American Jews don’t agree on what zionism means - poll

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Only one-third of American Jews say they identify as Zionist, even as nearly nine in 10 say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and Democratic state, according to a new survey conducted by Jewish Federations of North America.

The findings of the survey reveal that American Jews do not have a mutually agreed-upon definition of Zionism — with those identifying as anti-Zionist and those identifying as Zionist ascribing sharply different meanings to the term.

For example, about 80% of anti-Zionist Jews say “supporting whatever actions Israel takes” is a tenet of Zionism, while only about 15% of self-identified Zionists share the belief, according to the survey.

The survey marks the most detailed assessment of the sentiments of American Jews about Zionism by a major Jewish organization in the United States, finding that 14% of Jews ages 18 to 34 identify as anti-Zionist and that the only demographic with a majority of self-identified Zionists was Millennials between 35 and 44.

The divisions, JFNA is concluding based on the data, are real but often overstated — a matter of concern as Jewish communities and institutions decide whether and how to engage with Jewish critics of Israel.

“If we misread the trend about ‘Zionism’ to mean that large numbers of Jews, especially young Jews, are turning against the existence of Israel itself, we will draw the wrong conclusions and take the wrong actions,” Mimi Kravetz, JFNA’s chief impact officer, wrote in an essay about the survey’s findings. “We risk responding with anger when the moment calls for steady leadership, pulling away when the moment calls for connection, and defensiveness when the moment calls for listening and understanding.”

Kravetz’s comments add JFNA, the umbrella organization of hundreds of local Jewish federations in the United States and Canada, to an emerging group of Jewish leaders calling to open dialogue with Jews who have recently taken stands against Israel or in support of its opponents. JFNA would continue to define itself as Zionist, Kravetz noted, “in large part because we adhere to the historic definition,” but she conceded that the term had undergone “definition creep.”

Conducted in March 2025 by the research firm Burson, the survey posed a variety of questions to more than 1,800 Jewish and more than 4,100 total respondents about their relationship to Israel and Zionism, as well as about their beliefs about the definition of Zionism.

It was new territory for studies of American Jews. While a major 2021 survey of American Jews by the Pew Research Center had polled Jews on their relationship to Israel, that survey had avoided the use of the word “Zionism.” Other major Jewish groups that conduct population surveys have in the past typically avoided closely interrogating Jewish opinions about Zionism. JFNA’s venture into this territory came as part of the umbrella group’s series of post-Oct. 7 Jewish trend studies, which have also revealed what the group has termed a “surge” of Jewish engagement.

Overall, more than 70% of Jewish adults who responded to JFNA’s survey agreed that “I feel emotionally attached to Israel,” and 60% said Israel made them proud to be Jewish. At the same time, nearly 70% also agreed that “I sometimes find it hard to support actions taken by Israel or its government.”

One of the survey’s big sticking points emerged around self-identified Zionists. Only 37% of Jews surveyed said they identified as Zionist, while 7% labeled themselves anti-Zionist and another 8% said they were non-Zionist. Another 18% said they weren’t sure, while 30% said none of the labels described them.

At the same time, 88% of surveyed Jews believed that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, Democratic state” — traditionally one of the most historically accepted definitions of Zionism. Seven percent of Jews disagreed with that sentiment, equal to the number who consider themselves anti-Zionist.

Respondents were also quizzed on what views they believed constituted “a part of Zionist beliefs.” Among Jews, 36% said Zionism only meant “the right of the Jewish people to have a Jewish state.” More than one in four Jewish respondents said they thought Zionists were expected to be “supporting whatever action Israel takes,” and 35% said Zionism meant “believing Israel has a right to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

Smaller numbers of Jews indicated that they thought “believing Palestinians are a made-up population” and “believing Jews are superior to Palestinians” were also core Zionist tenets.

To Kravetz, these results indicate that some Jews “are not rejecting Israel’s existence or the idea of a Jewish state. They are reacting to an understanding of Zionism that includes policies, ideologies, and actions that they oppose, and do not want to be associated with.”

That is especially true for younger Jews, according to the survey, which shows stark differences along age lines. Less than half of Jews under 44 agreed that “in general, Israel makes me feel proud to be Jewish.” The lowest share of Jews who agreed that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish and Democratic state came from the same age group — though even then about three in four, a sizable majority, agreed with the statement.

Uneasiness in describing oneself as Zionist held true across nearly every age range, with only around 35% of Jews in most demographics using the term to describe themselves.

Of the Jewish respondents, 37% were Reform, 17% were Conservative, 9% were Orthodox and 30% identified as other or as no particular denomination. Survey results shared with JTA broke down respondents by age range, but not by other factors such as denomination; individuals were randomly assigned to receive certain questions.

The debate over Zionism remains fraught. The last few years have seen increased demonization of “Zionists,” alongside shifting definitions of the term, among progressives and far-right figures on social media and college campuses. At the same time, new advocacy groups like The Jewish Majority and the Movement Against Antizionism have called for shunning those expressing anti-Zionist or anti-Israel sentiment from Judaism’s big tent.

Still, more Jewish researchers are looking to better understand the intra-Jewish divide over Zionism and the various ways Jews understand the term.

