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A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them
(JTA) — As a kid I went to Sunday school at our Reform synagogue. I didn’t hate it as much as my peers did, but let’s just say there were literally dozens of other things I would have preferred to do on a weekend morning.
As a Jewish adult, I had a vague understanding that Sunday school was a post-World War II invention, part of the assimilation and suburbanization of American Jews (my synagogue was actually called Suburban Temple). With our parents committed to public schools and having moved away from the dense urban enclaves where they were raised, our Jewish education was relegated to Sunday mornings and perhaps a weekday afternoon. The Protestant and Catholic kids went to their own religious supplementary schools, and we Jewish kids went to ours.
In her new book “Jewish Sunday Schools,” Laura Yares backdates this story by over a century. Subtitled “Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” the book describes how Sunday schools were the invention of pioneering educators such as Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children in Philadelphia in 1838. As such, they were responses by a tiny minority to distinctly 19th-century challenges — namely, how to raise their children to be Jews in a country dominated by a Protestant majority, and how to express their Judaism in a way compatible with America’s idea of religious freedom.
Although Sunday schools would become the “principal educational organization” of the Reform movement, Yares shows that the model was adopted by traditionalists as well. And she also argues that 20th-century historians, in focusing on the failures of Sunday schools to promote Jewish “continuity,” discounted the contributions of the mostly volunteer corps of women educators who made them run. Meanwhile, the supplementary school remains the dominant model for Jewish education among non-Orthodox American Jews, despite recent research showing its precipitous decline.
I picked up “Jewish Sunday Schools” hoping to find out who gets the blame for ruining my Sunday mornings. I came away with a new appreciation for the women whose “important and influential work,” Yares writes, “extended far beyond the classrooms in which they worked.”
Yares is assistant professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the MSU Program for Jewish Studies. Raised in Birmingham, England, she has degrees from Oxford University and a doctorate from Georgetown University.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how your book came to be about the 19th century as opposed to the common 20th-century story of suburbanization.
There’s a real gap in American Jewish history when it comes to the 19th century, chiefly because so many American Jews today trace their origins back to the generation who arrived between 1881 and 1924, the mass migration of Jews from from Eastern Europe. So there’s a sense that that’s when American Jewish history began. Of course, that’s not true at all.
The American Jewish community dates back to the 17th century and there was much innovation that laid the foundations for what would become institutionalized in the 20th century.
Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism. If they’ve treated it at all, they tend to be dismissive — you know, there was no substance, they just taught kids the 10 Commandments, it was run by these unprofessional volunteer female teachers, so it was feminized and feminine.
But there’s also a lot of celebration of Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children.
That’s the first indication I had that there might be more of a story here. Rebecca Gratz is lionized as being such a visionary and being so inventive in developing this incredible volunteer model for Jewish education for an immigrant generation that was mostly from Western Europe. And yet, by the beginning of the 20th century, [Jewish historians] say it has no value. So what’s the story there?
Two other things led me on the path to thinking that there was more of a story in this 19th-century moment. I did my Ph.D in Washington, D.C. And as I was searching through the holdings of the Library of Congress, there were tons and tons of Jewish catechisms.
“Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism,” says Dr. Laura Yares, author of the new book, “Jewish Sunday Schools.” (Courtesy of the author)
A catechism is a kind of creed, right? It’s a statement of religious beliefs. “These are things we believe as Jews.”
So Jewish catechisms had that, but they were also philosophical meditations in many ways. Typically, the first question of the catechism was, what is religion? And then the second question is, what is Jewish religion?
And then I started reading them. They were question-and-answer summaries of the whole of Judaism: belief, practices, holidays, Bible, you name it, that the children were expected to memorize. This idea that you’ve got to cram these kids with knowledge went against this historiographic dismissal of this period as being very thin and that kids were not really learning anything. The idea that children had a lot to learn is something that Sunday school educators actually really wrestle with during this period.
What was the other thing that led you to pursue this subject?
When I was beginning to research my dissertation, I was working as a Hebrew school teacher in a large Reform Hebrew school in Washington, D.C. And I remember very distinctively the rabbi coming in and addressing the teachers at the start of the school year. He said, “I don’t care if a student comes through this Hebrew school and they don’t remember anything that they learned. But I care that at the end of the year they feel like the temple is a place that they want to be, that they feel like they have relationships there and they have an (he didn’t use this word) ‘affective’ [emotional] connection.”
