Why do I wince when I hear about Lehi or Irgun’s Jewish victims?

At first, the question itself might seem puzzling or silly. “Of course you should wince. They were Jews, they were innocent, and they shouldn’t have died.” Yet I don’t think it’s that simple, and it hints at a much deeper moral question. To understand what triggered this questioning, a look at history:

By summer 1941, Lehi was in a rough situation. In May, the launch of an underground radio station was meant as a portent of the spread of their ideological message throughout the yishuv. Instead, after it initially went on air and denounced the Jewish Agency as a “clique of aging lobbyists” and claimed that their “authority is less than that of a Jewish community in territories conquered by Germany,” the Haganah sprang into action. Sherut Yediot, the Haganah’s intelligence service, provided information to the British, leading to the capture of several key members of the organization.

Deeply strapped for cash, a robbery against the Ottoman Bank in Jaffa was planned and executed, but failed miserably. To make matters worse, rank-and-file members seemed to be getting arrested regularly by then, and the arrest of his deputy, Nathan Friedman-Yellin, in Aleppo left the organization moneyless and almost rudderless. Stern stepped in and assumed direct operational command himself. He authorized a series of robberies, the first of which went without a hitch but provided very little funds. Then, on January 9, 1942, the robbery that would ultimately lead to his death went awry.

Collateral Damage, or Collateral Murder?

This frisky January morning seemed like any other morning for Tzvi Kopstein, an employee of HaMashbir HaMerkazi, a wholesale cooperative affiliated with the Histadrut. Leaving a branch of the HaPoalim Bank carrying 1,093 palestinian pounds in a courier case as he routinely did, he made his way to the bus stop in front of Gymnasia Herzliya.

He apparently sensed he was being followed, but before he had time to react, three men, including Yehoshua Becker, 20, and Nissim Reuven, 19, pounced on him. Hit behind the head by a homemade truncheon, he dropped the case. The unnamed third member grabbed it, and the trio started running away. Kopstein got back on his feet and shouted, “Robbery! Pursue Them! Catch them!” as several passersby gave chase.

The trio split. The unnamed accomplice who snatched the money got away cleanly, while Nissim was quickly surrounded. He fired a few warning shots in the air, threw his gun away, and surrendered. He was then badly beaten by the crowd.

Becker kept running and entered a warehouse connected to Eden Cinema. Amongst the crowd pursuing him were two British policemen. Several shots were exchanged between them, and Avraham ben-Avraham was struck and killed.

Becker continued his attempted escape, and, as he emerged back onto the street, was faced with a third British policeman, leading to another exchange of gunfire. Matityahu Federman was shot. Becker eventually discarded his pistol and surrendered. He was also badly beaten by the crowd.

Two Lives Lost

Avraham ben Avraham was 38 years old and was born in Egypt. He had immigrated to Eretz Yisrael, married, and lived with his wife and six children in the Neve Shalom neighborhood of Tel Aviv. An Egged employee, he happened to be outside one of the transportation company’s facilities near the old Eden Cinema during the shoutout. He was hit in the head and died on the scene. It is possible he was a righteous convert, and some sources say his wife was pregnant with their 7th child at the time.

Matityahu Federman was born in Tel Aviv and was 17 years old. He attended an Alliance school, worked evenings in his father’s shop, and volunteered with the Tel Aviv fire brigade. He had also begun learning how to operate a locomotive for Palestine Railways, and was studying to obtain his license when he was killed.

Both were buried in the Nachlat Yitzhak cemetery, in the same block and row.

Injustice?

Becker maintained to the end of his life that Federman had been shot and killed by a British policeman, and that they had tampered with evidence, which showed that the fatal shot came from Becker’s gun. Nissim Reuven was sentenced to 14 years in prison, while Becker received a death sentence.

The robbery itself was not an armed robbery against a British or Ottoman bank, but a Jewish bank, with a case filled with Jewish money from Jewish workers. They were taking money from the very people they claimed to be fighting for. Regardless of whether Becker killed none, one, or both of the victims, the fact remains that they undoubtedly died as a result of the robbery and its consequences. The very fact that they carried firearms, and initially fired in the air, created the circumstances that led to their death.

Neither of the victims was British, Arab, military, police, involved in their pursuit, or any other mitigating factor. They happened to be there at the wrong time. A street robbery should have foreseen that passersby, most of them Jewish, would be involved. This could potentially endanger them. Becker’s claim that he only shot to frighten those pursuing him but never intended to hit anyone does not erase the reckless discharge of a firearm that led to death.

Their Lehi commanders ordered them only to shoot in the air, but not to kill anyone. This, in itself, is incriminating: they recognized from the outset of the operation that there were serious risks that Jews could be killed during the robbery. It also sullied the reputation of the Underground and led to unintended consequences, such as Avraham Stern’s death as well as at least two other Jews.

Pretty damning, isn’t it?

The Mandela Effect

Underground organizations engaged in a national struggle cannot be funded through taxation or state mechanisms, as the Haganah was. “Expropriation” for the sake of the people has been intrinsic to the financial mechanisms used by insurgencies that regard themselves as a proto-government of a future state. Whether these organizations gain fame, infamy, or a mix of both usually depends on whether they’ve achieved their goals, failed, or accomplished some while failing others.

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela became one of the principal advocates of eschewing non-violence and protests in favor of underground military action. He co-founded the MK organization and served as head of its National High Command. He personally planned sabotage operations, attacks on infrastructure meant to damage the South African economy. He was in direct command of the MK when it began bombing government and infrastructure targets, which included arson attacks and the destruction of public infrastructure. He listed the four steps the MK would have to take: sabotage first, then guerrilla warfare, followed by terrorism, and finally open revolution, depending on how events unfolded.

He initially ordered his men to avoid targets that could lead to the death of South African civilians, but over the years, well over 100 are recorded as having been killed by MK-linked violence. More collaborators, informers, and those suspected of being either were killed, including by infamous “necklacing”. This became a common execution method, some allegedly ordered by his wife, where a petrol-soaked tire would be placed around a suspected collaborator or informer and set alight. Mandela spent over 27 years in prison, and refused ever to repudiate the violent action he and his group engaged in, though he eventually agreed to take the path of peace.

To raise funds, the MK also engaged in “expropriation” of property, especially in its early years, but, unlike Lehi, also benefited from ANC fundraising, foreign donors, African governments funding it, and the Soviet bloc providing it with weapons, money, training, and logistics. The latter, in fact, provided the bulk of its military support.

Much like the MK under Mandela, or at least its beginnings, Lehi members were also told to avoid all unnecessary civilian deaths. If one believes that British rule was illegitimate and maintained through coercion of the population, the crimes committed to sustain resistance need to be evaluated differently from individual acts committed for private enrichment. The robberies were not meant for the personal enrichment of Lehi members, but for organizational purposes. There is no indication that, at any point, Lehi as an organization or its members committed robberies for personal gain, unlike the MK in South Africa.

Insurgencies also often have to operate in civilian environments because the occupying power itself, as was the case with the British, is embedded in cities and civilian institutions. That is not to say it excuses civilian deaths, but it does complicate any standard requiring underground warfare if it is only ever allowed to occur on isolated battlefields, which overwhelmingly favors the occupying power. In this case, their commanders had ordered Becker and his acolyte only to shoot in the air, and not to kill anyone.

Armed resistance will inevitably entail some risk to people who are not the intended targets. The difficult question becomes “How much risk is morally permissible?” We’re also forced to make a distinction between an organization’s policy and an operative’s actions: if Becker violated his commanders’ instructions by firing dangerously, how much blame attaches itself to Becker personally, and how much to Lehi? If Becker himself only fired in the crowd to frighten them, this is also evidence that civilian deaths were not part of the plan, and they were actively trying to mitigate them even though it could be described as negligent or reckless action under pressure.

This is compounded by the fact that Becker could have perceived himself in physical danger. It was known that, sometimes, unsympathetic crowds would severely beat captured underground members of Lehi and the Irgun. In fact, this is exactly what happened to Nissim, then Becker himself, as they were captured. This could have caused him to further panic. It could also be argued that Becker and Reuven, being 20 and 19, were more immature and inexperienced, and thus more likely to panic; this could mitigate the severity of their actions somewhat.

We do not know exactly what Becker could see, where Federman stood, the direction in which Becker fired, or how obvious the risk to those around was at the exact second he pulled the trigger. With Ben-Avraham, we do not even know if he was killed by Becker or British policemen. If he was in fact killed by the British, then the Lehi members can be blamed for initiating the situation, but policemen in this instance should be held to an even higher standard as far as discharging their firearms while civilians are present.

Trust the System?

It might seem hard for a modern reader, at face value, to believe Becker’s claims that the evidence was tampered with, that the bullet was switched, and that he did not kill anyone. America in 2026 is not the British Mandate of Palestine in 1942, and still there are to this day plenty of examples of police brutality, corruption, evidence tampering, false accusations, and a litany of other crimes that are much harder to get away with today than they were in the colonial British Mandate.

We know, for example, that Roy Farran, a highly decorated SAS officer seconded to the Palestine Police to command an undercover counterterrorist squad, kidnapped 16-year-old Alexander Rubowitz, tortured him, and then murdered him after trying to extract information about Lehi from him. Farran then confessed to his superior, Bernard Fergusson, who refused to give evidence during the court-martial trial. Farran’s own written account and confession of the murder were held inadmissible by the court, and he was acquitted, after which they immediately destroyed all copies of the confession alongside the evidence. Farran never faced any repercussions for his actions; neither did the members of his squad who accompanied him and participated in the torture, nor Fergusson.

Avraham Stern lost his life as a result of the chain of events leading back to this robbery. Though the exact description of what lead to his capture is outside of the scope of this essay, both a Jewish witness and British policeman present at the time of his arrest testified that Avraham Stern did not try to escape, was already in custody, and, despite the official police report claiming otherwise, was shot by Geoffrey Morton in cold blood as revenge for his many attacks on British targets.

Jews were not the only ones who accused the British police of planting evidence or breaking the law to get their man. As recorded by Matthew Hughes, during the Arab Revolt, there were many instances where the police were accused of planting evidence to lead arrests, such as an elderly Arab with no criminal record who was sentenced to ten years after three rounds of ammunition were supposedly discovered inside a coffee pot during a police search. His sentence was later reduced on appeal. Many such cases went to court and were dismissed, reversed, reduced on appeal, or upheld, while the condemned repeatedly affirmed their innocence and claimed they had been framed.

The British used what they called the “third degree,” beginning with the Arab revolt. Their coercive interrogation and torture methods were extensively documented. Multiple members of the underground, such as Irgun commander Binyamin Zeroni, reported being severely tortured in 1939 by CID members such as Ralph Cairns.

Entire books could be (and have been) written about the behavior of the British police during the Mandate, but none of it necessarily proves that Becker is guiltless. It does demonstrate, however, that we can’t easily dismiss his claim of being framed for the death of Federman.

It is not hard to imagine a scenario where the police realized that one or more of their members accidentally killed a bystander, and decided that it was simply more convenient to pin the blame on a Lehi member. After all, there is credible evidence that Morton, who had been in pursuit of Stern for four years at this point, was out for blood. He blamed Stern for the 1938 booby-trap bomb on a train that killed two British policemen. He or members of his team could have decided to shield members of the British police in Palestine from having to deal with accidental death in the pursuit of hated terrorists that they considered morally responsible for the death in the first place.

Or it could be Becker killed both. Or the British police did tamper with evidence in the Federman case, but Becker was responsible for the death of Ben-Avraham. Ultimately, what seems clear is that Becker did not set out to kill or murder the civilians, though this was the tragic result of what he helped set in motion. Causal responsibility (Lehi’s robbery caused their death) is not quite the same as direct responsibility (Lehi killed them).

Justice?

Just as it was possible to make a case about how morally reprehensible the actions of Nissim and Becker were, as well as make a case that they resided in a grey area of morality, it is also possible to go further to defend, excuse, or justify the actions of Lehi and their members.

Lehi was not only fighting a genuine war of national liberation against the British, but, at a time when Jews were being exterminated in Europe, against the very world power which had closed the doors of immigration to Palestine when Jews needed it the most. In Stern’s view, and by extension Lehi, the British were worse than the Nazis. The Nazis were the classical antisemites, but Britain was actively enabling their massacres by preventing Jews from fleeing to Palestine. There is a real case to be made that if an arsonist throws a Molotov cocktail through your window to burn you alive, a man who knowingly does nothing to help you escape or actively prevents you from fleeing the building is at least equally bad, if not worse, than the arsonist.

The organization engaged in what they termed “expropriation” due to a lack of funds. There is no doubt that Lehi would have preferred a similar arrangement to the one the MK had with Soviet Russia with another government (in fact, they pursued them fruitlessly). Denied access to taxation, banking, state revenue, or ordinary fundraising, they could justify their forced appropriation to wartime requisition rather than theft, and that “expropriation” was a matter of necessity and desperation. And a matter of necessity and desperation it was.

At this point in time, Lehi sincerely believed that without money, the organization would cease to function, and the struggle against the British would collapse, dooming both Jews in Europe and in Israel. As horrifying as the Apartheid system might have been, it is still not the wholesale eradication of a people in Europe, and destruction of its only possible national home in Eretz Yisrael, which could serve as shelter from those fleeing genocide. On that basis, then, one might say that if the MK were justified in what they did, even if not in all their details, how much more so Lehi.

The organization they chose for the expropriation was a part of the Histadrut. The Jewish agency kept all of its institutional funding for its own organizations, cooperated with the British, and was seen as not only fundamentally misguided but aiding a foreign enemy at the time the Jews needed to fight them the most. Lehi was not stealing from small shopkeepers and ordinary civilians. They were directly targeting a wholesaler that was part of the official Jewish organization that declined to give them funding, allow them to operate, and even cooperated with their enemy. At a time of desperation and necessity, expropriating a small amount of funds that would not impact civilians directly (except the employee truncheoned in the back of the head) weighs little on the scale when measured against wholesale extinction.

Lehi meant the operation to be both harmless and selfless. It was not for enrichment, it was not for glory, it was simply to keep the struggle going. Operational orders to minimize the risk of civilian casualties were clear; the warning shots were intended only to help the fighters evade pursuit if necessary. It was entirely reasonable to expect that it would allow their escape so that nobody would die. This would make the plan dangerous, but far from inherently murderous.

Federmen and Ben-Avraham were not murdered. They were not a target. They were not known to Becker. They were not killed because of their ethnicity, political beliefs, or as enemies to the cause. When Becker opened fire, attempting to scare those pursuing him, his physical safety was not the only thing in danger. It could have been a question of life and death, even. Under British rule, discharging a firearm in a place where civilians were present was considered a capital offense. Jews in the Underground were arrested, sentenced, and even executed for the act. Most famously, Shlomo Ben-Yosef, an Irgun member, was put to death in 1938 for discharging a firearm even though no one was harmed or injured.

One can make a serious case that firing warning shots was necessary for self-preservation. If those pursuing him might beat him severely or even kill him in the process, then firing warning shots can be morally distinguishable from firing at them, and thus morally justified. If they, or at least one of them, were shot by the British policemen, then the responsibility lies squarely on the trained and experienced officers who are supposed to prevent these collateral deaths from happening. Due to their training, and that they would have shot to kill and not to warn, they would bear more moral responsibility for their actions, even if the individual killed was not their designated target.

Perspectives

The case for Lehi’s moral justification in carrying out the robbery, and to excuse what happened as a tragic accident, can be summed up by saying that accidental civilian deaths do not retroactively make an otherwise legitimate resistance operation immoral, just as accidental civilian casualties do not invalidate legitimate conventional military operations.

When civilians are killed during an IDF bombing meant to hit a terror target, everyone understands that the IDF is doing its best; this was an unintended consequence, and if they could have done it differently, they would have. There was simply no other way to eliminate the target that wouldn’t further endanger IDF soldiers or civilians down the line, so they had to act.

The same could be said of Lehi; continued British rule was causing substantial Jewish suffering and preventing not only Jewish political independence, but also preventing those fleeing from the Nazis from finding shelter. Accidental casualties, in attempting to topple the British Mandate and to allow Jews to flee Nazi persecution, would be tragic but morally justified.

The purpose of the expropriation was legitimate, the funds were necessary, killing was explicitly forbidden, the deaths entirely unintended, and one participant reacted under pressure and legitimate fear for his life.

Still, none of this provides any consolation to Federman’s parents and two sisters, or the wife and six children of Ben-Avraham.

The case for moral condemnation begins by challenging almost all of these arguments. Accidental civilian deaths do not make a legitimate military operation immoral, just as calling a death “accidental” does not make the operation that caused it legitimate either. Lehi was not bombing a military or government installation on January 9, 1942. They were robbing a Jewish civilian employee, carrying the money of a Jewish cooperative, in a Jewish city. Kopstein was not a threat to Becker, Nissim, and their third accomplice; neither was Federman nor Ben-Avraham. They were not a threat to Lehi, or the Jewish national project, either. Lehi chose this operation, the victim of the robbery, and its location.

The deaths were not bizarre, unforeseeable accidents. They went into a populated area, robbed someone while carrying loaded firearms, and were pursued. This exact chain of events was foreseen as likely enough by their commanders, who ordered them to fire only into the air, not to kill. If there hadn’t been a serious possibility for things to go awry, they would not have had to carry loaded firearms in the first place.

Becker might have feared for his safety, but he put himself in this situation. Even if he did not fire the bullets that killed Federman and Ben-Avraham, he was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to their deaths.

Even the fact that Lehi sincerely believed that its survival was essential to the Jewish national struggle is irrelevant. Every revolutionary movement believes this to be the case. Every single one of them believes that their survival is indispensable, and it justifies the morally grey area they operate in. Throughout history, we’ve seen how many of them believe it also justifies downright evil acts.

The Haganah of it All

November 25, 1940. Yitzhak Sadeh, under authorization from Moshe Sharett, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, is directed to sabotage the SS Patria, carrying over 200 Jewish refugees. The plan was to make a small hole in the hull large enough to force the Patria to remain in Haifa, while political pressure built up to prevent their deportation. When the first explosive charge failed, a second, stronger charge was ordered placed on the boat.

The Haganah had badly miscalculated both the strength of the second charge and the conditions of the aging Patria. Instead of disabling the Patria, it tore open its side, causing it to roll over and sink in approximately sixteen minutes. 267 were killed, at least 200 of them Jewish refugees, and 172 were injured. Many had been trapped below deck and had no chance to escape.

What makes this unfortunate incident worse is that, according to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People, experts had warned the Haganah not to place the explosive where it was ultimately positioned. Over 200 refugees died as a result of their gross negligence.

Between 1944 and 1945, the Jewish Agency and Haganah engaged in what would come to be known as ‘the Saison.’ In an attempt to suppress the Irgun’s revolt against the British, which they had renewed towards the end of WWII, Haganah intelligence identified, abducted, interrogated, tortured, and delivered members of the Irgun to the British, as well as supplying them with a list of names that led to the arrests, detentions, and deportations of hundreds. They did this knowing full well that at least some of the men they turned over could receive the death penalty. Begin ordered the Irgun not to retaliate, fearing a civil war. Within months of the Saison’s end, the Haganah decided to join the Irgun and Lehi in fighting the British through what would be called the Hebrew Resistance Movement.

On July 22, 1946, as part of the Hebrew Resistance Movement activities, the King David Hotel was bombed by the Irgun, leading to the death of 91 people when the wing of the hostel hosting the British intelligence and military secretariat collapsed. While they quickly washed their hands of the operation publicly, the fact remained that they had originally agreed to it and were in constant communication with the Irgun, Moshe Sneh, chief of the Haganah General Headquarters, and Yitzhak Sadeh of the Palmach, who were both involved in planning discussions with the Irgun. 17 Jews died as a result. Everyone agrees that the Haganah initially approved the plan as executed. Most agree they had subsequent internal discussions about reconsidering, but diverged as to whether they attempted unsuccessfully to ask Begin to call it off.

In June 1948, shortly after Israel’s establishment, the Irgun arms ship ‘Altalena’ arrived from Europe carrying both weapons and fighters. Ben-Gurion’s government ordered Begin to transfer all of the arms to the newly formed IDF, and Begin refused, saying that some should remain under Irgun control and sent for the defense of Jerusalem, currently under siege. Ben-Gurion eventually ordered Yitzhak Rabin to shell the ship. The boat was sunk, and Rabin’s troops kept firing at the Irgun men even after the white flag was raised and Begin had ordered them not to fire back. Sixteen were ultimately killed, many of them described as waving white flags or swimming away from the sinking ship. All of the weapons were lost.

Lehi is blamed and condemned for the civilian casualties caused by their action. To a large extent, so is the Irgun. Why does the Haganah get a pass? Is it because the public inherently trusts the Haganah’s intention more? Why? Simply because they were part of the apparatus that formed the government, and thus gained more legitimacy? Is history written by the victors?

Why was the Irgun’s fight against the British so heinous that their members had to be tracked down, some of them tortured, and then turned over to the British for their anti-British activities, when the Haganah itself allied with them a few months later and partook in the same type of attacks the Irgun had been engaging in all along? The Irgun hadn’t changed; the Haganah’s position had. If the Irgun were terrorists for their fight against the British, then so were the Haganah. If the Haganah was justified in engaging in those attacks, then so were the Irgun.

If Lehi bears some responsibility for a civilian shot by British police while pursuing Lehi robbers, how much responsibility does Haganah bear for civilians subsequently killed by British forces reacting to a Haganah attack? If “foreseeable risk to innocent life” condemns Lehi, you then have to ask what it says about planting explosives on a ship packed with refugees despite experts saying not to.

Why is the Patria treated differently? If the claim is that it seemed more altruistic than a robbery, the expropriation can be reframed as part of a struggle to help save far more than 200 refugees, and open the gates of Palestine wide open to all Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Two men carrying two firearms in public is far less reckless and negligent than planting explosives on a boat carrying hundreds of refugees.

Why should the Lehi or Irgun be treated differently than the Haganah, if not the politics involved? Over 217 deaths of uninvolved Jewish civilians can be directly attributed to the Haganah pre-State. 27 deaths of uninvolved Jewish civilians can be directly attributed to the Irgun and Lehi, 17 of them also attributed to the Haganah.

Why is one routinely condemned while the other is not?

Historical Hypocrisy

The Hasmonean dynasty has taken a near-mythical status in our time, due to a tripartite mythologization. In America, certain segments have turned it into the Jewish version of a non-Jewish holiday, down to 8 nights of presents and a Hanukkah bush. In Zionist circles, and by extension the Dati Leumi and Modern Orthodox, the Maccabees are seen as proud Jewish fighters who fought for Jewish dignity and autonomy, rebelling against an occupuying empire and reclaiming Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel. And in further-right Orthodox circles, particularly the Haredi world, as vanguards against assimilation and change.

The reality of the Hashmoean dynasty is that they rebelled against the recognized imperial government, operated without anything resembling modern democratic authorization, conducted irregular warfare, killed fellow Jews regarded as collaborators or apostates, imposed enormous risks on civilian Jewish society who suffered from reprisal and collateral damage during warfare, and believed that their religious and national survival demanded revolt. There is simply no doubt that innocent Jewish bystanders died during their 25-year-long revolt against the Seleucid Empire.

Why, exactly, are they perceived differently from Lehi or the Irgun? Or, rather, why are the Lehi and Irgun not perceived as modern Maccabees? Is it because of time? Their success? Did they benefit from the same popular acceptance as the Haganah? Is it simply that successful insurgents become founders, while failed insurgents remain terrorists?

Which brings me back to my original question:

Why do I wince when I read about the Jewish victims of Lehi and the Irgun? Why don’t I wince when I read about those of the Haganah? The Maccabees? And if the victims had been innocent Arabs, would I wince just as much, or at all?

Would you?

In the next essay, Jewish-Arab intra-communal violence pre-State, Russia and Ukraine, and Hamas on October 7th.

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Some movements ideologically opposed to Zionism tried to replace the Land of Israel with another, but to no avail. The collapse of Territorialism and the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Oblast should have been easy to foresee; they were doomed to fail from the start. The vast majority of Jews were not interested in even considering a sovereign plot of land in Soviet Russia, Argentina, or Madagascar to call their own. If they were already living in Frankfurt, Paris, or Moscow, why should they leave everything behind to build a new life in a land that is also alien to them, but without their current amenities? The only reason for such a drastic life decision, at least for Jews not making it out of desperation, was because of the intense yearning and connection they felt to Palestine.

Jewish attachment proved to be too strong and too suprahistorical for Territorialism and Birobidzhan ever to have a fair chance at success. But what, exactly, is this attachment? Where does it come from? And why has it endured throughout centuries and across continents?

A Jew’s Right Hand Knows What to Do

A Jew’s entire life is focused on the Land of Israel, from the day he is born until the day he dies. The commandment of circumcision is directly linked to the inheritance of the Land promised to Avraham by G-d (Bereishit 17:7-11). Our Sages (Bereishit Rabbah 46:9) say explicitly that it was conditional: if Jews perform the commandment of milah, they will deserve to go into the Land, but if not, they would not be allowed to. This is why Yehoshua circumcised the people before crossing the Jordan.

After 120 years, once he passes, a Jew should make every effort to be buried in the Land of Israel. Yaakov demanded an oath from Yosef to be buried there (Bereishit 47:29-31). Yosef later asked the same of his brothers (Bereishit 50:25). The Talmud explains (Ketubot 111a) that one buried in the Land of Israel is considered as though he had been laid beneath the altar. Another opinion is that burial there provides atonement for your sins. In the Talmud Yerushalmi (Kilayim 9:3), it says that dying and being buried outside the Land provides a double loss: not only is said atonement provided by the Land lost, but when Mashiach comes, the resurrection of the dead will first apply to those in the Land, and those buried elsewhere will have to go through a painful process before resurrection.

Every other day in between the first and last is just as centered on the Land, too. The Shulchan Aruch’s first chapter, amongst the earliest instructions for how a Jew’s day should begin, rules that every G-d-fearing person should feel distress and anxiety over the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash (Orach Chayim 1:3). Before he gets dressed in the morning, Judaism demands that a Jew already be yearning and mourning for Jerusalem.

A Jew, or at least the pious amongst us, continues the Shulchan Aruch, should also make sure to wake up at midnight, sit on the floor, ashes smeared on their forehead, and recite the Tikkun Chatzot prayer, which laments the destruction of the Temple and beseeches G-d for its swift reconstruction as well as the ingathering of the exiles. It used to be that, not so long ago, this was the common practice not just of scholars and saints, but of cobblers and wagon-drivers, too. This was not restricted to Tisha B’Av, or confined to synagogue conduct, either.