For The Sake of Argument, an organization that promotes “healthy arguments” and works with several mainstream Jewish groups including JFNA, recently undertook its own interview series with Jewish anti-Zionists. Co-directors Robbie Gringas and Abi Dauber Sterne plan to soon publish findings from their conversations with about 30 participants.

“It’s great that people are starting to talk about the elephant in the room,” Gringas told JTA from Israel. “We, the Jewish world, don’t yet know what to do with this. And in the meantime, we have to find a way to not break each other’s hearts as much as we have been.”

The pair’s main takeaway from their interviews, Gringas said, was that Jewish anti-Zionists were “sad, if not brokenhearted, about the ways in which they not only find no expression for their Judaism, but also find the Judaism that they’re meeting very challenging.” He added, “The people we met were very knowledgeable about Israel and about Judaism. They were rich human beings.”

The fact that more institutional Jewish groups are interested in learning about what motivates Jewish anti-Zionism is a positive step, Gringas said, adding that it fits the current challenges of the Jewish moment.

“We need to recognize that the world’s changed. We’re in a different time,” he said. “We’re not in a transition. We’re in a rupture. And we need to confront it and think about it carefully.”

Interesting, thank you for posting this.

This really makes me curious to compare how the broader population defines Zionism too, as well as how the understanding changes between people who are more supportive of Israel vs. more critical.

It seems there's almost certainly people who could be labelled as Zionists by some definitions, while being considered as not a Zionist or even anti-Zionist by others.

While I believe much of the attempts to treat Zionist-labelling as a slur is motivated by bad faith, I can see how Jews who don't self-identify as Zionists might view being identified as Zionists by others (in particular by anti-Zionist gentiles) as merely being slurred.

I mean..... racists don't usually self-identify as racists. It really doesn't matter what percentage of Americans openly self-identify as Zionist, that's not a particularly meaningful or useful statistic.

The newest Jewish Federations of North America survey has already generated its share of anxious headlines: Only 37% of American Jews say they identify as Zionists. Seven percent call themselves anti-Zionist, 8% non-Zionist and 18% aren’t sure. Another 30% say none of the labels offered describe them.

And yet 88% say Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.

One eye-catching, and perhaps unsurprising, finding in the survey is that younger Jews are more likely to declare themselves anti-Zionists. Only 35% of Jews ages 18-34 accept the Zionist label.

But look closer and another intriguing generational breakdown stands out: Contrary to conventional wisdom, older Jews are not more likely to identify as Zionists. In fact, only 33% of Jews ages 75 and older say they use the term to describe themselves.

Why would the youngest and oldest cohorts in the study have strikingly similar attitudes about the word “Zionism”? (The only demographic with a majority [55%] of self-identified Zionists was millennials between 35 and 44.)

The answer may lie less in changing attitudes toward Israel than in the long, complicated evolution of a word.

For Jews now in their late 70s and beyond, the reluctance to use “Zionist” may have roots in how the term was used — or not used — after Israel’s founding. Middlebury College sociologist Ted Sasson, a scholar in residence at the Israel-based Institute for National Security Studies, argues that even when Jews were celebrating the establishment of Israel, they remained anxious about their own standing as loyal Americans and used the label more sparingly than we might assume.

“Zionism was always a minority political movement among American Jews,” said Sasson, author of “The New American Zionism” (2014). “They came increasingly to support Israel, but as the most powerful Jewish community in the world mobilizing support as an act of faith and commitment and responsibility, but not one that they would describe as Zionist.”

That ambivalence about the ideology of Zionism was famously captured in the 1950 agreement between David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, and Jacob Blaustein, a leader of the American Jewish Committee. Blaustein pledged that American Jews would support nation-building in Israel with their dollars and advocacy; in exchange, Ben-Gurion said Israel would not interfere with American Jewish affairs, suggest Jews should owe their first loyalty to Israel, or, crucially, call for large-scale immigration of American Jews to Israel.

The Jewish establishment’s views on Zionism were exemplified in Max Fisher, a Detroit philanthropist and general chair of the United Jewish Appeal in the 1960s. According to a profile of Fisher by Boris Smolar, the longtime editor in chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Fisher was “not a Zionist” yet “a most dedicated friend of Israel.”

“For American Jews to be a Zionist meant to contemplate aliyah and to declare oneself in exile,” said Sasson, 60, using the Hebrew term for immigrating to Israel. “So ‘Zionism’ already in the 1950s and ’60s was not used by American Jews to describe their commitment to Israel.”

Instead, he notes, “Americans call themselves ‘pro-Israel,’ and that captures how American Jews think about their diaspora responsibilities as protectors and mobilizers on behalf of the Jewish state.”

That distinction may help explain why older Jews — who grew up raising money for Israel, marching for Soviet Jews’ right to emigrate to Israel or celebrating Israel’s unexpected military victories — don’t necessarily see themselves as Zionists. The state existed; their role was to support it, not necessarily to join an ideological movement.