And so I’m sitting there by day at the Library of Congress, reading these catechisms that are saying, “Cram their heads with knowledge.” What is the relationship between Jewish education as a place where one is supposed to acquire knowledge and a place where one is supposed to feel something and to develop affective relationships? The swing between those two poles was happening as far back as the 19th century.
You write that owing to gaps in the archives, it was really hard to get an idea of the classroom experience. But to the degree that there’s a typical classroom experience in the 1860s, 1870s and you’re the daughter or grandchild of probably German-speaking Jewish immigrants, maybe working or lower middle class, what would Sunday school be like? I’m guessing the teacher would be a woman. Are you reading the Bible in English or Hebrew?
You are probably going for an hour or two on a Sunday morning. It’s a big room, and your particular class would have a corner of the room. It’s quite chaotic. Most of the teachers were female volunteers. They were either young and unmarried, or older women whose children had grown. Except for the students who are preparing for confirmation — the grand kind of graduation ritual for Sunday schools. Those classes were typically taught by the rabbi, if there was a rabbi associated with the school.
There would be a lot of reading out loud to the students with students being expected to repeat back what they had heard or write it down so they had a copy for themselves. Often the day would begin with prayers said in English, and often the reading of the Torah portion, typically in English, although in many Sunday schools, we do have children reporting they learned bits of Hebrew by rote memorization. Or they memorized the first chapters of the book of Genesis, for example, but I’m not sure that they quite understood what they memorized. “Ein Keloheinu” is a song that often children tell us [in archival materials] that they had memorized in Hebrew. They probably would have learned at least Hebrew script, and a little bit of Hebrew decoding. But it is fair to say that if they were reading the Bible, they were reading it mostly in English, because you have to remember that most of the women who were volunteering to teach in these schools came of age in a generation where Hebrew education wasn’t extended to women.
What’s the goal of these Sunday schools?
The Sunday school movement arose because there was a whole generation of immigrant children who did not have access to Jewish education, because their parents didn’t have either the economic capital or the social capital to become part of the established Jewish community. They couldn’t afford a seat in the synagogue, they couldn’t afford to send their children to congregational all-day or every-afternoon schools [which were among the few options for Jewish education when Gratz opened the Philadelphia Sunday school]. Sunday schools are really a very innovative solution to a problem of a lack of resources.
You also write that the founders of these supplementary schools want to defend children against “predatory evangelists.”
That was how Rebecca Gratz described her goal when she created the first Sunday school. She was very, very worried about the Jewish kids who were not receiving any kind of Hebrew school education. She talks about Protestant missionaries and teachers who would go out onto the street ringing the bell for Sunday school and offering various kinds of trinkets, and Jewish kids would get kind of swept into their Sunday schools. There was a very concrete need to give Jewish children somewhere else to go.
So Gratz and the people who created the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia looked at what the Protestants were doing and they saw that Protestant Sunday schools were providing very accessible places where kids could go and get a basic primer in their religious tradition.
The approach was to teach Judaism as a religion, as opposed to Judaism as a people or culture, to demonstrate that being Jewish was as compatible as Protestantism with being wholly American.
That is certainly part of it. It’s a demonstration that Judaism is compatible with American public life. But I think there’s actually a much bigger claim that the Sunday schools are making. The claim is not only that Judaism is as good as Protestantism, but that Judaism does religion better than Protestantism. These rabbis who were writing catechisms and teaching confirmation classes were saying that Judaism does liberal religion better than liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics and other kinds of liberal denominations. You see the same sentiment in the Pittsburgh Platform as well, which is the foundational platform of the Reform movement written in the 1880s. Sunday schools take that idea and bring it down to a grassroots level.
There are many, many fewer Jews in America in much of the 19th century, before the waves of Eastern European immigrants arrived beginning in the 1880s They didn’t really have strength in numbers, or the kind of self-confidence to have a system of day schools, yeshivas or heders, the elementary schools for all-day or every day Jewish instruction.
And this is also a community that has grown up at the same time as the birth of public education in America, independent of churches. That really emerged beginning on the East Coast in the 1840s.This generation of Americans really believes in the power of public education to craft an American public. It’s a project that 19th-century American Jews believe in and want to sustain. So Sunday schools don’t just become the preferred Jewish model because of lack of resources, but because American Jews really believe in the idea of public education.
What happens at the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Eastern Europeans with different models for Jewish education?
