Uncategorized
Why do so many Jews support Israel — but reject ‘Zionism’?
A new Jewish Federations of North America survey contained a shocking and confusing statistic: While just one-third of American Jews call themselves Zionists, almost 90% say they believe in Israel’s right to exist as a democratic Jewish state.
How could that be?
That finding has been widely read as evidence of a generational collapse in Jewish attachment to Israel. It is nothing of the sort. What it reveals instead is the collapse of confidence in a specific political ideal that, to many, no longer means what it once did.
For much of the 20th century, the term “Zionism” referred to a fairly straightforward and surprisingly normal proposition: that Jews constituted a people, not merely a religion, and therefore had a plausible claim to national self-determination.
The arguments around Zionism were not uniquely Jewish. They echoed similar ideas advanced about Poles, Greeks and Czechs. If Romania could be a Romanian country, the thinking went, Israel could be a Jewish one. Whether Israel should exist was not a particularly hard question. Where its borders should lie, how minorities within those borers should be treated, and how Palestinians displaced by war and state-building should be compensated were.
Even the word itself began modestly. It is widely believed to have been coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum, a Jewish intellectual and activist, to give a name to an emerging political current associated with the Hovevei Zion movement: Jews who believed emancipation would be achieved through collective action.
The idea of a return to Zion was ancient, embedded in Jewish liturgy and longing. The term “Zionism,” by contrast, was new, and political.
That practical spirit carried into the work of Theodor Herzl, who used the term sparingly and without reverence. In his vision, Zionism was not an identity to be worn or a moral credential to be displayed. It was a solution to a political problem: the chronic vulnerability of a stateless people.
“I consider the Jewish question neither a social nor a religious one, even though it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question,“ he wrote in Der Judenstaat, his foundational text. “We are a people — one people.” Herzl laid out certain principles for answering that national question: international legitimacy mattered, minority rights within a future Jewish state were essential, and sovereignty imposed obligations rather than erased them. Zionism, he believed, could coexist with liberal norms and civic equality.
Today, that framework has eroded.
The moral mire of occupation
The occupation of the West Bank beginning after the 1967 Six-Day War fundamentally altered the moral landscape in which Zionism is understood.
Settler violence, seemingly permanent military rule over another people without the rights of citizens, a system of legal inequality and terrible violence resulted. What was once a movement for national self-determination increasingly came, in the public eye, to signify territorial entitlement and moral indifference.
For many Jews, especially younger ones, the word “Zionism” began to feel less like a description of a political belief like any other than a demand for complicity in a reality they never chose.
The rise of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accelerated this corrosion. Because of his omnipresence in Israeli politics for the last three decades, it is his face many think of now when the term comes up. Over time, the idea of Zionism became rhetorically fused with Netanyahu’s political survival strategy, and, with it, with contempt for liberal institutions, and a narrowing of Jewish identity into a blunt instrument of power.
In the past, one could be a Zionist and still oppose specific Israeli governments, criticize military actions, or argue for far-reaching compromises with the Palestinians. Zionism was not an oath of loyalty to power; it was a framework for arguing about how Jewish sovereignty should be exercised and constrained.
In an era defined by occupation and Netanyahu’s political scheming, the term “Zionism” became welded to a politician known for corruption, cynicism, and conflict. So for liberals — which most American Jews are — it became radioactive.
From specific ideal to vague slur
Then came the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
The scale of Israeli suffering on that day might have created sympathy for Israel — but the disastrous war in Gaza that followed put an end to any such compassion. Israeli security officials do not dispute the estimate that the war killed 70,000 people in Gaza, of which half or more are likely to have been civilians. The images coming out of the strip for more than two years showed scenes of utter devastation.
Layered onto this awful reality was an online ecosystem that rewards distortion. In activist spaces and on social media, the word “Zionist” became a slur, deployed with deliberate vagueness. It could mean “supporter of occupation,” “apologist for civilian deaths,” or simply “Jew with opinions about Israel.”
Bots and bad-faith actors amplified the worst definitions and drowned out the rest. In that climate, identifying as a Zionist began to feel like inviting a moral indictment.
The result is an increasingly familiar absurdity. I find myself appearing on leftist podcasts, listening to earnest but ill-informed commentators say they “suspect” I might be a Zionist, as though they were uncovering a hidden vice.
The irony is that I am a complete and total Zionist — under the original definition. Does it still apply?
I believe Jews are a people; that they have a right to a state; and that Israel’s legitimacy does not depend on being liked; only on existing within moral and legal constraints.
What I do not accept is the mutated version of Zionism that equates Jewish self-determination with permanent and non-democratic domination over another people.
Why does this definitional change matter?
When Jews stop identifying as Zionists, they abandon the clear, shared language that explains why Israel exists at all. That vacuum can be quickly filled with definitions supplied by Israel’s most illiberal defenders and most hostile critics. Without “Zionism” as an acceptable term, it becomes easier to portray Israel as illegitimate by definition. And it becomes easier for people who hate Jews to pretend that they hate “Zionists” instead.
