Zionism needs no progressive permission

(Oct. 21, 2026 / JNS)

Bernard Avishai has identified a Zionism that American progressives can still be permitted to support.

Writing in The New York Times, Avishai urges American progressives not to abandon Israel’s “cultural Zionists.” His argument cites a familiar division: There is a secular, liberal, democratic Zionism worthy of progressive sympathy, and then there is the increasingly religious and nationalist Zionism that has supposedly led Israel astray.

As a Religious Zionist, I have a problem with that construction.

This is not because I have anything against cultural Zionism. I don’t. Ahad Ha’am, for example, belongs in the Zionist story. The rebirth of Hebrew as a spoken language, the extraordinary flowering of Hebrew literature and the creation of a vibrant Jewish culture in the Land of Israel are among Zionism’s greatest accomplishments.

But cultural Zionism is but one tributary of a much larger river. It did not create the Jewish attachment to Zion, and it cannot claim ownership of what Zionism means.

For nearly 2,000 years, no matter where we stood, Jews turned toward Jerusalem in prayer. We ended the Passover seder with “Next year in Jerusalem.” We mourned Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av. At Jewish weddings, we broke a glass and recalled Jerusalem even at the moment of greatest joy.

We didn’t do those things because we hoped that one day there would be a flourishing Hebrew theater scene in Tel Aviv.

Zion was embedded in Judaism long before Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress and certainly long before contemporary American progressives began deciding which versions of Zionism pass their ideological tests.

Modern Zionism’s genius was not that it invented Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel. It was that it transformed an ancient religious and national longing into organized political action.

Religious Zionism was there almost from the start. Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines founded Mizrachi in 1902, just five years after the First Zionist Congress. That was 65 years before the Six-Day War, before the settlement movement and before the Israeli politicians who are now so frequently offered as evidence that Religious Zionism is somehow a dangerous distortion of the Zionist project.

That history matters. Too often Religious Zionism is judged by its most controversial adherents, while cultural and secular Zionism are judged by their highest ideals.

There are religious extremists. Some Religious Zionist politicians deserve criticism. There are policies advanced in the name of religion with which I disagree. Feel free to criticize them.

But we do not define American liberalism solely by its most radical campus protesters. We do not reduce an entire political or religious tradition to the people who embarrass it most. Why should Religious Zionism be any different?

What about the teachers, doctors, scientists and entrepreneurs? The Hesder students who combine Torah study with military service? The Religious Zionist families who have buried sons defending the country? The thousands who volunteer, build communities, educate children and participate fully in the civic, economic and military life of Israel? They are Religious Zionists, too.

There is another part of this discussion that American Jews may find more uncomfortable. For generations, much of American Jewish life has moved toward an identity defined increasingly by ethnicity, culture, politics and family memory rather than religious observance, Jewish learning and obligation. We ought to ask how well that experiment is working.

Pew Research Center’s landmark study of American Jews found that among non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010, 72% married non-Jews.

More striking is what happens in the next generation. Among married Jewish parents with a Jewish spouse, 93% said they were raising their minor children Jewish by religion. Among Jewish parents married to non-Jews, just 28% said the same. Thirty percent of those intermarried parents said they were not raising their children Jewish at all.

Those figures do not prove that cultural Judaism causes intermarriage or that intermarriage alone creates a weaker Jewish identity. Pew warns against drawing that conclusion. People whose Jewish identity is already weaker may simply be more likely to marry non-Jews.

But the correlation is not meaningless, and it raises a question that American Jewry ought to confront rather than evade: Can a civilization sustain itself indefinitely when its identity is increasingly reduced to ancestry, food, political attitudes, family memories and occasional ritual?

Bagels and lox are wonderful. So is remembering your grandmother’s seder. But nostalgia is not a transmission strategy.

That does not mean that every Jew must become Orthodox. It does not mean that an intermarried Jew is less worthy or that children from intermarried families should be pushed away. Quite the opposite: All Jews should be welcomed and encouraged to deepen their connection to the Jewish people. But there must be something to deepen.

Judaism asks something of us. Jewish peoplehood comes with obligations as well as memories. And our connection to the Land of Israel is not simply a political preference or an interesting feature of Jewish culture. It runs through Jewish prayer, law, scripture and history.

That is what Religious Zionism insists we remember. And this is where Avishai’s attempt to rehabilitate a culturally acceptable Zionism strikes me as backwards.

At a moment when American Jewish continuity itself is under enormous pressure, why would we conclude that the answer for Zionism is to become less rooted in Judaism? Why should Zionism have to shed covenant, faith and Jewish particularism to gain the approval of American progressives?

More to the point, would that bargain even work?

Does anyone seriously believe that activists chanting for the elimination of the Jewish state will become Zionists if Israelis quote more Hebrew poetry, become more secular and promise to keep religion out of their national identity?

Increasingly, their quarrel is not with Religious Zionism. It is with Zionism. It is with the proposition that the Jews are a people entitled to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.

Israel is not merely a center for Hebrew culture. It is not a Jewish museum, an interesting sociological experiment or a Mediterranean outpost of Western liberalism. It is a country. More importantly, it is the sovereign expression of an ancient people that survived exile, persecution and dispersion without forgetting where it came from.

Cultural Zionists have a place in that story. So do secular Zionists, traditional Jews and Religious Zionists.

Israel should be criticized when it does wrong. Religious Zionists should reject extremism and confront injustice when it occurs. Jewish sovereignty does not absolve us of moral responsibility.

But criticism is one thing. Demanding that Zionism discard the Judaism that sustained the dream of Zion for millennia before it can receive progressive approval is something else entirely.

We do not need that permission. And we certainly should not rewrite 3,000 years of Jewish history to obtain it. We have been telling the story of Jerusalem considerably longer than there has been a New York Times to argue with us about it.