A new generation tries to reform Jewish education, led by a young educator from Palestine named Samson Benderly, who leads the new New York Bureau of Jewish Education. He tries to change American Jewish education to make it more professionalized, but to bring more traditionally inclined Jews on board he has to convince them that he doesn’t want to make more Sunday schools, because Sunday schools by the end of the 20th century had become very much associated with the Reform movement in a way that they weren’t when they were founded and for much of the 19th century.
A painting of Philadelphia philanthropist and Jewish education activist Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully. (The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia)
Benderly is surveying the scene of recent immigrants living in New York City [tenements] and other kinds of downtown environments, and his proposal is to create these community institutions for these dense communities, where children can be taught Hebrew in Hebrew. His disciples also created Jewish camps as a way to get children out of the inner cities and develop the muscular Zionist ideal of healthy bodies and a robust sense of Jewish collectivity.
You write that Benderly’s vision is a sort of masculine response to the “feminizing” perception of the Sunday schools.
These women teachers are recognizing that they’re being criticized for the kind of thinness of the Jewish education that they’re teaching in comparison to other models, but in periodicals like The American Jewess women are writing back and saying, “But you didn’t teach us Hebrew! I didn’t get that opportunity as a woman, so what do you expect?” It’s really important to note that the women did the best that they could in the time that they had available, and that they were the product of opportunities that were denied to them.
What lessons did you learn about Sunday school and Hebrew school education in the 20th century that relate to your research into the 19th century?
The move that is so decisive for shaping American Jewish education is suburbanization. Rather than having a large immigrant generation who are living in these tight ethnic enclaves, you have American Jewish children who are predominantly growing up in the suburbs, and socializing with children from all sorts of different backgrounds who are attending public schools. The place that you go to get your Jewish education is the synagogue supplemental school, which becomes the dominant model for American Jewish education up until today. Benderly might reflect that it looks a lot more like the Sunday school movement of the 19th century than his vision.
Today’s model is really a religious model. And by that I mean that students go to Hebrew school primarily to kind of check a religious box, to learn about the thing that makes them distinctive religiously, and to achieve a religious coming-of-age marker, which is the bar, bat or b mitzvah. Certainly the curriculum today is more diverse, embracing more aspects of traditional Judaism then you would have seen in a 19th-century Sunday school: more Hebrew, more of a sense of Jewish peoplehood, ethnic identity and Zionism of course. But the question that American Jews are increasingly asking themselves is, is this a model that they still want? So you may have seen that the Jewish Education Project published a report recently on supplemental schools, which saw that enrollment has really, really declined.
Sunday schools are based on a vision of Judaism as a set of a religious commitments that American Jews actualize through belonging to a synagogue and sending their children to a synagogue or a religious school, where they will learn primarily a set of religious skills: the ability to read from the Torah, the ability to decode Hebrew, the ability to navigate the siddur.
Is that still the vision that most American Jews have for what Judaism means to them? I think increasingly the answer seems to be no.
How else did experience in a Hebrew school classroom influence you? Did you access anything else when you were writing the book?
I think about the number of college kids and graduate students and empty nesters who are either volunteering or earning minimum wage, working at Hebrew schools, all over the country. That’s the labor force of American Judaism. These people also bring so much to the table. There are a lot of skills, dispositions and knowledge that don’t tend to get taken very seriously because this is a workforce that just gets kind of put into the category of “oh, they’re part time.” That made me look really closely in the historical archives to see if I could find anything out about the women who are volunteering to teach in Sunday schools. And what I found out was that [many] were public school teachers. And they brought a lot to the table. It was women in fact who were really pushing to make the Sunday school curriculum more experiential and to move away from rote memorization.
As a historian formed by feminist methods, I find it really important to recognize that these women were giving over what they had, as opposed to critiquing them for not teaching in a more traditional way. I think we need to pay attention when women are being scapegoated for problems that are described as problems of Jewish continuity. It blinds us to the role that women’s volunteerism has played in American Jewish life. This whole Sunday school movement was possible only because these women volunteered their time and largely were not paid.
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The post A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue
Voters may react differently to a Jewish politician who publicly practices their faith than to one who simply identifies as Jewish, a new poll found. The distinction could matter for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a possible 2028 presidential candidate who has made his Jewish faith central to his public life and service.