Can the term be reclaimed? That would require an Israel that behaves better. Even then, undoing the damage will be an uphill battle. And of course, many of Zionism’s critics will never be pacified. The strange durability of the phenomenon known as antisemitism makes that crystal clear.
The post Why do so many Jews support Israel — but reject ‘Zionism’? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement
I have long been obsessed with the Vatican and the inner workings of the papacy. (I majored and did my Master’s in religious studies.) But usually other people are not as tickled as I am by analyzing the newest theological statements from the Holy See.
Not this week. Pope Leo XIV just put out his first encyclical — the term used to refer to official statements outlining the church’s stance on a topic — and it has gone viral. “Spitting fire right out the gate,” said one of many similar trending posts, as though the encyclical was a rap song.
The topic is buzzy: AI, which the pope casts as one of the greatest threats to human flourishing and morality. (The encyclical is titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity” in English, if that gives you the gist.) “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur,” it opens, “ is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
The document notes many of the concrete risks of AI — sexual abuse, distortion of facts, job loss — and calls for pragmatic solutions. But it is, at its heart, a testament to what makes humans human, written with palpable adoration for the people of the world: our creativity, our empathy, even our weaknesses. It’s a declaration that machines can never have the ineffable qualities of God’s children.
Structuring our world around technology, Leo writes, reduces “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
Later, in a paean to the importance of deep thought over easy answers, he goes on: “The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions,” he writes, calling on the world “to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine” and warning against rendering “human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
“Magnificatus Humanitas” is a major statement, both in length — more than 43,000 words — and in symbolism. A pope’s first encyclical indicates the issues they believe are most important to the church, and signals the likely direction of their papacy.
That direction, for Pope Leo, is to be a voice for moral leadership, writ large. He addressed the encyclical not only to Catholics or even Christians, but “to all men and women of goodwill,” and cited thinkers like Hannah Arendt and J.R.R. Tolkien alongside the Bible.
It’s a declaration of a new — or, arguably, very old — relevance for religious leaders. As people rush through our increasingly fast-paced, frantic world, striving to keep up with the newest technology or geopolitical shift affecting markets and jobs, the slow-moving, zoomed-out perspective of religious leaders seems to be more and more important.
The Vatican held massive authority both moral and military for much of Western history. But its sway faded in the modern age. As democracy rose, Christianity broke into factions and religion’s prominence weakened, leaving the Church without the same ability to bestow a divine mandate on nations and rulers.
So many modern popes have kept their sights more narrowly focused on the theological. Even Pope Francis, who was a liberal, modernizing force for the church, and spoke out strongly on topics like the environment and immigration, focused three of his four encyclicals on Christian theological concepts like the Sacred Heart and Christianity as the world’s guiding light.
Pope Leo, however, seems to have found his way to modern, secular relevance by speaking out clearly on major issues of the day. He notes that he drew inspiration for “Magnificatus Humanitas” from Pope Leo XIII, an influential pope in the late 1800s and the inspiration for the modern Leo’s own papal moniker, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” on the economy and conditions of the working class, was criticized for insufficient focus on the Gospel. The current pope’s own document is remarkably concrete and political.
Making political statements isn’t new for Leo, but the encyclical canonizes his boldness into an official form. In the past few months I’ve written about the ways in which Pope Leo has used sermons and statements to directly counter those made by U.S. leaders. After Pete Hegseth made a speech implying the U.S. military is doing God’s will, the pope gave a homily saying that prayers for war cannot be heard by God. He has made strongly worded comments about the rights of immigrants as Trump announced increased ICE raids, and made a point of appointing foreign bishops in American parishes. He has refused to visit the U.S. despite the fact that he is American and has been invited numerous times, including for the nation’s 250th birthday; he is instead planning to visit an island that serves as a refugee landing point in the Mediterranean.
It’s not all that surprising that Leo is making pronouncements on the justness of wars; popes have always given commentary on the world, albeit often less pointedly. Of course, Catholics have always looked to the pope for moral leadership — though that is increasingly under question, as renegade Catholics doubt the pope. (Even J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert with a book coming out about his conversion, has warned the pope to be “careful” with his theological interpretations — a near heretical statement. That’s how Protestantism came about.) The difference today is that everybody is listening.
I think the reason is that there is a certain ineffable quality that can’t be accounted for in so much of modern-day discourse in our metrics-focused world. Everything needs to be provable with a statistical analysis or some quantifiable indicator, or it needs to be as profitable as possible to extract value. But so much of what is most valuable in the human experience is intuitive — experiences and emotions like love, joy, transcendence. Connection with each other. Religious leaders have been honing the language to talk about these qualities for centuries, and they guard one of the only arenas in which the intangible remains central.
Of course, there are also plenty of issues with religious institutions, and the Vatican in particular is famous as a site where abuses of power were hidden and protected. But “Magnifica Humanitas,” and its virality, points toward a new relationship with religion, and a newly important role for it to play.
Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking, a hope for my own increased importance as a religion reporter.
The post Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?
Twice, the mezuzah on my front door was ripped off.