Even if one is unable to rise at midnight but wakes up in the morning instead, the Shulchan Aruch tells him that, before he has even gotten out of bed and is only starting to regain his bearings, his first thoughts should be on G-d and then on the rebuilding of the Temple. This repository of Jewish law, which binds Jews the world over, continues, and states that, after washing hands and reciting the morning blessings, a Jew winds tefillin around his arm and affixes them between his eyes. Inside the black boxes is a passage (Shemot 13:11-15) that opens “It shall be when Hashem brings you to the land of the Canaanite… which He swore to your fathers to give you.” G-d’s promise of the Land of Israel is literally bound to his body before he has eaten or drunk anything.

A Jew then wraps himself in his tallit and prepares to leave for synagogue. As he passes through the doorway of his house, he stops and touches the mezuzah. Inside the case is the second paragraph of the Shema (Devarim 11:13–21), in which Hashem promises rain upon the Land in exchange for obedience, and exile as a consequence for sin. “You will quickly perish from the good Land that Hashem gives you.” Embedded in the literal walls of a Jewish home is a remembrance of our covenant with G-d, His promise regarding the Land, and the consequences for breaking said covenant with Him.

Clad in tallit and tefillin, he makes his way to synagogue. The Talmud (Berachot 30a) describes how not only a Jew’s mind, but his very body, must be directed towards the Land of Israel. If he is outside of it, he must face in its direction; if within it, face towards Jerusalem; if in Jerusalem, face the Temple Mount; if on the Temple Mount, face the Holy of Holies. This is how the Shulchan Aruch rules (O.C. 94:1), and the Talmud poetically describes it as: “All of Israel direct their hearts toward one place.” Whether a Jew prays in Poland, Morocco, Yemen, or Shanghai, they are all fixated on the same common point, whether now, tomorrow, or a thousand years ago. Jews have been dispersed to the four corners of the earth, but our minds, hearts, and souls have stayed in one place.

A Jew then begins to pray. Allusions and references to the Land and Jerusalem occur dozens, if not hundreds, of times throughout the liturgy. Three times on an ordinary day, the standing Amidah prayer is recited. Three times a day, a Jew asks G-d to “Sound the great shofar for our freedom, raise a banner to gather our exiles, and gather us together soon from the four corners of the earth to our Land”. He later asks for Jerusalem to be rebuilt, saying “Return in mercy to Yerushalayim, Your city. Dwell within it as You have spoken. Build it soon in our days as an everlasting structure.” He asks for the restoration of the Kingdom of King David, expresses hope that “May our eyes behold Your return to Tzion in mercy” and seals the blessing with “Who restores His Divine Presence to Tzion.”

After his prayers, he eats breakfast and, after finishing a meal including bread, recites the Grace after Meals, where he thanks Hashem for “a desirable, good, and spacious land” and asks for mercy on Jerusalem, Zion, and the Kingship of the House of David. This echoes what he asked earlier when, during the morning blessing of Ahavah Rabbah preceding the Shema, he prayed to be led “soon, upright, to our Land.”

The Talmud (Berachot 48b) explains the significance behind the Grace after Meals’s specific order: Moshe established the blessing for sustenance when the manna fell; Yehoshua established the blessing of the Land when they entered it; David and Shlomo established the blessing for the building of Jerusalem. The Talmud goes further and rules that, if one omits to mention either the Land or the Kingship of the House of David, he has not fulfilled his obligation and must recite the Grace after Meals again. On weekday meals, as a preamble to reciting Grace, we first say Tehillim 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Tzion.” On Shabbos, Tehillim 126: “When Hashem restores the return to Tzion, we will be like dreamers.”

An Everlasting Structure

As Rabbi Nachman famously declared, “וווּ איך גיי, גיי איך קיין אָרץ־ישׂראל”. “Wherever I am going, I am going to the Land of Israel.” Where a Jew is staying, too, his life is centered around the Land of Israel. When he builds a house, a Jew is meant to leave a square amah of wall unplastered, opposite the entrance, where guests would see it. Bava Batra 60b, and as later codified in Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chayim 560:1), declares that the Jewish home is not permitted to look complete while Yerushalayim remained incomplete.

As he stands beneath the chuppah on his wedding day and he hears the words “If I forget you, Yerushalayim, let my right hand forget its skill” (Tehillim 137:5), the custom is that ashes are placed on his head at the spot where tefillin rest. The Talmud (Bava Batra 60b) derives from the verse “If I do not raise Yerushalayim above my highest joy” that even at what is meant to be one of the happiest moments in his life, a Jew should remember, and mourn for, the Temple, Jerusalem, and lament our Exile. The Rema (Orach Chayim 560:4) records the later Ashkenazic custom of breaking a glass, explicitly to remember Yerushalayim. The joy of the wedding also cannot be permitted to be complete while Yerushalayim is in ruins.

A Jew’s calendar follows the climate of the Land of Israel. The festivals are structured around its agricultural seasons: Pesach as Chag HaAviv, the festival of Spring; Shavuot is tied to the wheat harvest and the first fruits; Sukkot as Chag HaAsif, the Festival of the Ingathering of the harvest. The Mishnah’s laws of prayer for rain follow the agricultural requirements of the Land, not the weather conditions of Poland or Persia or Morocco. The months themselves function according to the sighting of the New Moon in Israel, not Babylonia, Egypt, or Syria. Throughout all of Jewish history, Jewish communities living in very different climates prayed according to a calendar fixed for a land that most of them had never seen.

In the Musaf prayer of every festival, during what is meant to be a celebration, a Jew declares: “Because of our sins we were exiled from our Land and distanced from our soil,” and we ask to be returned to it. At the end of Pesach, at the end of Yom Kippur, in communities scattered from Baghdad to Amsterdam, Jews wish each other “לשנה הבאה בירושלים”. “Next Year in Jerusalem”.

The Hebrew calendar reaches its emotional nadir on Tisha B’Av. The Mishnah in Ta’anit 4:6 lists the catastrophes on that day: the decree against the wilderness generation entering the Land, the destructions of the First and Second Temples, the fall of Beitar, and the plowing of Jerusalem. For Nine Days, we observe mourning traditions, following the Talmudic direction that “When Av enters, we diminish joy.”

Throughout Jewish History, Tisha B’Av and the morning after have always been ominous. In 1096, thousands of Jews were murdered, forcibly converted, or driven to kill themselves or their families; this is recorded in the lamentations we recite that day. The English Edict of Expulsion of 1290 fell on Tisha B’Av. So was the 1306 expulsion of Jews from France. 1492, the day Jews were kicked out of Spain. 1914, the beginning of World War I, which World War II continued. 1941, Hermann Goring orders Reinhard Heydrich to prepare the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” 1942, beginning of the mass deportations of the Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka, where 300,000 died. 1994, the AMIA Jewish center is bombed, with 85 killed and hundreds wounded. 2005, Jews are kicked out of Gush Katif, dismantling the protections which Disengagement critics claim could have prevented October 7. There are too many tragedies, or their inception, which fell on this Tisha Be’Av to count.

Despite all the tragedies that mar this day, the primary reason a Jew fasted, sat on the floor, and recited the kinot was to mourn the destruction of the Temple, the origination of all those calamities. He also recites Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi’s Tzion HaLo Tish’ali, which addresses Tzion directly: “Tzion, will you not inquire after the welfare of your captives?” Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi yearned his entire life to live in the land of Israel, left everything behind in his mid-60s, boarded a ship, and made his way to Jerusalem. According to contemporary documents found in a geniza, as he finally reached the gates of Jerusalem, he was murdered by a passing Arab.

A Place for Him in the Lower Worlds

The melding of even ordinary Diasporic Jewish life with the Land of Israel did not arise on its own. It was the downstream influence of our foundational covenant between Avraham and G-d, repeated across the span of the entire Torah, in which the Land is not an accessory or an add-on to the promise He made to Avraham at the Covenant Between the Parts, but rather its primary reward.

The first command Hashem issued directly to Avraham is geographical: “Go from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house to the Land that I will show you” (Bereishit 12:1). Almost immediately afterwards, he continues, “To your descendants I will give this Land” (Bereishit 12:7). Hashem commands him to look in every direction and walk through its entirety: “Rise and walk through the Land, its length and its breadth, for I will give it to you.” The Land of Israel is described as covenantal, eternal, and that despite temporary exiles, G-d would eventually return us to it: “The Land upon which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants… I will return you to this soil” (Bereishit 28:13–15).

The Exodus does not stop with an escape from Egypt. It was not about departing a place, but entering another. Moshe was not sent as a redeemer to remove us from bondage. “Let My People go… so that they shall serve Me,” but to bring us to our Land. To see the Jewish arrival to the Land of Israel as a refuge from persecution is a misreading and misunderstanding of the entire reason why Jews went down to Egypt in the first place.

In Devarim, Moshe explains to the people that the Land creates a deeper bond between them and G-d. Unlike Egypt, which relies on human irrigation, the Land of Israel relies on our relationship with G-d: “A Land that Hashem, your G-d, seeks. The eyes of Hashem, your G-d, are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year” (Devarim 11:12). The act of agriculture is not an autonomous process left to human effort but responsive to our covenantal faithfulness. Devarim 11:13–21 reiterates both sides of that responsiveness explicitly: blessing for obedience, exile for sin.

King Solomon understood, at the moment of the Temple’s dedication, what the building would become after its destruction. His prayer, recorded in Melachim Alef 8:48, anticipates Jewish exiles who would pray “toward their land which You gave their fathers, the city You chose, and the house I built for Your name.” The ever-narrowing description, from Land to city to house, became the blueprint Chazal later codified as the directional structure of Jewish prayer.

Daniel in Babylon (Daniel 6:11) provides the Bible’s exilic model par excellence. He is politically subjected to another empire, geographically displaced and in exile, and yet his windows face Jerusalem. Three times a day he stands still and prays in that direction. The verse reaffirms the centrality of the Land in Jewish life during exile, long before the current post-Second Temple exile began.

The Land is not a means to an end, but the end itself. This is why, critically, exile does not dissolve our covenant. Even when you dwell in the land of your enemies, Hashem declares, His promise will not be annulled. Devarim 30:1–5 describes the full arc of our return: “Hashem, your G-d, will restore your captivity and have mercy upon you. He will return and gather you from all the peoples… Hashem, your G-d, will bring you to the Land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it.” The Rambam (Hilchot Melachim 11:1) cites this passage as the Torah foundation for belief in the restoration of land by Mashiach.

Sotah 14a asks why Moshe urgently wished to enter the Land of Israel, to the point of praying 515 different prayers, even begging to lose everything he had, but to be permitted to enter as a poor man. The Talmud’s explanation for why is not national sentiment or sentimentalism: “Israel was commanded many mitzvos that can be fulfilled only in Eretz Yisrael. Let me enter the Land so that they may all be fulfilled through me.”

The Torah is clear: Jews are not in the land to till it and benefit from its fruits; this is the incidental benefit of being its caretaker. Jews are in the Land of Israel because it is central to our covenant with Hashem, and where we are meant to fulfill it in its entirety. In the language of our Sages (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 5:1), the purpose of the entirety of creation was for Jews to create a dwelling place for G-d in this lowest and furthest point of creation, through His Torah and His commandments, specifically in the Land of Israel.

Mourning and Rebuilding

After the destruction of the Second Temple, some Jews wished to abandon meat and wine entirely in mourning. The Talmud (Bava Batra 60b) records the discussion. Rabbi Yehoshua eventually rejected permanent total mourning as impossible to sustain. What Chazal created instead was meaningful but manageable mourning, such as leaving a portion of the house unfinished, smashing a glass cup beneath the chuppah, and peppering daily references or Psalm recitations.

Moed Katan 26a requires tearing one’s garment upon seeing the cities of Judah, Jerusalem, or the site of the Temple in its destruction. Upon seeing Jerusalem in ruins, one recites: “Tzion has become a wilderness. Yerushalayim, a desolation”(Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayim 561). Then, a Jew is required to tear the cloth of the garment he is currently wearing.

In Ta’anit 30b, the Sages declared that, “Whoever mourns for Yerushalayim merits to see its rejoicing.” The Nachemprayer we recite on Tisha B’Av anthropomorphically addresses the city directly: “Comfort, Hashem, our G-d, the mourners of Tzion and the mourners of Yerushalayim, and the city that is mourning, destroyed, disgraced, and desolate.”Jewish mourning was never about the past as much as our present, and our hopes that our promised future will materialize within our lifetime.

It would also be a misreading and a misunderstanding of Jewish mourning for Jerusalem and the Temple to treat it as nostalgia for what once was, or as a wish to return to sovereignty for sovereignty’s sake. Neither is it symbolism, nor a reminder of what we’ll finally receive until Mashiach; until then, it’s simply out of reach. The objection that Judaism never seriously expected Jews to inhabit the Land again until after the coming of Mashiach does not survive a serious reading of halachic literature.

The Mishnah (Ketubot 13:11) grants a legally privileged position to the spouse who wishes to move to the Land of Israel within the boundaries of Jewish marriage law: “All may compel ascent to Eretz Yisrael. None may compel departure from it.” This was written down and codified after the destruction of the Second Temple, when most Jews already lived outside of the Land. Talmud (Ketubot 110b) rules that a person should always live in Eretz Yisrael, even in a city whose majority are not Jewish, rather than live outside it even in a city whose majority are Jewish. It describes the one who lives there as comparable to one who has a G-d, and the one who lives outside as comparable to one who does not. This deliberately extreme rabbinic language is not rhetorical noise. It describes Eretz Yisrael as the normative geographical setting for the full Judaic life, and the spiritual consequences of exile.

Ketubot 112a records that our sages did not simply pray toward the Land or write about it. Rabbi Abba kissed the stones of Akko. Rabbi Chanina repaired the roads so travelers would not speak badly of the Land. Rabbi Chiya bar Gamda rolled in its dust. The Talmud cites Tehillim 102:15 as the basis for their actions: “Your servants cherish her stones and favor her dust.” The Rambam later codified this as praiseworthy behavior in Hilchot Melachim 5:10, and many to this day kneel and kiss the ground after they have landed in the Land.

Gittin 8b permits instructing a non-Jew to write a deed of property purchase on Shabbat, an act otherwise Rabbinically restricted, for the acquisition of a house in Israel: “For the sake of settling Eretz Yisrael, the Sages did not apply their decree.” The value of settling the Land of Israel was sufficient to displace a Rabbinic restriction, which would usually otherwise entail a severe punishment if broken. The Sifrei on Devarim 80 records that Rabbi Elazar ben Shamua and Rabbi Yochanan HaSandlar were traveling abroad to study Torah, but wept and tore their garments when they remembered the Land and turned back, declaring that dwelling in the Land of Israel is equivalent to all the mitzvot of the Torah.

The Ramban, in his fourth addition to the Rambam’s list of positive commandments, argues that we were commanded to possess the Land given to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, and that we must not leave it desolate or in the hands of another nation. He understands this as a command applying throughout the generations. A Jew, at any time in history, is individually commanded to come and settle in Israel if he can do so. It is worth noting that the Rambam himself does not list it as a separate positive commandment in the same form. That omission has generated substantial halachic discussion ever since.

An individual mitzvah to settle the Land is not, without further argument, a command to establish a modern nation-state in itself. It does, however, make it impossible to reduce the classical Jewish relationship with Eretz Yisrael to prayer and poetry alone. The Land was not meant to be only remembered from afar; Jews were praised for walking upon it, purchasing a plot of land in it, living within its boundaries, and refusing to leave. The Rambam (Hilchot Melachim 5:9) explains that the only three reasons where one is permitted to leave are to escape danger, learn Torah from a greater master than currently dwells in the Land, or to find a spouse.

Exile Was Never Home

To read our tradition honestly is to reject two caricatures simultaneously.

The first is the Zionist caricature: that traditional Judaism sanctified passivity, accepted exile as a permanent ideal, and produced a people so spiritually anesthetized by two thousand years of powerlessness that Herzl had to wake them up by inventing Jewish national consciousness from scratch. This is historically false. As the sources above make clear, Jews did not require a nationalist movement to tell them they were in exile or that Jerusalem mattered. They already knew, breathed it, lived it. It was built into their walls, their prayer books, their wedding ceremonies, and the very rhythm of their lives. And, as we’ll see in later installments, religious attempts to revive organized Jewish life in the Land long predated the 19th century.

The second is an anti-Zionist caricature that cuts in the opposite direction: that acceptance of Divine punishment of exile meant acceptance of exile as the permanent and spiritually complete condition of Jewish existence, and that any impatience with exile or active desire to return to the Land must therefore be a recent innovation imported from secular nationalism. This, too, fails against both the record of history and Halachic sources.

The classical structure of exile was this: exile followed our failure to obey our part of our covenant with Hashem and was Divinely governed, but did not annul our covenant. Jews were commanded to live religious lives within our exile; Jewish communities could be created, built up, and flourish, but exile was still exile. Vayikra 26 describes it as punishment and displacement. Devarim 30 describes return as the covenantal promise awaiting fulfillment. Though the majority of Jews have spent the majority of our storied history in exile, it is not the norm, desirable, or acceptable. We survive in exile, but to truly live requires dwelling in our Land according to the dictates of Hashem.

Convenience Not Covenant

While it’s hard to extricate Judaism entirely from Zionism, if you have gone through the long series of essays I’ve written on these various Ideological Zionisms and their counterparts, it’s hard to deny that these variations on Zionism were all rooted in ideologies foreign to Judaism. They sprouted from 19th-century European Nationalism, Constitutional Liberalism, Socialism, Romanticism, Nietzsche, Canaanism, and a slew of other intellectual milieux. Even the Revisionist movement, which touted itself as more connected to Jewishness and traditionalism than their socialist competition, had far more to do with Jewish history and historical Jewish culture than it had to do with Torah observance.

Revisionism’s Maximalist offshoot, with its demands of the restoration for a Jewish Kingdom, did attract more traditional and Orthodox Jews than others, but this was quite possibly in large part due to, or at least initiated by, Lehi’s Abraham “Yair” Stern own embrace of religion around his marriage, and his insistence that only through keeping Shabbat, Kashrut, Family Purity laws and otherwise living a Jewish life, that not only the liberation of the Land but maintening it would be a possibility. This was not a view he publicized much, and certainly not one he imposed on Lehi, which was very ideologically diverse. Still, it did create an opening for more Orthodox Jews to join his movement than others who were hostile to traditional Judaism, often overtly so.

For the Ideological Zionists, the Land of Israel was not inherently special. If anything, it was incidental to their stated goals, and choosing it had nothing to do with the location. It was purely as a result of the Jewish attachment to it. Bundists and Yiddishists bet on the Jewish attachment to the land they had lived on for centuries, and formulated their alternatives to Zionism and counterproposals on this foundation. Their inevitable breakdown can be attributed to, though not in its entirety, their failure to fully take into account the depth of the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel. They believed it could be swapped out for something else. After all, if the land is not inherently special and is only representative of history, then why not swap it for another, with a much more recent and relevant history?

The already existing attachment was not Zionism. Jewish life had been oriented toward the Land for thousands of years before it appeared. That orientation was based on Torah, our covenant, the messianic promise, Jewish law, practices, and liturgy, not a modern political ideology.

Herzl did not teach Jews to say “to our Land.” Their grandparents had already said it three times a day. What Herzl supplied was a theory of political agency for Jews to adopt, along the lines of the nationalist political theories taking hold in Europe at the time. For the man who had once declared as the solution to antisemitism that Jews worldwide get baptized publicly on the same day to gain acceptance, Zionism was first and foremost a modern political theory for how Jews should become a nation like all others, dwelling in a land of its own, wherever that was.

Give Us a King

The initial hostility of the traditional Torah world to Zionism is easy to understand. It was very much perceived as a modern version of what the Jewish Nation told the prophet Shmuel (Shmuel I, 8:5-7): And they said to him, “Behold, you have grown old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now, set up for us a king to judge us like all the nations.” And the thing was displeasing in the eyes of Samuel, when they said, “Give us a king to judge us,” and Samuel prayed to the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people, according to all that they will say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from reigning over them. In our covenant with G-d, the Land of Israel was never meant to be a Land like other Lands, and a Jew to be like non-Jews. Paris should be in France, not Netanya, and a Jew could live in France, but France could not live in a Jew.

While we’ve seen that the Land of Israel has always been central to Judaism and Jewish Law, those sources do not, by themselves, establish whether nationalism is a Torah value. The questions on the intersection between Zionism and Judaism needs to answer whether any particular sovereign polity possesses automatic religious sanctity, whether human political action may accelerate or initiate geulah, what halachic status the events of 1948 hold, whether the modern Israeli government exercises any form of the authority of the House of David, or whether attachment to the Land of Israel requires acceptance of Zionist ideology, or if rejection of Zionism requires distancing from aliyah, yishuv Eretz Yisrael, or the covenantal claim to the Land.

The tradition that Ideological Zionism drew upon when it appropriated words like return, redemption, nation, and Land was genuine and long-extant for the Jewish people. Zionism did not invent a Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, but rather re-imagined it for a 19th-century European Nationalist context. The biggest divergence between Judaism and Ideological Zionism is the idea of why Jews should live in the land of Israel. Ideological Zionism itself proudly proclaimed that they were a break with traditional, spurned Jewish observance, and reframed the attachment to the Land from Religious and covenantal to historical and cultural. They themselves openly proclaimed that their movement was distinct and divorced from Judaism. The traditional Jewish world retorted that there was never a marriage in the first place.

Three Answers to Three Questions

From a Torah perspective, Ideological Zionism is most certainly not Judaism. From the Ideological Zionist perspective, Judaism is most certainly not Zionism either. Simply because both a secular ideology and the Torah agree on the importance of living on the Land of Israel doesn’t mean that there is any other junction point. One calls upon Jews to be a holy and separate nation unto G-d; the other, to be a nation like all the others, whether it keeps its Jewish seasoning or not depending on the Zionism.

If Jews are bound to reject an ideology that clashes, contradicts, or opposes Torah, it’s also important to remember that Zion itself, and our attachment to it, is part of Torah. To maximally reject Herzl’s views in a way that severs this connection is just as opposed to Torah as to embrace it. To reject secular ideology is not to embrace exile.

Still, Ideological Zionism is not the entire sum of the term Zionism; thus the qualifier. Before Herzl, proto-Zionism had a Rabbinical face. The entire Religious Zionist movement developed almost entirely separately from the Ideological Zionist movement, and the Torah opposition to it developed almost entirely separately from the Torah opposition to Ideological Zionism as well. The Religious Zionist movement itself, after all, rejected the framework of Ideological Zionism almost in its entirety.

To complicate matters more, then comes the question of Zionism after 1948, or Zionism as a Political Question. Now that the State exists, should it be Jewish, Democratic, Jewish and Democratic, or Neither? There, also, both Ideological Zionisms, Religious Zionism (and Religious Anti-Zionisms), have a plethora of answers to give, most of which are not wholly connected either to their views of Ideological Zionism or Religious Zionism as well.

Two Jewish Movements, Three Opinions on Zionism.

In the next installment, the History of Religious Zionism before Herzl.

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You can access the first eight essays on Ideological Zionism here: 1. Looking Backward to Look Forward, 2. Which Way, Hebrew Man? 3. The Zionisms That Never Were (Part 1), 4. The Zionisms That Never Were (Part 2), 5. No Zion, No Cry (Part 1) , 6. No Zion, No Cry (Part 2), 7. No Zion, No Cry (Part 3), 8. No Zion, No Cry (Part 4)

Two Jews, Three Opinions. As anyone who has studied a modicum of Talmud knows, a limitation of three opinions represents a very restrained approach to any subject. Few topics in Judaism have been both as controversial and as far-reaching as the subject of Zionism. There is nary a Jew not affected by the discourse on some level, positively or adversely, but most often, both.

To limit Zionism to the Land of Israel is to completely misunderstand what Zionism, and the opposition to it, are in their essence. After all, not all Zionists advocated for the State to be built in the Land of Israel. Some anti-Zionists objected to the creation of the State, yet not only approved but encouraged Jews to live in the Land of Israel. A follower of Herzl will have very little in common with a resident of Judea and Samaria, living on an isolated hilltop, who has dedicated his life to the teachings of Rav Kook and his disciples on Zionism. A self-described anti-Zionist and a Likud voter might share the same type of political opinions on the State. A traditional Moroccan man who served in the army and self-describes as a Zionist might have religious views regarding the sanctity of the State far closer to Satmar than it does Rav Kook.

None of these are contradictions. They are all part of the same discussion, far more faceted than most people realize. Zionism came to answer the Jewish Question the Jewish way.

The Four Questions

Beginning with the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753, the non-Jewish world began to gradually ask 1) “Are the Jews an alien nation in our midst, or a religious group part of our nation?”, and 2) “How should we treat them in light of this?” With the rise of nationalism, the question gained a sense of urgency.

Simultaneously, the Jewish world was caught in between the winds of the Enlightenment, Emancipation, and Tradition. The Jewish Jewish Question became 1) what is the Jewish relationship to the concept of Nationhood and, regarding the fourth unspoken wind, 2) “Is there any way we can stop people from spontaneously barging into our towns, ghettos, and cities, and massacre us? Like, for real.“

To limit Zionism to Herzl also leads to a complete misunderstanding of not only Zionism itself, but the scope of the debate. What would now be classified as Religious Zionism and Religious Anti-Zionism was a debate already raging prior to his birth. Rabbis Yehuda Alkalai and Tzvi Hirsch Kalisher both produced many works, pamphlets, and arguments, and had public debates centering on the idea of Jews moving to the Land of Israel and not only rebuilding the land, but creating quasi-State apparatuses, as well. There was also strong pushback from figures such as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, who considered it a deviation from the path of Judaism.

After the creation of the State, Zionism gained another dimension, encapsulated in the question, “Jewish and Democratic, Jewish, or Democratic?” It would be yet another mistake to think that this is merely an extension of Zionism as a religious or ideological question. In fact, for many, it is all but separate from them, only connected by the central essence of Zionism but on a different plane altogether.

Therefore, to develop a full understanding of Zionism, it must then be understood that Zionism is like the three-pronged vertex of a cube. Its axes are:

1) Ideological Zionism

2) Religious Zionism

3) Political Zionism

These are not unrelated, unconnected debates. They all branch out from the singular point, land as such, and remain deeply connected.

Axes and Axels

To make metaphors worse, each of these three axes comes with its own internal debates. And their respective questions can be summed up as:

1) What is the Jewish Nation supposed to be?

2) Is the State of Israel holy?

3) Does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish State?

These three questions serve as axles to the three axes.

Ideological Zionisms and their polar opposites were concerned not simply with the idea of establishing a State or not, but with the continuation of the Jewish people as a whole, as well as the very notions of nations and peoplehood. Some were focused on building both, while others were focused on one or the other. Yet others believed that if you built one, the other would naturally happen.

They can be broadly divided into two categories: those who believed in building a State, and those who believed in building a People. Both categories contained within them what could be classified as pro-, non-, and anti-Zionisms.

State-Building Zionisms focused first and foremost on a State, though it had opinions on what kind of people it wanted that State to foster, or people to foster to create the State. Their primary focus was:

• Political Zionism: A sovereign nation broadly modeled on European constitutional states, established via diplomacy and recognized by international law.