The Politico poll of 2,002 U.S. adults showed that Democratic voters were less likely to vote for a candidate who regularly attends synagogue than for a candidate not practicing a religion or attending services once a year. Among Republicans, however, a candidate who regularly attends synagogue performed better than one who attends only once a year.
The survey, conducted online in partnership with the London-based polling firm Public First between August 8 and 14, asked respondents to choose between hypothetical candidates with different characteristics, including political ideology, age, race, profession, sexual orientation and religious practice. The sample has a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.2%.
The poll offers a window into how religious observance may shape the way voters view a Jewish candidate. In an earlier poll conducted by the same firm in May, among 2,038 voters, candidates were identified simply by religion rather than how often or where they worshipped. Being identified as Jewish hurt a hypothetical candidate among voters in both parties compared with being identified as Christian.
The findings could be particularly relevant to Shapiro, the popular Pennsylvania governor running for reelection this fall. He maintains a traditional Conservative Jewish lifestyle, keeps kosher and is a longtime member of Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia. In his recent memoir, Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro detailed experiences shaped by and tied closely to his Jewish identity, including his vetting as a vice presidential candidate in 2024.
Shapiro has been viewed as a potential first Jewish president since his gubernatorial campaign in 2022 and is one of three prominent Jewish Democrats — along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — mentioned as possible 2028 presidential candidates.
Religious identity, particularly Christianity, has become more central in Republican politics since President Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Trump and his Cabinet have made religious faith a prominent part of his administration’s agenda. He created a White House Faith Office to work with religious organizations and established a Justice Department task force focused specifically on what the administration calls anti-Christian bias. At the same time, an increasingly vocal faction on the far right has made Christian nationalism and antisemitism central to its politics.
The Politico poll does not explain why Republican voters responded differently to Jewish candidates based on how often they attended synagogue. But the gap aligns with the broader split in positions among conservatives who have warmly embraced visibly religious and politically conservative Jews, while criticizing liberal or less observant Jews over their politics and commitment to Judaism.
Trump has repeatedly drawn that distinction himself. During the 2024 election, for example, he said that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats “hate their religion.”
The post Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue appeared first on The Forward.
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Nazi imagery nothing new for crypto casino behind Orlando fight with swastika flags and Hitler salutes
(JTA) — Nazi salutes. A swastika flag. Fights in the stands. They were all part of the scene at a recent combat sports event in Orlando that pitted an Israeli Jew against an avowed racist with SS bolts tattooed on his chest – and ended with the latter mocking his defeated foe as “a short little f–king Jew prick.”
The condemnation that followed the Aug. 29 event was aimed in a number of directions: at Paul Miller, the fighter who performed the Hitler salute after his win; at the attendees who returned the salute and displayed the Nazi flag; and at the Kia Center, the city-owned arena best known as the home of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, which hosted the fight night.
Politicians were shocked by the display and wrote statements condemning the event — but the Nazi symbols were nothing new for Duel, the online cryptocurrency casino behind the promotion.
Founded last year and billing itself as “the first casino that gives a f–k,” Duel has used Nazi symbols and racist language in its gambling programming. And its owner, Ossi Ketola, a Finnish high-stakes poker player, is himself a self-described First Amendment absolutist with his own history of racially charged comments. He celebrated his free speech devotion just one week after the Orlando event, in a social media post featuring a photo of himself with Donald Trump Jr.
One of Duel’s blackjack dealers, Nelli Levonyan, has worn a Nazi outfit with a swastika armband on multiple occasions while dealing cards on the blackjack stream. In a skit from the blackjack table that circulated online, a man, dressed up as an Orthodox Jew and holding an Israeli flag, attacked Levonyan by throwing coins at her. Levonyan’s character then sprayed something at the Jewish man — “Gassing!” he yelled — and said, “Go away from me, you dirty kike.”
In another blackjack stream, the dealer imitated one of the two San Diego mosque shooters, who killed five people in May. Levonyan has sung the lyrics to “Heil Hitler,” the Ye (formerly Kanye West) song, during a stream. She has also appeared alongside Miller while hosting the card game.
Earlier this month, Ketola joined a neo-fascist rally in Helsinki staged by the far-right party Sinimusta Liike, or the Blue-and-Black Movement. Ketola, who was dressed in a Spongebob costume, livestreamed the rally and posted the footage with the title “Saving white Finland.” Speaking about immigrants, he said that people “need to be educated about how the genes work, and how these people realistically cannot be integrated here.”
