The Unfortunate Relationship Between Secular Judaism and Anti-Zionism

Without ritual, practice, and communal life, Jewish identity is fading faster than ever — and the consequences are existential.

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This is a guest essay by Hava Mendelle, who writes the newsletter, “Decolonization of the Jewish Mind.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The Jewish problem has never really changed.

Across millennia, under different political systems and under different names, it has consistently forced Jews to confront two enduring questions:

1. How do Jews survive persecution?

2. How do Jews survive assimilation?

Sometimes one dominates more than the other, but Jewish history is shaped by this constant tension between external threat and internal erosion. Jews are either being attacked from the outside or losing cohesion from within and — more often than not — the two problems occur simultaneously.

Today, Jewish persecution is surging once again, which is unprecedented considering the modern context in which we live: full and formal legal equality (in the West), relative prevalence of liberal democracies, and the restoration and existence of a sovereign Jewish state that is home to millions of Jews. Yet Jew-hatred across the Diaspora is at record levels including countries that were the most welcoming to Jews such as Australia, Canada, and America.

This resurgence is driven by “anti-Zionism,” the contemporary form of Jew-hatred that thrives within a secular, human-rights-obsessed culture deeply suspicious of Jewish particularism and the Jewish nation-state itself. Historical anti-Jewish narratives have been reshaped and embedded into successive contemporary political thought with their own Soviet and Arab twist: first through Marxism, then anti-colonial theory, and now human rights discourse — each providing a new moral vocabulary through which Jewish particularism could be recast as suspect.

As a result, Israel is not treated as one state among many that emerged in the post–World War II period of renewed nationalism, but is framed as a moral aberration, and Jewish self-determination falsely defined as illegitimate.

At the same time as “anti-Zionism” is surging, assimilation continues to gnaw at Jewish life and continuity. As a product of life in Western liberal democracies, rates of intermarriage are rising, while Jewish religious and communal affiliation is in decline. In the United States alone, more than 60 per cent of recent non-Orthodox Jewish marriages are intermarriages and the majority of children from those marriages are not raised Jewish. Synagogue affiliation is in decline. Hebrew literacy is in decline. Ritual practice is in decline. Jewish continuity is weakening.

Underlying this decline is an intellectual framework shaped by post-Enlightenment secularism and New Atheist thinking¹ that treats religious practice as obsolete superstition. The moment “God” or “religion” enters the conversation, it is met with a knee-jerk aversion. This has given rise to the category of the “Secular Jew,” a category that places full focus on ethnicity and ancestry, devoid of practice and ritual with the assumption that “heritage” alone can sustain Jewish life. It is the Judaism of nostalgia, ethnic sentimentality with a bagel and lox that gets more thinly spread with each generation.

The brutal reality is: Secular Jewish identity has a half-life of about two generations.

As a category, the “Secular Jew” in finding no need to observe Jewish ritual, participate in Jewish communal life, or believe in the Jewish God. They may reject the Jewish nation-state, thus giving rise to the phenomenon of the tokenised “Anti-Zionist-Secular-Atheist Jew. The “Secular Jew” category does not merely produce a Jew who assimilates faster; it produces a Jew who is more susceptible to becoming “anti-Zionist” and therefore more useful to “anti-Zionism.”

We now have two realities: increasing persecution from “anti-Zionism” and increasing assimilation from secularism. And they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they feed into each other: Secular Judaism weakens resistance to “anti-Zionism” because it strips away the practice, ritual, and religious grounding that historically sustained Jewish collective identity and connection to the Land of Israel. Without these core tenets of Judaism, we leave Jews vulnerable to the distorted moral vocabulary of hostile contemporary political thought.

This is also where Secular Zionism has failed.

Take the example of the mobile Israeli. Israel is a majority secular society, but once Israelis leave because of family, war, or economic reasons, that underlying Jewish environment that sustained Jewishness with a Jewish calendar, Jewish festivals, Jewish language, and Jewish public ceremonies all disappear. In the Diaspora, their children often attend non-Jewish schools, speak English more fluently and grow up without Jewish practice in the home. This means that what sustained Jewishness inside Israel no longer exists outside it. By the next generation, Jewish identity thins even further; by the third, it often disappears.