• Practical Zionism: A nation rebuilt through settlement, labor, and life in the Land rather than primarily through diplomacy.

• Synthetic Zionism: A nation established through both diplomacy and practical nation-building.

Dominant Ideological Zionisms were a hybrid of State-Building and People-Building Zionism, in that they were both involved in building the State while also developing an ideology that had concrete effects on the people building it.

• Labor Zionism: A productive, socialist Hebrew nation created through labor and equality.

• Revisionist Zionism: A proud, independent nation defined by strength, liberty, and self-defense.

The Zionisms for a New Jew were those who were concerned first and foremost with a renewal of the Jewish people in their image, where the mechanisms of the State mattered less.

• Restorationism: A modern Jewish nation restored to its ancestral homeland.

• Cultural Zionism: A spiritual and cultural center inspiring Jewish life everywhere.

• Muscular Zionism: A physically strong and confident nation replacing exile’s weakness.

• Vitalist Zionism: A heroic nation reinventing itself through will, power, and renewal.

• Hebraism: A unified Hebrew nation bound together by language and culture.

The Zionisms for a New Society were those that were less concerned with the concept of Jewish peoplehood and instead wanted to create an entirely new paradigm that would then reshape the people.

• Canaanism: A new Hebrew nation severed from Diaspora Judaism and ancient exile.

• Binational Zionism: A Jewish national home sharing sovereignty equally with Arab nationalism.

• Red Zionism: A classless socialist society built through collective agricultural life.

• Lechi–Eldad Zionism: A fully liberated Hebrew kingdom restoring complete Jewish independence.

The Ideological Non- and Anti-Zionisms agreed with the premise that the Jewish people had to be re-invented, or at least go through a dramatic change, in order to persevere and perpetuate. They disagreed that it had to be through the land of Israel. A few were focused on creating a physical State for the Jewish people to dwell in, but most believed that Jews had transcended the need for a physical territory to inhabit.

A Land other than Zion was necessary. Palestine was too far and too impractical, or even too foreign, for Jews to inhabit. They believed that:

• Territorialism: A secure national homeland anywhere capable of protecting Jewish survival was necessary, and Palestine was a pipe-dream preventing real solutions from being implemented.

• Birobidzhanism: A secular Soviet Yiddish nation rooted in socialist territory would solve the Jewish Question.

• Autonomism: A dispersed nation sustained through cultural and communal self-government. Everywhere Jews lived would function as semi-independent States based on a Federalist system.

The Landless Non and Anti-Zionisms believed that the Jewish people did not need land, and to be a Jew was a private matter at best, and something to abolish at worst.

• Bundism: A socialist Yiddish nation flourishing autonomously wherever Jews already live.

• Yevsektsiya: Jewish nationhood is a bourgeois concept that should disappear into the universal Communist revolution.

• Diaspora Yiddishism: A secular Yiddish civilization flourishing without political sovereignty.

• Emancipationism: Jews should become equal citizens within the nations where they live, and live publicly as citizens and privately as Jews.

• Classical Reform: A universal religious community rather than a separate nation.

Today, the Ideological Zionism discussion is almost entirely relegated to academic discussions and has very little impact either theoretically or practically on the average Israeli, much less a Jew living in the Diaspora. Most recognize the names Herzl and Jabotinsky, but fewer and fewer are familiar with Dubnow, Nordau, or Ahad HaAm; much less so the content of their works, Herzl and Jabotinsky included.

Now that there is an Israeli state, and Israeli people, and an Israeli culture, there are still a few Zionisms who tried to fan the flame alive, and direct the Israeli destiny towards a new destination (more on them in a later installment) but for the most part, things have taken a turn of their own, and there’s not much to do but go along, ideology-wise. It’s much easier to shape a cake before it’s been baked, after all. The same holds true of the ideological Non- and Anti-Zionisms. While it might be trendy online to say you’ve adopted Bundist views or call yourself a Yiddishist, the reality is that there is no turning back the clock, and those are ideologies that cannot be salvaged from the dustbin of History.

The debate about Ideological Zionism might have died down, but this is still the Zionism that gets the most reaction from the Haredi society. Today, the almost entirety of the Haredi world, when they protest and proclaim opposition to Zionism, are directing their ire and invectives to the secular zionism of the past. This is why you can find a dedicated anti-Zionist in Borough Park, and one in the Upper East Side, but the former is lamenting that Israel is not destroying Hezbollah or striking Iran harder, while the latter laments about how the Two-State Solution has not been implemented and calls Netanyahu a genocide-enabler. Their oppositions to Zionism are themselves diametrically opposed.

Is Zionism Judaism?

One of the statements most likely to raise the blood pressure of the average historically-minded or politically-minded Orthodox Jew, though the very same statement will sometimes be repeated by some Orthodox Jews, is the idea that Zionism is simply lehavdil Judaism, or vice versa. Many get very offended at this formulation, while many more get very offended that Orthodox Jews are offended at the proposition in the first place.

This is again an issue of definition of terms. If “Zionism” is translated as “attachment to the land of Israel,” then even Satmar and Neturei Karta would agree that they are Zionists. If “Zionism” is translated as “the philosophy of Theodor Herzl,” then even the most ardent religious Zionist who serves in a combat unit and lives on a hilltop is just as anti-Zionist as Satmar and Neturei Karta. If we define “Zionism” as “the teachings of Rav Kook”, then the spectrum becomes much narrower, with very few embracing either extreme.

Disentangling the relationship between Judaism lehavdil and each form of Zionism is only one piece of the puzzle that needs to be addressed. The issues that surround Religious Zionism and Religious Anti-Zionism are many and complex. In this series, we will broadly be covering:

• The Land of Israel’s importance in Judaism prior to Zionism, where we explore the aforementioned initial question.

• What is Religious Zionism today?, where we will differentiate how the term is colloquially used versus what it really means.

• The Three Oaths, the Talmudic argument at the core of the Religious Zionism vs Religious Anti-Zionism debate.

• The Religious Case against Zionism Beyond the Three Oaths

• The distinctions between Am Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael, the State & the Government

• A Sovereign State through the lens of Jewish Law

• The History of the Religious Zionist movement Pre and Post-State

• The History of the Religious Anti-Zionist movement Pre and Post-State

• The Fractures in Religious Zionism post-Gush Katif

• What Is the Chabad View on Zionism?

• The Haredi Draft, where I will finish the series of essays I had already begun on the subject

• Schroedinger’s Zionist: where I’ll discuss Zionism in Halacha, Politics, and Pragmatic approach in the Haredi non-Zionist and anti-Zionist world

• The Orthodox Map of Zionism Today

• Religious Zionism and Religious Anti-Zionism in light of October 7

Some of these articles will be multi-parters, due to how much I’ll have to cover. It will easily dwarf the eight essays I’ve already written in length, but I genuinely believe that this is material that most people have never been exposed to and is more relevant today than ever.

Futuristic Politics

In the last leg of the series, I’ll be discussing what is today’s most dominant Zionism-related discussion: Does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish State? Does the State have to choose between being a Jewish State, being a Democratic State, or can it be both? What does that entail? Is the Two-State Solution still a possibility, should it be, and are there alternatives other than the Status Quo?

To cap off the series, I’ll have a look at the Ideological Zionisms that still exist today and want to rewrite the State or recreate the Jewish people, Ideological post-Zionism, where both Religious Zionism and Religious Anti-Zionism are headed, and whether political alternatives are being posited that could break through the political axioms that have been accepted but might not be so axiomatic after all.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment exploring whether Zionism and Judaism are similar, and the place of the Land of Israel within Judaism historically.

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Simon Dubnow did not believe the Jewish future required sovereignty in Palestine. He did not believe it required socialist revolution, either. What he believed, with the confidence of a man who had dedicated decades to reading Jewish history from the inside out, was that Jews had already solved the problem of national survival without sovereignty, and had done so repeatedly, spanning centuries and continents.

All that was needed to solve the Jewish Question was to recognize and modernize the answer that had simply always been there.

Dubnow’s argument began with history. In his estimation, the Jewish people could not be summed up as a religious community awaiting national rebirth, nor as an organic class configuration awaiting liberation, only to dissolve into the proletarian mass. Jews were a mature nation that had progressed beyond the territorial stage of collective life into a higher form of existence sustained by common culture, collective memory, shared law, and communal institutions.

Zionists saw exile as deprivation, but Dubnow saw it as evidence of Jewish resilience. Jews had built self-governing communities across Poland, Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mediterranean, complete with courts, schools, charitable networks, and representative bodies. They did not represent local enclaves severed from each other, either. A Jew could move geographically from one place to another and still find the same barometers regulating Jewish communal life, regardless of their location.

The Council of Four Lands was his most important historical precedent. From roughly 1580 until its dissolution in 1764, delegates from the major Jewish communities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth met to apportion taxes, regulate communal affairs, resolve disputes, supervise institutions, and represent Jewish interests before the authorities.

The Council did not rely on its own sovereignty, army, or any of the other standard means of a ruling polity. It was a subnational superstructure that existed under the protection, and within the limits, of a political order Jews did not control.

For generations, Jews had administered substantial portions of their collective life through institutions spanning hundreds of communities, regardless of borders, languages, local or global politics, all under the guise of a self-binding autonomous agreement of communities to bend themselves to its dictates. To Dubnow, this Jewish form of a gentleman’s agreement demonstrated that a dispersed people could sustain national existence without the need for its own territory.

He looked at that history and drew the opposite conclusion from Zionism: The survival of the Jews did not prove that exile had failed. It reinforced that Jewish nationhood no longer depended on territory.

National Bodily Autonomy

Dubnow understood the development of nations as a progression. Peoples began as tribal communities that eventually became territorial-political nations, but it was not the end of the national journey. They could eventually mature into cultural-historical or spiritual nations whose existence had transcended, or at least no longer depended entirely on, borders.

The Jews, having survived the destruction of their political independence for nearly two millennia, the loss of their territorial center, and centuries of dispersion, had reached this final evolutionary stage before anyone else. Jews were what he called a “world-nation;” praise serving as a funhouse-mirror counterpart to Stalin’s “Jews-as-rootless-cosmopolitans” condemnation.

This did not mean that Jews were supposed to dissolve into mankind, as socialists, universalists and assimilationists hoped. Dubnow considered assimilation a form of national suicide. Nor did it imply that Jewishness should be restricted to private religious belief, as Classical Reform proposed.

Jews were a nation, and all nations required institutions through which they could act collectively. Dubnow’s answer was national-personal autonomy within the collective of nations. Jews would remain citizens of the countries in which they lived, subjected to the same civil laws and entitled to the same individual rights as everyone else, but at the same time, they would be recognized as members of a nonterritorial Jewish nation possessing collective rights and a quasi-independence of its own that did not impugn the sovereignty of their host. Those rights would not be attached to a province delineated by Jewish borders; they would follow the individual.

As had long been the case throughout history, wherever sufficient numbers of Jews lived, they would elect communal councils. Those councils oversaw education, language, cultural institutions, charitable systems, and matters of internal communal concern. Regional bodies would coordinate between communities, while an expanded national assembly would represent Jewish interests before the government. Jews would vote in general elections as citizens and in Jewish elections as members of a nation.

In modern terminology, Dubnow wanted national rights without secession and communal self-government without territorial separation. This represented a form of federalist citizenship that recognized hierarchical power structures while simultaneously limiting the non-Jewish state’s involvement in Jewish affairs when those affairs did not directly conflict with its interests. The Russian Empire, and later the successor states of Eastern Europe, would become multinational political bodies containing Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Jews, and other peoples, each entitled to preserve and administer its own national culture.

Dubnow’s practical program belonged to the same wider European conversation that produced Austro-Marxist theories of national-personal autonomy. Yet it was not grounded in Marxist theory but in the historical experience of Jewish communal self-government, and its demonstrated performance history.

The political vehicle for this vision was the Folkspartei, the Jewish People’s Party associated with Dubnow and other Autonomist activists. Unlike the Bund, the Folkspartei was decidedly not Marxist in theory or practice, and did not treat class struggle as the engine of history. However, unlike Zionism, it did not direct Jewish political energy toward Palestine. And unlike Reform, it did not ask Jews to surrender their status as a people in a bargain for belonging.

It offered a unique answer: remain where you are, remain what you are, and demand that the political system recognize both.

The Folkspartei never became a mass movement, though Dubnow’s underlying diagnosis reached beyond the party itself. There was a profound influence on certain aspects of the Bund’s political program; they adopted elements of national-cultural autonomy while continuing to subordinate nationality to class struggle and believing that socialist revolution was the ultimate destination. (Parts of) Autonomism was only part of the journey.

For a narrow historical window, permanent minority nationhood did not look utopian, but an emerging and concrete feature of the new European order. After the First World War, minority-rights treaties imposed on several new Eastern European states briefly appeared to provide a legal framework within which something like Dubnow’s vision could operate.

His relationship with Zionism was more complicated than simple hostility. He did not oppose Jewish settlement in Palestine per se, nor did he deny that a cultural center, in the vein of Ahad Ha’am’s vision, there might benefit the wider Jewish world. What he rejected was the idea that Palestine could, or should, absorb most Jews, or become the exclusive center of Jewish national life. Diaspora life was not a bug, but a feature of Jewish life. It needed to be fostered and taken even further, not left to wither.

To him, the notion that millions of Jews would abandon the countries in which they lived and concentrate in one small territory was impractical, needlessly messianic from a bygone era, and potentially distracting from the immediate struggle for rights in the Diaspora. Palestine could become one Jewish center among many, but it could not be permitted to consume all others.

In this sense, Autonomism wasn’t just a rejection of Zionism but a competing theory of where Jewish history had been heading all along. Zionism sought to reverse the development from a territorial nation to a world-nation, while Autonomism wanted to secure and cement its evolution.

History as Historical Homeland

Dubnow’s training as a historian was instrumental in shaping his view of Jewish nationhood, and provided the lens for his entire weltanschauung.

If Jews were to survive without a common territory, historicity would have to perform some of the work that territorialism performed for other nations. A Frenchman could point to France. A German could point to Germany. An American to America. The Jew would point to a continuous national-historical consciousness linking communities thriving despite being separated by oceans, languages, governments, and centuries.

History did not merely constitute a storehouse of the nation’s records. For Jews, it was the main repository of Jewish national consciousness.

This helps explain Dubnow’s obsessive commitment to Jewish documentation. He believed that historical memory strengthened the national will to continue, and therefore did not write history solely to explain the Jewish past. It was a tool for perpetuating the Jewish future. A people that understood how it had survived could consciously reproduce the mechanisms of that survival.

For Dubnow, history became a kind of portable homeland. This was not untreaded ground. Long before Dubnow, Heinrich Heine had described the Bible as the “portable fatherland” Jews had saved from the destruction of the Second Temple, and carried through exile:

I say its rediscovery, for the Jews, who had rescued it from the great conflagration of the Second Temple and carried it with them in exile, as it were, like a portable fatherland throughout the Middle Ages, carefully concealed this treasure in their ghetto.

This was a common leitmotif in Rabbinical writings as well.

For Dubnow, rather than the Mishnah, Gemara, Midrash, and Halacha, the secular records, communal minute books, memoirs, newspapers, literature, and historical scholarship were what connected the Jew in Vilna to the Jew in Warsaw, Odessa, Berlin, New York, and Palestine. A dispersed nation could remain one nation so long as it continued to remember itself as one, whether bound by territory or theology, or not.

This was the strength of Dubnow’s vision. He understood something that both assimilationists and some Zionists underestimated: Jewish continuity had never depended exclusively on political power. Jews had survived through institutions, texts, education, communal discipline, historical consciousness, and the ability to reconstruct collective life after catastrophe. Dubnow gambled that even without religion, common history was enough to endure, and in the face of the Jewish Question, Dubnow made a leap from resilience to security through Autonomism.

The fact that Jews had survived repeated catastrophes did not mean that the structures and institutions through which they survived could protect them from the next one. An archive could preserve the memory of a murdered community, but could not prevent the murder. A communal council could administer a school only while the government permitted the council to exist, a minority treaty could protect a language only while the state remained willing to enforce the treaty, and an elected Jewish assembly could represent its constituency only while the sovereign recognized Jews as a legitimate constituency.

Autonomy could organize a Jewish life, but it could not guarantee the political conditions under which that life remained possible. The Council of Four Lands proved both sides of Dubnow’s case. It demonstrated that Jews could build sophisticated national institutions without sovereignty, but it also demonstrated that those institutions could be abolished by a parliament in which Jews possessed no decisive power.

These achievements were real, but so was their dependence on others’ whims.

A Country Made of Language

Yiddishism grew from a similar premise as Dubnow’s, but it was not simply another name for Dubnowism. Dubnow valued Yiddish as the living language of the Eastern European Jewish masses, but was far from a full ideological Yiddishist. His national theory rested more broadly on history, communal autonomy, and collective consciousness than language itself. Yiddishists, on the other hand, made language itself the organizing center of modern Jewish nationhood.

The Bund had already incorporated Yiddish as part of their socialist political program. Yiddishism was broader. It proposed that language itself, rather than class, religion, or territory, could become the organizing medium of a complete modern Jewish civilization. Dubnow’s History was replaced by Language as the imperative.

If Jews were a modern nation in Eastern Europe, Yiddishists argued, then that nation already possessed a national language. It was not Russian, Polish, or German, the languages into which assimilationists hoped Jews would disappear. Nor was it Hebrew, which remained central to Torah, prayer, and an emerging national revival in Palestine, but was not yet the daily language of the Jewish masses.

Yiddish was that unifying language.

It was in Yiddish that millions of Jews argued, cajoled, traded merchandise or jokes, prayed informally, read newspapers, wrote letters, attended political meetings, watched plays, and spoke to their children.

Dismissing Yiddish as corrupted German or as kitchen-sink jargon was not merely a linguistic judgment but also a dismissal of the vibrant and dynamic culture of the people who spoke it.

Elevating Yiddish was therefore both a national and even democratic act. This was a declaration that the language spoken by the Jewish masses was not an embarrassment to be discarded and replaced by a more authentically Jewish Hebrew, but the legitimate medium of a modern Jewish civilization.

Chaim Zhitlowsky became one of the most forceful theoreticians of this perspective. A revolutionary socialist, Diaspora nationalist, and participant in several competing Jewish political currents at different points, he sought to fuse socialism with a secular Jewish national renaissance.

Jewish culture no longer needed to depend primarily on the beis midrash, and Jewish politics would not have to wait for Palestine anymore. A modern secular civilization could be built in the language Jews already spoke, where they already lived.

The movement’s defining public moment came at the 1908 Czernowitz Conference. Writers, intellectuals, activists, and educators gathered in the Bukovinian capital to debate the status and future of Yiddish.

Hebraists and Yiddishists collided. Hard.

Ultimately, the conference did not declare Yiddish the sole national language of the Jewish people, as some participants wanted. Instead, it adopted a more carefully negotiated formula stating that Yiddish was a national language of the Jewish people, rather than the national language.

The difference between “the” and “a” formed an entire ideological battlefield that left both sides bruised. The compromise left room for Hebrew while insisting that Yiddish could no longer be treated as a linguistic embarrassment awaiting extinction. It was entitled to schools, literature, scholarship, standardization, and national prestige.

As a result of the conference, efforts were made to create secular school networks, newspapers, theaters, publishing houses, and political organizations to make Yiddish the language of a public culture in which Jews debated socialism, nationalism, religion, migration, assimilation, Palestine, and the future of Jewish life, rather than either local languages in their locales, or Yiddish as a placeholder while Hebrew reclaimed its primacy.

Then came YIVO.

Founded in 1925 on the initiative of the linguist Nokhem Shtif, and developed by figures including Max Weinreich, Zalmen Reyzen, and Elias Tcherikower, the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut transformed Yiddish culture into an organized scholarly study.

Based in Vilna, YIVO collected archives, standardized language, trained scholars, studied Jewish economics and psychology, preserved folklore, and treated the life of Eastern European Jewry as worthy of the same intellectual seriousness that established academies devoted to other nations.

Its first offices reportedly operated from a room in Weinreich’s apartment. From there, it began constructing an intellectual institution for a nation without a government. YIVO’s scholars and supporters represented a broad range of ideological commitments that sometimes coincided with Autonomism, and sometimes didn’t. They still carried the same overarching dream: a Jewish nation studying itself, producing its own culture, and preserving itself through institutions rooted in the Diaspora rather than Palestine.

The Autonomist Limitation

Autonomism contained an insight Zionism easily dismissed too easily: Jewish dispersion was not just a historical condition forced upon Jews, but a very real civilizational strategy as well.

A people distributed across many political centers could not be destroyed through the fall of only one. When Jews were expelled from Spain, other communities remained. When the Chmielnicki massacres devastated Eastern Europe, Jewish life continued elsewhere. When one government turned hostile, Jews could flee toward another. The multiplicity of Jewish centers created redundancy. Even if Hitler had, G-d forbid, eliminated the entire European Jewry, many other centers of Jewry worldwide would have been unscathed and endured.

In this respect, Dubnow understood something important: concentration creates power, but it also concentrates risk.

October 7 made that problem impossible to ignore. The massing of a large portion of world Jewry in one narrow and heavily contested territory created possibilities for collective defense, political agency, and national revival that Dubnow had never believed possible in the first place. It also created a single geographic center to which enemies could apply military, political, and ideological pressure.

In a 2002 speech, a then-breathing Nasrallah declared that:

“The Jews will gather from all parts of the world into Palestine… Allah wants to save you from having to go to the ends of the world. They have gathered in one place, and there the final and decisive battle will take place.”

It seems that Dubnow was right: Jews needed more than one center. Where he was wrong was in confusing multiple centers with protected centers.

The existence of Jewish communities in Warsaw, Vilna, Odessa, Berlin, Riga, Paris, and New York did not create a system of mutual defense. The Jews of one country could petition for those in another, raise funds, publish reports, lobby governments, arrange visas, and organize relief, but could not compel a hostile regime to stop, or a friendly one to step in. Autonomism understood redundancy better than Zionism sometimes did, but understood projected power far less.

The entire Autonomist political structure depended on the surrounding state accepting that Jews were a legitimate nation entitled to collective rights. Dubnow’s model also required governments to recognize the very thing that antisemites most resented: that Jews were simultaneously loyal citizens and members of a transnational people with commitments extending beyond the border. A dual loyalty centered on both a physical nation and a nation-by-association.

In liberal and multinational political orders, that dual identity might be accommodated. In increasingly ethnonational states, it could be portrayed as proof of disloyalty. Under totalitarian regimes, it became not only an indictment, but a threat to the powers-that-be, and regularly a death sentence.

The same institutions designed to preserve Jewish nationhood also made Jewish life easier to identify, isolate, regulate, and then destroy. Membership lists, schools, newspapers, communal councils, archives, addresses, and elected representatives formed the skeleton of national autonomy. These very institutions became the very address book the Nazis used in their gambit for total Jewish extermination.

Autonomy ultimately confused a right granted by power with power itself.

“Jews, Write and Record”

Dubnow lived long enough to witness the world upon which his theory depended entirely collapse around him.

The multinational empires of his youth disappeared. The minority protections written into the postwar settlement proved weak and then gave way. Independent states across Eastern Europe became less tolerant of national minorities instead of embracing them. Soviet Communism crushed independent Jewish political and cultural organization. Fascism rejected the entire premise that different ethnic groups could coexist as equal members of a shared national political order.

After Hitler came to power, Dubnow left Germany for Riga. When the Germans occupied Latvia in 1941, the elderly historian was forced into the Riga Ghetto. He was murdered that December.

Survivors remembered him urging those around him: “Yidn, shraybt un farshraybt.” “Jews, write and record.”

The line is often presented as his final declaration. Whether it was spoken at the moment of his death or repeated as an exhortation inside the ghetto and attributed to his final moments, it nonethless distilled his life’s work into four words.

If institutions of Jewish life once again could not save the Jews that had depended on them, perhaps the record of what happened could prevent their disappearance from history.

The historian’s final act was to demand more history. He was answered. Diaries were buried beneath ghettos, archives concealed in milk cans, testimonies were gathered from survivors, books were rescued from looted libraries, and the fragments of demolished institutions rebuilt elsewhere. YIVO’s New York branch became the new Yiddishist center after the destruction of Vilna. Scholars continued collecting and studying the world that had been murdered.

History was preserved, but Dubnow’s political vision was not.

Answered by Genocide

Autonomism was not refuted in the same manner as Classical Reform’s original anti-nationalism. It did not survive by revising itself until its earlier program became almost unrecognizable in its current form. Nor was it simply abolished like the Yevsektsiya, destroyed by the regime it had served.

It was buried by the History it elevated as evolutionary lodestar.

The Jews who might have voted for Autonomist parties, attended Yiddish schools and read Yiddish newspapers, elected communal representatives, staffed cultural institutions, and built a modern nonterritorial Jewish nation were murdered in their millions.

The cities that could have become the capitals of a Jewish world-nation became graveyards, and are today sites of memory. Vilna, once called the Jerusalem of Lithuania, lost almost its entire Jewish population. Warsaw, the greatest center of Jewish life in Europe, was emptied of the civilization that had sustained its schools, presses, theaters, synagogues, political parties, and arguments. Today, almost no Jewish life remains in most of what had been the beating heart of European Jewry.

Autonomism showed that when governments governing Jewish life abandoned pluralism or turned hostile, the autonomous institutions possessed no independent means of defending the people they represented. Those institutions could issue resolutions and teach Yiddish or Jewish History, but they had no armies to issue marching orders to, or borders for Jews to retreat safely to.

Yiddishim ultimately suffered the same fate as Autonomism, and for the same reason. Yiddish survived in literature, scholarship, theater, publishing, and especially as a living daily language within Chassidic communities. What did not survive was the idea of Yiddish as a foundation of civilization. Even without the Holocaust, which devastated most of the Yiddish-speaking world, it’s unlikely Yiddisihim would have survived to this day.

Indeed, one of the darker ironies of Yiddishist history is that the communities most successful at transmitting Yiddish across generations were often those least committed to the secular national program Yiddishists had constructed around it. And those most committed to a secular national Yiddishist program were the least likely to carry that project over to the next generation.

The Holocaust cannot be said to have served as a controlled experiment between Zionism and Autonomism and produce an orderly verdict. While it is true that the manner of the destruction exposed the central vulnerability of Dubnow’s program, it also highlighted a real risk embedded in the Zionist project. Dubnow’s world-nation, or Yiddishism, could exercise autonomy for as long as another nation permitted it and was at the mercy of its host governments.

Where Autonomism showed that the lack of traditional state apparatus could not protect against pogroms and massacres, it highlighted that Jewish dispersion was a real mechanism to prevent civilizational extinction. October 7 and the threat of a nuclear Iran, on the other hand, have highlighted that a traditional state apparatus might generally offer better protection against pogroms and massacres, but the concentration of the Jewish population in one location rather than multiple geographically dispersed centers significantly raises the stakes.

