The “anti-Zionist” narrative endures because it has not been deconstructed at its linguistic roots, and that process must begin within the Jewish community itself.
The problem with claiming that anti-Zionists deny the peoplehood of the Jewish people in favor of Judaism as a religion is that the vast majority of the left-wing anti-Zionists are not religious, or not of the Jewish religion. They may be religious in the sense that leftism is a religion or wokism is a religion.
Agreed. The far left is atheistic generally. So, by reducing Jewishness to only a religion, they are free to reject it. Otherwise, they might understand that they, too, are part of the Jewish people.
Outstanding essay! Both the far right and far left are intent on erasing Jewish peoplehood. It is ironic that many conservative Christians support the nature of Jewish peoplehood more than progressive Jews and others who collaborate with the far left and fascists to erase our nationhood, peoplehood and history..
Yes. It’s really important to acknowledge that this is both right and left. The left’s effort to erase our peoplehood is being driven by academia (the lower schools, too). Unless academia is totally overhauled, they will continue to produce more antizionists.
I’m less certain what’s driving the hatred on the right, but it seems like there’s Groypers, Christian replacement theory, and classical blut and soil Neo-Nazism -distinct but overlapping. How to address those, I don’t know.
Linking Mansour’s piece about the horrendous EZra Klein podcast which touches on Edward Said killed Jewish liberal intellectualism in academia. This is the root which must be pulled up and the earth salted.
I have read some of the comments, and several add valuable insights, but I think what touched me the most about Hava's article was the awakening you triggered, like an ancient, hidden memory. That memory is that my being a Jew, traced backwards in time, meant we who are Jews are all descendants of people who owned a land, a land that today is a nation with sovereign borders, which in English is called Israel.
We only needed this description, "Jew," to identify where we came from and what we believed after we were torn from this land. We needed to be called something because "we" had these residual beliefs, and we were eventually called, as you noted, "Jews".
Today, I am always a Jew and proud to worship God in the ways of our ancestors. And I need that title because otherwise, I would only be called an "American", and it would be assumed that I was likely a Christian American because that is what the majority of Americans are.
And I am that American as well as a Jew. And I am beyond grateful that of all the other places besides Israel, which didn't exist yet when I was born, my parents were born in America and not Germany, Poland (very few Jews since WWII), Russia, or some South American country.
And thus, because of my parents, I was born in America. I love America and I cast my lot with all American citizens and would fight and die to preserve America.
But I was at birth and still am only a minority, an American citizen, yes, but often not accorded full citizenship. I could not go to the graduate school I chose because I was identified as a Jew. I could not belong to a gym or golf club because I was a Jew and that was in the 1980s and beyond.
So, your article gave me a better understanding of why Israel came back into being as a sovereign nation and why I must also defend its right to exist in peace. Israel invites and allows diaspora Jews to reassimilate and have again an ownership of nationhood based on their ancestral claim to a nation.
And, by doing so, we have not only a right, but a duty to never allow that nation to be taken away, be destroyed, to again force its Jewish people to be forced into exile.
Jewish anti-Zionism is often started by adolescence defiance and nurtured by misanthropic ignorance. When the you realise that if is very hard to reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into, you will slightly less outraged.
The anti-Zionist Jews are like the Wicked Son in the Haggadah insofar as they exclude themselves from Jewish peoplehood and therefore the appropriate answer to them is also that which follows in the Haggadah insofar If they had been in Egypt they would have been among those who were not redeemed.
Zionist Jews are like those at the foot of mount Sainai, who have lost all trust in GD and instead turn to a golden cow. The nukes of Israel are not a guarantor of our people's safety, they are a sin against the earth and GD and man. Those who trust in nuclear fire as their protector will be consumed by fire in turn.
The self-hating, auto-antisemitic so called "Jews", will be the first ones to pay the price for their transgressions if and when Democracies, law and order collapse.