The first time, I was shocked. The second time, I made a decision that still pains me. I did not put it back up.
This was before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The fear did not begin after the Hamas attacks. It was already there, intruding with the quiet calculation of whether a small Jewish symbol on my home made me less safe.
A mezuzah is not a political statement. It makes no argument about a government or a war. It is a sacred object, a marker of memory, a tiny declaration that says: Jews live here. I thought about that mezuzah again recently when the Anti-Defamation League released its annual audit showing that antisemitic physical assaults in the United States reached record highs in 2025. That increase reflects something many Jews already feel in daily life: the slow erosion of ease, the daily calculation of whether to speak up or stay quiet — things I have felt since the first time my mezuzah was violently torn off my doorframe.
Since then, the realm in which I feel safe as a visibly Jewish person has been shrinking from all directions.
After the Oct. 7 attack, the bulletin boards in my apartment building began filling with calls to boycott Israel. Campaign flyers for a Jewish political candidate who came to speak there were defaced with Hitler mustaches. I learned to scan the walls before I scanned my mail.
This was not happening on a campus quad or in some distant place. It was happening where I live.
Then, among my mother’s things, I found a Star of David necklace from the 1930s — marcasite set against black onyx, delicate and old. A boyfriend had given it to her when they were both 14.
I put it on in Florida, where I spend much of my time caring for my mother. I loved wearing it. It felt like more than jewelry. It felt like inheritance, memory, and a small way of carrying my family with me.
But when my mother knew I was going back to New York, she told me to take it off.
My mother is 102. She is not easily frightened. She has lived long enough to know when the temperature in the room has changed. She was not making a political argument. She was trying to protect her daughter.
I still wear that Star of David. But I admit I am selective. In New York, there are moments when I leave it visible and moments when I tuck it under my shirt. That calculation itself tells me something about the world I am moving through.
Recently, in a private Facebook group for women essayists, I shared a personal piece I had written for the United Kingdom-based Jewish Chronicle about how Oct. 7 changed life for my mother and me. It was not a political manifesto. It was a reflection on fear, Jewish identity, aging and visibility.
And still, I was attacked by other writers.“What about Gaza?” I was asked. The message was clear: even my personal Jewish pain had to pass a political test before it could be acknowledged.
That is the narrowing.
This ugliness is coming from more than one direction now. It stems from old conspiracy theories on the right and newer moral certainties in some of the progressive spaces where I once felt most at home. Different language brings about the same result: Jews become less human, less particular, less entitled to fear.
That collapse is what frightens me most: the definitional collapse between Jew and Israeli; Israeli and Israel’s government; Jewish symbol and political provocation; mezuzah and target.
As Jews like me reckon with that collapse, we must reckon with how much we’ll go along with it.
Right now, too often, Jews are being asked to choose between our own safety and our compassion for others. We should be able to prioritize both. I am a Zionist. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to a homeland. I also believe Palestinians are human beings who deserve freedom, dignity, and protection from suffering.
These beliefs should not cancel each other out. They should make us more careful, more humane, more committed to truth.
Yet now we must choose between speaking about antisemitism and being accused of indifference to other hatreds. That is no way to live.
Since Oct. 7, I have found myself going to synagogue on Shabbat, something I never did before. I was a High Holiday Jew. Now I seek out rooms where I do not have to explain why this moment feels frightening. I have learned where I feel seen. I have learned who can hold my fear without turning it into an argument.
The mezuzah I did not put back up is small. It fits in the palm of my hand.
But what it represents is not small: memory, faith, survival, home, and the right to be visibly Jewish without fear.
When I did not put it back up, I told myself I was being practical. But now — after Oct. 7, the bulletin boards, my mother’s warning, and the explosive allegations I’ve seen travel through respected media without sufficient care or verification — I understand it differently.
I was not just protecting a doorframe. I was learning to shrink.
The post How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig
ס׳איז לעצטנס אַרויס אַ פּאָדקאַסט מיט דער באַליבטער אַקטריסע אין ישׂראל, ליאַ קעניג, וועלכע איז הײַנט צום בעסטן באַקאַנט ווי די ייִדיש־רעדנדיקע באָבע פֿונעם פּערסאָנאַזש שלום שטיסל אין דער ישׂראלדיקער טעלעוויזיע־סעריע „שטיסל“.
אינעם שמועס באַטייליקן זיך אויך יניבֿ גאָלדבערג — דער מחבר פֿון אַ נײַער ביאָגראַפֿיע וועגן איר אויף ענגליש; דער איבערזעצער און דראַמאַטורג מיכל יאַשינסקי, און דער ייִדישער זינגער און קולטור־טוער חיים וואָלף. דעם פּאָדקאַסט האָט טראַנסמיטירט די באָסטאָנער ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם „דאָס ייִדישע קול“.
ליאַ קעניג גיט איבער אירע זכרונות במשך פֿון איר לאַנגער קאַריערע אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, ווי אויך אינעם העברעיִשן טעאַטער, טעלעוויזיע און קינאָ. כּדי צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
The post Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig appeared first on The Forward.