Until that fated day in 2023, one could look back and say the gamble had paid off. Today? We’ve found out the question has not been definitely answered yet.

In the next installment, an analysis of the failures of ideological anti-Zionisms and non-Zionisms, and a look at their future, if they have one.

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For a time, the gamble seemed to be paying off. European Jews entered the professions, the academies, the arts, and the political classes at a pace that astonished observers on all sides. In the United States, the trajectory was even more dramatic. By the late twentieth century, American Jews had achieved a level of civic integration, social acceptance, and material success that no Jewish community in the Diaspora had ever managed. Napoleon’s offer, in its American iteration, looked like it might actually hold. Yet, this was only one possible option amongst many.

Simultaneously in the East and West, two other alternatives to Zionism were developing as revolution brewed and emancipation was argued. Classical Reform non-Zionism embraced the idea of integration on a theological level, and declared that Jews were bound by Judaism without nationhood, while Dubnow’s Autonomism declared that Jews had nationhood without Jewish sovereignty. The former reduced Jewish collective life to religion, while the latter extended it in an attempt to create a sort of multinational Jewishness. Their only point in common was their refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty in Palestine as a necessary condition of Jewish survival, much less as a desirable one.

A Not-So-Short Disclaimer of Sort

Before proceeding, and to avoid readers getting the wrong impression, I believe it’s important to reinstate what the goal of this series has been:

In the 19th century, Jewry was faced with two problems: 1) In the face of modernity and nationalism, how does the Jewish people endure, and 2) how do we solve the Jewish Question? Zionism answered both questions with Palestine. By having a State, not only would the Jewish people endure, but they would also gain the respect of nations as a peer, and antisemitism would subside, if not disappear, as a result. And if it did not, at least Jews would never know pogroms and Jewish fragility again, as it would have a State and army to defend itself. Various anti-Zionisms and non-Zionisms proposed alternatives to address these questions. In light of October 7, we are revisiting their arguments and examining them in light of our modern Jewish reality.

Now that we’ve reached the Classical Reform answer to these questions, it would be very easy for the reader to assume that I, as an Orthodox Rabbi, am writing this from a polemical point of view. I am not. I obviously have very strong theological disagreements with the Reform movement, but I have no desire to engage in debates and controversies that have raged since the mid-19th century.

What follows is an examination of “How did Classical Reform’s answer to the perpetuation of the Jewish people in the face of modernity, to nationalism versus universalism, and to antisemitism, fare in light of October 7th? If they had prevailed over Zionism, would we be in a better, or worse, position?” Some of the comments I make will be critical, even very critical, but they are not meant in any way as religious polemics. They are an examination of Classical Reform’s actions and reactions in the face of Zionism, the 19th century, the Holocaust, October 7th, and today’s landscape. This is not about theology, but ideology.

A Theological Wager Through Merger

It would seem that the position of the Classical Reform movement to Zionism would be more at home in the upcoming second leg of this series, where we will discuss both Religious Zionism and Religious Antizionism. A closer examination of this ideology, on the other hand, reveals that their position had far more in common with, and, in fact, was a theological expression and continuation of, the Western emancipation gamble than with traditional Judaism and its relation to the land of Israel.

In the 19th century, many proponents of Jewish emancipation and integration found that legal equality and civic participation had proven insufficient on their own. It pushed some Western Jews to consider a different alternative in a different realm altogether. If the political path could not completely resolve the tension between Jewishness and national belonging, perhaps the answer lay in redefining what Jewishness itself meant.

This theological restructuring found its avatar in Classical Reform Judaism, which emerged in nineteenth-century Germany but spread far more rapidly in the United States than it did in Europe. Reform thinkers set out to redefine Judaism, arguing that it was not a national or ethnic identity tied to land, language, or ritual law, but rather a universal ethical monotheism whose mission was to bear witness to moral truth in the world. The particularism of peoplehood and the concrete demands of halakha were to be set aside in favor of a prophetic religion compatible with modern citizenship and enlightened values. In doing so, Reform effectively restructured Judaism along the lines of the dominant Western religious model: a faith of private conscience, that preached individual salvation through ethical conduct, and had a universal moral aspiration, stripped of the ethnic and legal particularity that had historically set Judaism apart from its Abrahamic neighbors.

This redefinition found its clearest and starkest articulation in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. The platform declared that Jews no longer constituted a nation but a religious community. It rejected any expectation of a return to Palestine, the reconstruction of the Temple, of sacrificial worship, or the laws of a Jewish state. Instead, it framed Judaism’s purpose as the pursuit of justice and righteousness, culminating in a messianic age of universal peace. Ironically, in modern terms, this came to be known as Tikkun Olam, to repair the world, a kabbalistic concept wherein the things that were rejected by the Pittsburgh Platform are the very tools Judaism prescribes to repair the world and bring justice, righteousness, and a messianic age of universal peace.

The message was clear: ritual practices that no longer served an ethical or spiritual function in modern life were to be abandoned. Those the participant did not feel connected to could be discarded. Judaism’s rigid legalistic system and commandments became à la carte. The synagogue remained, but it was to function as a local house of prayer and moral instruction rather than the center of a national or legal system. In this vision, the Jew could be fully German, French, or American in every public dimension while remaining Jewish in the private sphere of conscience and worship.

This was not merely rhetoric: the founder of the Reform movement, Abraham Geiger, refused to intervene in the Damascus blood libel affair, as Syrian Jews were Syrians of Mosaic persuasion and had thus no relation to Germans of Mosaic persuasion, on top of which their outdated Orthodoxy conflicted with modern European emancipation. This was a radical break with the attitudes of the past and, more so, Jewish nationhood.

It’s easy to understand why the appeal of this radical theological compromise was considerable to Western Jews, already swept by the winds of emancipation and integration. It offered a dignified way to maintain a Jewish identity without the social friction that traditional observance often created. You could now work on Saturday, eat from your neighbor’s tables, and participate in the many social rituals Judaism forbade Jews from partaking in. The barriers Judaism set in place to prevent integration, and ultimately assimilation, had been withdrawn entirely. Reform congregations adopted vernacular liturgy, mixed seating, and abbreviated services. They emphasized ethical teachings over ritual details and presented Judaism as a forward-looking faith aligned with the progress of the age. The ancient faith had finally been updated for the modern era.

The Spiritual Integration-to-Assimilation Pipeline

The proponents of Reform’s reforms claimed that this form of Judaism was helping many Jews integrate more fully into Western societies while still preserving a sense of religious purpose, producing lively communities, influential institutions, and a generation of Jews who felt both modern and Jewish without the constant negotiation and sacrifices that traditional practice required. In the United States especially, Reform became the dominant expression of Jewish religious life for several decades, shaping how American Jews understood their place in the nation.

Yet the same historical pressures that exposed the limits of political emancipation eventually forced Classical Reform to reconsider its own premises. The rise of racial antisemitism in Europe, the growing refugee crisis of the 1930s, and the destruction of most of European Jewry made the earlier trust in a purely universal, non-national Judaism increasingly difficult to maintain. The 1937 Columbus Platform marked an early but decisive shift. It affirmed the Jewish people as a living nation with ties to a historic homeland and called on Jews everywhere to support the upbuilding of Palestine as both a refuge and a center of Jewish culture.

The Columbus platform did not restore the full national or ritual framework that Pittsburgh had rejected, but it moved away from the strict anti-nationalism of the earlier statement. After the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel, Reform Judaism continued to soften its Pittsburgh rejection. It came to affirm Jewish peoplehood more explicitly, incorporate greater liturgical and ritual traditionalism, and develop a strong institutional relationship with the State of Israel while still maintaining its distinctive theological commitments.

At the time, this trajectory was neither a reversal nor an admission of error. It represented an attempt to respond to historical reality without abandoning its core claim that Judaism’s highest purpose was ethical and universal. Classical Reform had bet that a reimagined Judaism could secure civic belonging by aligning Jewish identity with the highest values of modern liberal societies. When those societies proved incapable of guaranteeing Jewish safety, the movement adapted by recovering elements of peoplehood and connection to a particular place while preserving its emphasis on moral mission.

A Sinking Cost

This attempt at theologically course-correcting is, in many ways, similar to the reaction of proponents of civic emancipation when faced with many roadblocks. So much effort had been expended on shaping an entire movement over two continents; they simply could not throw in the towel. It was either double or nothing. In doing so, they demonstrated both the strengths and the boundaries of the theological expression of Napoleon’s promise. The political path had sought belonging through citizenship. The theological path sought to do so by redefining Jewish purpose. Neither could fully protect Jews from the vulnerabilities that the twentieth century exposed.

Today, we see that the same integration-to-assimilation slippery slide that swallowed Western Jewry after political emancipation is also affecting the Reform movement. The Reform movement in America is not merely facing a temporary slump; its demographic future looks structurally bleak. Pew’s 2020 survey still found Reform to be the largest American Jewish denomination, at 37% of U.S. Jewish adults, but that headline number masks the deeper problem: Reform and Conservative Judaism are heavily concentrated among older Jews, while younger Jews are far less attached to the old liberal denominations. Among Jews under 30, only 29% identify as Reform and just 8% as Conservative, compared with 44% Reform and 25% Conservative among Jews 65 and older.

At the same time, the Orthodox share rises sharply among the young, reaching 17% of Jews ages 18–29, compared with only 3% among those 65 and older. The marriage and family numbers are even more ominous: Pew found that 72% of non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010 have non-Jewish spouses, while Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly marry other Jews, and Orthodox families have far more children.

Put simply, Reform Judaism still has many members because it inherited the great mass of twentieth-century American Jewish affiliation, but its pipeline is weak: fewer young Jews, high intermarriage, lower fertility, and declining denominational loyalty. That is why the future math looks brutal. Reform is not disappearing tomorrow, but as a generational movement, it is aging far faster than it reproduces itself and faces likely extinction within a few decades if things continue as is.

What Went Wrong with Emancipations?

The twentieth century exposed the limits of every promise supposedly heralded by Humanism and by Napoleon’s subsequent Civic Nationalism, as well as the Classical Reform’s theological emancipation and its attempt at integration. In Europe, civic equality proved revocable. Legal emancipation had never gone deep enough to uproot the social and cultural antisemitism that ran beneath it, and when political conditions shifted, the rights that had been granted after great effort were taken back effortlessly, often at catastrophic speed.

In America, the picture was not only more complicated, but also counterintuitive. Rights had been enshrined in the Constitution, and were legally very unlikely to be uprooted. Yet, up to the 1970s, quotas and other measures showed that the law itself could be selectively enforced or ignored, and even when they weren’t, Rights only protected Jews from the government, and not illiberal masses.

Rights, enforced or not, came in exchange for integration. Both in America and Europe, the real cost of integration only became visible in retrospect: weakening communal bonds, rising intermarriage, and a generational drift away from Jewish identity that institutions seemed powerless or unwilling to try and reverse. The theological emancipation of Classical Reform posited that it wasn’t enough to integrate into the surrounding society legally; this integration had to be theological as well. The Classical Reform answer in Germany was to adopt many Lutheran trappings. It did not stop the Holocaust. The answer in America was to adopt many Protestant trappings. It did not prevent assimilation and disappearance.

Then came October 7. The campus protests, the social media campaigns, the rapid importation of a European-style antisemitic discourse into American public life; all of it revealed that the social acceptance American Jews had built over decades was far more conditional than it had appeared. The belonging that had seemed permanent turned out to have terms. It’s great to be treated as an equal, but ultimately pointless if demonstrators prevent you from walking into your classroom or synagogue.

Ultimately, neither legal nor theological emancipation could deliver on their promise. There were limits to integration, both internal and external. Internally, integration inexorably led to assimilation. Externally, integration was no guarantee for acceptance, even temporarily. And neither proved to be a protection from antisemitism. No Jewish diaspora had been as successful, integrated, and assimilated as German Jewry prior to the Holocaust. And no Jewish diaspora community has been as successful, integrated, and assimilated as American Jewry is today. Yet, the tides of antisemitism are rising, and no amount of integration or assimilation short of disappearance will make a Jew acceptable to those surfing on them.

You can think you’re saying and doing all the right things, but it still won’t stop you from getting hounded out of a march you showed up to in solidarity. If relegating Judaism to private faith, and eventually private faith that married itself with soft Zionism, did not work, would a multinational Jewishness devoid of Palestine be the solution?

In the next and last No Zion, No Cry essay, Dubnow and his Autonomist Adventure, and then we turn to the future of Ideological Zionism. Stay tuned.

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All three experiments were a failure. They were crushed, betrayed, or rendered moot before they could be tested against anything approaching normal historical conditions. The experiments that might have been vindicated were annihilated or absorbed. The regimes they trusted or served turned on them. The question of whether they could have worked is, for the most part, permanently closed.

The West made a different gambit. The path to solving the Jewish Question was not through revolution, a substitute territory, nor self-abolition through assimilation, but through belonging. Jews in Western and Central Europe, and eventually in America, wagered that modernity had genuinely changed the terms of Jewish existence. Through legal equality, civic participation, religious reform, and cultural integration, they could solve the Jewish Question positively. Where the East had answered with revolution, the West answered with faith. Faith in the Enlightenment. Faith in citizenship. Faith in the system. Faith in the capacity of modern liberal societies to keep their promises. They rejected Zionism not out of ideology as much as for lack of necessity.

This was not naïveté, but rather based on real achievements that had, for the most part, been nonexistent to Jews in the East. Legal emancipation, steady economic and cultural flourishing, a reinvented form of Judaism in sync with local culture, as well as a type of diaspora nationalism that reimagined local Jewish collective life without traditional Judaism, political sovereignty, and Palestine. They were Germans, French, or Americans of Mosaic descent, and Berlin, Paris, or New York City were their Jerusalems. It was not so much assimilation as culmination. Jews finally found a place where they belonged after their 1,800-year walk in the wilderness, and did not have to yearn for acceptance or dream of a faraway land anymore.

If the East pledged mandated equality, the West pledged mandated liberty. In a post-October 7 world, can we say the West, unlike the East, kept its promise?

Napoleon’s Promises

Emancipation was not handed to Western Jews. It was argued for, negotiated, and won over decades of litigation, legislation, and Enlightenment-era debate in which Jews and their advocates made the case that equality under the law would produce loyal, productive, and fully integrated, if not assimilated, citizens. Napoleon was the first to offer what would become the underlying basis of Western Civic Nationalism. The terms of the bargain were clear: Jews received rights and would, in exchange, become German, French, or British in everything but confession. The synagogue would be the boundary of Jewish distinctiveness, and everything beyond it, such as language, dress, name, political loyalties, and cultural aspiration, would belong to the nation. Or, as Moses Mendelssohn framed it, the Jew would be a proud citizen in the streets, and a Jew in the privacy of his home.

For a time, the arrangement held, and produced something concrete. In Germany, France, Britain, and eventually the United States, Jews entered universities, then the learned professions, the arts, finance, and public life at rates that astonished observers. It confirmed, for those inclined to believe it, that the Jewish Question was solving itself through the ordinary mechanisms of modern citizenship. The Rothschilds, Disraelis, and later the Einsteins and Freuds were not anomalies but symptoms of a wider transformation of the Jewish population. Emancipated Jewry wasn’t simply surviving or adapting, but it was flourishing in their host societies, and doing so on the terms modernity had offered them. Jews were assimilating into society in a way emancipation proponents believed would one day finally eliminate old hatreds.

Yet, with every reaction, there is a reaction. The speed at which the emancipated-from-the-Ghetto Jew started to immerse himself in the surrounding societies, his civic participation, and economic involvement confounded even its advocates, raised the alarms for Orthodox Rabbis, and created ethnic resentment from the non-Jews, unhappy to have to compete on equal grounds. Even as European Jews were finally being fully allowed to integrate and even assimilate into European society, the seeds of what was to come started to germinate.

The political compact between Jews and Western society rested on the crucial distinction between integration and assimilation. Integration meant that Jews could retain a separate religious and cultural identity while becoming full participants in the nation’s civic and economic life. Assimilation implied the gradual erosion or deliberate shedding of that distinctiveness. Most of those who pursued emancipation in the West aimed at the former, but often hit the latter. They wanted to be accepted as loyal Germans, Frenchmen, or Americans who happened to be Jewish, not as people who had ceased to be Jewish in any meaningful collective sense, though more often than not, it generationally meant cessation of Jewishness.

The Limits of Promises

The limits of the integration wager revealed themselves gradually, then catastrophically. Legal equality did not erase antisemitism; it merely displaced it. The hostility that had earlier been expressed in religious terms, such as the accusations of deicide, of heresy, or ritual murders, migrated into racial and economic idioms that were, if anything, harder to answer. While it is true that for many, when a Jew received baptism, what you were left with was a wet Jew, conversion was still on the table, and acceptable to most. Celebrated, even. A Jew could not change his blood, however. No matter how many bratswursts he might eat and how much Goethe he might recite, a Jew was not an ethnic German. Jews were now cast as biologically alien to their host society who refused to intermarry, racial corrupters diluting the gene pool, rootless cosmopolitans, international conspirators, financial parasites, tribalistic nepotism, capitalist exploiters, socialist subversives; no matter how contradictory the accusations were, they quickly filled the theological gaps left by emancipation.

The older religious basis for exclusion had been eliminated without dissolving the impulse to exclude. Even those who viewed Jewish conversion with disdain or suspicion were, short of an inquisition, forced to accept them at face value. Not so with ethnicity, nationalism, and secular ideologies. When that impulse returned in political form across Central and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the legal protections that emancipation had secured proved thinner than anyone had wanted to admit.

Still, integration, despite its limitations, seemed to answer the Jewish problem in the minds of many. While the Dreyfuss affair made some Jews, Herzl most famously, reconsider how likely integration was to succeed, plenty others considered it a bump in the road. There was a certain sunk cost to it. If, after all of these efforts, it could all be ripped away from you in an instant, was it the wrong part? No. You cannot make an omelet without breaking any eggs, as the saying goes. That must be it. This is a temporary setback, and no more.

Then came the election of the Nazi Party in 1933, and with it the Nuremberg laws attacking what could arguably be seen as the most integrated and assimilated segment of Jewry in History. The promise had been broken.

The rise of the Nazis and subsequent Holocaust did not stop at killing Jews. It also demonstrated, in the most extreme form, that citizenship and acceptance remained contingent, if not out of reach, for Jews in Europe. Germany had been home to one of the most emancipated and culturally integrated Jewish communities in the world. Its Jews had served loyally in the First World War to the tune of 100,000 strong, identified deeply with German culture, and participated in every sphere of national life. Yet when the political order turned against them, the protections of citizenship and participation in society collapsed. The same pattern, though in smaller amounts, appeared elsewhere. The political wager had assumed that modern liberal societies, once they extended rights, would have structural reasons to protect them. The twentieth century showed that those reasons could give way under sufficient political, economic, or ideological pressure.

These political hopes pinned on emancipation and civic belonging did not disappear after the Holocaust, but it was profoundly chastened. In the United States and Western Europe, Jewish communities continued to invest heavily in integration and participation in the greater society. Yet the confidence that legal equality and patriotic loyalty would, by themselves, be sufficient had been permanently shaken.

The Melting Pot

The American case, however, differed from the European case in important ways. American Jewry did not undergo a formal emancipation struggle in the European sense because no such struggle was necessary. The constitutional framework had, at least formally, separated religious from civic identity from the start. In a 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, George Washington wrote:

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Many historians consider this letter an important first step towards the First Amendment, which would be ratified the following year, in 1791.

What American Jews navigated instead was voluntary acculturation, the gradual adjustment of language, names, neighborhoods, and manners to the expectations of a society that asked less than Europe but still asked. The result was integration without the drama of emancipation, which made it easier to overlook that the underlying logic remained the same. Belonging proved conditional, and its conditions were set by the majority. You belonged in the American pot, but had to melt into it.

And melt into it Jews did. The social and political ascent of American Jewry in the postwar period is, by any historical measure, remarkable. The quotas that had kept Jews out of Ivy League universities, prestigious law firms, and posh country clubs began falling in the 1950s and collapsed almost entirely by the 1960s and 1970s. Jews in America also entered the professions in extraordinary numbers, moving into the upper strata of finance, law, medicine, and academia, and became a disproportionate presence in American intellectual and cultural life. Hollywood, which spun out of the Yiddish theatre and was built by Jews who had been blacklisted from the budding movie industry on the East Coast, became an economic powerhouse in America and the premier cultural American export.

The same was true of American letters, journalism, and eventually politics. By the end of the 20th century, Jews had been elected to Senate seats, held Cabinet positions, and received Supreme Court appointments at rates that dwarfed their roughly two percent share of the American population. Henry Kissinger served as Secretary of State. Three of the nine Supreme Court justices were Jewish simultaneously. Joe Lieberman was selected for Vice President by the Al Gore campaign in 2000.

The social antisemitism that had defined American life as recently as the 1930s, with its restricted hotels, quotas, and gentlemen’s agreements, had not disappeared entirely but had been pushed to the margins of acceptable public life. By the 1990s, American Jews publicly celebrated their contributions to America and were celebrated for them. For the first time in two millennia, a Jewish community existed somewhere in the world that faced no serious legal or social barrier to full participation in the surrounding society. Napoleon’s offer, in its American iteration, had been honored more closely than anywhere else in Jewish history.

The promise of Western Civic Nationalism had been tripartite: Jews received rights, the Jews participated and integrated, and then came acceptance. At first glance, for American Jews, it seemed successful: they were safe, prosperous, and accepted. How stable this arrangement was and what it was costing American Jewry were questions most preferred not to ask.

A Cracked Pot

Internally, the limits of emancipation are showing. The erosion and eventual fall of the social ghetto walls created real gaps in communal retention and intergenerational transmission. The generations that followed full integration pushed further than their predecessors had, in ways their predecessors would not have imagined or entertained. The American melting pot asked Jews to melt just enough. The problem for emancipationists, and that their ideological heirs are still dealing with, is that there is no reliable thermostat. The same openness that made America the most successful iteration of Napoleon’s promise is quietly thinning the Jewish community the way European antisemitism did loudly.

Among Jews under thirty, denominational affiliation has thinned dramatically, Jewish literacy has declined, and connection to communal institutions has weakened. Intermarriage rates, which were negligible in the immigrant generation and modest in the first American-born generation, began climbing in the postwar decades and have not stopped. The Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey of American Jewish life found that 72 percent of non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010 have non-Jewish spouses. “Don’t date Becky,” became “Date Becky but at least don’t marry Becky,” became “Marry Becky, but convert her first,” became “Don’t convert Becky but at least ask her to raise the kids Jewish,” and is becoming “What’s a synagogue anyway?” in the span of a few generations.

Externally, the speed at which large segments of American Jewry went from integration to assimilation temporarily slowed down antisemitism, but only temporarily. In the 1990s, in the heydays of cultural and social celebration, antisemitism might have felt like a relic of the past, but beginning in the early 2000s, and accelerating sharply through the 2010s, antisemitic incidents in the United States began climbing in ways difficult to dismiss as statistical noise. The Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh in 2018, the Poway shooting, the Jersey City attack, the Monsey stabbing: these are instances of violence that a previous generation of American Jews would have associated with Europe, or with a far-off past.

In the 2020s, it became impossible to ignore the ideological spread of explicit Jew-hatred on both ends of the political spectrum. Antisemitism in the public discourse was simultaneously being normalized by figures on the populist right who trafficked in reviving old conspiracies with a new coat of paint, and on the activist left, by an anti-imperialist politics that had made hostility to Jewish particularism a precursor of progressive credibility and a required criterion for admission in polite society. The social quarantine that had kept antisemitism out of polite American life since the postwar decades has all but eroded. Nazis, Hitler, the Holocaust, or gas chambers, all went from edgy memes to common teen humor, to normalized banter in private chats, to being discussed unironically publicly without pushback. What had previously been taboo to discuss, much less joke about, was now becoming catchphrases. In a not-so-distant past, the revelation of a political candidate sporting an SS Death Head tattoo on his chest would have been not only the end of their political career, but public life. Today, it’s brushed aside as a youthful indiscretion.

Then came October 7, and it made the erosion impossible to deny. Campus encampments, public celebrations of the massacre, torrents of hostility directed at Jewish students and institutions became part of daily life. Jews are roughly two percent of the American population but account for sixteen percent of all reported hate crimes and nearly seventy percent of all religion-based hate crimes in 2024. Those numbers alone would be striking and should ring alarm bells. Instead, they are met with silence. No hashtags, no black squares, no campaigns.

Third World Discourse with First World Tools

What has been witnessed post-October 7 has not been fringe eruptions but organized, and in many cases celebrated, political expressions that have been building for years and now have their moment in the sun. “Antizionism” on the Left, and barely concealed antisemitism on the Right, are tickets to fame, popularity, clicks, and monetization. And, as we’ve seen recently, electability.

What has dramatically changed the environment is the global dimension that social media has introduced into what had previously been a mostly domestic conversation. Platforms that aggregate content without regard for national origin began flooding American discourse with material produced in countries where antisemitism is not a fringe position but a mainstream one, where it is taught in schools, parts and parcel of the local culture, embedded in state media, and treated as self-evident political and religious truth.

The hatred that poured into American feeds in the weeks after October 7 did not originate in American political culture. It was imported, algorithmically amplified, and absorbed by American users, including the younger generations, who have no framework for recognizing it as a distinct ideological tradition with its own history and genealogy.

The result was a kind of contamination of the American public square, in which centuries-old conspiracy theories and open calls for Jewish elimination circulated alongside ordinary political content. Napoleon’s promise of a Western Civic Nationalism assumed a national conversation among citizens sharing a common political culture, goals, and destiny. It was never meant to be an answer in a world in which the most eliminationist voices in Cairo or Tehran could reach a college sophomore in Ohio before breakfast, or a Chinese algorithm could selectively propagate certain viewpoints while suppressing others.

For now, America still remains a different proposition than Europe. The continent that invented emancipation is watching its Jewish communities shrink, depart, or retreat behind security barriers in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. French Jews are leaving France. British Jews are leaving Britain. The synagogues of Brussels and Amsterdam do not function without armed guards, and barely so. America’s geographic isolation, its stronger constitutional protections, and the deeper roots its Jewish community has put down over a century and a half have so far kept it from reaching that point.

Ultimately, the West has kept its emancipation promise longer than the East, and America has kept it better than anywhere else in Jewish history, but its deterioration seems just as real, if slower-moving. The external threat is real and growing, but it is still only half the story. The more quietly devastating challenge to American Jewish life has always been, and remains, not the enemy at the gates but disappearance through self-dissolution.

