When Jews Call Synagogues ‘Zionist’: The Cost of Teaching Zionism as Politics

What do you tell a Jewish student who says that attacks against synagogues, while terrible, “are kind of understandable because they are Zionist synagogues”?

“What’s a Zionist synagogue?” you ask.

“You know, the ones that support the state of Israel,” the student responds.

Perhaps the question isn’t what a “Zionist synagogue” is, but rather how we arrived at a moment where such a label exists. What happened in the Jewish world that a Jew would call a synagogue “Zionist” in the first place?

For many years, educators working with Jewish students, in both formal and informal settings, have observed a troubling pattern. Although much can be said about Jewish education as a whole, one point stands out: Many Jews describe Zionism as a political movement because that is precisely how it has been taught. As a result, antizionism is often misinterpreted as a legitimate political debate about Israel’s government rather than an assault to Jewish peoplehood itself.

No comprehensive study currently documents how Jewish schools, summer camps, or youth movements teach Zionism. Yet surveying existing curricular materials and publicly available content paints a rather bleak picture. The dominant frameworks continue to present Zionism as a set of ideological options or political “streams,” obscuring its foundational role in Jewish identity and its historical continuity long before the modern state.

In a July 2024 letter to the editor of Jewish Rhode Island, Russell D. Raskin writes that “it was with profound sadness that I read the opinion piece titled ‘We need to speak with candor.’  The writer tells us that his children ‘feel estranged and ashamed’ of Israel, despite the fact that they were given the gift of attending Zionist summer camps in British Columbia.  Apparently, despite their summer Zionist experience, the children have allowed their political disagreement with the current government to overshadow their common cause with 8,000,000 endangered brothers and sisters at risk in Israel.”

Let’s revisit the sentence, “despite the gift of attending Zionist summer camps, children have allowed their political disagreement with the current government to overshadow their common” estrangement from Israel. Perhaps it is not “despite the gift of attending Zionist summer camps” but because of attending Zionist camps that Jewish kids arrive to feeling alienated from Israel. Raskin arrives at a similar conclusion: “I am left wondering,” he writes, “how Zionism is taught at summer camps.”

How is Zionism taught in Jewish educational settings? Though it is always risky to generalize, the growing phenomenon of Jewish students feeling estranged from Israel and Zionism demands serious inquiry. Consider, for example, “Integrating Zionism: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Israel Narratives,” an initiative of The Jewish Education Portal. The curriculum explores four core “narratives” of Zionism — Political, Labor, Cultural and Religious — with a thread of American Zionism woven throughout. Presenting “the many flavors” of Zionism, this approach ultimately frames Zionism as a set of political choices. The unit begins with “Political Zionism,” casting the movement primarily as a response to antisemitism and the need for emancipation. It then moves through Labor Zionism’s “new Jew,” Cultural Zionism, and Religious Zionism.

While this curriculum captures important ideological expressions that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, it misses a fundamental truth: Zionism did not appear sui generis. When Zionism is treated as just another modern -ism, students are encouraged to focus on the suffix rather than the root: Zion. Yes, the term “Zionism” was coined in the 1890s, but the movement it names was centuries in the making. Appearing for the first time in 1890 in an article by the Austrian Jewish journalist Nathan Birnbaum, “For the Honor and Peace of Our People,” Birnbaum himself points out that the word “Zionism” was meant to “express the connection between the Jews and Zion.”

Indeed, who was Yehuda Halevi, if not a lover of Zion? His twelfth-century poem “My Heart is in the East” is a testament to the enduring Jewish longing for Zion, for Israel. To teach Zionism without this deep civilizational context is to present it as an optional political ideology rather than an expression of Jewish peoplehood as old as the Jewish people themselves.

For the American Enterprise Institute, Samuel J. Abrams cites a 2020 Pew national survey in which a sizable gap exists between those in the 65-and-older age category and those under 30 in relation to attachment toward Israel: 67% to 42%. Similar figures emerge around “seeing Israel as an essential part of what being Jewish means to me” (53% and 33%). What accounts for such a steep drop from one generation to the next? There are, of course, several factors that go into understanding these results: having family in Israel, visiting Israel, feeling uncomfortable with strength and power, and/or feeling turned off by a nation state.

But let us go back to the Jewish student who rationalized an angry mob chanting “Globalize the intifada” or “Free Palestine,” or worse, vandalizing synagogue property as “understandable” because the synagogue is “Zionist.” When pressed further, the student reveals that she believes that a Zionist synagogue is one that supports the state of Israel.

“How does that work exactly?” you ask. “Should the synagogue remove from its liturgy all references to Israel and move the location of the ark so as not to face toward Jerusalem?”

The student responds, “not all Jews feel connected to Israel.”

True, but this logic is flawed. Not all Jews keep kosher, yet kashrut remains the governing norm. Not all Jewish men wear kippot, yet the obligation still exists. If one prefers an example outside the Jewish context: not all Muslim women wear the hijab, but the hijab is still a normative Muslim practice rooted in religious law.

