Only about one-third of American Jews are Zionists, according to a recent survey conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America, the first major survey of American Jews in a long time to ask explicitly about Zionist or non-Zionist identity.
Yet the same survey finds that nearly nine in 10 American Jews believe “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.”
To many observers, especially within organized Jewish and pro-Israel advocacy circles, this looks like a contradiction begging to be resolved. The most common resolution is tidy and reassuring: Most Jews are Zionists without realizing it. They support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state; therefore, they must be Zionists, even if they resist the label.
That conclusion is no doubt comforting for many pro-Israel Jewish groups, but it is wrong. What the survey actually reveals is not mass confusion, but a growing insistence on nuance.
American Jews are not secretly Zionists who have forgotten the definition. They are Jews with varied, thoughtful, and sometimes conflicted views about peoplehood, democracy, nationalism, and power, views that no longer fit neatly under a single ideological banner.
The key mistake made by many advocacy groups today is to treat “Zionism” as a static synonym for believing Israel should exist. As a scholar and educator on European Jewish intellectual history, I know that the truth is far more complicated than that.
Nuanced views of Zionism among American Jews
When I study debates about the possibility of creating a Jewish state from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when “Zionism” first became a political label under which people organized, I find that some of their positions are so far afield from where this term has ended up that it hardly makes sense to speak of them under the same singular rubric.
I see this range of meaning among my students, too, who learn about the many forms Zionism has taken and often tell me they feel too conflicted to easily characterize their views.
Historically, Zionism has never been one single concept. It has been a family of arguments, not a single creed: political Zionism, cultural Zionism, religious Zionism, socialist Zionism, revisionist Zionism, and more. To say “Zionism” without adjectives is already to erase its internal diversity.
But in contemporary discourse, especially in the United States, the term has narrowed. For many Jews today, “Zionism” no longer means support for a Jewish homeland or even for Israel’s continued existence. It means endorsement of a specific political project as it is currently practiced and defended.
That project is often perceived, rightly or wrongly, as prioritizing the maintenance of a permanent Jewish voting majority over and above liberal democratic principles. When Zionism is publicly articulated as requiring territorial maximalism, permanent military rule over millions of Palestinians without citizenship, or the subordination of democratic equality to ethnonational identity, many Jews step back.
Of course, these American Jews may still believe deeply that Israel matters as a place of refuge, culture, language, and memory. They may still affirm its right to exist as a state for all its citizens, but they seemingly do not recognize their own values in what the label of Zionism has come to signify.
This tension is sharpened by the assumptions that dominate Israeli politics today. Across the Israeli Jewish political spectrum, from the far-right to the center-left, the prevailing view is that a “Jewish state” necessarily requires a durable Jewish voting majority.
Maintaining that majority is treated as a political axiom, even when it comes into direct conflict with democratic principles. Israeli governments have been willing, often openly, to sacrifice the democratic side of the “Jewish and democratic” equation rather than confront its implications.
A state that is both Jewish and democratic, in any robust sense, would require either a Palestinian state alongside it, or full political equality for Palestinians under Israeli rule, even at the expense of maintaining a Jewish voting majority.
Yet the Israeli government now openly opposes Palestinian statehood and has structured its politics to avoid equal citizenship. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for most Israeli Jewish politicians today, Israel’s “right to exist” as a Jewish state is more important than its need to exist as a democratic state.
Thus, American Jews who say they support Israel as a Jewish and democratic state may mean that they hold both commitments as equally important. They may well conclude that Zionism, as it is currently articulated and enacted, sacrifices democracy for Jewishness, and reject the label on precisely those grounds.
The numbers in the survey make sense once we allow for that distinction. A Jew can believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state and still doubt whether contemporary Zionism advances both of those commitments.
Some Jews resolve that tension by emphasizing “democratic” over “Jewish,” arguing that any state claiming Jewish legitimacy must guarantee full civic equality, even if it no longer maintains a Jewish voting majority.
Others emphasize “Jewish” in cultural or civilizational terms rather than demographic ones: Israel as a homeland, not a fortress; a center of Jewish life, not an exclusionary nation-state. These positions are not evasions. They are nuanced and committed moral and political judgments.
A brief detour into Martin Buber's thought helps illuminate how mutable these terms are. Buber, one of the 20th century’s most influential Jewish philosophers, was a committed Zionist. He emigrated to Palestine, supported Jewish national renewal, and believed passionately in Hebrew nationalist culture.
Yet he also advocated for a binational state, shared by Jews and Arabs on egalitarian political terms, grounded in political equality and mutual recognition. In his own time, Buber was squarely within the Zionist tent, so much so that Theodor Herzl invited him to serve as editor of the Zionist newspaper Die Welt.
Today, if you espouse Martin Buber’s views of a binational state without emphasis on maintaining a Jewish voting majority, you are labeled an anti-Zionist.
What changed? Not Buber’s political and cultural commitments, which remained remarkably consistent throughout his entire turbulent life, but rather the meaning of Zionism itself.
Positions once understood as Zionist alternatives are now treated as negations. The label has hardened, while Jewish political imagination has not. When American Jews decline to call themselves Zionists, they may be signaling less about Israel and more about language: a refusal to accept a definition that has narrowed beyond recognition.
This is why the claim that most Jews are Zionists, even if they do not know it, rings hollow. It assumes that there is a single, authoritative definition of Zionism, and that Jews who dissent from that definition are merely mistaken. In reality, many Jews know exactly what they are doing. They are refusing a word that, in their view, no longer leaves room for moral disagreement, historical complexity, or political evolution.
The deeper finding of the JFNA survey, then, is not confusion but pluralism. American Jews hold a wide range of views about Israel’s purpose and future. Some are passionately Zionist in a traditional sense; others are post-Zionist, non-Zionist, or ambivalent.
Many care deeply about Israel as a place with symbolic meaning for multiple religious traditions, without placing it at the heart of their Jewish identities. This diversity is not a problem to be explained away. It is a reality to be reckoned with and even embraced.
Clinging to the old assumption that American Jews are uniformly Zionist, if only they could be made to admit it, does real damage. It flattens internal debate, alienates younger generations, and turns political disagreement into accusations of bad faith. Most of all, it prevents the kind of honest conversation this moment demands.
If the survey teaches us anything, it is that this binary of “pro-Israel” versus “anti-Israel” no longer captures how Jews think or speak. The community is wrestling, openly and seriously, with what it means for Israel to be Jewish and democratic, and whether current political realities honor that aspiration. We would do far better to listen to that wrestling than to rename it.
At a time when four out of 10 American Jews believe the state of Israel is guilty of genocide, about the same percentage as the percentage of American Jews who identify as Zionists, the era when American Jews could be assumed to march under a single ideological flag of “Zionism” is over.
What comes next will require more humility, more historical awareness, and a lot more nuance than our inherited labels allow.
The Jewish Federations of North America survey did us a great favor by finally telling us how many American Jews identify as Zionists. We can never again assume that political Zionism is the dominant ideology of the American Jewish community. And that frees us to finally embrace the pluralism of who we are.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.