The central Jewish ritual of my childhood in the late 1960s took place not in the sanctuary of Temple Sinai in Tenafly, NJ, but in the classrooms downstairs, where I attended Sabbath School and every Saturday deposited a quarter in the Jewish National Fund (JNF) tzedakah box. The charity, our teachers told us, helped plant orange trees in the desert. To be Jewish meant you believed in Israel.
Posters on the wall showed men and women working shoulder-to-shoulder, wearing khaki shorts and bucket hats, turning sand into farms. It was a secular, muscular kibbutznik state that in 1967 had struck first to win a quick, decisive war against hostile neighbors, vastly expanding its territory. We studied the changed borders on multicolored maps on the wall. We learned that this was the second time Israel had defeated “the Arabs,” the first being the 1948 War of Independence.
What we did not learn was that when Jews began arriving in significant numbers early in the 20th century in what would become Israel, other people were already there. I don’t recall any reference at Temple Sinai to “Palestine” or “Palestinians.” As a child, my understanding reflected the Zionist slogan that this region had been “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
The slogan was, and is, propaganda—or, as we might call it today, disinformation. The continuing gap in perception it reveals lies at the heart of the bitter conflict over Israel, including the debate among American Jews over our relationship with the country.
In her cover essay for the Spring 2026 issue, Nadine Epstein argues that it is time to jettison the contested term “Zionism” and substitute a clear-eyed reconsideration of what Israel actually has been and what it is now. I agree.
Epstein observes that Zionism has meant different things to different people at different times. Through at least the early 1960s, many Jews in the United States felt ambivalent about Zionism as it was then understood in Israel, because the ideology assumed that Jews ought to make aliyah, that is, relocate to the newly formed state. That skepticism eroded in the wake of the Six-Day War, as pride in Israel’s military prowess and overall resilience eclipsed earlier hesitation. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 swept away remaining ambivalence, as American Jews rallied to Israel’s defense in the face of a surprise Arab attack that nearly overwhelmed the vaunted Israel Defense Forces. Norman Podhoretz, then editor of Commentary, published an essay in The New York Times asserting that American Jews “have all been converted to Zionism.” The Zionism that surged in the United States in the following two decades seemed uncomplicated and unproblematic to the majority of American Jews, featuring heroic accounts of the country’s founding and development similar to what I learned at Temple Sinai.
The legal scholar and historian Noah Feldman has observed that for many American Jews, dedication to Israel became an article of faith—a central pillar of what it meant to be Jewish. This development was especially profound for some Jews “who feel little connection to the religious aspects of Judaism, whether because they don’t believe in God or for other reasons,” Feldman wrote in his 2024 book To Be a Jew Today. “Israel can function as the chosen focal point for their Jewish identity and connection. Caring about and supporting Israel can be constitutive of what makes them actively Jewish.”
Feldman’s account accurately describes my family’s experience. We weren’t deeply religious in a spiritual sense; other than around the High Holidays, our attendance at services was sporadic at best. But support for Israel was reflexive and unquestioned. When I was growing up, my mother and maternal grandparents, who had survived the war living underground as faux Catholics in occupied France, rarely if ever referred to the Holocaust or the dozens of relatives who had perished in Eastern Europe. But my grandparents, people of exceedingly modest means who lived in Manhattan, did travel to Israel and proudly displayed tourist photos from those trips in the living room of their tiny one-bedroom apartment.
The surge in Zionism in the United States eventually became intertwined with previously suppressed acknowledgment of the enormity of the Holocaust. After her parents had died and the movement to memorialize the Holocaust gained momentum in the 1990s, my mother spent years documenting her secret childhood, culminating in her successful campaign to secure recognition at Yad Vashem for the members of the French Resistance who protected her and her parents.
But as a Zionist consensus among American Jews solidified, Israel moved dramatically to the right politically, beginning in the late 1970s with the rise to power of the Revisionist-influenced Likud coalition led by Menachem Begin. I’m not going to attempt a thorough description of Israel’s political evolution in the decades since—beyond noting that the maximalist Revisionist claim to sovereignty over all of historical Israel, including the occupied West Bank, has led to the current travesty of institutionalized oppression of Palestinians, relentless expansion of illegal settlements and widespread toleration of settler terrorism against Palestinians.
Many younger American Jews who did not grow up with the Israel I knew as a child view Zionism negatively. A broader swath of American Jews who consider themselves politically progressive—I’m one of them—also see a contradiction between what we understand to be our religion’s dedication to equality and social justice and support for a country responsible for the destruction of Gaza under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and his racist far-right coalition. The collective decision made more than a half-century ago to intertwine American Jewish identity with unwavering loyalty to Israel has come back to haunt us.
In some ways, what has transpired in the West Bank is more ominous for Israel’s future—and for American Jews’ relationship with Israel—than what’s happened in Gaza. Without excusing it, Israel’s violent reaction to October 7 can be understood as the product of a nationwide post-traumatic break. In contrast, the decades-long, systematic oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank, justified by an ideology of Jewish supremacy, has bred a generation of Jewish settler terrorists whose activities have been increasingly tolerated, and often enabled, by the IDF, Israeli police and the country’s judicial system. This toleration of ultranationalist lawlessness has eroded core Israeli institutions and norms—and cannot be attributed to an overreaction to a singular attack on Jews. Not only do extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich now shape government policy; their extremism has infected the state itself, and it is far from obvious how that can be cured.
And the problem goes even deeper. It begins with the reality that the Zionism of David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir denied the reality that I did not learn at Temple Sinai and that I did not begin to grapple with until I read the work of Israeli historian Benny Morris in the late 1980s. The reality was that the land was not empty, the Palestinians were there, and that from their perspective, the founding of the Jewish state was a catastrophe: in Arabic, the Nakba. (Tarnishing my childhood memory, it turns out that my quarters may not have been going to plant orange trees in the desert, after all. Some critics have suggested that the JNF’s tree-planting program focused heavily on strategically placing new pine forests to hide the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages.)
Nadine Epstein observes that most nations are born in sin. “Such is the nature of nations,” she writes. “Every inch of border and square foot of land represents a vision or narrative that has triumphed over other visions or narratives.” This is not an argument against the formation of nations generally or the existence of any particular nation. It’s worth noting that the birth and youth of my own country were marred by hypocrisy and brutality that contradicted its professed ideals. Acknowledging such realities does not negate the underlying legitimacy of imperfect states. Instead, it tees up the question of whether nations are moving, however haltingly, in the direction of their supposed founding values or are retreating from those values—and what can be done to improve those trajectories.
It’s from this perspective that I applaud Epstein’s contention that the term “Zionism” is no longer useful. The term fails to distinguish among the various versions of Zionism that have jostled with one another over the generations. Of more immediate relevance, when “Zionism” is deployed in contemporary debates about Israel, it obscures the country’s complicated history and makes reform less likely. It is long past time, but never too late, to face hard facts.
[This piece is a response to Nadine Epstein’s essay “The Word Zionism Is Dead.” For all responses, click here.]
Paul Barrett, a former journalist with The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, is currently an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law.