The Eight Zionisms

In Zionism: An Emotional State (Rutgers University Press, 2023), Derek J. Penslar of Harvard University attempts to correct the epidemic of miscommunication surrounding the divisive Z-word. “Zionism,” he writes, “is the belief that Jews constitute a nation that has a right and need to pursue collective self-determination within historic Palestine.” While certainly a form of nationalism calling for shared territory, language, and culture, it is also an emotional identification:

For Jews who choose to identify as Zionists, Zionism connotes liberation and redemption. The word perpetuates venerable Jewish self-conceptions of uniqueness and vulnerability while striving for collective security and integration into the community of nations. It is also a signifier of potent feelings that vary enormously depending on who employs the word and how it is used. An affirmation of Zionism and self-identification as a Zionist can be an expression of love of the Jewish homeland and hope for its future or of ethnic price and collective Jewish solidarity. Feelings of fear for Israel’s survival or hatred of Israel’s enemies serve to intensify that solidarity. For some Jews, Zionism is a source of profound discomfort, and Jews who reject it are no less passionate than those who embrace it.

Thus, Penslar writes, despite the fact that “Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians from their land and oppression of those who remain ha[s] made it one of the most disliked countries on the planet,” Zionism endures as an identity many proudly accept, many others strongly reject, yet none can ignore. He goes on to outline eight general forms of Zionism that exist today, with the caveat that individuals who identify with any label tend to “conceive of their attachment to the collective in multiple, overlapping, and even mutually contradictory ways”:

1. Philanthropic Zionism: “a compassionate attachment for Jews who seek refuge or dwell in the land of Israel… expressed primarily through donating money, fundraising, or providing social services on a voluntary basis.”

2. Hebraic Zionism: “an expression of Jewish nationalism through use of the Hebrew language, devotion to that language’s development and dissemination, and the belief that the flourishing of Hebrew and the revival of the Jewish community in Israel are mutually dependent.”

3. Statist Zionism: “a focus on Jewish self-determination as the keystone supporting all other forms of Zionism… Initially, Statist Zionism did not necessarily demand a sovereign state for Jews in Palestine.”

4. Catastrophic Zionism: “an extension of Statist Zionism that demands Jewish statehood to ward of an imminent cataclysm threatening the survival of the Jewish people.”

5. Transformative Zionism: “assumes that the Jewish people must undergo a series of far-reaching changes, that the Zionist movement is the only means by which those changes can occur, and conversely that only Jews who have undergone this transformation can ensure Zionism’s success.”

6. Ethnic Zionism: “a form of Jewish nationalism that invokes the Land of Israel more as a symbol of collective identity than a sacred object or homeland… a means of making oneself feel at home in, rather than estranged from, a diaspora homeland.”

7. Sacral Zionism: “a belief that the Land of Israel is both sacred and sanctifying but that it and the Jewish people as a whole require the institutions of modern statehood.” Sacral Zionism is then divided by Penslar into two sub-categories: “Halakhic Zionism refers to the integration of religious observance with acceptances of the principles of Jewish nationalism” while Messianic Zionism sees “the economic and political labors of secular Zionists as paving the way for the Jews’ messianic deliverance.”

8. Judaic Zionism: “a fierce attachment to both the Land of Israel and the Jewish people, justified in terms of theological concepts, miraculous origin stories, and sacred canon. On the surface, it resembles Sacral Zionism, but its essence is difference. Its focus is neither the observance of ritual law nor the expectation of the Messiah but rather the location of theological meaning in the state and its armed forces.”

Penslar situates most forms of Zionism “within a settler-colonial matrix while allowing for its particularities… includ[ing] the heritage of the Holocaust, which accounts for the cohesiveness of Israeli Zionist identity and the determination of Israeli Jews to resist pressure to withdraw from the Occupied Territories and foster the creation of a Palestinian State.” As explained in a discussion at Harvard Divinity School, this is meant descriptively rather than pejoratively, which gives the language more nuance than many readers may expect. With similar nuance, Penslar acknowledges the complex ways that American Jews connect with Zionism and oppose anti-Zionism:

Most early twenty-first century American Jews were not overwhelmed by guilt, shame, disappointment, or embarrassment about Israel. They were, if not fervently Zionist, “Zionish,” as my college-age daughter once described her own feelings about Israel. A majority were uneasy with the hawkishness of Israel’s government, the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the increasing political power of Orthodoxy, and discrimination against non-Orthodox denominations of Judaism in Israel. The Israeli elections of 2022, which brought to power the most right-wing government in the country’s history, promised to intensify this discomfort that so far has been compensated for by the mixture of adhesive positive and negative emotions that characterized the American Zionist romance since 1948.