He then attended an anti-fascist rally held elsewhere in Helsinki simultaneously, prompting left-wing demonstrators to chase him and his video crew back to their car. Ketola could be heard off-camera yelling “Sieg heil” as they drove away.
“What f–king violent pussies. Imagine what f–ing leftists,” Ketola said after taking off the Spongebob costume. “You see? These right-wing people, white people, the most friendly people. I just walked there, we didn’t say anything, we didn’t do anything — we go to these leftists and they try to f–ing attack us. F–ing dumb stupid f–ing n–ers.”
The following night, Ketola attended the dinner with Trump and about a dozen others in Tallinn, Estonia, hosted by Studioworks, a company that develops software for online casino sites. Ketola posted a photo of himself and the U.S. president’s son on Instagram, and wrote that he discussed “Duel, the state of the world and current political climate with him and his staff.”
“The political situations in our respective countries have become increasingly similar, with a rising tide of violence and radical leftism in both America and Finland,” Ketola wrote. “As a firm 1st amendment absolutist and an individual with many values that coincide with Republicans and Donald Trump himself, this was a great chance to align on many things important to both.”
Neither the Trump Organization, Miller, Ketola nor Levonyan responded to requests for comment.
Duel was founded last summer and has featured some prominent personalities on its streams, including boxing great Mike Tyson — who told Levonyan, “You dumb b–h, you like Hitler” — and the “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, who is known as Clavicular.
The fight night that it organized and promoted in Orlando was its first foray into combat sports, and made for the company’s biggest splash yet. It also caught the attention of at least one watchdog and a local lawmaker.
“Right after the event there was a lot of criticism put on the venue, which didn’t have much responsibility in this, and not enough eyes on the people who actually made it happen,” Mark Pitcavage, senior fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (The city had said that, as an operator of public venues, it “cannot deny access because we disagree with the political ideology, opinion or perspective, regardless of the message.”)
State Rep. Anna Eskamani called for the Florida Athletic Commission to revoke Duel Arena’s license. The commission’s members were appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not commented on the event. The governor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from JTA.
DeSantis’ immediate predecessor and fellow Republican, U.S. Senator Rick Scott, posted that the event was “utterly disturbing” and that “Antisemitism has NO PLACE in Florida.”
Pitcavage said that combat sports are “a draw for far-right extremists and white supremacists” who often view themselves as “white warriors.” He noted, however, that they make up a small portion of the participants and fans.
“It’s not at all surprising that some of them will get into various types of what they would consider manly, or warrior-like athletics,” he said.
Duel’s involvement in the Orlando event put the intersection of online gambling sites and far-right ideologies on his radar. “It’s something we’re starting to look into,” Pitcavage said. He noted that Duel is registered and licensed offshore on the autonomous island of Anjouan, making it more difficult to investigate.
Eskamani, who is running for mayor of Orlando, told JTA that Duel should not be allowed to operate in Florida, citing reasons that she says would beat the city’s First Amendment defense.
“These offshore cryptocurrency — I mean, there are so many red flags in how this entity is operating that from a purely financial security position for a public venue, I would not want to accept a reservation,” Eskamani said.
Duel set and promoted the matchups on the fight card, which included the kickboxing match between Miller, who goes by the moniker “Gypsy Crusader,” and his fellow influencer Ben “King” Azoulay.
Miller, who has made numerous appearances on Duel’s casino games streams, has been known to use racial slurs and denigrate minority groups in his online content. He was convicted in 2021 of felony weapons charges, and sentenced to 41 months in federal prison. He had posted about initiating a race-based civil war.
During a livestreamed conversation with Adin Ross, a Jewish streamer who has interviewed or maintained friendly relationships with controversial figures including Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, Miller said there are no exceptions in his feelings toward Jews.
“I respect you for having an opinion that is different from the Jews,” Miller told Ross. “But that doesn’t mean that I would not laugh if I see you in a gas chamber.”
Clips from the Orlando event showed Miller performing the Nazi salute twice after his victory — something he has done after winning previous fights — prompting a number of attendees to do the same. One fan brought a Nazi Germany flag and waved it in his seat.
“He’s not a tough guy, he’s not an alpha male. He’s a short little f–ing Jew prick,” Miller declared about his opponent Azoulay in his post-fight interview, eliciting some cheers from the crowd.