The Integration-to-Assimilation Conclusion

The liberal Western European reality has shown that emancipation might lead to integration but usually ended in assimilation. Post-emancipation, despite assurances of their advocates, the roadblocks to integration pushed European Jews towards assimilation rather than to hold firmly onto their identity and patiently wait for the roadblocks’ removal. It is true that America had fewer roadblocks, but they existed nonetheless, and led to the same unintended consequences.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American Jewry faced a society that frowned upon beards or traditional garb, and an at-will employment economy that required work on the Sabbath; as a result, Orthodoxy temporarily all but disappeared. To this day, at least in American Jews of a certain age, remnants of this era have left marks on the collective psyche. While observing a Jew in an alien garb, with strange rituals, and a slightly different language, though he might be just as American as they are, there’s a certain recoil. A certain subconscious “He’s endangering the bargain! We’re all at risk!” In other words, “Why can’t you be more American?”

This desire not only to be accepted by Americans but to be accepted as Americans had major theological ramifications for American Jews, who accepted the American promise and premise. As a result, American Judaism mostly moved away from Orthodoxy. By the 1870s, more than half of the American synagogues had switched their affiliation to the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (later the Union for Reform Judaism); a change that happened in less than 40 years. Only when millions of more traditional Jews moved to America in the 1880s to 1920s did the tide start to turn back, and Orthodoxy was re-established.

The switch to the UAHC mirrored developments in Jewry in Western Europe. Thanks to the promise of integration and the enticement of assimilation, the Reform movement, which had originated in Germany, was also sweeping over Western European Jewry, though to a lesser extent than in America. Liturgy and sermons in the local language, the abandonment of “archaic and alienating” practices, all became very attractive for those Jews willing to do everything they could to integrate into society, barring complete and total assimilation. If they were ready to make such sacrifices to integrate themselves into their host society, why couldn’t Judaism?

Stay tuned for Part 3, where we discuss Reform non-Zionism and Autonomism.

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On a lively stretch of Montgomery Avenue in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, the General Wayne Inn still stands much as it did when it was built. Travelers once pulled up to the sturdy stone-and-timber structure from the main road to Lancaster seeking respite. Prior to the Revolution, King George’s post…

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Pay any attention to public Jewish discussions about Israel long enough, and you will eventually hear the word “anti-Zionist” worn as a badge. What’s striking is how little the underlying shape of the argument has changed even as its content has been almost completely inverted. A century ago, the loudest Jewish voices arguing against Zionism were not arguing from outside Jewish life, looking in. They were arguing from within socialist, territorialist, and revolutionary Jewish movements, with their own institutions, their own newspapers, their own competing diagnoses of the Jewish Question, and their own competing cures. Today’s ideological Jewish anti-Zionism is, by contrast, steeped in nostalgia. It borrows vocabulary and concepts from that older discourse, doikayt chief among them, while operating in a world where almost none of the original movements that coined those words and ideas still exist. Still, there is intense nostalgia among many for revisiting them, or even reviving them.

This series has so far traced the internal life of Zionism itself: the founding theses of Political, Practical, and Synthetic Zionism on how to create a State, the long-standing argument between Labor and Revisionism over what kind of State Zionism should produce, and the minor currents that Zionism generated and then outgrew in a two-parter. Each was judged by the same questions: did it solve the Jewish Question; if not, could it have prevented an October 7; and if not, how would it have reacted to it? Without exception, the answer to the first question was no, and almost without exception, the answer to the second was no as well.

But Zionism was never the only posited Jewish Answer to the Jewish Question. In the same decades, among the same Jewish populations, competing visions emerged that rejected the entire premise that sovereignty in the Land of Israel was imperative for Jewish survival. These were not stray opinions. They had organized ideologies, with parties, presses, schools, and, in one case, an actual territory granted by a state. Though history has seemingly not vindicated them, they deserve to be inspected on their own terms. These ideologies are not mere footnotes to Zionism’s eventual success; they were serious rival answers to the same Question that Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, and Jabotinsky were trying to answer.

These alternative answers were not just tied to a place in time, but in space as well. In the East, the Pale of Settlement and the early Soviet Union, the response to Jewish powerlessness was radical, political, and revolutionary: a labor movement that insisted Jews could be liberated where they already lived through the Marxist praxis, a territorialist movement willing to build a Jewish homeland almost anywhere except Palestine, and a Soviet Jewish communism that tried to dissolve Jewish particularism into the Revolution itself.

All three of these Eastern answers shared the same assumption from the outset: a piece of land in Palestine is not the answer. Something else, such as class solidarity, a different territory, or the Soviet state, could deliver redemption instead. All three were organized mass movements. And all three were not refuted so much as physically and politically annihilated by the Holocaust, by Stalinism, or by both together, before history had finished litigating whether they were right. Or, as some who opposed them would say, their end was an answer in itself.

Were these ideologies victims of history or of their own shortcomings?

Laboring Here, Not There

The General Jewish Labor Bund was founded in Vilna in October 1897, the same year and for very nearly the same season as the First Zionist Congress in Basel. The Bund’s founders saw their movement as the explicit refutation of Herzl’s: internationalism against nationalism, integration as opposed to evacuation, optimism against what they portrayed to be Zionist pessimism about the Diaspora, and class struggle against what they dismissed as bourgeois preoccupations and class collaboration. While Herzl concluded that Jewish life in Europe was structurally unfixable and required an exit solution, the Bund’s founders, veterans from the underground circles of Jewish workers and socialist intellectuals in the Pale of Settlement, concluded the opposite: that the Jewish worker’s enemy was not Europe but capitalism, and that the cure was revolution where Jews already stood rather than a flight of Levantine fancy.

The Bund’s ideology rested on three pillars: practical Marxism, Yiddishism, and Doikayt. For the Bund, Marxism was not abstract. It was the trade unions, strikes, and mutual aid societies built specifically for Jewish workers crowded into the garment trades, noxious tanning, the sugar-refining factories, and the small, unsalubrious workshops of the Pale. Secular Yiddish culture was not meant only as the authentic vernacular of a living Jewish working class; it also required its own press, schools, and literature. Class solidarity would help the Jewish worker, and cultural solidarity would help the Jewish people. The third, and the one that gave the movement its enduring name, was doikayt, “hereness”. It was the conviction that Jewish flourishing was not only inseparable from the diaspora but inherent to it. Jewish vulnerability would be solved through building a better world locally rather than withdrawing into a separate national enclave.

The Bund had always opposed Zionism on principle, viewing it as a bourgeois nationalist project that served the interests of an emerging Jewish capitalist elite rather than the Jewish working masses. But it was after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, when Zionism’s appeal among ordinary Jews began to surge, that the Bund’s leadership, with thought leaders such as Vladimir Medem, moved doikayt from a background assumption into the movement’s defining slogan and rallying cry. They put their disagreement in stark terms: a national home in Palestine would not end the Jewish exile but rather redirect Jewish hope toward a fantasy and, as such, set back both the Jewish worker and Jewish people. The necessary struggle for a better life was in the here and now, not there and later.

This was not a fringe position amongst the Jews of the Russian Empire. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Bund counted roughly thirty thousand members, a third of them women, concentrated in the Yiddish-speaking working population of the Pale. This was no small feat. Lenin’s own party, the rival Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, meant to appeal to all Russians rather than Jewish workers, numbered only a few thousand at the time. The Bund had helped found that party in 1898 before splitting from it in 1903 over the question of Jewish national-cultural autonomy. It was an early warning sign that the Bund’s Jewish particularism, however secular and however hostile to Zionism, was never going to dissolve quietly into a generic socialist internationalism. It transformed Bundism from a competing ideology to a threat to the Socialist endeavor as a whole in the eyes of the Bolsheviks.

In interwar Poland, the Bund became the most electorally and culturally significant Jewish political movement of the 1930s, winning municipal power in cities such as Warsaw and Łódź and running an extensive network of secular Yiddish schools, youth movements, and sports clubs. It also built and maintained armed self-defense units, organized in response to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and active through the Russian Civil War, that made the Bund, in parts of the Pale, the most credible organized force standing between Jewish communities and pogromists. The Bund printed its own newspapers, ran its own candidates, trained its own fighters, and offered a coherent answer to the question of where Jewish safety would come from. Land was not the answer. Organized Jewish labor, in solidarity with the broader working class, was. Compared to the uncertainty and difficulties of life in Palestine, many were swayed more by their accomplishments than even their arguments.

None of the Bund’s achievements and infrastructure survived what came next. The German invasion of Poland and the subsequent destruction of the very communities, Vilna, Warsaw, Łódź, that had been the Bund’s heartland, eliminated its membership along with everyone else’s. Thanks to their training, Bundists were prominent in ghetto resistance and in partisan units, fighting and dying as Bundists to the last, but resistance is not survival. The Yiddish-speaking working class on which the entire ideology depended was all but gone by 1945. Self-defense units could fare well against peasants drunk on vodka, blood, and the allure of easy riches, but they could seldom hold their own against a single Panzer, much less the entire German apparatus.

What remained of the Bund in the Soviet sphere fared no better: the Bund’s majority faction in Russia had already been dissolved and absorbed into the Communist Party as early as 1921, and independent Jewish socialism of any kind became increasingly intolerable to Soviet authorities. Stalin’s early ideological career was marked by strong opposition to Bundism. In Stalin’s only paper of record, “Marxism and the National Question,” heavily influenced by Lenin’s input in 1913, he sharply attacked the Bund’s push for Jewish national-cultural autonomy as bourgeois nationalist. Stalin’s only solution to the Jewish Question was assimilation and eventual disappearance into the working masses. After Lenin appointed him as the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin used all the tools at his disposal to crush what remained of the Bund. After his ascendency to the head of the Party, he ensured that dreams of a local Jewish workers’ paradise soon turned into a workers’ nightmare in the far-off Gulags.

The Holocaust and subsequent establishment of Israel in 1948 closed off the argument in a different, almost crueler way. Doikayt had bet that a Jewish future in the diaspora was not only possible but preferable to a national one. After 1939-1948, with European Jewish communities in ruins and the creation of an independent Zionist state absorbing the very survivors the Bund could no longer organize or protect, the Bund had not only lost the debate but also its very reason to exist.

Galveston, oh Galveston

Territorialism was originally a faction of Zionism, not a rejection. The Sixth Zionist Congress of 1903 was thrown into disarray by the British government’s offer of a tract of East Africa in what would come to be known as the Uganda Scheme. It could serve as a temporary refuge for Jews fleeing pogrom violence in Kishinev and across the Pale. Herzl, as head of the Congress, made clear that the British proposal would not displace the ultimate aim of a Jewish entity in the Land of Israel, but the very idea split the movement nearly in two. When the Seventh Congress formally rejected the scheme in 1905, twenty-eight delegates refused to accept the decision and walked out. They were led by Israel Zangwill and Nachum Syrkin. Within months, they had founded the Jewish Territorial Organization, the ITO, and then declared themselves the true heirs of Herzl’s practical urgency rather than traitors to his Zionist vision.

The premise was simple and, with its own internal logic, defensible: the Jewish Question was a problem of refuge, not of geography. Zangwill himself would later confess that there was no land on earth that the ITO did not consider: Galveston, Texas. Angola. Mesopotamia. Cyrenaica. Madagascar. Australia. Alaska. Grand Island on the Niagara River, where a Jewish refuge called Ararat had briefly been proposed as early as 1825, decades before Herzl was born.

Zangwill had once mused that since “the soul is greater than the soil,” Jewish renewal could occur anywhere without abandoning historic attachment to the Holy Land. After 1905, that sentiment hardened into the Territorialist doctrine: any sufficiently large, sufficiently empty territory would do; Palestine’s claim on the Jewish future was sentimental rather than practical or necessary. Almost none of their efforts amounted to anything.

The only practical success of the ITO was an assembly point in Galveston, which ultimately served merely as a transit harbor for individual immigrants rather than the compact, autonomous settlement the movement had originally envisioned. The ITO dissolved itself in 1925, its founder dead a year later, with its dream of an alternative homeland having considered every continent and settled on none.

If I Forget Thee, Birobidzhan

One state did eventually attempt what Zangwill could never do. In 1928, the Soviet government designated a remote, swampy stretch of the Far East, bordering Manchuria along the Amur River, as a territory for Jewish agricultural settlement. For a brief period, Yiddish was its official language, making it, in effect, the world’s only Yiddish-speaking state. In 1934, it was elevated to the status of Jewish Autonomous Oblast, with Birobidzhan as its capital. The Soviet media apparatus went to work in earnest: Yiddish-language novels described a socialist utopia in the taiga, leaflets were dropped from airplanes over Jewish neighborhoods in Belarus, and a state-produced film called Seekers of Happiness followed a Jewish family’s exodus from the diaspora to the new Soviet Zion. Street signs, railway signs, and postmarks appeared in Yiddish alongside Russian, schools taught in Yiddish, and a Yiddish state theater opened its doors in 1934. A regional library was named for Sholem Aleichem and held a substantial collection of Yiddish literature and Judaica. It seemed, for a moment, that the Soviets were genuinely creating an infrastructure for Jewish socio-cultural autonomy.

It was also never close to what its planners had promised. By 1939, Jews made up under twenty percent of the territory’s population. This was a far cry from the several hundred thousand settlers Soviet officials had once spoken of as a requirement to normalize Jewish national status. The land itself spelled doom for the project: it was swampy, suffered from harsh winters, and was poorly suited to the agriculture the settlers had been promised. It was also, first and foremost, far from anything resembling the Yiddish-speaking world most of them had left behind.

Even at its absolute peak in the late 1940s, the Jewish population reached only 46,000 to 50,000, roughly a quarter of the oblast’s residents. It was far from the majority that the Soviets required to create a truly autonomous Jewish homeland. As a prelude to the fate of Jewish Birobidzhan, the Jewish leaders of the project fell victim to the Great Purges of 1936 to 1938, denounced as nationalists and Trotskyites, and were liquidated.

A decade later, Stalin’s postwar campaign against so-called rootless cosmopolitanism targeted Birobidzhan’s Jews all over again. Many were deported to harsher parts of Siberia, while at the same time, the new State of Israel began absorbing the very diaspora Birobidzhan had been built for. The population, which had once approached 50,000, was cut roughly in half by 1959 and continued to shrink for decades afterward. Today, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast still exists on the map, the only such oblast left in Russia, but while a visitor will find Yiddish street signs and a giant ceremonial menorah, there are almost no Jews to be seen. The most recent reliable census found fewer than two thousand Jews remaining in a territory that was supposed to be theirs.

The Territorialist dream, in its many incarnations, was killed by failures that represented two sides of the same coin. The diaspora-organized version, the ITO, failed for want of power: it could propose, negotiate, and beg, but it could never compel a great power, much less an individual country, to hand over land, as Britain’s Mandate eventually handed Palestine to the Zionist project. The state-organized version, Birobidzhan, had power and still failed, because the same Soviet hand that built its schools and theaters was the one that purged its officials and deported its Jews. A refuge alone, it turned out, was never the variable that mattered. Sovereignty did, and the one time the Territorialists got something resembling sovereignty, it was Stalin’s to give, and Stalin’s to take away.

The Jewish C-Section

While Territorialism tried to solve the Jewish Question by relocating Jews, Soviet Jewish Communism tried to solve it by abolishing Jewishness itself. The Yevsektsiya, the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party, was founded in 1918 with Lenin’s blessing. It was staffed overwhelmingly by Jews, many of them former Bundists who had simply traded one revolutionary home for another after the ascent of Bolshevism. Lenin himself denied that Jews constituted a distinct nation at all, and treated assimilation as the only progressive resolution to the Jewish Problem. The Yevsektsiya’s task was to make Lenin’s denial a reality. It was tasked with dissolving Jewish religious and communal life, turning it into Soviet proletarian culture. Yiddish itself would be repurposed as a temporary instrument of propaganda to be discarded once Jewish assimilation and then dissolution were complete.

Their campaign was swift, brutal, and total. The first Yevsektisya conference in October 1918 resolved on the systematic destruction of Zionist and “bourgeois” Jewish institutions, with the kehillot, yeshivot, chadarim, Hebrew schools, and the Zionist parties at the top of the list. In 1919, the Zionist party headquarters in Moscow and Petrograd were seized, their members arrested, their newspapers shut down, and, in April 1920, the All-Russian Zionist Congress itself was broken up by Yevsektsiya activists backed by the secret police. Seventy-five delegates were arrested on the spot, and thousands more were imprisoned on the charge of conspiring with the Anglo-French bourgeoisie to restore a Palestinian state.

Hebrew, being the language of Scripture, and modern Ivrit, of the Zionist national revival, were conflated and targeted for elimination. Yiddish, stripped of religious or national content, was promoted as the only acceptable language for the Soviet Jewish proletarian identity. Synagogues were shut down, rabbis persecuted, Jewish schools dismantled and replaced with Soviet alternatives stripped of any connection to Jewish faith or to Israel. The Yevesktiya attacked the core aspects of Judaism and Jewish identity in a way no outsiders ever could have. They were Jews, doing it to other Jews, in the name of a revolution that had promised to dissolve the Jewish problem by dissolving the Jews.

The irony, and this is the irony that distinguishes Yevsektsiya from both the Bund and Territorialism alike, is that Yevsektsiya’s own success and methods were the ultimate instruments of its destruction. By January 1930, the Central Committee judged that the Yevsekstiya had fulfilled its mandate of integrating Jewish workers into Soviet ideology, rendering a Jewish apparatus superfluous. The Central Committee ordered its dissolution as part of a broader liquidation of all ethnic sections within the party. Having spent twelve years arguing that Jewish particularism was a bourgeois relic standing in the way of true Soviet integration, the Yevsektsiya was dissolved on precisely that logic, by the same party it had served.

What followed was worse than the dissolution they were a part of. Within the following decade, the Yevsektsiya’s own leadership, the men and women who had shut down synagogues and broken up Zionist congresses in the name of the Revolution, were purged, imprisoned, exiled, tortured, or executed by the very Soviet apparatus they had spent their careers serving. Semyon Dimanstein, the movement’s founding chairman and a former rabbinical student who had abandoned yeshiva for Bolshevism, was arrested and shot. Moshe Litvakov, editor of the movement’s flagship Yiddish paper, was executed in 1937. Esther Frumkin, once the chief ideologist of the anti-religious campaign, died in a Kazakh labor camp. The Yevsektsiya had set out to liquidate Jewish identity in the name of the Soviet project, but while Jewish identity survived the Soviets, if barely, the Yevsektsiya’s fate was its own liquidation.

An Unshakeable Bund

Ultimately, the Bund was crushed by an external enemy, Territorialism by its lack of power, and the Yevsektsiya was eaten by the very system to which it had sworn its loyalty. Though seemingly three distinct movements, Birobidzhan and the Yevsektsiya were no strangers to the Bund, or each other. It was largely former Bundists who staffed the Yevsektsiya’s Yiddish-language work in the 1920s and, as Bolsheviks, pursued the same dream of a secular Yiddish cultural future in Birobidzhan. Both projects centered on the idea that a Soviet, Yiddish-speaking Jewish identity could replace religious and national particularism alike, and both were dismantled by the same hand, in the same decade, for the same reason: Stalin’s state, and especially Stalin himself, had no patience for a Jewish anything, whatever ideological costume it wore.

Three movements, three diagnoses, and a common fate. It’s easy, through the hindsight of history, to see that they were doomed to fail from the start, and, as such, dismiss them entirely. From within their context, however, each was a serious response to a real and worsening catastrophe, built by people who had watched pogroms, war, and revolution tear through the only Jewish world they knew and had concluded, reasonably, that statehood in a distant desert was not an adequate answer to violence in the streets of Vilna or Kishinev tonight. It’s not that History necessarily refuted them so much as it ran out the clock on all three at once.

Could any of these movements have prevented October 7? Most assuredly. If there are no Jews left to persecute, how could there be pogroms, after all? Unlike the Zionisms who never had their moment in the sun, there is no need to hypothesize whether Bundism, Territorialism, or Jewish Communism could have solved the Jewish Question. They had their experiment, and their conclusion was a resounding no. So why are some trying to revisit or revive them?

There is real nostalgia for the Bund today, as seen through the resurgence of doikayt. Post-10/7, particularly, Jewish ideological opponents point to the State being unable to protect its citizens from the worst assault on world Jewry since World War II, as well as the rising antisemitism linked to the State, as a reason to revisit Bundism in what amounts to historical inversion. Bundism was ultimately unable to protect Jews, and class solidarity did not prevent, stop, or diminish antisemitism.

There can be a dialogue asking whether Zionism was the right answer to the Jewish Question, or whether there were or are better alternatives. Myopic nostalgia, and to reach backward into a movement that no longer exists, is not the way forward. The language of the Bund is being borrowed by people operating in a world the Bund never had to survive, a world with a sovereign Jewish state already built, for better or worse, on the ashes of every alternative this piece has described. The Bund is not being revived. Neither is Territorialism, nor Jewish Communism. They are a relic of their time, as are Canaanism, Cultural Zionism, and all of the other “isms” that History’s inexorable walk left behind.

These Eastern movements were not just radical but radically different from their Western counterparts. While the East answered the Jewish Question with class and territory, the West sought to answer it through Liberalism, citizenship, and theology. In the second part, we will address the Western objections to Zionism.

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That is easy to forget, nowadays. The State exists, has existed for nearly eighty years, has fought wars and won them, built cities, universities, an army, and a high-tech economy. It is easy to look at what emerged and assume it was the only thing that could have emerged; Zionism had a single destination and reached it.

It wasn’t so.

The Zionist world before 1948 was not a movement with a single blueprint. As we’ve highlighted in the first three essays, there were many Zionisms, each with varying degrees of success, influence, failures, and endings. The solution to the Jewish Emancipation question was a heated, fractious, sometimes violent argument among people who agreed that the Jewish future required a return to the Land but profoundly disagreed about what that return was meant to produce.

The first essay, “Looking Backward to Look Forward,” explored those Zionisms that were first and foremost concerned with the creation of a State, rather than the shape it would take. In the second essay, “Which Way, Hebrew Man?,” we discussed the two strains of Zionism that came to dominate the debate over the State’s future direction, and their historical records. In the third essay, “The Zionisms That Never Were (Part 1),” we explored those disagreements as they applied to the New Jew himself: how should the Jew be rebuilt, what language he should speak, and what should his body and mind look like?

This fourth essay turns to the Zionisms that were not only trying to create a New Jew, but a New Society for them to inhabit as well. These movements, with their radical breaks from traditional orders and cultures, never dominated the Zionist mainstream. Some were defeated. Some were absorbed. Some were simply overtaken by events that outpaced their dreams. But none of them were meaningless; each one was a serious attempt to answer a question the State answered differently.

These movements might have been a radical intellectual departure from mainstream Jewry, yet their concerns remained similar. They too believed Jews needed to be healed and reborn from exile, and that the only way to protect Jewish physical safety was a revolutionary break with the current order.

October 7 was a stark, painful, and traumatizing reminder to the Jewish world that sovereignty is not self-justifying. The kibbutzim meant to be the seeds of a new civilization and serve as a socialist light unto the nations became the sites of massacre. The Iron Wall proved porous. The State could defend itself with force, but it could not prevent the return of Jewish vulnerability on its own soil.

Did those other Zionisms hold an answer to a question that had yet to be asked?

A Brand New World

Not every Jew who turned toward national liberation wanted the same polity. None of the movements in this essay were ideologically anti-Zionist; they did not reject a return to Eretz Yisrael, deny a desire for Jewish national rebirth, or advocate the Diaspora as the Jewish future. They were Zion-centered at their core.

What divided them from the mainstream was not the destination but the desired political and social order at the end of the journey. Their burning question was: “When the New Jew is reborn, where should he dwell?”

A Hebrew nation?
A binational commonwealth?
A federation?
A socialist commune?
A liberated kingdom?

They ultimately shared more with each other, and with mainstream Zionism, than their differences suggest. All of them demanded a foundational break with galut. All believed that Hebrew rebirth in the ancestral Land had to be transformative, not merely restorative. All rejected the idea that Jewish vulnerability was a permanent condition to be endured rather than a problem to be solved. Their quarrel was with the mainstream of Zionism’s prescription, not its diagnosis.

New Cana’an

While Zionism, in almost all its forms, aimed at a rebirth, Canaanism wanted to shed Jews of their Jewishness, and for them to evolve into something wholly different.

This ideology fueled the circle of the Young Hebrews, the movement led by the poet and ideologue Yonatan Ratosh, whose group came to be known as the Canaanites. Whereas other Zionists saw returning to the Land as the renewal and rejuvenation of an ancient people aged and weakened by exile, Ratosh saw it as the birth of an entirely new nation.

The Jews arriving in Palestine were not merely coming back to their ancient homeland. They were on a journey to become something they had never been, nor could have been: Hebrews, natives of the ancient Near East, rooted in a land and a civilization that predated post-Second Temple Judaism, the Diaspora, and the exilic Jew.

Every major strand of Zionism shared one assumption: that the Jewish people, however transformed by the return, remained the Jewish people. Labor Zionism wanted to shed the psychology of exile, not the Jewish identity that had survived it. Revisionism wanted to arm the Jew and restore his dignity through hadar, not dissolve him into something pre-Jewish. They wanted continuation, not conclusion.

Ratosh rejected all of it. In his view, Diaspora Judaism was not a source of strength or a common bond to draw from, but rather a foreign civilization to escape. The fracture had to be total. The Hebrew, rooted in the soil of the ancient Levant, was to be a different human being from the Jew of the ghetto or the shtetl. Jewish identity did not need to be supplemented, but supplanted.

In many ways, Canaanism was not out of sync with Zionism but rather its fullest expression, carried to its most radical conclusion. Canaanite ideology was ferociously Land-centered, believed in physical rebirth on its ancestral soil, despised the exile and everything exile had done to the Jew. It was the secular anti-galut impulse personified. The Zionist id entirely unfiltered.

Zionism’s superego, however, was not willing to follow. Neither did the State. When independence was declared in 1948, it was couched as a continuation of Jewish history, even its fulfillment by some, but certainly not as its repudiation. The Israeli who emerged was a new phenomenon in many ways, shaped by his relationship to the land, hardened by war, and imbued with a pioneering spirit, but he did not stop being a Jew. His Jewishness was always central, never on the periphery, and certainly not forgotten.

Independence led to the dissolution of Canaanism, yet it left its trace. Their fierce native self-confidence, insistence that the Hebrew belonged to this land and owed nothing to the world’s judgment, and its contempt for exilic psychology, all became part of the Sabra archetype. Canaanism’s ideology also left its mark on strands of Israeli literary and intellectual culture that long outlasted the movement itself, even if today, they, too, have begun to wane from popular consciousness.

Canaanism declared war on Judaism itself. It lost that war, but the battle left its mark on the Israeli psyche.

Zion Without Domination

Not every Jew who recoiled at the idea of a state established on the basis of Jewish nationalism was an anti-Zionist. Some accepted, even celebrated, the need for national rebirth in the Land of Israel. What they could not accept was this rebirth requiring exclusive sovereignty, majority rule, or the political subordination of another people. They wanted Zion to be an inviting home, not a fortress.