It truly baffles the mind how jews can be this ignorant on who got slaughtered on Oct 7 exactly. Somewhere in these fools’ minds they probably still think they are safe as long as they “support narni….” pardon “palestina”
Unfortunately the far left (by which I intend to include "anti-zionist 'jews' ") is not intellectually coherent. Therefore semantic arguments fall upon deaf ears. There's a cult-like, emotional underpinning instead that coheres this movement, and the icing on their zealous cake is the sense of self-righteousness that accompanies their self-appointed moral high ground. So maybe the needed counterpunch is not an abstruse semantic argument but an emotional one: tell the story of the Hamas atrocities, just as we've told the story of the Shoah to ensure that the true horrors of Nazism are known to all decent-minded people. Tell the lurid, horrific details of the vicious, sadistic, murderous acts of Hamas, PIJ, PLO, PFLP, and Hezbollah, so that these anti-zionist 'jews' can better understand who are the good guys and who are the evil ones. Out with pallid intellectual discourses and in with the raw, brutal truth on an impactful level.
Can we please stop holding ourselves accountable (essentially blaming ourselves, which seems like scaepgoating) for antizionism and/or antisemitism? It's like holding Black people accountable for racism. Societies determine who is what race and whether certain people are categorized in that race, or nationality, or whatever. Too much history to back that up. RIght now, all one has to do is look at California's new law (yes, signed into law) making it clear Israelis are not white for demographic data. I suspect it's an untintended consequence of Arab groups asking to be categorized as MENA, but here we are. Personally, I don't think "as a Jews" are self hating. I think they've nternalized the implicit bias that has persisted across the globe. https://jweekly.com/2025/11/12/california-law-redefines-israelis-as-not-white/
I wrote about something similar earlier today when I was writing the "Dear Reader" introduction to a book I am releasing called David Rising:
Dear Reader,
A friend asked me, “Why did you write the book?”
I replied, “It was very painful growing up without knowing about the knowledge and wisdom available to us, and I wanted to spare others the pain of growing up without these ‘secrets.’”
It is said that God looked into the Torah and created the world.
As such, the Torah gives us an operating system, a blueprint for operating in life that will enable us to succeed and live with joy, strength, and blessings, both material and spiritual, in this world and the World to Come.
Our sages said, “Turn it over and turn it over, for all is in it.”
It was painful to live without this knowledge, and I wanted to give others an entry point inside an otherwise closed gate.
I wrote this book because I grew up as a secular Jew in Tenafly, NJ, completely ignorant of the rich cultural heritage and all of the divine wisdom that our Jewish ancestors had worked so hard to acquire and pass down to us.
In 10th grade, the marquee class of our high school experience was called Humanities. A Jewish teacher named Mr. Gold taught us all about “Western Civilization,” but he did not mention the Jews or Torah.
We had been erased from Western Civilization. If you look around the world today with a careful eye, you will also notice an effort to erase Jewishness from the world and cover it over with a modern narrative, a version of truth that obscures the real essence of life, proffered by self-serving marketers and self-styled intellectuals whose definition of “truth” changes every few years as it becomes convenient to do so.
The problem with this is that it obscures the real Truth and therefore dislocates you from your true position of power, knocks you off balance, removes you from your true inheritance, and obscures your real purpose here. It is why so many are feeling lost and confused, no matter how many external signs of success (degrees, money, positions) they acquire.
The real “Truth” is one that existed before the world was created and which our ancestors, starting with Avraham, rediscovered and brought into the world when he started teaching people the ways of the one God and His ways.
Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and felt uneasy, like something was off? You leave feeling off. Later, you realize that the person was lying to you, so you could not make the right decisions. If you knew the truth, you would have felt better. That is one reason why knowing the Truth will make you happier. The Truth also comes with a whole range of tools and techniques to empower you, teach you how to think differently, solve problems from a productive place, and build a life that will lead to fulfillment.
We have an incredible “technology” called life, we just have to learn how to use it.
Depending on how religious you are, this may seem familiar or may not seem like a far bridge to cross at this point. I was an undergraduate student at NYU where I felt scared of what my peers would think of me if I talked about God.
My stepfather used to go around saying that he did not believe that God existed. TV, news, the Internet, movies all presented versions of reality that barely mentioned God’s name and certainly did not live up to the lifestyle of the Torah.