The Secular Zionist experiment has reached its limit. What we now call “Secular Zionism” is really the post-state inheritance of Political Zionism. Political Zionism primarily understood the Jewish dilemma as one of powerlessness and that Jews were unsafe because they lacked sovereignty. Emancipation had failed. Jewish life in the Diaspora remained exposed to hostile actors. Jews remained dependent on the tolerance of others — a tolerance that history had proven to be unreliable. The solution was political: Restore Jewish power through a sovereign state. As articulated by Theodor Herzl in Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) in 1896:

“The Jewish Question is neither a social nor a religious one, even though it may assume these and other guises. It is a national question, and to solve it we must first of all establish it as an international political problem which will have to be settled by the civilized nations of the world in council.”

On this point, Political Zionism succeeded. The State of Israel restored Jewish sovereignty and absorbed millions of Jews who faced persecution in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and the former Soviet Union, and transformed Jews from a stateless minority into a people capable of self-defence, self-determination, and political agency. For the first time in nearly two millennia, Jews were no longer reliant on the goodwill of others for their collective survival.

However, Political Zionism assumed that once sovereignty was achieved, Jewish continuity would take care of itself. Culture, religious practice, and generational transmission to children were treated as secondary — as necessities of exile rather than conditions for Jewish survival as a whole.

This assumption defines the limits of Political Zionism.

Even at the time of the emergence of Political Zionism, this limitation was recognised. Cultural Zionists warned that a state could only secure Jews politically but could not maintain Jewish civilisation. They were not “anti-Zionist” and they did not oppose Jewish sovereignty. What they opposed was the assumption that a state could substitute for culture, practice, ritual, and traditions.

Further, a Jewish homeland might absorb some Jews, but it could never absorb all Jews. Diaspora Jewish life would remain a permanent condition. So, without a cultural centre capable of generating meaning, education, and Jewish philosophical depth, Jewish life outside Israel would continue to thin and become fragile.

This was most clearly articulated by the Hebrew journalist and essayist Ahad Ha’am in “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem” in 1897: “A Jewish State is not the same thing as a Jewish people.” More pointedly, he asked what would be passed on once political success was achieved: “We shall have a State — and with it, perhaps, a parliament and an army — but where will our spiritual centre be?”

This warning has played out in real time. Cultural Zionists expressed the now-visible issue of restored Jewish power with no Jewish cultural core. We have Zionist councils across the globe, Zionist advocacy bodies, and Zionist political infrastructure, yet far weaker systems of sustaining Jewish life. Jewish practice, language, and ritual are treated as optional or private.

If we understand the Jewish People as one of the earliest colonised peoples, we can see a consistent historical pattern: Jewish survival has depended on adaptation and preservation under hostile conditions. The solution requires a radical shift in thinking.

I am not calling for a revival of belief. Jewish history makes this particularly clear. Jews, including some of the greatest rabbis and thinkers, have doubted, argued, and struggled with their faith in God. Fundamentally, the ultimate Jewish life question was consistently (and remains) about practice. The Jewish daily rituals and rhythms, Shabbat observance, our holidays, the dietary laws, the prayers that mark morning and evening, the rituals around birth, marriage, and death — these practices created a lived reality that was unmistakably and distinctively Jewish.

Jewish life was not preserved because Jews believed the same things, but because they did the same things. This is why the current aversion and even disdain to practice, dismissed as “religion,” is so destructive. It is not a radical idea to uphold the traditions of your people. It is, in fact, what preserved Jewish life for millennia when Jews lacked power, land, and protection.

It is also why Israel must be reclaimed not merely as a political project, but as a civilisational core in Jewish thought. Zionism did not begin as a 20th-century ideology; it is embedded in Jewish scripture, ritual, language, and longing. One must engage with Jewish texts and historical consciousness to understand the deep connection to the Land of Israel, the centre of a living civilisation.

The term “Israeli” represents an attempt to name the civilizational anchor of shared language, cultural reference points, collective memory, and an enduring connection to the Land — standing above the hyphenated identities of Jewish-Australian, Jewish-American, and so on. Israel exists not just as a political entity, but as a cultural and historical reality that precedes and surpasses contemporary debates. To preserve Jewish life, we must recognize both the deep cultural roots of the Land and the deliberate effort required to maintain our connection to it.

Today, “anti-Zionism” poses the gravest threat to the Jewish People. It is fueled by a form of secularism that erodes Jewish identity over generations, accelerating assimilation and weakening communal bonds. In an era when Jews are more geographically and culturally mobile than at any point in history, a revival of and return to our civilizational Israeli core has never been more urgent.

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1. New Atheist thinking is a 21st-century movement advocating that religious belief is irrational, dangerous, and detrimental to society, promoting instead a worldview based solely on science, reason, and empirical evidence. It rejects faith as valid evidence, often viewing religion as a primary cause of social ills rather than just a symptom.