A new survey found that even many Jews who don’t identify as Zionists are still attached to Israel but also accuse it of apartheid and genocide.
By Arno Rosenfeld, The Forward
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
For years, leaders of the nation’s largest Jewish organizations have insisted that the overwhelming majority of Jews — often as high as 95% — are Zionists, powerful evidence that anti-Zionism was a form of antisemitism.
But there was a glaring lack of data to back this up.
Despite the absolute deluge of surveys polling American Jews, it seemed as though nobody wanted to ask whether they actually considered themselves to be Zionists.
The standard explanation was that there wasn’t a common enough understanding of the term to ask the question and that, therefore, it was better to rely on ostensible proxies for “Zionism” like whether Jews believed Israel had a “right to exist.”
That logic made some sense, and yet I had a sneaking suspicion that the major Jewish advocacy organizations sponsoring most of these polls were also afraid of unfavorable results: The share of Jews who considered themselves Zionists was bound to be less than 95%, and if the share of “Zionist” Jews turned out to be especially low, it would undermine claims that anti-Zionism was a fringe view.
Jewish Federations of North America, to their credit, finally bit the bullet and released the results of a survey conducted last spring. It found that only 37% of American Jews identify with the term “Zionist,” even as 88% believe that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.” Meanwhile, a plurality — nearly half — don’t identify themselves in relation to the term at all, rejecting the labels “Zionist,” “non-Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” to describe their views on Israel.
Mimi Kravetz, chief impact officer at the organization, argued these results demonstrated a misunderstanding of the term.
Zionism should properly mean “the right of the Jewish people to have a Jewish state,” Kravetz wrote in an op-ed announcing the study. The Jews who don’t consider themselves Zionists, then, “are reacting to an understanding of Zionism that includes policies, ideologies, and actions that they oppose, and do not want to be associated with.”
Kravetz goes beyond this explanation, however, to answer why the Jewish federations network and most of the organized community “continue to proudly call ourselves Zionists” despite most American Jews saying the term does not describe them.
“We adhere to the historic definition,” she wrote. “For us, Zionism means supporting the State of Israel and the Israeli people and uniting the Jewish people behind this shared commitment.”
But supporting “the right of the Jewish people to have a Jewish state” (and, notably, one that is also democratic) is not the same thing as “supporting the State of Israel.”
If you dig into the federation network’s survey results, the widespread belief that Israel has a right to be Jewish and democratic does not mesh with the policy positions held by the largest Jewish advocacy organizations.
For example, nearly half of the Jews who don’t identify as either Zionist or anti-Zionist — representing 56% of the total population — think that Israel committed genocide against the Palestinians and that the country is an apartheid state. More than a quarter of this group thinks that Israel should give Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank Israeli citizenship “even if Jews become a minority.” (JFNA did not release the exact totals for these views.)
These distinctions matter in part because leading Jewish organizations often treat allegations of apartheid and genocide as expressions of anti-Zionism, which are in turn antisemitic because they reject near-universal Jewish support for the existence of a Jewish and democratic state.
One way to understand the survey results is that most American Jews maintain a high degree of emotional attachment to Israel (71%) and sympathy for its geopolitical situation (around 90% believe it’s under “constant threat from hostile neighbors who seek its destruction” and that “Palestinian leadership has been corrupt and unwilling to negotiate in good faith”) but they aren’t precious about the relationship — many are willing to brook not just criticism of specific government policies but also beliefs that call into question the country’s legitimacy and ability to maintain a Jewish majority.
Data like this can obscure as much as it clarifies, undermining right-wing efforts to neatly equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism while simultaneously dispelling claims from the left that the American Jewish connection to Israel is fabricated by a small elite.
I’m hopeful that this survey will open the door to more studies examining how Jews understand their identity in relation to Israel — even if the results are inconvenient for those who want to codify a universal definition of antisemitism that includes opposition to a Jewish state in Israel.
GO DEEPER:
* JFNA 2025 Survey of Jewish Life (Berman Jewish DataBank)
* OPINION | What JFNA data really shows about Jews, Israel and Zionism today (JTA)
* OPINION | The JFNA survey proves ‘Zionism’ only impedes the conversations that Jews, Israelis and Palestinians need (JTA)
This story was originally published on the Forward.
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