But all of those versions of reality are serving someone else’s bank account, ego, career, or movie sales. The version of reality offered here is about serving God, the Creator. And He is the only one with the power to actually pay you back. And He does so in the form of happiness. As they say, “It is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it, and all its supporters are happy.”
I wrote this book as a novel so that the reader could gain access to Torah knowledge and information in an accessible way and see the experience lived on the page, and thereby understand how this powerful knowledge could shape and uplift one’s life.
As Jews, we speak differently than people in the secular world. If you have Jewish friends, you may hear them constantly saying “Baruch HaShem.” This is their way of thanking God.
As we study Torah, we learn that we cannot really achieve anything unless God enables us to succeed. We cannot even take a single step without His help.
In that light, I want to thank God for allowing me to present this book to you. I am grateful that it has landed in your hands.
It is my religious belief that the majority of my co-religionists are worshipping a golden cow called Israel and are destined for hell for this blasphemy.
My point post Bar Kochba and the loss of sovereignty is that the Jewish people survived through rabbinic innovation and necessity. Shared law, memory, longing, language and land.
No. Judaism exists and survived because of the connection to the Land of Israel. That's the entire point.
The rabbis built a way for a people in exile to stay connected to their land.
Our prayers, holidays, direction of prayer, and Hebrew language all kept Jews facing Eretz Yisrael while living under empires, displacement, and pressure to assimilate.
The problem with claiming that anti-Zionists deny the peoplehood of the Jewish people in favor of Judaism as a religion is that the vast majority of the left-wing anti-Zionists are not religious, or not of the Jewish religion. They may be religious in the sense that leftism is a religion or wokism is a religion.
Agreed. The far left is atheistic generally. So, by reducing Jewishness to only a religion, they are free to reject it. Otherwise, they might understand that they, too, are part of the Jewish people.
Exactly!
Outstanding essay! Both the far right and far left are intent on erasing Jewish peoplehood. It is ironic that many conservative Christians support the nature of Jewish peoplehood more than progressive Jews and others who collaborate with the far left and fascists to erase our nationhood, peoplehood and history..
Yes. It’s really important to acknowledge that this is both right and left. The left’s effort to erase our peoplehood is being driven by academia (the lower schools, too). Unless academia is totally overhauled, they will continue to produce more antizionists.
I’m less certain what’s driving the hatred on the right, but it seems like there’s Groypers, Christian replacement theory, and classical blut and soil Neo-Nazism -distinct but overlapping. How to address those, I don’t know.
Linking Mansour’s piece about the horrendous EZra Klein podcast which touches on Edward Said killed Jewish liberal intellectualism in academia. This is the root which must be pulled up and the earth salted.
https://substack.com/@metacritique/note/p-178991638?r=2q93jc&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Simple response from me. If YOU don't stand for what and who you are then who exactly will? That is THE fundamental choice.
I have read some of the comments, and several add valuable insights, but I think what touched me the most about Hava's article was the awakening you triggered, like an ancient, hidden memory. That memory is that my being a Jew, traced backwards in time, meant we who are Jews are all descendants of people who owned a land, a land that today is a nation with sovereign borders, which in English is called Israel.
We only needed this description, "Jew," to identify where we came from and what we believed after we were torn from this land. We needed to be called something because "we" had these residual beliefs, and we were eventually called, as you noted, "Jews".
Today, I am always a Jew and proud to worship God in the ways of our ancestors. And I need that title because otherwise, I would only be called an "American", and it would be assumed that I was likely a Christian American because that is what the majority of Americans are.
And I am that American as well as a Jew. And I am beyond grateful that of all the other places besides Israel, which didn't exist yet when I was born, my parents were born in America and not Germany, Poland (very few Jews since WWII), Russia, or some South American country.
And thus, because of my parents, I was born in America. I love America and I cast my lot with all American citizens and would fight and die to preserve America.
But I was at birth and still am only a minority, an American citizen, yes, but often not accorded full citizenship. I could not go to the graduate school I chose because I was identified as a Jew. I could not belong to a gym or golf club because I was a Jew and that was in the 1980s and beyond.