Such ambivalence about “Zionism” was not universal, however. Sylvia Barack Fishman, emerita professor of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University, grew up in the Modern Orthodox Bnei Akiva youth movement, which actively encouraged aliyah (as opposed to haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, Jews, many of whom opposed the establishment of a modern political Jewish state on theological grounds). Now 80, she recalls that nearly all of her bunkmates at the movement’s Camp Moshava in Rolling Prairie, Indiana eventually moved to Israel.

Those who stayed behind, she said, represented the distinction between “pro-Israel” and “Zionist.”

“When you’re looking at people over 75, I think their idea of a Zionist is a person who goes to live in Israel,” she said. “So, you know, ‘are you a Zionist?’ ‘No, I live in Queens. What kind of a Zionist could I be?’”

Writer and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, 86, who did grow up in Queens, said she called and still calls herself a Zionist — with an explanation.

“I grew up calling myself a Zionist. We had to argue, though, that being a Zionist didn’t require moving to Israel. It just required letting your dollars go to Israel and your heart go to Israel, and your body stay here in the diaspora,” she said.

Today, when Zionism has come under attack in leftist circles where she had devoted her career as a feminist pioneer, Pogrebin describes a more cautious relationship with the label: “I am only comfortable calling myself a ‘liberal Zionist,’ then explaining myself, not just letting it out there, because it’s become so radioactive.”

Pogrebin said external rhetoric has reshaped the emotional resonance of the word “Zionism” for Jews younger than she. “Opponents made [Zionism] a dirty word, and somehow the ‘Z’ had the same kind of power on the left that we [Jews] fear from the swastika,” she said.

Fishman compares the word’s trajectory to another charged identity marker.

“What has happened to the word ‘Zionist’ for young people is a process of delegitimization, very similar to what happened to the word ‘feminist,’” said Fishman

Even before the Oct. 7 attacks and the war that followed, said Fishman, the left had succeeded in stigmatizing “Zionism.”

“For Jews under 30, the word Zionism has become equivalent to ‘white supremacist’ in many circles,” she said, describing their peers’ anti-Zionist attitudes. “So it’s not that the majority of them don’t care about Israel, but to be a Zionist means that you think Jews are better than other people. … It has so many negative connotations and people under 30 are notoriously sensitive to what their peer groups think.”

The result, she says, is strategic avoidance:

The youngest and oldest American Jews may converge on deploying (or avoiding) the word “Zionist,” but still view Israel across a yawning gap of experience and memory. As Harvard scholar Derek Penslar describes it in his 2023 book “Zionism: An Emotional State,” Jews who came of age in the 1970s and early ’80s grew up when Israel’s pivotal wars of 1967 and 1973 were a living memory, and the 1990s Oslo peace process “could give young Jews a sense of hope and a belief that Israel embodied [their] liberal values.”

In contrast,” writes Penslar, “university-age Jews in the twenty-first century lived in a radically different environment — darker and more foreboding on every front.” Many have only known Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a series of increasingly right-wing governments.

Pogrebin agrees that her understanding of Zionism was shaped by historical experience as much as ideology. “I was a child during the Holocaust, but I was a very alert child. I was aware that my parents were scared to death,” she said. “You don’t forget that; you’ve internalized it.”

The JFNA survey was greeted with good news/bad news reactions. Many welcomed the finding that a majority feel an attachment to Israel, but disagreed on who might be to blame for the reluctance to embrace the “Z” word.

For the Greater Philadelphia branch of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, the gap between the majority who told JFNA they feel emotionally attached to Israel and the roughly one-third who identify as Zionist is a sign of the failure of the “education systems,” Jewish institutions and Jewish families to teach “what Zionism actually is.”

On the left, the survey offered proof that the Jewish establishment has itself tarnished the “Zionist” brand by discouraging criticism of Israel’s flaws and advocacy of democratic values in the country.

“I personally don’t think the terms Zionism and anti-Zionism serve us any longer,” wrote Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of the rabbinic human rights group T’ruah, in a JTA essay. “We need a new vocabulary to describe the conviction that most American Jews actually have: a deep connection to Israel and belief that it should be a Jewish and democratic state, and a willingness to fight for Palestinians’ rights and to criticize the Israeli government.”

The JFNA survey may ultimately reveal less a collapse of Zionism than a transformation in how American Jews talk about themselves. The oldest generation absorbed Israel into a sense of communal responsibility; younger Jews navigate a world in which ideological labels are heavily politicized and Israel is for many a pariah state. Both cohorts may support Israel deeply while resisting a word whose meaning has shifted.

Or perhaps what’s lacking is a time horizon, and the generations can’t be understood without measuring how their attitudes change over the years. It’s possible that the people with the highest hopes about Israel’s future could be the most disappointed by its present.

Having seen the Jewish community from both the inside and outside, I would say that usually someone would only be spoken of as a Zionist if they were an activist, like in an organization such as Hadassah. Typically a religious person. Very few American Jews identify with that. But for most Jews, Israel is a given. The Anti-Zionist position, that the State of Israel must be dismantled, would horrify the vast majority of those Jews.

I don't really know, but most Jews identifying as Anti-Zionist are probably just reacting to coverage of the Gaza war in the popular media. Most are probably ignorant of the details, but nowadays they are too concerned about making rent to bother educating themselves.