The consequences of framing Zionism as merely political are profound. Once Zionism is presented as a political stance rather than as the modern expression of Jewish peoplehood, antizionism is easily misread as ordinary political disagreement. When this dimension of Zionism is not taught, students and institutions lose the ability to recognize antizionism for what it represents: an assault not on a policy but on the legitimacy of Jewish peoplehood itself. Antizionism is the contemporary mutation of Jew-hatred, crafted and disseminated by the Soviet Union’s sophisticated propaganda apparatus and now operating as the successor to antisemitism and anti-Judaism. As with its predecessors, its core function is to recast the Jew as a villain.

But treating Zionism primarily as a political ideology exposes a deeper, equally consequential issue within Jewish education: the uncertainty surrounding a basic question, “Who are the Jewish people, and where do they come from?” At first glance, the answer seems obvious. Yet many American Jews confidently reply, “Jews come from everywhere.”

I encounter this misconception regularly. Because I was born in Ukraine, many members of the American Jewish community often insist that I am “Ukrainian.” I explain that “I am not Ukrainian. I am Jewish.” This clarification invariably generates a stir: “Jewish is a religion,” they respond, “and Ukrainian is your ethnicity.”

This categorical error, reducing Jews to a religious group, creates profound confusion. It severs Jewish identity from its national origins in Israel. And it may well be one of the reasons American Jews failed, for so long, to recognize antizionism for what it is: not a critique of policy, but an assault on the Jewish nation itself.

In the Soviet Union, my mother had several encounters with antizionism, one of which came in the form of politinformatsiya, mandatory meetings at work, loosely translated as “political information sessions or briefings.” At such meetings: “they spoke about how we [the workers] should understand international events from a communist perspective. And many times, at such briefings, America and Israel would come up. In fact, almost always Israel. They urged Jews to come forward and denounce Zionism as a form of racism. And many times, there were Jews at such meetings who did just that.”

At these work meetings, I imagined my mother and perhaps all the Jews silently taking it, taking the abuse because “if we said anything, we would lose our jobs or worse, go to jail.” They must have bowed their heads in submission or worse, nodded in consent to perform the correct party line.

But here is the critical discovery: neither my mother nor the Jews in the Soviet Union who heard that Israel is a racist, Nazi, apartheid state confused this with political criticism. They knew it was Jew-hatred through and through.

How is it that Jews in the Soviet Union, without access to Jewish schools, summer camps, Hebrew classes, or any sanctioned institutions of Jewish learning, instinctively understood that antizionism was a form of Jew-hatred? And how is it that we, with an abundance of educational resources, somehow continue to produce Jews who remain confused about how to recognize and confront this third mutation of anti-Jewish hatred?

Why didn’t Soviet Jews mistake antizionism for mere “criticism of Israel”? The answer lies in one of history’s great ironies. Even as the Soviet state sought to erase Jewish identity, banning religious practice, suppressing Hebrew, and dismantling communal life, it simultaneously ensured that Jews could never forget who they were. Every official document, from internal passports to school rosters, stamped “Jewish” as a nationality.

In trying to unmake the Jews, the Soviets ended up making the point unmistakable: Jews were not simply adherents of a religion, but members of a nation. By classifying “Jewish” as an ethnicity, the Soviet Union inadvertently preserved the very truth it wished to suppress, and, in doing so, equipped Soviet Jews to recognize antizionism instantly as an attack on their collective existence.

In trying to unmake the Jews, the Soviets ended up making the point unmistakable: Jews were not simply adherents of a religion, but members of a nation. By classifying “Jewish” as an ethnicity, the Soviet Union inadvertently preserved the very truth it wished to suppress, and, in doing so, equipped Soviet Jews to recognize antizionism instantly as an attack on their collective existence.

Of course the prescription here is not to label Jews as the “other” as in the case of the Soviet Union, but to compel our Jewish educators and institutions to rethink how they present two fundamental concepts: Jewish peoplehood and Zionism. One would think this is an easy task, but many Jews and, most disturbingly, Jews who write from positions of authority, that is, from the ivory towers where they produce “scholarship” from within departments of Jewish Studies, posit that exile is a necessity and a Jewish nation state is an anathema. They are — as historian Gil Troy and Soviet Jewish refusenik Natan Sharansky have written — the Un-Jews, undoing not only the bond between the people and the land, but redefining Jewish identity by rejecting peoplehood.

The response to the Un-Jews is preventative. To ensure that our youth do not label synagogues as “Zionist” requires a three-part educational corrective. First, we must teach that Zionism is not a political position. Second, we must teach that Jews are an ethnic people who originate from Israel. And third, we must teach what antizionism is and how it functions.

In his recent essay for Sources Journal, Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology Shaul Kelner argues that “Jewish Americans must tackle the problem of the ‘sample of one,’” meaning the tendency to rely exclusively on Nazi antisemitism as the “paradigmatic model of twentieth-century anti-Jewish hatred.” He rightly notes that public schools are already “overpacked,” yet emphasizes that American Jews possess the ability to change the education delivered within their own institutions.

Educating Jewish youth about the third era of Jew-hatred, antizionism, is therefore an essential responsibility for Jewish schools. But this education must follow the proper order: first, teach that Zionism is the expression of Jewish identity and peoplehood; second, that Jews are a nation that comes from Israel; and third, that antizionism is an assault on that very peoplehood.