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, the Jewish Republican firebrand whose district includes Palm Coast and Daytona Beach, posted a video of the Nazi flag being unfurled and wrote, “This is not a joke and it is not edgy. The guy who did this is old enough to know exactly what that symbol means and to know that it’s not funny. We will make an example out of him.”
Asked what he meant by making an example of the attendee, Fine told JTA, “We put the video out so he would be recognized and be held publicly accountable. Most folks are unwilling to associate with Nazis.”
Cheering Miller on ringside was Jake Shields, a former mixed martial artist-turned far-right influencer who has espoused conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel. Shields wore a shirt reading “FCK ISRL.” Myron Gaines, a prominent streamer who has spread similar conspiracy theories and performed Nazi salutes, was in the stands, and told Miller before the fight, “You fight for the goyim,” according to clips shared on social media.
Pitcavage said he has been tracking a trend of the far-right getting involved in combat sports since the late 1990s, as mixed martial arts and UFC became a more mainstream phenomenon and amateur gyms became widespread and increasingly accessible.
The ADL has flagged that in recent years “active clubs,” or “localized white supremacist crews” that gather for fight training, have become more common. The ADL writes that these groups “see themselves as fighters training for an ongoing war against a system that they claim is deliberately plotting against the white race.”
As news outlets covered backlash to the Orlando fight night, Duel issued its own statement saying it was horrified “to learn that a group of viewers were displaying symbols of hate at our event.” The company criticized the city’s “shocking remarks that the ‘First Amendment’ applies and that ‘free speech’ is permitted at their arena,” and pledged to “work with local activist groups to push back on this and ensure that this kind of hate does not fester ever again.”
The statement appeared to be an example of Duel trolling with deadpan, buttoned-up language. Before the fight, Ketola had similarly released a promotional video that appeared to be condemning Miller’s views. “Paul Miller is a Nazi. Being a Nazi is bad,” Ketola narrated, over footage of him shaking his head. “We cannot support this. The only reason we are allowing him to fight is to ensure the good guys get to add another victory to their record.”
Then, after Miller’s win, Duel’s Instagram account left a comment that told a different story.
“The good guys won,” Duel wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Nazi imagery nothing new for crypto casino behind Orlando fight with swastika flags and Hitler salutes appeared first on The Forward.
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I want to rescue the word Zionism. We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment.
On Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about my predecessor Rabbi Alexander Kohut. He was the renowned European scholar who gave his first sermon here in 1885 and began with the Gomel prayer, thanking God for bringing him safely to America, to this promised land.
I need to tell you how the rest of that sermon went down. Our new German-speaking rabbi proceeded to warn our congregation about the changes he saw happening in American Judaism that threatened our connection to the Jewish people as a whole.
Two years earlier, when Hebrew Union College ordained its first class of American-trained Reform rabbis, its celebratory dinner included littleneck clams and shrimp salad: the infamous Trefa Banquet. It was a provocative declaration that American Jews were no longer bound by archaic laws that separated us from our neighbors.
Kohut cautioned that discarding tradition would leave Judaism a skeleton “without spirit and heart.” If every Jew could simply pick which rules to follow, what would hold us together as a people?
Kohut illustrated this point with a famous Midrashic parable. A group of people are traveling together on a boat. When one passenger begins drilling a hole beneath his seat, the others cry out, “What are you doing?” He responds, “Why do you care? The hole is only under my seat.” Kohut’s sermon sent shock waves through the Jewish community.
The next Shabbat, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, the leading voice of radical Reform, answered from his own pulpit just eight blocks uptown, arguing, “Judaism is a living faith, not a religion confined to dead letters.” For weeks, the two rabbis traded sermons before packed pews. The Kohut–Kohler debates even made the front page of The New York Times.
Later that year, Kohler helped author the Pittsburgh Platform, defining the principles of a new American Reform Judaism. Its most consequential statement was not about kashrut or ritual garb but about peoplehood, declaring, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”
America had offered Jews a radical promise: you could be fully Jewish and fully American. With America gratefully embraced as our new nation, Judaism could just be our religion, like our Protestant neighbors’ down the street. It was liberating, but it also amputated a part of Jewish identity that had been essential for thousands of years.
Of course, Judaism is a religious practice. But for centuries, it was also our law and calendar, our language and literature. Jewish identity runs through how we speak and argue and tell a joke, and through that inexplicable pull that, when something happens to a Jew we have never met in a place far away, we somehow feel it happened to us.