The most serious of these currents gathered around two organizations, Brit Shalom in the 1920s and 1930s, and its successor Ichud in the 1940s, as well as two towering figures: the philosopher Martin Buber and the American-born Reform rabbi and educator Judah Magnes, founding president of the Hebrew University. Their ideological circle also notably included, at various points, the scholar Gershom Scholem, whose position eventually evolved toward accepting partition, and Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah.

Their core conviction was that the Jewish return to the Land had to be morally defensible on its own terms according to secular humanist values, not merely strategically viable. Buber argued for genuine dialogue and mutual recognition between Jews and Arabs as national communities, insisting that Jewish renewal could not be built on domination of one people over another. Magnes pushed further, and advocated openly for a binational state in which Jews and Arabs would share the country as equal national partners, with Jewish immigration allowed to continue but without leading to Jewish political supremacy. Various federalist and cantonal models were posited and then circulated in their orbit, imagining shared institutions, communal autonomy, and parity rather than majority rule.

What made this current Zionist rather than simply humanist was its insistence on Jewish national rebirth in the Land. It was fiercely Zionistic in that it neither saw Diaspora life as an acceptable Jewish future, nor Jewish identity as purely religious. It wanted a Hebrew cultural renewal, Jewish immigration, and a living Jewish civilization in Eretz Yisrael. Its quarrel was with the political form that civilization would embrace. More than anything, they believed Zionism required living with Arabs in peace and full equality.

It would be reductive to call this a Diaspora fantasy imposed from afar. Brit Shalom and, later, Ichud, were rooted in Palestine’s Hebrew University and Jerusalem’s intellectual circles. Yet their center of gravity was not the farm, the union office, the Haganah training grounds, or the immigrant camp, but the university, the study, the posh salon, and the moral imagination of Central European Zionism. They were Zionists, but far more at home among professors, philosophers, German-Jewish liberals, American-born moralists, and cultural Zionists than among those laboring, defending, and building the State institutions of the Yishuv.

History, however, rarely makes way for well-intentioned but ultimately utopian visions. By the 1930s, the Arab-Jewish conflict had hardened in ways that made binational political arrangements increasingly difficult to imagine, let alone implement. By the 1940s, as a result of the continuing conflict, the Holocaust and the Arab response to Jewish immigration, the possibility was almost entirely closed off. Survival replaced ethical experimentation. Sovereignty eventually became the only answer to Jewish vulnerability.

After the 1948 War of Independence, binational Zionism became very difficult to advocate without sounding either naive or defeated. The movement disappeared as a political program, but its moral vocabulary and utopian vagary still haunts some corners of Israel’s universities, studies, salons, as well as Diasporic organizations. Looking through the lens of a hundred years of conflict, for some Israelis Brit Shalom represents an almost quaint and wistful look at what could have been. For others, it is a glimpse of a very well-meaning but naive past that never could have been.

Red and White

The kibbutz was not supposed to be merely a communal settlement, but rather to become the apex of Jewish civilization and serve as its future modality. This distinction matters for understanding the utopian left of the Zionist world, those who went further than mainstream Labor Zionism. They did not merely want a state with socialist policies or a government friendly to organized labor. They wanted a transformed and transformative Jewish society, classless, collective, agricultural, egalitarian, and built from the ground up on the rejection of the bourgeois individual and the psychology of exile that had produced him.

The most significant of these currents was Hashomer Hatzair, a Marxist-oriented youth movement and political party that eventually formed the backbone of Mapam and the Kibbutz Artzi federation. Where mainstream Labor Zionism under Ben-Gurion was pragmatic, statist, and willing to make the compromises required by governance, Hashomer Hatzair held tightly to its ideological commitments. Marxist class analysis formed the backbone of its policies, and the kibbutz was the model for the future rather than merely a state institution amongst many. For a time, following the lead of Jewish Marxist movements in the Diaspora, it even advocated binational political arrangements on the grounds that genuine socialist solidarity between Jewish and Arab workers made exclusive Jewish sovereignty unnecessary, a bourgeois indulgence, and morally suspect.

Behind all of this, in spirit if not always in direct influence, stood A.D. Gordon. His vision of Hebrew labor was less a Marxist program than a personal and national religion. For Gordon, physical work on the land was not merely economically necessary or politically useful. It was the cure for the woes exile inflicted on the Jewish spirit. A Jew who worked the earth with his hands was healing himself, recovering a wholeness that centuries of enforced rootlessness and petty mercantilism had taken from him.

The State could not model itself after the Kibbutz, or the post-government communal structure envisioned by Marx. The Workers’ Paradise would have to wait. What the State needed after it declared its independence was armies, ministries, police forces, tax collection, diplomatic relations, and the absorption of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had not been shaped by pioneering ideology and had no particular attachment to collective agriculture. The kibbutz could inspire the State, supply it with leaders and soldiers, and serve as its founding mythology, but could not be the kibbutz writ large. Security overpowered utopia. The party absorbed the commune. The final coup de grâce to Red Zionism was the invisible hand of the market, arriving gradually and then all at once after the economic liberalization of the 1980s, defeating the socialist imagination more thoroughly than any political opponent had.

What remained was powerful precisely because it was no longer programmatic. The kibbutz became a national symbol rather than a blueprint, the pioneer a founding myth rather than a model to be emulated. The future of Jewish civilization became its storied past. The Kibbutz would be learned about in history books, visited on school trips, and a tourist attraction, but never the civilizational path they dreamt it up to be.

Still, the language of collective sacrifice, of building the land from the ground up, of Hebrew labor as something more than employment, all of this embedded itself in Israeli culture and in the early ethos of the IDF long after the ideology that produced it had been quietly dismantled.

The Revisionist Reds

If Brit Shalom dreamed of a softer Zion, Lechi dreamed of a harsher one.

Not every unrealized Zionism imagined less sovereignty. Some imagined more, and fiercer, and beyond what any parliamentary system, diplomatic framework, or governing coalition could contain. These were the maximalist and revolutionary currents that the State inherited in part, absorbed selectively, but could never fully digest.

Their central figure was Avraham Stern, known as Yair, who had broken from the Irgun in 1940 to found Lehi, sometimes called the Stern Gang by the British who hunted him. Where Jabotinsky had been willing to work with the British when tactically useful, Stern regarded the British Empire as the primary enemy, worse in practical terms than the Germans because it was the British who actively blocked Jewish immigration to Palestine while Europe burned. His was not a politics of patience or coalition-building. It was an ideology of revolt, total and uncompromising, against every foreign power that stood between the Jewish people and their full liberation in their ancestral land. He took Jabotinsky’s Revisionism, pushed it to its limit, then made it his.

Around and after Stern, others carried his maximalist vision into its most intellectually developed forms. Yisrael Eldad took the movement’s mythic and messianic language and turned it into a philosophical program, insisting that Jewish liberation required not merely a state but a kingdom, a restoration of Jewish sovereignty back to its fullest historical dimensions. Uri Tzvi Greenberg supplied the poetry, ferocious and prophetic, that gave the underground its emotional register and its sense of world-historical stakes. Abba Ahimeir brought the ideological hardness, the anti-socialist nationalism, the willingness to borrow from European radical right currents and reframe them in Jewish terms.

The State that emerged could not accept this. It felt the need for international legitimacy, which required it to accept limits. It wanted a monopoly on force, which meant dismantling the underground militias rather than absorbing their program. They required practical borders and diplomatic relationships, which meant that territorial maximalism had to confront the calculations of what was actually achievable and sustainable. The underground had to become an army, and the Revolution a government.

What the State kept was some of the fire without the full program. The insistence on Jewish power, on self-reliance, on refusing to depend on the goodwill of foreign powers, on projecting strength rather than seeking permission, all of this passed into Israeli strategic culture and security doctrine in ways that shaped the country’s behavior for decades. The language of uncompromising national dignity survived even as the specific maximalist territorial and political visions were set aside or defeated.

The maximalists never forgave the State for its compromises, but it is doubtful whether it could have survived without making them. Yet, it could not have been built at all without the fire the maximalists supplied.

Alternate History Redux

As per the previous installment in this series, we must ask: “What might have happened had a different Zionism inherited the State. Would October 7 still have happened? And if so, how would they have answered it?”

Could Canaanism have prevented October 7? Almost certainly not, and it might have made the underlying vulnerability worse. A Hebrew nation severed from Judaic memory and Diaspora identity would have lost something Israel still leans on in its darkest hours: the deep well of religious and historical meaning that lets a country tide over catastrophe without losing its sense of why it exists. How would Canaanism have reacted to the massacre? Probably with a fury stripped of theology, a vow of nativist vengeance rather than religious mourning, framed not as Jews defending Jews but as Hebrews defending their ancestral soil from a foreign incursion. Diasporic support, politically, economically, materially, and spiritually, has always been crucial to the State of Israel. It is doubtful a Canaanite nation cutting itself off from it would have even survived long enough for an October 7 to happen in the first place.

Could binational or federal Zionism have prevented it? This is the hardest hypothetical to dismiss, and also the hardest to believe. Had Brit Shalom’s vision somehow taken root, a shared political structure built on Arab-Jewish parity rather than Jewish sovereignty might have addressed the grievances that fuel rejectionist violence at their source. But this assumes a counterfactual so large it nearly swallows the question: a regional history without Political Islam, the wars, the refugee crises, and the decades of organized rejection that made binationalism politically impossible by 1948. A binational entity built in 2023, by contrast, would not have been immune to Hamas. It might have been more exposed, not less, having traded hardened borders and a unified army for the kind of internal political fragmentation that ideological enemies of coexistence exploit most easily. Its reaction to such an attack might not have been unified retaliation but paralysis, two national communities unable to agree on what had even happened, let alone what to do about it. If we look at history, however, we can surmise more likely scenarios, fueled by the rise of Islamic extremis over the last century: a binational State would have either been engulfed in a civil war, Jews would eventually have been relegated as a 2nd class minority with diminished right as is the case with all minorities in Islamic and Arab lands, or a painful war of Jewish Emancipation post-binational State that would have either failed, or succeeded but created a smaller, more vulnerable, and less defensible, State of Israel.

Could Red Zionism have prevented October 7? History often loves to indulge in painful irony. The kibbutzim that suffered most on October 7 were themselves the living remnant of this very movement. Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz these were not generic towns. They were communities built on the socialist, collectivist vision of Red Zionism and still carried its DNA in their structures and politics, decades after the ideology that had built them had faded from national life. A more fully realized Red Zionism, one where the kibbutz had remained the dominant social unit rather than one sector among many, would not have prevented the attack. If anything, the open, undefended, deliberately non-militarized character that early kibbutz idealism prized, the conviction that good fences make bad neighbors, may have made the communities more vulnerable, not less. These communities’ reaction to October 7, true to the movement’s ethos, was already on display in the immediate aftermath for the world to see: communal solidarity, mutual aid, and a refusal to abandon coexistence as a value even amid grief that would justify abandoning it. Men pass, but ideology endures.

Could the maximalists have prevented it? This is the one hypothetical where the answer plausibly tilts toward yes, and it is also the one the actual State came closest to inheriting. Eldad’s insistence on overwhelming, unembarrassed Jewish power, and Lechi’s contempt for any posture of restraint that could be mistaken for weakness, describe almost exactly the doctrine Israel initially pursued in the war’s aftermath. The honest answer is not that maximalism was rejected and proven wrong. It is that maximalism was partially inherited, and October 7 happened anyway, a sign that even the hardest partial version of Jewish power has limits that ideology alone cannot will away. Would an unrestrained Maximalist State project the kind of power that could have shielded it? Yes. Would that State still be the State that exists today? Most definitely not.

The State That Swallowed Its Dreamers

Before the die is cast, the future is filled with endless possibilities. Once it settles, there is no dream left but what has crystallized. There were over a dozen different schools of Zionism, each with their own internal variants. Each of these eventually had to recede so that a single polity could stand in its place. This is the State as it stands today.

There is, however, one current we have not yet examined: those who looked at the entire Zionist project, in all its forms, and said no. Not to this Zion, but yes to a different Zion. Or, no Zion at all.

The next essay turns to ideological anti-Zionism and non-Zionism; those Jews who believed Jewish destiny was never meant to culminate in a state, and who built their own visions of Jewish life and Jewish future somewhere else entirely, or believed that Jewish emancipation was destined to be outside of the Land of Israel. Before, we asked which Zion. Now we ask whether Zion was ever the answer.

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Those who dropped Torah observance never dropped the Jewish sense of humor. Yiddish humor, often of the dark variety, satirized, contemplated, skewered, or lovingly ribbed Jewish life, the shtetl, and our history. When Jews moved to America, they took Yiddish humor and turned it into stand-up. The Borscht Belt developed its reputation as a comedy boot camp for comics. From Hollywood to Broadway, comedy was seen as the Jewish NBA.

What differentiates a trite laugh from humor that stands the test of time is often how deeply it resonates with the human experience. Millions of Jewish jokes have been forgotten, but others have stood the test of time. “Two Jews, Three Opinions” and its variations are a good example. It captured a sliver of the Jewish experience and, as a result, captured the imagination. Jews are not only strongly opinionated, but very creative about it as well. As then-Prime Minister Golda Meir is said to have quipped to then-President Richard Nixon, if he thought it was hard being “the president of 150 million Americans,” try being “the prime minister of 6 million prime ministers.”

It’s Funny Because It’s True

This moment of wit etched itself into political history not only because of how funny it was, but also because of how deeply it resonated. Jews do not merely have opinions; they build worlds out of them. Give Jews a question, and they will not produce one answer, but schools of thought, counter-schools, manifestos, factions, institutions, newspapers, and arguments that outlive their authors.

So when modernity forced the Jewish people to confront the question of national survival, it should surprise no one that they did not produce one Zionism. They produced many.

Those Zionisms sprang out either as a reaction to antisemitism, or to a perceived decay in the body, spirit, or soul of the Jew. They believed that through living in the Land of Israel, the Jew could protect or renew himself. The anti-Zionisms, on the other hand, often examined the same problems and reached the opposite conclusions: the Jewish future would not be saved by a return to Eretz Yisrael.

Many Jewish intellectuals threw their hats into the ring, each offering a different vision for how this project could be achieved. Most of these Zionisms hinged on their visions being implemented; once the State came to be as it was, they faded into history.

That is not to say they never existed. The Zionisms That Never Were never came to dominate the conversation, but their arguments, organizations, inspirations, aspirations, and institutions shaped Hebrew culture, influenced Jewish politics, and left fingerprints all over Israeli society. Some disappeared entirely. Some survived in the background. Some were so entirely absorbed into Israeli life that their names became unnecessary. Yet they were never meaningless.

The Origins: Restoring the Jew in the Modern World

The historical roots of proto-Zionism trace back to the triad of Rabbi Yehudah Alkali, Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalisher, and Moses Hess. Already at its inception, what would come to be known as Zionism divided itself into secular Ideological proto-Zionism and Religious proto-Zionism, while their ideological and religious oppositions took shape along lines similar to those they hold today. [Note: Religious proto-Zionism will be fully fleshed out and discussed in the Religious Zionism & Antizionism series]

Proto-Zionism, also known as Restorationism, posited that the Jew needed return, but not the old messianic kind. As one of the first fully modern and non-religious answers to the Jewish Question, it insisted that the Jew needed a sovereign commonwealth animated by socialist ideals in the Land of Israel: a progressive nation-state built on the same logic of national liberation that was remaking Europe. Nationalism, with Jewish seasoning.

Its secular version originated in the 1850s–1860s among German-Jewish intellectuals in the wake of the failed 1848 political revolutions. Its definitive expression came in the form of 1862’s Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question, written by Moses Hess during his Parisian exile, then later published in Germany. Hess, a Rhinelander once dubbed Marx and Engels’s “communist rabbi,” watched Italian unification under Mazzini and German national stirrings and concluded that the age of universalist socialism had ignored the stubborn reality of nations. The Damascus Affair of 1840 and persistent antisemitism after legal emancipation convinced him that assimilation was a dead end as well. Jews were not merely a religious community but a historic people with an unresolved national question; the last one left in Europe.

Hess rejected both the nascent Reform movement’s dilution of national identity in its Enlightenment-driven rewriting of Judaism just as he rejected strict Marxist blindness to nationality. In Rome and Jerusalem, he argued for a Jewish socialist state in then-Palestine that would combine ancestral right to the land with modern principles of justice and collective labor. It would be a model society, built on agriculture, self-sufficiency, and emancipation, proving that Jewish national revival could advance, rather than contradict, universal human progress.

Its achievements were purely ideological, yet foundational. Rome and Jerusalem provided the first coherent secular blueprint for what would later become Labor and Socialist Zionism. Hess directly influenced Nahman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, and the kibbutz pioneers; his synthesis of nationalism and socialism became the intellectual DNA of the Yishuv’s dominant strain. His remains were reinterred in Israel in 1961 alongside other Labor Zionist founders; it was a quiet acknowledgment of the intellectual debt they owed him. His book also gave secular European Jews permission to embrace Jewish nationalism without religious language.

Yet as a practical movement it achieved nothing in its own time. No settlements, no organizations, no land purchases followed. After its publication, Rome and Jerusalem stirred controversy in assimilated German-Jewish circles but won almost no mass support or funding. Hess lacked the institutional reach, philanthropic networks, or political skill to turn his theory into action. He died in 1875 with none of his vision realized. The Jewish masses were still streaming toward America and Ottoman Palestine remained distant and inaccessible.

Culture over Nurture

Restorationism said that the Jew needs a national body. Cultural Zionism countered: the Jew needs a soul.

Cultural Zionism (also called Spiritual Zionism) emerged in late-19th-century Eastern Europe, initially as a critique of the struggling practical settlements of Chovevei Tzion and later as a counterweight to Theodor Herzl’s Political Zionism. Its intellectual center was Odessa, a hotbed of competing Jewish intellectual ideologies, and its ideological opposition to the direction of Zionism crystallized in the explosive 1889 essay by Ahad Ha’am, “Lo Zeh ha-Derekh” (“This Is Not the Way”), published in Hebrew.

Ahad Ha’am (born Asher Tzvi Hirsch Ginsberg) argued that Zionism faced two major problems: the First Aliyah colonies had collapsed into economic dependency and cultural emptiness, while Herzl’s congress-driven diplomacy risked creating “a state of Jews” rather than a genuinely Jewish civilization.

The Old Yishuv, the traditional religious community of the Land, had been dependent on the chalukah system for centuries, upkept and upheld by the generosity of Diaspora Jews. In their attempt to emancipate the modern Jew, the Zionist pioneers had instead adopted the very same lifestyle, in which they depended on patrons and philanthropy, without the spiritual seriousness that had justified the old model.

The deeper crisis facing Jews, he insisted, was not merely antisemitism, but the spiritual fragmentation of non-Orthodox Jewry. Assimilation, loss of national creativity, and inner hollowness threatened to dissolve Jewish identity even if physical safety were somehow guaranteed.

A Haskalah product who had moved from Hasidism to secular nationalism, Ahad Ha’am founded the semi-secret B’nei Moshe society in Odessa, and later edited the influential journal Ha-Shiloah. He deliberately stayed aloof from formal party leadership. Instead, he proposed a small, high-quality “spiritual center” in Palestine that would radiate Hebrew language, literature, ethics, and national consciousness outward to the entire Diaspora.

Mass immigration and immediate statehood were secondary; the priority was moral and cultural regeneration so that a future Jewish polity, whatever its form, would embody authentic Jewish values rather than become just another Levantine nation-state. Only after this groundwork, he believed, could the center serve as “a light unto the nations.”

Its achievements were profound yet indirect. Ahad Ha’am’s ideas seeded the Hebrew literary renaissance, inspired poets like Bialik, and helped shape the ethos of Hebrew education and cultural institutions that became cornerstones of Israeli society. The principle that Israel must be more than a refuge but instead serve as a sort of “Light Unto the Nations” civilizational beacon remained a lasting undercurrent in Labor Zionism and secular Israeli thought long after political Zionism won the day. Ki miHebrew University teitzei Socialism.

Yet, as an independent political program, it never became dominant. Ahad Ha’am’s vision was deliberately elitist and gradualist, favoring a select cultural vanguard over mass mobilization. It consequently lacked the organizational muscle and urgent pragmatism of Herzl’s congresses. While it inspired, it could not absorb refugees, negotiate charters, or answer the accelerating physical threats facing European Jewry. The spiritual center Ahad Ha’am demanded was never realized in its pure preparatory form; the state that eventually emerged was born in crisis, not in the slow cultural ripening he prescribed. The founders of the State found more urgency in draining swamps and hoeing than in reading Schelling.

Brawn over Books

A national body? A soul? The Jew needs a strong body and an even stronger will!

Muscular Zionism and Nietzschean (also known as Vitalist) Zionism were two closely related yet distinct early Zionist currents that emerged in the 1890s–1910s. Both rejected the stereotyped image of the passive, intellectually bent Diaspora Jew and championed the creation of a vigorous “New Jew” (or “New Hebrew”). To survive the modern world, this New Jew would have to be physically robust, self-assertive, and psychologically reborn.

They overlapped in their call for national regeneration through strength and their shared roots in the post-1881 pogroms and the broader Hebrew literary awakening. But they differed sharply in emphasis and method: Muscular Zionism was pragmatic and corporeal, focused on sports, discipline, and physical culture; Nietzschean Zionism was philosophical and radical, demanding an existential transvaluation of Jewish values, heroic individualism, and a break from tradition.

Together they supplied the psychological fuel for the pioneering ethos of the Yishuv and the later Sabra ideal, yet neither ever functioned as a fully independent political movement.

Muscular Zionism originated in Central and Western Europe and was crystallized in a single dramatic moment: Max Nordau’s 1898 speech at the Second Zionist Congress in Basel. A physician, social critic, and close collaborator of Herzl, Nordau drew on fin-de-siècle European anxieties about “degeneration” and declining national vigor. He coined the term Muskeljudentum (“muscular Judaism”) and called for gymnastics, sports, and disciplined self-defense to produce healthy, agile pioneers and fighters. It was a mainstream effort, organizational and tightly tied to the Zionist Congresses.

Nietzschean Zionism, by contrast, arose in the Hebrew literary circles of Eastern Europe (especially the Russian Empire and Ukraine) during the same period. Its central voice was the writer Micha Josef Berdichevsky, who adapted Nietzsche’s ideas of the Übermensch, the Will to Power, and the transvaluation of values.

While Nordau prescribed calisthenics, Berdichevsky demanded a deeper cultural and psychological revolution: Jews must overcome the “slave morality,” rabbinic passivity, and antiquarian history to embrace ancient Hebraic vitality, creativity, and self-creation in their ancestral homeland. Nordau wanted the Maccabees by way of the Greek gymnasium. Berdichevsky wanted the ancient Hebrews by way of the modern Teuton.

Both currents wanted to answer the same urgent question: how do we transform a people long defined by enduring subjugation into one capable of self-determination? Muscular Zionism supplied the workout routine; Nietzschean Zionism supplied the philosophical podcast during sets.

Their combined achievements were cultural and psychological rather than organizational. Muscular Zionism directly inspired the Maccabi sports clubs, Hebrew gymnastics, the Maccabiah Games, and overlapped with self-defense groups such as Hashomer, thereby embedding physical education and body culture into Zionist youth movements and, later, Israeli identity.

Nietzschean Zionism enriched modern Hebrew literature, legitimized radical self-assertion, and was echoed in the work of early Yishuv writers. Its influence would later flow into movements like Canaanism. Together they helped forge the image of the tough, self-reliant New Jew that became central to Labor Zionism and the Palmach esprit de corps.

Yet as distinct streams they never became dominant. Neither generated a mass party or independent infrastructure. Their ideas were too psychological and youth-oriented to solve the era’s accelerating political and diplomatic crises, and they could not overcome the deep psychological hold of Diaspora identity for most Jews. Muscular Zionism was sometimes criticized for reducing regeneration of the Jew to the body alone; Nietzschean Zionism’s fierce anti-traditional stance alienated potential allies and remained largely literary rather than programmatic.

Ink over Iron

The pen is mightier than the sword. Therefore, the Jew needed a language and a native identity, not a squat rack. This was the conclusion of Hebraism.

The Hebrew Renaissance, or Hebraism, was the Zionist cultural-linguistic movement that transformed Hebrew from a sacred, liturgical tongue, typically reserved for prayer, study, and ancient texts, and intercommunal correspondence, into the living, spoken, literary, and everyday language of a modern nation. It became the cultural backbone of the Yishuv and later of the State of Israel.

Its intellectual roots lay in the Eastern European Haskalah and Chibbat Tzion circles of the 1870s–1880s, centered in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement, especially Odessa. The practical turning point came in 1881 when Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (born Eliezer Perlman in then-White Russia) arrived in Jerusalem and began his single-minded Hebrew revival project amid the First Aliyah. The movement gained momentum through Hebrew newspapers, schools, literary societies, and the Hebrew language committees he helped found.

Hebraism arose from the nationalist shock of the 1881–82 pogroms and the practical chaos of early Zionist settlements. Immigrants arrived speaking Yiddish, Russian, German, Ladino, and Arabic; without a common tongue rooted in Jewish history and the land itself, national revival seemed impossible. Proponents rejected both the “exilic” Yiddish of the Diaspora and the purely religious confinement of classical Hebrew. They argued that true sovereignty required cultural sovereignty: a modern, secular Hebrew culture capable of sustaining a people returning to its ancestral soil after two millennia.

This movement is overwhelmingly associated with a single visionary: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, universally known as the father of Modern Hebrew. He systematically revived spoken Hebrew, coined thousands of new words for science, technology, and daily life, established Hebrew-only schools and newspapers, and compiled the monumental Ben-Yehuda Dictionary. National poet Chaim Nahman Bialik and other writers of the Revival period supplied the literary soul, but Ben-Yehuda was the singular engine of the Hebrew linguistic revolution. He even enforced Hebrew in his own home; his son Itamar became the first native speaker of modern Hebrew.

Its achievements rank among the most remarkable linguistic feats in history. Creating an entire modern vocabulary from ancient roots was painstaking, and adoption outside committed circles was slow until the Second Aliyah reinforced it. By the 1920s, Hebrew had become the dominant language of the Yishuv. In 1948, it was declared an official language of the new state. It produced a flourishing modern Hebrew literature and press, culturally unified waves of diverse immigrants, and embedded Hebrew education and identity at the core of Israeli society. Hebrew was no longer perceived by the non-Orthodox world as a holy relic; it was now the language in which even secular Jews fought, loved, governed, joked, and dreamed.