American Jews, though, have always been “sensitive to anti-Zionism as threatening their own well-being and that of the State of Israel”:

True to the logic that one can only be betrayed by a friend, pro-Zionist Jews were particularly incensed by Jews who distanced themselves from Israel or whose attachments to Israel did not prevent them from being strongly critical of it. It is common among critics of Zionism to liken it to Nazism, but only supporters of Israel compare Jewish critics of the country to kapos..

Penslar acknowledges that “there is an abundance of evidence of negative conceptions of Israel that catalyze or are catalyzed by anti-Jewish hatred” but also emphasizes that negative views of Israel (particularly voiced by members of the Jewish community) can alternatively “stem from emotions such as disappointment and anger — feelings that, if blended with sympathy, could stimulate meliorative actions directed not at destroying Israel so much as reforming it.” As such, writing all Anti-Zionist Jews out of the community, with no appreciation for the different places such Anti-Zionism can come from, would be a grave mistake.

Ultimately, Penslar makes the following case about Zionism, regardless of its form:

Zionism has been and continues to be a global project with multiple goals. These goals are as desperate as enduring peace and security for the state of Israel, the advent of the messiah, strengthening Jewish ethnic consciousness and warding off assimilation in the diaspora, and the transformation of Jews into authentic, harmonious, and productive beings imbued with military prowess and civic virtue. Not only do these goals remain unattained despite the achievement of Jewish statehood, there is also no foreseeable point at which they could be attained. Zionism remains, therefore, a permanent revolution and as salient in the twenty-first century as it was at the end of the nineteenth. Greater than the sum of Israeli or diaspora Jewish institutional structures, Zionism is part of the emotional substrate of Jews throughout the world.

Penslar’s work emphasizes that Zionism is a word with many meanings, and as many emotional connotations as political ones. As such, his work stands in contrast to “counter-Zionist” narratives which seek to eliminate the word from the contemporary Jewish vocabulary rather than embrace its multi-faceted nature as Penslar does.

The most popular champion of counter-Zionism in the present moment is newly-appointed Harvard Professor Shaul Magid (previously of Dartmouth College), whose position was summarized by me at length elsewhere. As I wrote,

Magid understands Zionism as “the ideology that resulted in the founding of an ethnostate that Zionists call a ‘Jewish state.’” Such a state cannot be a true democracy when it “contains a large minority who have been living on the land for generations, have their own nationalistic aspirations, and have been largely displaced by the ethnostate.” Combine that with the trauma of “the ethnic majority having undergone a horrific genocide… and the chauvinistic fabric of an ethnostate seems all but inevitable” (69). Magid’s counter-Zionism recognizes this and “abandons Zionism without necessarily abandoning the state it produced (but radically recalibrating it).” This renders Zionism “a thing of the past that can be studied and examined, but not an ideology that supports a twenty-first century nation-state” (72-73). Counter-Zionism, “free from Zionist ideological claims and proprietary principles, free from the intoxication of power, can provide a vision of nationhood that includes (and does not simply tolerate) ethnic difference” in a way that Zionism never can (73).

Part of Magid’s abandonment of Zionism as a term is its having been, in his words, “flattened to mean, simply, support of the State of Israel against all detractors” rather than the more nuanced collection of meanings that Penslar cites. Magid laments that many, typically young and progressive, Jews find themselves “forced to prove their allegiance to the Jewish people by uncritically supporting the Jewish state, and many feel like they have been pushed out of Jewish communities, or are at odds with collective Jewish identity, if they cannot do so (or choose not to do so on principle).”

Penslar’s taxonomy of Zionisms avoids this by directly acknowledging that self-identification as Zionist need not correlate with support for a particular Israeli government or a particular way of interacting with Palestinians. The word may have so many different uses that it’s becoming irrelevant in discourse, but that is a very different sort of problem.

The current challenge is whether we the Jewish community can embrace how differently the word Zionism is used within our own ranks or if we have indeed fallen into the pitfall Magid described. Can we really acknowledge such vastly different perspectives within a unified camp?

