but also responded to Kemalist discourse and policies. Relying on sources in Kurmanji Kurdish, Turkish and French, my paper explains the former Ottoman Kurdish elite’s views of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) and Kemalist policies through an analysis of their descriptions of Ataturk, his relations with and his attitude toward the Kurds. My analysis includes how the Kurdish nationalists criticized the Kemalist linguistic, spatial, historical theories as well as Kemalist policies to assimilate Kurds into Turkishness. While Kurdish nationalists were exceedingly hostile to the Turkish Republic and its nationalist policy, ironically their Kurdish nationalist ideas sounded similar to the Turkish nationalist ideas of the Kemalists nationalists. Through my analysis, I unpack the dynamics involved in the formulation of rival nationalisms by the former Ottoman Turks and Kurds, reflecting their similar visions of society, religion, and modernity in this important era of history.