Yet as a distinct ideological movement, it never needed to survive long. It succeeded so completely that it dissolved into the air Israelis breathed. While it achieved supremacy in the Land, it never fully displaced Yiddish or other Jewish languages in the Diaspora, nor did it erase traditional religious usage of Hebrew among the ultra-Orthodox. Early implementation faced ferocious opposition: ultra-Orthodox communities viewed spoken Hebrew as desecration of the holy tongue, leading to boycotts, excommunication threats, and alleged occasional violence against Ben-Yehuda. To this day, some of the most virulently anti-Zionist groups refuse to use what they refer to as Ivrit, and only allow the traditional Lashon HaKodesh in its synagogues and study halls.

Alternating History

These five movements were part of the first generation of attempts to provide a modern, secular Jewish answer to the question “What does the Jew actually need?” They arose before the State existed, when Zionism was still a marketplace of dreams rather than a tool for governance. Restorationism’s socialist national home, Cultural Zionism’s focus on the Jewish soul, Muscular Zionism’s emphasis on the body, the Vitalist need for the Will to Power, and Hebraism’s emphasis on language and native identity all sought to address the issues of exile and to rejuvenate or recreate the Jew. Each was serious, creative, and influential in its own right, but none became the dominant path. And all of them, to some extent, tried to answer the question that animated modern Ideological Zionism as a whole: how should the Jewish people confront antisemitism, anti-Jewish violence, and the humiliations of exile?

As such, it is important to ask: in an alternate history where any one of these visions had produced the Jewish state, would something like October 7 still have occurred? The answer is almost certainly yes, though its scale, timing, and exact character would have differed. The core collision was never about the flavor of Zionism; it was about the fact of Jewish sovereignty itself in a land also claimed by an emerging Arab national movement. Restorationism’s socialist commonwealth, Ahad Ha’am’s cultural-spiritual center, Nordau’s disciplined muscular pioneers, Berdichevsky’s heroic vitalists, or Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew-speaking republic would all have represented the same existential reality: a non-Muslim political entity exercising self-determination in a region where Arab and pan-Islamic resistance to such an outcome was already latent by the late nineteenth century.

Demographic shifts, competing claims to holy sites, economic rivalry, and great-power maneuvering would have crystallized opposition regardless. A slower, more culturally focused state (Cultural or Hebraist) might have delayed mass confrontation, while a more assertively strong and self-reliant one (Muscular or Nietzschean) might have accelerated it. Or, inversely, the weakness of a culturally focused state-building effort might have invited violence, while projected power might have deferred it. But the zero-sum territorial logic would not have been erased by any of these early ideals. Could a Vitalist or Muscular state, with its own Lehi-style maximalist breakaway, put in an application of Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall so strong it would have succeeded? Could a Cultural state win over the Arab and Muslim mind and convince them of its benefits, or at least of coexistence? Possible, but unlikely. Competing national movements claiming the same land have rarely avoided bloodshed, no matter how progressive, spiritual, or linguistically pure the arriving vision.

While they might not have avoided such an attack, how would these early Zionisms have addressed it? Each would have reached for the tools it trusted most, and each would have discovered its limits. Restorationism would have doubled down on socialist solidarity, perhaps seeking class-based alliances with Arab workers while calling for international proletarian support, yet it would have found that national hatred often overrides class solidarity, as Hess himself lamented. Cultural Zionism would have turned inward, asking what moral or spiritual failure in the Jewish soul had invited the violence, and redoubled efforts to build a “light unto the nations,” yet it would have learned that moral refinement alone cannot deter rockets or massacres. Muscular Zionism and Nietzschean Vitalism would have responded with raw physical and psychological assertion: stronger self-defense, heroic resolve, and a refusal to return to “slave morality,” yet they would have confronted the painful truth that even supermen are not Superman; the strongest body and will cannot guarantee invulnerability. Hebraism would have insisted on Hebrew unity and native resolve, framing the defense as a continuation of the linguistic-cultural rebirth, yet it would have discovered that a shared language does not automatically produce a shared winning military strategy.

On the Fringes

The movements explored here remained focused on the Jew himself. They discussed how exile had bent him, weakened him, emptied him, fragmented him, or left him without a living national language. Their answers differed sharply, but they shared the same underlying assumption: before Jewish sovereignty could mean anything, the Jew who would inhabit it had to be restored, renewed, strengthened, or remade.

That is why they remained inside the Zionist tent, even when they stood near its edges. They accepted that the Jewish future required some form of return to Eretz Yisrael. Their quarrel was over what that return was meant to produce in the Jew.

But other unchosen Zionisms pushed the argument beyond the Jew and toward the structure of the national project itself. They did not ask only what kind of Jew would be created by return, but where he would live, what kind of political order he would build, and whether the actual State that emerged was the only possible Zionist outcome.

Did Jewish survival require Eretz Yisrael specifically, or merely some territory where Jews could govern themselves? Did return to Zion require exclusive Jewish sovereignty, or could it take the form of a shared Jewish-Arab commonwealth? Could Zionism become a socialist utopia, a binational moral experiment, or a revolutionary project rather than the state that actually came into being?

The next essay turns to those movements: the Zionisms that still lived somewhere within the margins of the Zionist tent, but challenged its assumptions about land, sovereignty, morality, and power.

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Even before statehood, many other contenders stepped into the Yishuv’s ring for the battle over its direction. Amongst them were Cultural Zionism with its vision of a spiritual and Hebrew cultural center, Religious Zionism and Old Yishuv Haredi anti-Zionism, Marxist Zionism variants, General Zionism, Canaanism, and a slew of other isms. Very quickly, however, two ideologies would come to completely dominate the fight: Labor and Revisionist Zionism.

In one corner stood the Labor Zionist Builder. The New Jew would be created through Hebrew labor, collective settlement, and a morally superior Hebrew society built on the ethos of socialism and a negation of the psychology of exile. In the other corner stood the Revisionist Zionist Fighter, who demanded an unapologetic Jewish power, independent enterprise, national dignity, territorial maximalism, and an Iron Wall no enemy could breach.

Yet the fight was never simply “left versus right.” These were two competing visions that sought to answer the most fateful question: What, exactly, was Jewish sovereignty for?

New States for New Jews

Labor Zionism answered exile and antisemitism with the vision of a New Jew who would come to replace the exilic Jew. Labor Zionism envisioned this New Jew as a Hebrew-speaking pioneer, physically strong and rooted in productive manual labor and agriculture, rather than what it saw as the weak, passive, bookish, mercantile, physically powerless Jew of exile. This New Jew would let go of old paradigms; secular and collective-minded, his rebirth would be created through the concepts of Hebrew labor and attachment to the land. This would remake the Jew into a self-reliant figure, liberated from the weakness and dependence of exile.

To foster his growth, a collectivist and socialist environment was needed. The kibbutzim, moshavim, a centralized economy, political and cultural institutions like the Histadrut, and a single party, Mapai, It, alone, would plan the State’s central economy and shape its central culture. Labor’s New Jew would be raised in what they conceptualized as an egalitarian, morally superior society, achieved through secular Hebrew nationalism and the shedding of traditional Torah observance. Centralized, pragmatic state machinery would foster a sense of public responsibility, national discipline, and Hebrew labor through its Mapai-led bureaucracy, education system, and welfare institutions that would absorb immigrants and thoroughly transform them, befitting their new society.

Revisionism’s answer to Labor’s New Jew was in many ways its shadow image. Instead of a clean break from the past, its New Jew would be a proud and disciplined warrior, rooted in Jewish historical memory and romantic nationalism. Revisionism desired to replace what it saw as the weak, exilic Jew with a fighter unwilling to beg for permission to survive; he would be armed, dignity-obsessed, capable of wielding power, and unafraid to use it. He would take what was his by historical right, refuse to depend on the goodwill of others, and, powered by an iron will, refuse to accept helplessness.

The Revisionist Jew would need something very different from a Labor State to thrive; an independent spirit was key to its success after all. Liberal economics and anti-socialist politics would ensure that individual initiative, private enterprise, and a rejection of both collectivism and socialist class politics would promote his development. The State would be organized around Jewish power, deterrence, and a refusal to be party to anything that diminished Jewish rights. While eventually Revisionism became Israel’s dominant political language, Labor Zionism became its founding machinery.

The Builder

Labor Zionism emerged from the deepening crisis of Eastern European Jewry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The 1881–1882 pogroms after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, and the waves of violence following the 1905 Russian Revolution convinced many young Jews that emancipation in Europe had failed and that Jews could not simply wait for acceptance. Unlike Herzl’s diplomatic Zionism, which emphasized international charters and relied on lobbying, Labor Zionism insisted a Jewish state had to be built “from below” through pioneering aliyah, Hebrew labor, settlement, and collective institutions. It fused Jewish nationalism with socialism, and advocated for the creation of a new Hebrew culture and society in Eretz Yisrael.

Its central historical setting was the Second Aliyah (roughly 1904–1914), when waves of young socialist Zionists arrived in Ottoman Palestine. Labor Zionism became increasingly dominant during the Second and Third Aliyah periods and, by the 1930s, had become the leading force in the Yishuv through institutions such as the Histadrut (founded 1920), its domination of the kibbutz and moshav movements, Mapai (founded 1930), the Haganah, and, later, the early Israeli state bureaucracy. Mapai dominated every Israeli government from 1948 until the political earthquake of 1977.

Though Ben-Gurion became its avatar in public consciousness, its intellectual prehistory includes Moses Hess, whose Rome and Jerusalem (1862) blended romantic nationalism with early socialist ideas about Jewish national revival, and a handful of other ideologues who dug its intellectual foundations. Nachman Syrkin argued that Jewish national liberation required a socialist society and that this view directly influenced the creation of the Poalei Tzion movement. Ber Borochov provided Labor Zionism with its Marxist-sociological framework; his “inverted pyramid” class structure posited that, in exile, there were too many intellectuals and middlemen in Jewish society, and too few productive workers. For the sake of the Jewish people’s national and social revival, the majority of Jews had to become productive workers, and the intellectual class had to dwindle to a much smaller proportion. A.D. Gordon infused the ideal of Jewish labor with an almost spiritual quality. For Gordon, physical work on the land was a form of personal healing and almost messianic national liberation. The Jewish people had been alienated from nature for centuries in exile and would find their redemption through agricultural toil. Berl Katznelson took those various streams and shaped them into Labor Zionism’s moral language, press, educational materials, and self-image, while David Ben-Gurion was its masterful orator, political executor, turning ideology into statecraft and well-oiled institutions and organizations.

Labor Zionism built much of the pre-state infrastructure that made Israel possible and produced Israel’s founding leadership and many later prime ministers, including Ben-Gurion, Sharett, Eshkol, Meir, Rabin, and Peres. The generation that declared independence and built the early state was overwhelmingly shaped by Labor Zionist assumptions.

The Building

Labor Zionism created a functioning state under impossible conditions: absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the early years (especially Holocaust survivors and the vast majority of the 850,000 to 900,000 Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews forced to flee from Arab lands), building an army, establishing national institutions, developing agriculture, creating a Hebrew education system, and forming a state bureaucracy. Labor-led governments and institutions presided over the military victories of 1948 and 1967 while shaping the military culture that enabled them.

It gave Israel a powerful founding mythology with its kibbutznik, its pioneer, the soldier-farmer, the swamp-drainer, the Palmach fighter. All of them became central to Israeli national memory. Even non-Labor Zionists absorbed much of this ethos through culture and education. There is no doubt that Labor Zionism’s greatest achievement was transforming Zionism from a movement into institutions, and institutions into a sovereign state.

Labor Zionism had many grand ambitions, but not all of them panned out. It ultimately failed in its quest to replace Judaism with purely secular Hebrew nationalism. While it created a vibrant Hebrew culture, Israeli society remained deeply bound to Jewish time, symbols, Tanach, family identity, and religious tradition, and this bond has only grown over time.

It failed many Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews. The ruling elite often treated Mizrachi immigrants paternalistically, as populations to be absorbed and “modernized.” This created lasting wounds around class, culture, religion, race, and dignity, fueling resentment that later helped the Revisionist right rise.

It created an Ashkenazi-dominated elite that many Israelis came to resent. Its control over politics, labor, media, military culture, the judicial system, and bureaucracy fostered a sense that the country belonged to a single founding class. While the 1977 Likud victory was a cultural revolt as much as a political one, this sentiment persists to this day in many segments of the population. There is a sentiment, not unfounded, that those who hold most of the levers of power in the institutions, and the ones they pass the torch to once they retire, are not representative of the public’s will but a continuation of its Labor elite.

Its socialist-economic vision eventually exhausted itself. The kibbutz movement lost ideological centrality; Israel shifted toward privatization, high-tech capitalism, and individualism. Today, very few of its institutions remain in their original socialist or socialist-inspired form. Its centralizing, state-first ethos could also turn ruthless. Most famously, during the Altalena Affair, Ben-Gurion ordered Yitzhak Rabin to shell an Irgun arms ship to assert a monopoly on force, even firing on men waving white flags or trying to swim to safety, despite the fact that Begin had ordered his men not to shoot back. In its later decades (especially after 1967 and Oslo), parts of the Labor Zionist movement came to be associated with the peace camp and two-state advocacy, though original Labor Zionism under Ben-Gurion was tough, statist, and security-minded.

Labor Zionism’s drive to build an ideologically cohesive Hebrew society in its own image also led to deeply controversial choices during the Holocaust. In the early years of World War II, the Labor-dominated Jewish Agency, which controlled the allocation of the limited British immigration certificates, deliberately prioritized young, healthy, secular or socialist-oriented pioneers who shared their vision of the New Jew through its legal channels and its illegal operations as well. Orthodox and Haredi Jews, who often had large families, were yeshiva students, or those otherwise seen as “non-productive,” were frequently deprioritized or denied certificates, a policy that Revisionist and religious critics denounced as ideological selectivity that knowingly left thousands of observant Jews to perish in Europe. Only toward the end of the war, as the full scale of the extermination became undeniable, did Labor leaders reverse course and begin supporting broader rescue efforts regardless of ideology, and eventually apologized for implementing the policy in the first place. The episode remains one of the most painful and contested moral failures in Labor Zionism’s record.

Despite its foundational importance, Labor Zionism’s direct political influence today is very weak. The Israeli Labor Party was reduced to four seats in 2022 and, in July 2024, formally merged with Meretz to form a new unified party, The Democrats, led by Yair Golan. As of 2026, The Democrats remain a small opposition force in a political landscape dominated by Revisionist-descended Likud and Religious Zionist parties, or General Zionist-influenced centrist parties.

Yet culturally and historically, Labor Zionism is still everywhere. Its fingerprints remain on the IDF ethos, Hebrew culture, state ceremonies, the memory of 1948, the kibbutz as national symbol, the language of sacrifice, civic service, and the image of Israel as a country built by pioneers. Labor Zionism no longer rules Israel, but it still haunts Israel as its founding myth, its inherited infrastructure, and unresolved wounds.

The Fighter

Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky was the founder and towering intellectual figure of Revisionist Zionism, which emerged in the 1920s as the major right-wing nationalist rival to Labor Zionism. Jabotinsky was a Russian-born Jewish writer, soldier, orator, and political thinker who launched the Revisionist Zionist Alliance in 1925, calling for a “revision” of mainstream Zionist policy, especially Chaim Weizmann’s gradualist diplomacy toward the British Mandate.

Revisionism ultimately grew out of several frustrations and a sense of urgency. Convinced that the walls were closing in on European Jews, Jabotinsky felt that the current Zionist leadership was too cautious and deferential to the British. European Jewry was facing a catastrophe, and everything had to be done to turn Zionism into a mass aliyah project as soon as possible. It was imperative to build a state as soon as possible, instead of lobbying and deferring while standing idly by in your brother’s blood.

He combined liberal nationalism, Jewish pride, military realism, romantic historical consciousness, and a deep suspicion of political illusions. His 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” became the doctrinal cornerstone: Arab opposition to Zionism was natural and would not disappear through goodwill or moral appeals. Peace could come only after the Arabs concluded that Jewish sovereignty could not be destroyed, at which point negotiation would become possible.

He interpreted placating the British as another expression of exilic weakness. Jews could not depend on goodwill or British promises; they needed power, discipline, military capacity, and to demand sovereignty, not ask for it. To him, Labor’s socialist institutions and collectivist vision stood in the way of the purely national mission required to save Jewry. This does not mean that Revisionism rejected diplomacy entirely. Rather, it rejected diplomacy without pressure, urgency, and an open demand for Jewish statehood.

Revisionists saw themselves as the true heirs of Theodor Herzl’s Political Zionism, focused on achieving recognized Jewish sovereignty rather than building socialist communes. Unlike Labor Zionism, which percolated through many thinkers until it unified into a single ideology, Revisionism, in its inception, was far more dominated by a single towering intellectual source, Jabotinsky, than Labor Zionism ever was. His intellectual legacy was carried on by Benzion Netanyahu, father of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was Jabotinsky’s secretary, a historian, and a carrier of the Revisionist historical consciousness into the next generation. Abba Ahimeir and Uri Zvi Greenberg eventually took Jabotinsky’s message in their own, harder, more militant, and anti-socialist direction, which is still felt today.

Revisionism’s ideological cousin was shaped by Avraham “Yair” Stern, who propelled Jabotinsky’s worldview into absolutism; whereas Jabotinsky was willing to use diplomacy with the British, Yair believed the time for talking was over. For him, Britain was the ultimate enemy; as bad as the Germans were, the British were worse. To actively prevent those fleeing from a massacre from escaping was morally worse than doing the massacre. Unlike Jabotinsky, who was very much a product of secular European romanticism and nationalism, Stern grew more observant and, after marriage, became fully Shabbat-observant, kept kosher, and maintained familial purity. To him, the Zionist project could only be a success if rooted in traditional Jewish values. Yisrael Eldad took Stern’s mythic-spiritual language and turned it into a philosophical and redemptive language. More than anyone, Eldad helped transmit Lehi’s ideological message after the State’s creation. Natan Yellin-Mor was another major Lehi thinker, who moved sharply leftward. His own ideology overlapped with anti-imperialist and global liberation movements. Ultimately, however, Menachem Begin became the very embodiment of Revisionist Zionism as Ben-Gurion was to Labor Zionism. He took Jabotinsky’s message and his movement and turned them into an oppositional force against a governing one.

The Fight

Revisionist Zionism was outnumbered in the pre-state Yishuv and lost the institutional battle but won the long-term battle for imagination and political power. It shaped the Irgun, which emerged from the Revisionist milieu after a split from the Haganah; Lehi later split from the Irgun and took a more radical path. Its armed underground campaign became one of the pressures that made continued British rule increasingly costly.

It gained growing support after 1948, especially among Mizrachi and traditional Jews, culminating in the 1977 political earthquake that ended Labor’s long monopoly. The Herut party (1948), which evolved into Gahal, and its successor Likud (1973) turned Revisionism into Israel’s dominant political force. Menachem Begin’s 1977 victory shattered Labor’s dominance and integrated the Revisionist camp fully into the state.

Revisionism produced Israel’s right-wing leadership: Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon (in his Likud phase), and Benjamin Netanyahu. Likud-led governments presided over major military operations, the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt (Begin’s historic compromise that returned the Sinai), and later normalization accords.

It reshaped Israeli security doctrine with a focus on deterrence, strategic depth, skepticism of international guarantees, and the principle that Jewish power must be overwhelming. It absorbed and empowered Mizrachi and traditional Jews, giving them political dignity and cultural voice. It also helped normalize market-oriented economics, contributing to Israel’s shift away from Labor-era collectivism.

Its greatest achievement is undoubtedly displacing Labor as the dominant political force and making Jewish strength, national pride, and historical rights the default posture of much of Israeli policy.

Revisionist Zionism has a powerful language of dignity, historical memory, and national honor, but a less developed positive vision of the society that Jewish power was meant to build. While Labor offered a full social utopia (even if flawed) and Religious Zionism offered a sacred telos, Revisionism’s answer was often survival, liberty, and pride. It was strong on the right to sovereignty, but thinner on its inner moral or spiritual purpose. Once the fight is won, where do we go from there?

Its later association with permanent control over Judea and Samaria, settlement expansion, and the unresolved Palestinian question has contributed to international isolation and deep internal polarization. Classic territorial maximalism claiming both banks of the Jordan proved politically unsustainable in practice; Begin himself returned Sinai for peace with Egypt. It is deeply ironic that those who were the least compromising on land issues were ultimately the only ones who ever ceded land. Critics from their own side point out that what they perceived as politically unsustainable in practice led to far greater political pressure: if you can give away this territory, why can’t you give away that territory as well?

Revisionist Zionism also carried a legacy of internal Jewish conflict. The Irgun/Haganah split, the Saison, and especially the Altalena Affair, left lasting scars. Its underground methods against the British, Arabs, and sometimes civilians remain morally contested. They are framed by supporters as necessary resistance but by critics as reckless or terroristic.

Its direct political influence today remains strong but faces headwinds. Likud, the direct heir of Revisionist Zionism, is still Israel’s largest right-wing party and remains central to governing coalitions. However, as of May 2026, the right-wing bloc is under significant electoral pressure ahead of anticipated snap elections, with polls showing it struggling to secure a majority. Netanyahu’s leadership is divisive post-October 7, and the broader right today is a fusion of Revisionist, religious-nationalist, Haredi, and populist currents rather than pure Jabotinskyism.

Yet culturally and strategically, Revisionist Zionism is even more pervasive than its electoral numbers suggest. Its fingerprints are on Israel’s security doctrine, settlement policy, skepticism of peace-process orthodoxy, and the national ethos of strength and self-reliance. It no longer fights for legitimacy; it is the mainstream right-wing. It functions as the founding-fighter myth, shapes Israel’s security worldview, and poses an unresolved challenge after October 7.

Post-Mortem

These two visions of the New Jew and the New State became the dominant expressions of Ideological Zionism that most secular Jews absorbed through osmosis. Today, both remain powerfully alive in Israeli society, but often in tension, yet increasingly unified in a single national character. The idea of the practical builder who seeks to redeem the Jewish people through labor, rootedness, and moral society lives on in Hebrew culture, the pioneering ethos of the IDF, and the deep instinct for state-building and immigrant absorption. The fighter who redeems the people through pride, power, and an unbreakable refusal to accept helplessness shapes Israel’s security doctrine, national dignity, and refusal to depend on the goodwill of others. They formed a people that still drains swamps in the spirit of the pioneer while standing behind an Iron Wall of strength.

Both visions of how the State should run have profoundly shaped contemporary Israel, each delivering major strengths while leaving behind significant drawbacks. Labor Zionism’s collective, institution-building model created the Histadrut’s vast economic-social-cultural infrastructure, the kibbutz and moshav movements, and a centralized state machinery that absorbed millions of immigrants and instilled a culture of pioneering sacrifice and public responsibility; Revisionism’s emphasis on strong central authority, liberal economics, private enterprise, and national dignity empowered Mizrachi and traditional Jews, shifted Israel away from socialist rigidity, and embedded deterrence and self-reliance as core principles of governance. Together, the pioneering ethos of the Labor chalutz and the fierce independent spirit of the Revisionist fighter fused into the modern Israeli character that helped transform the country into the “Start-Up Nation,” where Hebrew ingenuity, risk-taking, and refusal to depend on outsiders produced one of the world’s most innovative high-tech economies. Yet the same visions carried real costs: Labor’s secular Hebrew nationalism and centralized socialism often uprooted Jews from Torah and traditional Jewish culture, created an Ashkenazi elite that alienated many Mizrachi immigrants, and left a legacy of bureaucratic inefficiency and cultural thinness; Revisionism’s focus on power, territorial maximalism, and deterrence sometimes elevated force at the expense of deeper moral or spiritual reflection on sovereignty’s purpose, contributing to internal polarization, unresolved debates over the limits of strength, and ongoing international friction. The result is a resilient yet still divided state that continues to wrestle with the unfinished legacies of its two founding blueprints.

The deepest failure of both Labor and Revisionism was that they did not solve Jewish vulnerability as they claimed they would. Labor Zionism promised that the Jew remade through labor, land, and Hebrew rootedness would no longer be the helpless Jew of exile. October 7 shattered that myth with terrible force: the kibbutzim and border communities, those iconic symbols of Labor Zionist achievement, became scenes of massacre, captivity, abandonment, and rescue. The pioneer was supposed to be the answer to the pogrom; on October 7, the Jewish world watched pogrom-like scenes unfold in the very communities that embodied the Labor Zionist dream.

Revisionist Zionism promised that Jewish power and deterrence alone would prevent catastrophe; an Iron Wall of strength would eventually force acceptance and guarantee security. October 7 shattered that myth with terrible force: even a militarily powerful Jewish state was surprised, penetrated, humiliated, and forced to watch its citizens massacred in their homes. The strong Jew still bled.

Labor gave the State its builders. Revisionist Zionism gave it its fighters. But October 7 showed that neither the rooted Jew nor the armed Jew was immune to massacre, and that strength alone cannot answer the deeper question of what Jewish sovereignty is ultimately for.

In the next essay, we will explore the Zionisms That Never Were.

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When I wrote my original essay in 2022, ‘The Four Conversations About Zionism,’ I declared therein that:

Zionism as a Political Question [is] mostly moot, if not irrelevant, nowadays. […] The question was answered unequivocally in 1948. Although there have been many attempts to relitigate it in recent history (and quite unsuccessfully at that), the State of Israel is here to stay.

In a single day, seventy-five years of history were seemingly reversed. Zionism, as a political question, was being relitigated on the world stage. The necessity of Zionism as a shield against antisemitism was once again a topic of discussion between Jews. As we close in on three years past October 7th, the very legitimacy of the State of Israel, and whether Jews have a right to self-governance in their ancestral homeland, have both become matters of public discourse. Unlike in 1946, when communication was still rudimentary and kept the debate mostly localized, in 2026, it has become a hotly debated topic worldwide. People who have no say in the matter, no link to the land, nothing to tether them to the topic other than personal curiosity, feel a fury and stake in a subject that would make the most ardent of football hooligans blush.

Slurring Words

To have a proper debate, an agreement on the definition of terms is a required prelude; without it, it precludes any meaningful discourse. Prior to October 7, the conversation about Zionism had been mostly relegated to ethereal and theoretical arguments within the Jewish community or a source of scorn in the halls of academia. In the Jewish community, the debate has shifted back from the theoretical to its real-life ramifications. Since then, this discourse has exploded on the global public square as well, and Zionism now too often comes to mean “anything I don’t like or find evil in the world,” rather than its actual meanings.

It is true that the term “Zionist” has long served as a convenient euphemism for Jews by antisemites who were then (or still are) afraid of being labeled as such. “I’m not antisemitic; I’m just antizionist!” is their reflexive slogan when confronted, which, at face value, makes no sense. Antisemitism was coined specifically to refer to non-religiously based hatred of Jews and is therefore related to peoplehood or ethnicity; Zionism, meanwhile, is an ideology that transcends ethnic or racial barriers. Their claim is the equivalent of saying, ‘I’m not racist against Africans, I just hate socialism!’