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue attempts to do so in his recent book, For a Time Such as This. He acknowledges the “long history of non-Zionist Jews, not self-hating Jews or messianists for whom the establishment of the State of Israel can happen only once the Messiah has arrived. Proud Jews: labor Zionists, cultural Zionists, even religious Zionists who had attachments to the land but not to establishing a state” and that the increasing institutional overlap between being Jewish and being a Zionist. Indeed, Cosgrove readily admits that commitment to Zionism becoming “a litmus test of loyalty to the Jewish community and cause” is “regrettable.”

At the same time, Cosgrove is clear that while strands of non-Zionist thought exist, it is “a profound misreading of Jewish history to call Judaism anything other than a land-centered faith.” Judaism and Zionism may not be one and the same but, nowadays, Cosgrove firmly believes that supporting Israel is “fundamental to what it means to be a Jew today.” This leads to Cosgrove sending a strong message to those young Jews who would openly oppose support for Israel at this moment in history:

Israel is now in crisis. Are you going to exit – walk away and stand on the sidelines? Or are you going to use your voice – leverage your moral Jewish compass and the piercing clarity of your conscience to effect change, fight for your values, and help not only Israel but all the nations of the world realize a vision of national greatness that does not oppress others? In Israel’s case, given the ideals you champion, given the age you are, why on earth would you cede the discussion of what Zionism is and what it should be to those who are either our people’s true enemies, or to your own Jewish kin who would corrupt Zionism, making it into something it is not and never should be? Encounter, T’ruah, Zionness, Seeds of Peace, Roots, Israel Policy Forum - there is no shortage of organizations fighting the good fight, and I know they would welcome your engagement.

Not only, then, do young Jews who are becoming ever cynical about Zionism still have a place within the Zionist conversation, but he tells them that “that conversation depends on you. We might not always agree, but make no mistake, now more than ever we need you, the larger Jewish community needs you, and Israel needs you.”

Cosgrove and Penslar, then, articulate a “Big-Tent Zionism” that acknowledges vast differences in how one views Israel but emphasizes that we are still part of the same conversation and attempting to move in the same direction. It keeps as many within the fold as possible, only writing out those who have already removed themselves from the conversation by completely dropping all identification with Israel and/or Zionism.

Perhaps a starting metric for who remains part of the conversation in good faith may be found in some of the criteria outlined by Rabbi Moshe Hauer of the Orthodox Union in an article from Jewish Action Magazine:

1. “We cannot assume partnership with anyone who aligns with those who seek to harm Jews. Whatever opinion we may have of the current government, of its policies in Gaza or of the entire Zionist enterprise, there is no room for Jews to align themselves with those who seek to harm the Jewish people.”

2. “We cannot assume partnership with those who do not prioritize Jewish self-defense and do not recognize Israel’s right to have the last word on its own security.”

3. “We cannot assume partnership with those who do not see and champion the goodness that permeates Israel, who seem more ashamed than proud of Israel, and who constantly question the justice of its cause, its culture and its morality.”

4. “We cannot assume partnership with those who fail to unconditionally support the existence and defense of Israel even when critiquing it.”

As I recently wrote to someone on social media, if their response to “Jews should be able to safely and securely live in the land of Israel” is “no they shouldn’t” then there isn’t much room for discourse, let alone partnership. There is much room to discuss the plight of the Palestinian people, Hamas’ consistent undermining of Palestinian safety and security in Gaza, and the need for the current Israeli government to be held accountable for their own mistakes. But those discussions and debates should happen amongst those who are ultimately on the same side and interact with each other in good faith.

Within the eight Zionisms outlined by Penslar, there is much room for strong internal disagreements. And not everyone who doesn’t identify with any is an Anti-Zionist in the sense of being an enemy of Israel. Nuance is more important now than ever. This does not mean giving up against our enemy or seeding ground to Anti-Zionists, but it means knowing how to differentiate those who are still on our team and those who are truly our enemies. As Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute, recently wrote in a public Facebook post, “it is… critical that the Zionist and pro-Israel community be really clear about who they designate as enemies - rather than just the people they agree with and are capable of arguing in good faith against.”

Big tents can be built without losing track of the borders. Nuance is hard, and there are few things more tiring to fight for. But I truly believe that it is worth it in the long run.