The 20th-century philosopher Martin Buber understood why. Most religions, he noted, begin with an individual revelation. A prophet or a spiritual teacher has an encounter and shares it with others. But Judaism’s defining religious encounter is different. At Sinai, revelation happens to an entire people. Buber wrote, “In the hour of faith, the group becomes a nation. Only as a nation can it hear what it is destined to hear.” Jewish faith and peoplehood cannot be pulled apart.
But we kept trying. Modernity asked us to check a box. Religion, race, nationality: What are we?
The author Dara Horn gives the best answer I’ve heard. She says, “It’s not complicated. It’s just old. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture.” That’s a whole sentence in English, but in Hebrew, it’s just two letters: Am. We are Am Yisrael, the people Israel.
Around the turn of the 20th century, just as Reform Jews were loosening their claim on nationhood, Europe told our Jewish brethren, “Not so fast.” Pogroms swept through the Russian Empire. Political movements in Germany demanded the rollback of Jewish rights. Vienna, the glittering capital of European culture, elected an openly antisemitic mayor. And in France, Alfred Dreyfus, a Frenchman by birth, language, and military service, discovered that to his accusers, he was simply a Jew.
Europe kept asking what was called the Jewish Question: What to do with the Jews? Could they assimilate enough to belong, or would they always remain strangers in the lands they called home?
Jewish leaders began asking a different question: How can we take our future into our own hands? Different Jews gave radically different answers. Their answers came to be called Zionism.
The political Zionist Theodor Herzl asked, “How do we save the Jews?” His answer was sovereignty. Jews could no longer depend on the tolerance of other nations for our safety.
The cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am pushed back: “What good is saving the Jews if we fail to save Judaism?” His answer was cultural renewal, a Hebrew spiritual and cultural center that could renew Jewish life everywhere.
The Labor Zionist A.D. Gordon pushed the question further: But what kind of Jews are we trying to become? His answer was labor. Jews would become rooted again by working the soil, remaking not only a homeland but ourselves.
The religious Zionist Rav Kook asked, “How can this national rebirth also be a spiritual rebirth?” His answer was redemption. By rebuilding Jewish national life, even secular pioneers participated in a sacred process larger than they understood.
There was never just one Zionism, and there still isn’t today. Early Zionists disagreed about every aspect of the state they hoped to build. Zionism was a family argument about how an ancient people takes responsibility for its future.
Journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has defined Zionism as a rescue project, because underlying all of those competing visions was one urgent conviction: There has to be somewhere in the world where we do not need another nation’s permission to live as Jews.
The Holocaust made that need undeniable. Even after the world witnessed the Nazis’ machinery of extermination, hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced persons camps because most nations still refused to take us in. Later, more than 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries such as Iraq, Libya, and Iran, erasing Jewish communities that had endured for thousands of years.
And in the 1990s, Israel took in over a million Jews fleeing persecution from the former Soviet Union, and tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews escaping famine and civil war. After the founding of the State of Israel, Jewish survival never again had to depend on whether someone else would open the door.
And that brings me to a rescue project for our generation. I want to rescue the word Zionism.
A Jewish Federation survey earlier this year grabbed my attention. Nine out of 10 American Jews believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Nine out of 10. But only a third of us are willing to call ourselves Zionists. Why does that matter? Because when a majority of Jews reject the name Zionist, it obscures just how mainstream support for the Jewish state and attachment to Jewish peoplehood is for Jews.
Zionism, simply put, is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. If you believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state, you are already standing inside the Zionist argument.
Let me tell you why I am a Zionist. To me, Zionism is what becomes possible when the Jewish people can fully shape our own lives. In Israel, Jews not only live from January to December, but from Nisan to Adar, from Rosh Hashanah to Tisha B’Av. Children order ice cream in the language of our prophets. Jews have built amazing universities and hospitals where Jewish and Palestinian citizens study side by side and save lives together. Engineers make the desert bloom one drip at a time. And we live again in a land toward which Jews in exile have directed our prayers for 2,000 years.
With that return comes the responsibility to build a society worthy of our deepest Jewish values, always striving for peace. And because I know how essential safety and self-determination are for my people, my Zionism cannot deny those same fundamental rights to another. Palestinians, too, must live with dignity, security, and freedom in that land. That, too, is my Zionism.
Today, I’m not addressing the one in 10 Jews who reject the very idea of a Jewish state, though my door and this synagogue remain open to you. I’m speaking to the majority of Jews who believe in the Jewish state but refuse the Zionist name. And you’ve told me why.