So, your article gave me a better understanding of why Israel came back into being as a sovereign nation and why I must also defend its right to exist in peace. Israel invites and allows diaspora Jews to reassimilate and have again an ownership of nationhood based on their ancestral claim to a nation.
And, by doing so, we have not only a right, but a duty to never allow that nation to be taken away, be destroyed, to again force its Jewish people to be forced into exile.
Thank you for this wonderful article.
Thank you.
Jewish anti-Zionism is often started by adolescence defiance and nurtured by misanthropic ignorance. When the you realise that if is very hard to reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into, you will slightly less outraged.
The anti-Zionist Jews are like the Wicked Son in the Haggadah insofar as they exclude themselves from Jewish peoplehood and therefore the appropriate answer to them is also that which follows in the Haggadah insofar If they had been in Egypt they would have been among those who were not redeemed.
Zionist Jews are like those at the foot of mount Sainai, who have lost all trust in GD and instead turn to a golden cow. The nukes of Israel are not a guarantor of our people's safety, they are a sin against the earth and GD and man. Those who trust in nuclear fire as their protector will be consumed by fire in turn.
The self-hating, auto-antisemitic so called "Jews", will be the first ones to pay the price for their transgressions if and when Democracies, law and order collapse.
Watch Mark Levin tonight snd posting here. He mentioned all of this and more. Worth sharing .
A must watch and share
Mark Levin in FOX
Part 1
Nazis tried to cover up their horrific acts, Hamas was 'proud of what they did' on October 7th: Mark Levin
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6385185045112
Part 2
‘Culture of denial’ surrounding persecution of Christians: Rep. Chris Smith
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6385149234112
Part 3
Nazis tried to cover up their horrific acts, Hamas was 'proud of what they did' on October 7th: Mark Levin
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6385185045112
Mark Levin is more qualified to be a history teacher or professor than the whack jobs teaching America's youth.
It truly baffles the mind how jews can be this ignorant on who got slaughtered on Oct 7 exactly. Somewhere in these fools’ minds they probably still think they are safe as long as they “support narni….” pardon “palestina”
Unfortunately the far left (by which I intend to include "anti-zionist 'jews' ") is not intellectually coherent. Therefore semantic arguments fall upon deaf ears. There's a cult-like, emotional underpinning instead that coheres this movement, and the icing on their zealous cake is the sense of self-righteousness that accompanies their self-appointed moral high ground. So maybe the needed counterpunch is not an abstruse semantic argument but an emotional one: tell the story of the Hamas atrocities, just as we've told the story of the Shoah to ensure that the true horrors of Nazism are known to all decent-minded people. Tell the lurid, horrific details of the vicious, sadistic, murderous acts of Hamas, PIJ, PLO, PFLP, and Hezbollah, so that these anti-zionist 'jews' can better understand who are the good guys and who are the evil ones. Out with pallid intellectual discourses and in with the raw, brutal truth on an impactful level.
You have to understand and be familiar either you heritage to be proud of it snd to defend it
Can we please stop holding ourselves accountable (essentially blaming ourselves, which seems like scaepgoating) for antizionism and/or antisemitism? It's like holding Black people accountable for racism. Societies determine who is what race and whether certain people are categorized in that race, or nationality, or whatever. Too much history to back that up. RIght now, all one has to do is look at California's new law (yes, signed into law) making it clear Israelis are not white for demographic data. I suspect it's an untintended consequence of Arab groups asking to be categorized as MENA, but here we are. Personally, I don't think "as a Jews" are self hating. I think they've nternalized the implicit bias that has persisted across the globe. https://jweekly.com/2025/11/12/california-law-redefines-israelis-as-not-white/
I wrote about something similar earlier today when I was writing the "Dear Reader" introduction to a book I am releasing called David Rising:
Dear Reader,
A friend asked me, “Why did you write the book?”
I replied, “It was very painful growing up without knowing about the knowledge and wisdom available to us, and I wanted to spare others the pain of growing up without these ‘secrets.’”
