Jewish leaders and activists have been participating in a growing debate over whether to stop using the term altogether. The Washington Post reported this week that some prominent Jewish voices now see the word “Zionism” as so politically overloaded that it produces more heat than meaning. A word that helped name the movement for Jewish national self-determination is being treated by some ardent defenders as a liability.
A true historical twist of the semantical kind. Jewish spokespeople make a relatively direct case. Retire the word and make everyone say what they actually mean.
Sounds easy enough, except that every ounce of discourse associated with the theme is now a battlefield. There is, it seems, no winning—ever. In 2024, Case Western Reserve University professors Alanna E.
Cooper and Sharona Hoffman argued that “Zionism” had become a poor way to describe contemporary politics and should largely be returned to its historical setting. Actor and Jewish advocate Jonah Platt pushed the idea further in The Forward in 2025. Israel, he argued, already exists, so continuing to debate whether one “believes in” Zionism can make Jewish sovereignty sound like an unresolved proposition rather than an existing political reality that everyone should just accept.
He later told the American Jewish Committee that he wanted to retire the term for much the same reason. Israel’s existence should not be treated as a philosophical question every time someone asks whether a person is a Zionist. Then, Moment editor-in-chief Nadine Epstein made the case in even starker terms, declaring in March that “The Word Zionism Is Dead.” She argued that “Zionism,” “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” had become so elastic that people could use the same words while talking about entirely different things.
The terms no longer described the same concept to all. That is, actually, the problem in miniature. To one person, Zionism means Jewish self-determination.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