You’ve said, “I don’t want to call myself a Zionist because I can’t support the Israeli government’s or military’s treatment of the Palestinians.” But Zionism is older and larger than any government. Dissent, even contempt for an Israeli leader or policy, does not place you outside Zionism. It puts you alongside Israelis who have filled the streets for years protesting their own government because of their Zionism.
You’ve said, “I’m ashamed of Israeli extremists who commit crimes in the name of religious Zionism.” But all of us should be appalled by extremist settler violence. No one should stand in the same camp with racist ministers who excuse or enable this Hillul Hashem, this desecration. Hundreds of prominent Zionists, including prime ministers, former IDF generals, and heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet, have all condemned this Jewish terrorism and demanded an end to the violence and displacement in the West Bank.
You’ve said Zionism has become a slur, “She’s a Zionist” is now shorthand for colonialism, racism, apartheid, even genocide. But these words have a history. In the 1960s, Soviet propaganda deliberately recast the Jewish national liberation movement as a colonialist and imperialist project, while using anti-Zionism to oppress Soviet Jews, even sponsoring a 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The label Zionist has been weaponized against Jews for more than half a century.
We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment. As British writer Howard Jacobson says, “Zionism is not a country or a system of government. Zionism is an expression of a people’s soul. It is a longing and a necessity, a utopian fantasy. It’s an understanding of history and a solution, an act of reasoning, an act of despair, a prayer, a poem, and a song.”
And since when do we Jews let other people do our naming for us? If we refuse the Zionist name because others have smeared it, or because some have stained it with violence, we hand the word to its most fanatical followers and its most hostile opponents. We abandon the Zionists working every day to build a more just, secure, and peaceful Israel for all its inhabitants. And we surrender a word that has carried the dreams, sacrifices, and hopes of Am Yisrael for generations.
One of our young Central members spent the last year in Israel, and he said his time there both increased his love for the Israeli people and his disgust for the current government. He’s not the type to join in protests, but on Fridays he traveled to the West Bank to accompany Palestinian shepherds and farmers so they could work with less fear of harassment or violence from settlers. Israeli groups call this “protective presence.” This young man called it his Zionism.
I especially want the next generation to know that claiming Zionism means believing in Jewish sovereignty and insisting that it’s not exempt from our tradition’s moral demands. It means seeing clearly where Israel has been a beacon and a blessing, and where it has failed to live up to the values stated in its own Declaration of Independence: freedom, justice, and peace, and equal rights for all its citizens.
When we fall short of our promise, as every person and every nation does, the Jewish response is not abandonment. It is teshuvah, a return to who we are meant to be. That is what Yom Kippur asks of us. Teshuvah requires honest accounting and change. But the goal of teshuvah is not shaming. Teshuvah is fundamentally an act of hope, the hope of return.
When the Israelites first returned to Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE after their first exile, they sang.
“When God returned us to Zion, we were like dreamers.” They couldn’t believe it. They were living inside what once seemed impossible: to be back in their land.
Zionism has always required that kind of imagination. Theodor Herzl looked at a scattered, vulnerable people and imagined us sovereign again in our ancestral homeland, saying, “Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is no dream.” Less than half a century later, the State of Israel was born. Impossible, until it happened.
And after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israelis regarded Egypt as their most formidable enemy, and the vast majority of Israelis did not believe peace was possible. But soon thereafter, Israel’s mightiest adversary became the first Arab state to make peace with it. Impossible, until it happened.
And in recent memory, after 738 days of despair and fear that we would never see every hostage out of Gaza, on Simchat Torah, two years after their kidnapping, every last living hostage came home. It was a miracle made possible by the relentless work of so many and the prayers of Am Yisrael from around the world. Impossible, until it happened.
Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is no dream.
There is so much that still feels impossible in Israel right now. But if our history teaches us anything, it’s not to underestimate what is yet to come, or our responsibility to help shape it.
Rabbi Kohut served this congregation around the time of the birth of the modern Zionist movement. His message to us in 1885 is no less true today. We Jews are in the same boat. Half of the Jews of the world live in the State of Israel. No Jew should say, “Why should I care? The hole is only under their seat.” We cannot walk away from the most important sovereign project of the Jewish people. We must proudly claim the name Zionist and take our place in the unfolding story of Am Yisrael.
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