It is said that God looked into the Torah and created the world.
As such, the Torah gives us an operating system, a blueprint for operating in life that will enable us to succeed and live with joy, strength, and blessings, both material and spiritual, in this world and the World to Come.
Our sages said, “Turn it over and turn it over, for all is in it.”
It was painful to live without this knowledge, and I wanted to give others an entry point inside an otherwise closed gate.
I wrote this book because I grew up as a secular Jew in Tenafly, NJ, completely ignorant of the rich cultural heritage and all of the divine wisdom that our Jewish ancestors had worked so hard to acquire and pass down to us.
In 10th grade, the marquee class of our high school experience was called Humanities. A Jewish teacher named Mr. Gold taught us all about “Western Civilization,” but he did not mention the Jews or Torah.
We had been erased from Western Civilization. If you look around the world today with a careful eye, you will also notice an effort to erase Jewishness from the world and cover it over with a modern narrative, a version of truth that obscures the real essence of life, proffered by self-serving marketers and self-styled intellectuals whose definition of “truth” changes every few years as it becomes convenient to do so.
The problem with this is that it obscures the real Truth and therefore dislocates you from your true position of power, knocks you off balance, removes you from your true inheritance, and obscures your real purpose here. It is why so many are feeling lost and confused, no matter how many external signs of success (degrees, money, positions) they acquire.
The real “Truth” is one that existed before the world was created and which our ancestors, starting with Avraham, rediscovered and brought into the world when he started teaching people the ways of the one God and His ways.
Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and felt uneasy, like something was off? You leave feeling off. Later, you realize that the person was lying to you, so you could not make the right decisions. If you knew the truth, you would have felt better. That is one reason why knowing the Truth will make you happier. The Truth also comes with a whole range of tools and techniques to empower you, teach you how to think differently, solve problems from a productive place, and build a life that will lead to fulfillment.
We have an incredible “technology” called life, we just have to learn how to use it.
Depending on how religious you are, this may seem familiar or may not seem like a far bridge to cross at this point. I was an undergraduate student at NYU where I felt scared of what my peers would think of me if I talked about God.
My stepfather used to go around saying that he did not believe that God existed. TV, news, the Internet, movies all presented versions of reality that barely mentioned God’s name and certainly did not live up to the lifestyle of the Torah.
But all of those versions of reality are serving someone else’s bank account, ego, career, or movie sales. The version of reality offered here is about serving God, the Creator. And He is the only one with the power to actually pay you back. And He does so in the form of happiness. As they say, “It is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it, and all its supporters are happy.”
I wrote this book as a novel so that the reader could gain access to Torah knowledge and information in an accessible way and see the experience lived on the page, and thereby understand how this powerful knowledge could shape and uplift one’s life.
As Jews, we speak differently than people in the secular world. If you have Jewish friends, you may hear them constantly saying “Baruch HaShem.” This is their way of thanking God.
As we study Torah, we learn that we cannot really achieve anything unless God enables us to succeed. We cannot even take a single step without His help.
In that light, I want to thank God for allowing me to present this book to you. I am grateful that it has landed in your hands.
- Avraham Chaim Meir Ben-Tov
It is my religious belief that the majority of my co-religionists are worshipping a golden cow called Israel and are destined for hell for this blasphemy.
Did Judaism exist between 136 and 1948?
My point post Bar Kochba and the loss of sovereignty is that the Jewish people survived through rabbinic innovation and necessity. Shared law, memory, longing, language and land.
Thank you for acknowledging that a zionist state of Israel is not necessary for Judaism to exist.
No. Judaism exists and survived because of the connection to the Land of Israel. That's the entire point.
The rabbis built a way for a people in exile to stay connected to their land.
Our prayers, holidays, direction of prayer, and Hebrew language all kept Jews facing Eretz Yisrael while living under empires, displacement, and pressure to assimilate.
Israel isn’t separate from Judaism.
Do you recognize how what you are saying now entirely contradicts the point you are trying to make about zionism?
Do you recognise that you'd prefer to deny an indigenous people the right to live in peace in their ancestral land?