The clearest evidence that “Zionist” has been used as a stand-in for Jews is the trove of social media posts and videos of people harassing Jews for being Zionists without their victims having uttered a word about politics or ideologies. It’s not quite socially polite yet to earnestly engage in overt Jew-bashing; you can solve the issue by harassing a Satmar Chassid in Golders Green, then boast to your followers about how you stuck it to a Zio, which is your ticket to acceptance, backlash-free.

Another canard, which used to be confined to far-right or neo-Nazi circles, is the ZOG allegation. The “Zionist-Occupied Government” trope has now been mainstreamed, in no small part thanks to the Third Worldization of internet discourse, the worst corner of which has adopted the conspiratorial Middle-Eastern mindset and fused it with far-right paranoia by adopting its language. “Zionists” now run Hollywood, politics, the banks, and any other entity you want to malign. Zionist false flags abound; there is no attack too small, no event so insignificant, for Zionists not to be involved.

When Jews are killed at Bondi Beach, it’s a Zionist false flag. When Jews are not killed at Temple Israel, it’s a Zionist false flag. Charlie Kirk was assassinated by the Zionists for not being Zionist enough, of course. If you start paying attention to your own life, you’ll discover how the Zionists who run academia are the ones who made you shell out $500 for your PoliSci 101 workbook, then rigged social-media algorithms to make it so addictive you didn’t study and got a D-.

The seemingly newer but thoroughly mainstreamed phenomenon is Zionism as dehumanization, a Nazi/fascist/racist inversion, a stand-in for settler-colonialism, and Holocaust denial-adjacent. Though it has only now entered popular discourse, it has been festering for decades in certain corners of academia and is rooted in USSR propaganda, particularly after 1967.

Its main raison d’etre is to flip the victim/perpetrator narrative in order to apply collective guilt to an entire ethnicity unrelated to actual ideology or policy. Through dehumanization, this tactic paves the way towards concrete actions such as actual violence. Slogans on campus during the Gaza war equated Zionists with rats, cockroaches, cancer, diseases, serial killers, Nazis, Satan, and even routinely called for extermination. Never mind that their posters and slogans would have been entirely at home at an actual Nazi rally if they replaced Zionist with Juden; these people are, of course, paragons of virtue on the right side of history. Their professors and social media told them so.

The metastasization of all five currents leads to the scapegoating of Zionism/Zionists for any and all unrelated societal ills. Police brutality? Israeli tactics. Covid? Spread by Zionists for profit or depopulation purposes. Child trafficking? At the behest of Zionism. Fentanyl crisis? Zionists are trying to weaken America. Are illegals flooding your country? Zionists are clearly trying to undermine and dilute your culture and population. Is the government engaging in mass deportation? Clearly, those Zionist tactics were learned from the Israeli army. Don’t like the latest season of your favorite TV show? It’s now “spiritually Israeli.”

By completely divorcing Zionism from its actual meanings, antisemites have been able to use the label to spread their message and create an atmosphere of hatred that Jewry has not felt since the 1930s. All of this external weaponization makes it even more urgent that we inside the Jewish community finally agree on what the word actually means.

One More Conversation

In a post-October 7 world, many Jews have been expressing their attachment to their Jewish identity through the lens of Israeli politics or nationalism, for very understandable reasons. Support for the Israeli government, the Israeli army, interventions against Hamas in Gaza, or strikes against Iran has almost become a litmus test. In the minds of many, if you’re not a Zionist, you can’t be a good Jew; you’re quite literally siding with the enemy.

The issue is that, within the Jewish community itself, the lack of adequately defining what ‘Zionism’ is meant to be is muddying the discourse, as well as Jewish advocacy. This absence of an agreed-upon communal definition has led not only to confusion and unnecessary friction within the Jewish community, but is currently worsening a political and social crisis in Israel, centered around army enlistment.

When someone declares that ‘Judaism & Zionism are an indivisible part of each other’ or that ‘Torah was always Zionist,’ it causes many Orthodox Jews to become uncomfortable, but not for the reasons you might think. When Orthodox Jews declare matter-of-factly that, of course, they’re not Zionists, it makes many non-Orthodox Jews look at the Orthodox community disdainfully, whereas if they understood their position, they would regard it far more favorably.

It is more important than ever to define Zionism and its relationship to Judaism if we’re to stop talking past each other, and try to turn back the narrative tides. Before we even begin, we must point out that there are now five different conversations regarding Zionism.

1. Ideological Zionism

2. Religious Zionism

3. The Sephardi & Mizrachi relationship with Zionism

4. Zionism as a Political Question

5. Zionism and Jewish survival

These five conversations reflect the different ways Jews understand and use the word “Zionism.” Ideological Zionism examines the competing secular visions of what kind of Jewish state and what foundations its society should be built on, from Herzl’s diplomatic pragmatism through Labor’s socialist “New Jew” and Revisionist romantic nationalism. Religious Zionism grapples with whether the modern State of Israel represents the beginning of the Messianic era (Atchalta deGeulah) and to what degree its institutions are holy, or whether there is any holiness at all, according to the religious antizionists.

The Sephardi and Mizrachi relationship with Zionism brings into focus their distinct traditional approach, rooted in Torah, mesorah, and historical experience, rather than European nationalist theory, and how it clashed in reality. Zionism as a Political Question asks whether the Jewish people have the right to national self-determination and a sovereign Jewish state in their ancestral homeland. Finally, Zionism and Jewish survival, a once-put-to-bed debate resurgent post-October 7, asks whether Jews have the collective right to defend themselves, mourn their dead without qualification, rescue their hostages, and continue existing securely in their Land.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

To discuss the question of Zionism as it stands today, we first need to understand its origins and how it has evolved over time. This is where Ideological Zionism comes in.

Let’s start with Herzl’s Political Zionism. Its thesis is that antisemitism comes as a consequence of the perception that Jews lack a national character and a national culture due to exile. If Jews were to have their own land and thus engage in the same activities as other nations, they would stop being seen as a rootless alien interloper in the midst of a land that they did not belong to, but rather would be just as accepted as a German who lives in France, or vice versa. This man represents no threat. You know he has a land as you do, and he has a culture as you do, and while theirs is different from yours, you can relate. This lack in the Jew makes him not just a foreigner, but foreign as well.

Just as nations gain legitimacy through international charters, a Judenstaat would need to be created first and foremost through diplomatic efforts. Herzl and his successors spent all their energy lobbying, arguing, trying to persuade, raising funds, and gaining access to the levers of power. To become like everyone else, you need to be like anyone else. A modern secular state, rooted in Jewish culture but with a separation between Synagogue and State, would have to be created. The new residents of the Jewish nation-state would be seen as no different from a Frenchman or a German; they would be the product of a liberal European nation like others.

Leon Pinsker’s antithesis, Practical Zionism, asked one question and one question only: “What are we doing about auto-emancipation?” Irritated at the idea of over-reliance on international agreements and excessive theorizing without application, this predecessor to Political Zionism put all its energy into creating a reality rather than dreaming of one.

Uninterested in political grandstanding, forums, or conferences, they focused on creating facts on the ground. Chovevei Tzion societies, as a part of the broader Chibbat Tzion movement, were Practical Zionism’s flagship organizations and were created in response to the 1880s Russian pogroms.

Yet, they were also uninterested in the question of solving local antisemitism, which was perceived as a lost cause; the creation of a Jewish national home was in and of itself the goal. Russian pogroms would be solved by all Jews moving to the national Jewish home, not through being accepted for having a home in the first place. Instead of trying to convince those around them to accept them, they formed self-defense groups that later served as inspiration and models for the nucleus from which the IDF’s military structures would emerge.

Though short-lived, Practical Zionism overtook Political Zionism in importance through its on-the-ground accomplishments. They formed the core of the First Aliyah and laid the groundwork that showed Jews worldwide that a return to the land was possible. It was short-lived as a label but foundational to Zionism, showing that to succeed, actions mattered more than words.

Chaim Weizmann, who would later become Israel’s first president, saw value in both approaches: pursue international diplomatic support while creating facts on the ground to bolster their efforts. His school of thought came to be known as Synthetic Zionism. This moderate tendency found expression in the General Zionists party, which was a centrist, liberal, European-style middle-class party. It was meant as a tent for all those who did not align with Labor, Revisionist, or Religious Zionism.

It had both a left-leaning wing, which supported a mixed economy and diplomacy with the British, and a right-leaning wing, staunchly anti-socialist and anti-British. Overall, the party embraced private enterprise, classical liberalism, and democracy. An important aspect of Synthetic Zionism was the continued role of Zionist organizations in the Diaspora.

It eventually evolved into Liberal Zionism, with an emphasis on the Israeli state being both Jewish and democratic, focused on human rights, free markets, and criticism of government policies without being seen as disloyal. It never dominated Israeli politics as a single-party ideology the way Labor Zionism once did, or the way Likud later would. But many of its assumptions became part of the common grammar of Israeli public life, especially among center-left and center-right Israelis. Chaim Weizmann’s synthesis had the longest-lasting impact, with the least public recognition.

A Post-Independence Post-Mortem

There are many successes and failures that can be ascribed to all three movements. Political Zionism put the question of Jewish independence on the map. Practical Zionism created the conditions that allowed for the State to develop. Synthetic Zionism leveraged the achievements of the latter to advance the goals of the former. There is no doubt that without Herzl’s tireless crusade to publicize the idea of creating a Jewish state, and the sweat and blood of Pinsker’s devotees draining malaria-filled swamps and fighting marauding Bedouin gangs, and establishing a roadmap to Jewish deterrence, Chaim Weizmann would not have been able to secure from Lord Balfour the famous declaration that led to independence being declared.

Political Zionism in its classical form is, by far, today’s most marginal view. It is only genuinely espoused by the liberal-democratic Zionist left, and represents a tiny minority of Israeli society, stereotyped as the affluent Tel Avivian leftist with a Haaretz subscription. This is not to say that Herzl is not seen as a revered figure across vast swaths of Israeli society due to his perceived role as the movement’s founder, but his doctrine is almost entirely irrelevant post-1948 and, by October 7, almost entirely invalidated. Still, Herzl was, is, and will continue to be seen as the father and founder of the State, if only spiritually, above any other.

Practical Zionism, after achieving what it sought, has been retired and confined to the history books. Unlike Herzl’s visions, Pinsker’s always had an expiration date. If you were to pick up a copy of “Auto-Emancipation” and examine it closely, you’d notice a stamp that says “Sell by May 14, 1948.” Practical Zionism was concerned with the creation of a State, but not so much about what would come after. That’s what the congresses, endless sessions of theorizing, and ideological debates were for. Today, the efforts of the pioneers of the First Aliyah, BILU, and all those who helped lead the way have been lionized and canonized in Israeli history, a signpost for schoolchildren and adults to reminisce about as the ideologues march on.

Synthetic Zionism, less of a household name, has become a household ideology. Chaim Weizmann’s ghost looms large as the principles associated with him, of a Jewish but democratic state, free enterprise, a focus on human rights, and constructive criticism of government policies, have become the backbone of all center-left to center-right parties, and the common political language of the majority of Israelis. Those ideas are even stronger today than during Chaim Weizmann’s lifetime, but most are unaware of their origins because of their widespread adoption.

Post-October 7, however, all these successes and failures must be scrutinized through the lens of ‘What did they seek to achieve, and how did it turn out?’ It’s not so much whether they delivered achievements, but rather lived up to their promises. If what these streams of Zionism sought was the creation of a State, then it succeeded. If their Zionism sought to solve antisemitism through the creation of a State, then it was a tremendous failure.

All three believed that they were the Zionist Answer to the Jewish Question. The first two were created in direct response, and the third picked up the torch. They succeeded in creating a State… but rather than lowering or eliminating antisemitism, the creation of a national state has led to its whitewashing.

These three approaches, Political, Practical, and Synthetic Zionism, were attempts to answer the Jewish Question, either through pragmatism, diplomacy, or both. October 7 was precisely the kind of event that Zionism and the IDF were supposed to make impossible. It exposed the limits of Jewish sovereignty as a shield from Jewish vulnerability. At the same time, it also displayed what sovereignty achieved: Jews were no longer waiting helplessly for another power to rescue them, avenge them, or decide whether Jewish blood mattered enough to get involved.

Political Zionism’s idea that, through international legitimacy and mechanisms, antisemitism would be solved, or at least mitigated, has long been disproven. Practical Zionism’s thesis that pogroms and antisemitic attacks would fade away as more and more Jews moved to their homeland has also been soundly disproven. Not only do antisemitic attacks still occur against Jews worldwide, but Zionism is oft-cited as the motivation for the attacks. Synthetic Zionism, embracing both views, also embraced both failures.

For a time, due to post-Holocaust guilt, overt antisemitism had become verboten in the Western world, at least in polite society. Hatred of the State of Israel allowed a legitimate outlet for antisemites to focus their hatred against Jews by couching it in the language of anti-Zionism. It has now percolated to the point where it allows for antisemitism against Jews outside of Israel, where support for Zionism is now a litmus test as to whether a Jew is deserving of scorn if they dare express support for Jews defending themselves, mourning their dead, rescuing their hostages, or continuing to exist collectively in their ancestral Land. History has thoroughly disproved Herzl’s idea of Zionism as a cure to antisemitism. If anything, Zionism is being used as a precursor to it, allowing antisemites to infect a new generation with the world’s oldest hatred in reimagined packaging.

Still, there is no doubt that Herzl, Pinsker, and Weizmann’s ideologies left an indelible mark on Israeli society and were deeply influential on all the movements that branched out from them.

Political, Practical, and Synthetic Zionism built the road to 1948. But the State they helped create was inherited by other Zionisms: Labor, Revisionist, Religious, and beyond. These movements no longer asked only how Jews could gain sovereignty, but what Jewish sovereignty was for. After October 7, they too must be judged by the same question: What did they seek to achieve, what did they actually build, and where did they fail?

Continued in Part 2

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As the sons of the leader of the Jewish people at that time, it’s easy to imagine they could have been too ashamed to ask their father about a mistake beneath their position. It’s just as easy to imagine that they could have found it too embarrassing to ask someone beneath their station about something that would reflect badly on them, their father, or his position. Yet, in their humility, they chose to build themselves up by doing the right thing.

Hubris and ego are never healthy; when it comes to self-improvement, they are a deadly poison. Even though, as Ben Zoma declared (Pirkei Avot 4:1),

בֶּן זוֹמָא אוֹמֵר: אֵיזֶהוּ חָכָם, הַלּוֹמֵד מִכָּל אָדָם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: מִכָּל מְלַמְּדַי הִשְׂכַּֽלְתִּי, כִּי עֵדְוֹתֶֽיךָ שִֽׂיחָה לִי.

Ben Zoma would say: Who is wise? One who learns from every man. As is stated (Psalms 119:99): “From all my teachers I have grown wise, for Your testimonials are my meditation.”

The reality is that it is a real challenge to ask for help or seek advice from those we consider smaller, lesser, not as important, or otherwise not our equal or superiors. If they have not at least attained our station in life, how could they relate or provide us with advice that we could not come up with ourselves?

This character flaw is, in many ways, humanity’s most tragic defect. Tragic in its Greekest form; an inevitable and inexorable engine of destruction of our own creation, purely within our control and yet entirely out of our grasp. Our history and tragedy are replete with examples of men who let their vanity get the best of them. As the wisest man to ever live, King Shlomo, poetically recorded in Proverbs 16:18, pride comes before a fall; his own mistakes are also on record in The Book of Kings I.

Both the wisest man to ever live, as well as the humblest man to ever live, ultimately fell prey to their own mistakes and could have been saved from misfortune if they had simply asked for advice. And when it comes to the most tragic of Judges, his daughter could have been saved as well.

A Life of Sacrifices

The Book of Judges is the most dichotomous of the entire Jewish Bible. On one hand, almost every story recorded is more harrowing, catastrophic, or heartbreaking than the last. On the other hand, the Talmud in Avodah Zarah 25a points out that the Book of Judges is referred to as the Book of the Righteous. From the micro, it’s a tragedy; from the macro, these tragedies are brief periods interspersed among some of the best spiritual and material years of the Jewish people. Just as the 39 years in the Wilderness after the rebellion of the Spies and Korach are characterized as decades when the Jewish people lived peacefully, eating manna and spending their days learning Torah, only to be relegated to a couple of verses, so are the years of plenty in the Book of Judges.

One of these aforementioned calamitous points in time is the story of Yiftach. Born in Gilead, east of the Jordan, he was the son of a man also named Gilead. His mother, however, was described in the Torah simply as a woman of ill repute. When his half-brothers from his father’s legitimate wife grew older, they drove Yiftach out of the family home. “You shall have no inheritance in our father’s house,” they declared, “for you are the son of another woman.” Cast aside and disinherited, the young man fled to the land of Tov. There, he gathered around him a band of outcasts and mercenaries. Tanach calls these men “anashim reikim”, empty men, and he became their leader. In that rough exile, Yiftach earned a reputation as a skilled and fearless warrior.

Years passed. The people of Gilead found themselves crushed under eighteen years of brutal oppression by the Ammonites. In desperation, the elders remembered the exiled fighter they had once rejected and sent messengers to bring him back. “Come,” they begged, “be our commander, and fight against the Ammonites.”

Yiftach did not forget their earlier cruelty. He bargained with them: “If you bring me back to fight the Ammonites and Hashem delivers them into my hand, will I truly become your head?” The elders swore a solemn oath before G-d at Mizpah that he would become not only their military leader but their permanent chief over all Gilead.

Before rushing to battle, Yiftach tried diplomacy first. He sent messengers to the king of Ammon, carefully laying out the historical truth: Israel had not stolen this land from Ammon; it had been taken from the Amorite king Sihon centuries earlier, after Sihon himself had attacked Israel unprovoked. Not only had three hundred years passed, but the Ammonite claim had no merit. Yet the king of Ammon refused to listen.

Strengthened by Divine favor, “the spirit of Hashem came upon Yiftach.” He passed through Gilead and Manasseh, mustered his forces, and advanced toward the enemy. It was then, in this moment of high tension right before the decisive battle, that Yiftach made a rash and fateful vow (Shoftim 11:30-31):

לוַיִּדַּ֨ר יִפְתָּ֥ח נֶ֛דֶר לַיהֹוָ֖ה וַיֹּאמַ֑ר אִם־נָת֥וֹן תִּתֵּ֛ן אֶת־בְּנֵ֥י עַמּ֖וֹן בְּיָדִֽי:

And Yiftach vowed a vow to the L-rd, and said, “If You will indeed deliver the children of Ammon into my hand,

לאוְהָיָ֣ה הַיּוֹצֵ֗א אֲשֶׁ֨ר יֵצֵ֜א מִדַּלְתֵ֚י בֵיתִי֙ לִקְרָאתִ֔י בְּשׁוּבִ֥י בְשָׁל֖וֹם מִבְּנֵ֣י עַמּ֑וֹן וְהָיָה֙ לַֽיהֹוָ֔ה וְהַעֲלִיתִ֖הוּ עוֹלָֽה:

And it will be, whatever comes forth, that shall come forth from the doors of my house towards me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall be to the L-rd, and I will offer him up for a burnt-offering.”

With those fateful words, Yiftach crossed over to face the Ammonites. Hashem delivered them into his hand, and he struck them with a great slaughter that stretched from Aroer all the way to Minnith and Abel-Keramim, twenty cities. Victorious and confident, he returned home to Mizpah. As he approached his house, his only daughter came out to greet him, dancing with tambourines in her hands, the first to meet her triumphant father (Shoftim 11:36-40):

לווַתֹּ֣אמֶר אֵלָ֗יו אָבִי֙ פָצִ֚יתָה אֶת־פִּ֙יךָ֙ אֶל־יְהֹוָ֔ה עֲשֵֹ֣ה לִ֔י כַּאֲשֶׁ֖ר יָצָ֣א מִפִּ֑יךָ אַחֲרֵ֡י אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂה֩ לְךָ֙ יְהֹוָ֧ה נְקָמ֛וֹת מֵאֹיְבֶ֖יךָ מִבְּנֵ֥י עַמּֽוֹן: לזוַתֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אֶל־אָבִ֔יהָ יֵעָ֥שֶׂה לִּ֖י הַדָּבָ֣ר הַזֶּ֑ה הַרְפֵּ֨ה מִמֶּ֜נִּי שְׁנַ֣יִם חֳדָשִׁ֗ים וְאֵֽלְכָה֙ וְיָרַדְתִּ֣י עַל־הֶֽהָרִ֔ים וְאֶבְכֶּה֙ עַל־בְּתוּלַ֔י אָנֹכִ֖י וְרֵעוֹתָֽי (כתיב וְרֵעֹיתָֽי) : לחוַיֹּ֣אמֶר לֵ֔כִי וַיִּשְׁלַ֥ח אוֹתָ֖הּ שְׁנֵ֣י חֳדָשִׁ֑ים וַתֵּ֚לֶךְ הִיא֙ וְרֵ֣עוֹתֶ֔יהָ וַתֵּ֥בְךְּ עַל־בְּתוּלֶ֖יהָ עַל־הֶהָרִֽים: לטוַיְהִ֞י מִקֵּ֣ץ | שְׁנַ֣יִם חֳדָשִׁ֗ים וַתָּ֙שָׁב֙ אֶל־אָבִ֔יהָ וַיַּ֣עַשׂ לָ֔הּ אֶת־נִדְר֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֣ר נָדָ֑ר וְהִיא֙ לֹא־יָדְעָ֣ה אִ֔ישׁ וַתְּהִי־חֹ֖ק בְּיִשְׂרָאֵֽל: ממִיָּמִ֣ים | יָמִ֗ימָה תֵּלַ֙כְנָה֙ בְּנ֣וֹת יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לְתַנּ֕וֹת לְבַת־יִפְתָּ֖ח הַגִּלְעָדִ֑י אַרְבַּ֥עַת יָמִ֖ים בַּשָּׁנָֽה:

And she said to him, “My father, you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to that which has issued from your mouth, since the Lord has done for you vengeance from your enemies, from the children of Ammon.” And she said to her father, “Let this thing be done for me, refrain from me two months, and I shall go, and wail upon the mountains, and I shall cry over my virginity, I and my companions.” And he said, “go,” and he sent her away two months; and she went with her companions, and she cried over her virginity upon the mountains. And it was at the end of two months, that she returned to her father, and he did to her his vow which he had vowed; and she had not known any man, and it was a statute in Israel. From year to year the daughters of Israel went to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite, four days in a year.

According to the Sages (Bereishit Rabbah 60:3, Vayikra Rabbah 37:4), Yiftach’s vow was reckless from the very beginning. They asked: What if a dog or a cat had come out first? Would he really have offered it as a burnt offering? Yet the Holy One, Blessed be He, arranged matters so that his own beloved daughter was the first to greet him, dancing with tambourines. The vow could have been properly annulled or redeemed according to halacha, but neither Yiftach nor Pinchas, the High Priest, were willing to humble themselves. Hearing that he sought his help, Pinchas declared that since Yiftach was the one who needed him, he should come to him. Yiftach declared that he was the head of the chieftains of Israel; should he lower himself by going to him? To which Pinchas replied, “Shall I go to that boor?” Between their two proud refusals, that innocent young woman was lost. Both men were later punished for the blood of Yiftach’s daughter.

Failure of Leadership.

Our Sages explained that, in lieu of a human sacrifice abhorrent to Judaism, they convinced his daughter to sequester herself on a mountain peak, to live her life alone. Only four days a year were her friends allowed to visit, and lament her situation. Her body might not have been offered up as a sacrifice, but her life was. And so were any possibilities of Yiftach’s line to continue on through her. All it would have taken to avert this disaster was simply to follow what G-d commanded us to do in the Torah, and the leaders who lived it.

Moshe Rabbeinu, the greatest prophet to ever live and leader of Israel, struggled with the burden of judging the entire nation alone. His father-in-law, Yitro, who was a non-native, recent convert, and, in fact, a former High Priest of idolatry, came, observed the situation, and made a bold suggestion: appoint judges to handle the minor cases so that you can focus on the major ones and concentrate on teaching the Jewish nation Torah. Moshe Rabbeinu listened to his father-in-law and decided to implement exactly what he suggested. Despite the fact that Yitro was much smaller in comparison, Moshe Rabbeinu humbled himself, followed his advice, and forged the path for all the leaders who came after him.

The necessity of following advice and asking for help from any source, no matter big or small, permeates both the Written and Oral Torah. As is known, the foundational principles of the former were given at Sinai alongside the latter. Even though the Mishnah and Talmud quote the teachings of post-Biblical Sages, these teachings had long been known to the entire nation. This is why our Sages throughout our history learned from everyone who had real wisdom to share and exemplified it in their personal lives. Already, in the era of the Judges, Yiftach and Pinchas would have had access to and been deeply familiar with them.

For example, Rebbi, the codifier of the Mishnah, famously explained that Torah is like water: just as water flows naturally to the lowest places, so too one must be willing to go to the lowest places to gain access to it. Rebbi personally demonstrated this through his relationship with his maidservant, who possessed wisdom highly respected by the Sages; she could explain difficult Aramaic or Hebrew words they struggled with, and she once issued a cherem (ban) that the rabbis honored and followed. Rather than ignoring or treating the source of their knowledge as shameful due to her station, her words are recorded for posterity. Our history is replete with such examples.

This makes Yiftach and Pinchas’s failure deeply ironic. On one side, the man meant to represent G-d’s power on earth. On the other side, the one meant to represent G-d’s Torah on earth. And both of them failed to follow G-d’s own example.

Leading by Example

In the third chapter of Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, we are told that seven things were created before the world, including Torah. In Bereishit Rabbah 1:1, 3:5, as well as Tanna d’Bei Eliayhu, we are told that G-d consulted the Torah to know whether He should create the world, and acted on that input. When G-d declared “Let us make man” (Gen 1:26), our Sages asked, “With whom did He consult?” They were less puzzled at the thought of G-d consulting with someone than at the mechanics of it.

In Bereishit Rabbah (8:4-9) as well as the Talmud (Sanhedrin 38b), three opinions are brought. According to Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi in the name of Rabbi Levi, G-d consulted “the works of the heavens and the earth,” like a king who never acts without advisers. According to R’Shmuel ben Nachman, G-d consulted the work of each day of creation. The third opinion is that G-d asked the ministering angel’s opinion. Regarding the angels, it says that G-d created a first retinue of them before creating the world and asked them about the world’s creation. Some agreed, some argued, and ultimately G-d sided with those who agreed with man’s creation.

This is, of course, metaphorical. G-d, in His perfection, does not need to consult with anyone. He declared Himself that He is not a man, and He does not change His mind. Why, then, do so many passages of our Torah seem to imply otherwise?

As Rashi and almost classical commentators explain in Genesis 1:26, the reason why G-d “consulted” with others was to show us the path before we were ever created: No one is ever too big to ask for help or advice. Before He even created us, He showed us the way.

If G-d can ask for help, why can’t you?

This is Part 3 or 7, G-d willing.

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