This past Tuesday, our sanctuary was filled with people gathered to mourn and pay tribute to one of the giants of twentieth-century American Jewry, Abraham Foxman, z”l. For forty years, Abe led the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, fighting against antisemitism and hatred in all its forms, becoming not only the voice of his organization, but in many respects, of American Jewry itself.
The tributes came from clergy and colleagues, from heads of state, and most movingly, from children and grandchildren. For me, one of the most remarkable moments of the funeral came from an artifact his daughter shared: a yearbook page from Abe’s high school, the Yeshiva of Flatbush. Given that Abe was born in 1940, his essay must have been written in 1958, a decade after the establishment of the State of Israel.
Abe’s essay begins by reflecting on the good fortune and privilege of witnessing Israel’s tenth anniversary. Yet, in the midst of that joy, the eighteen-year-old Foxman writes, there are two contemporary realities that must be remembered and mourned. “The first,” he continues, “is the slaughter of the six million of our brethren in concentration camps and ghettos in Europe.” The second is “the great sacrifice of our youth in Israel for the independence of the state.”
While I will not read the essay in full, perhaps its most telling feature is its title, “Lest We Forget.” Already in 1958, Foxman’s paramount concern was the fragility – and deceit – of memory. Concern not only that the six million might be forgotten, along with the fallen heroes of Israel, but that the conditions which made Jewish self-determination compelling, necessary, and urgent would themselves fade from Jewish consciousness. “Lest we forget,” Foxman warned, what it meant for Jews to live at the mercy of the whims, pogroms, and persecutions of the host countries in which they resided. Lest we forget not only the history that made the establishment of a Jewish homeland an imperative, but that we misremember the thousands of years that preceded it. Decades before Abe Foxman would confront Holocaust denialism and antisemitism on the world stage, his concern as an eighteen-year-old was far more parochial and prescient: that a generation of Jews might grow distant from the memory of Jewish vulnerability and therefore grow indifferent to the argument for Jewish self-determination itself.
The topic of non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews is a fraught one, and my decision to speak of it this morning brings to mind Alexander Pope’s warning that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Recent studies suggest that these conversations are no longer peripheral to American Jewish life. A 2025 survey conducted for the Jewish Federations of North America found that fourteen percent of Jews ages eighteen to thirty-four identify as anti-Zionist, and roughly one-third identify as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist. What I say this morning is said with the awareness that some of those percentages sit in this very room – not as abstractions or caricatures, but as fellow Jews, fellow congregants, thoughtful and morally serious people who may agree or disagree with what I am about to share.
But first, a word about the meaning of words. I, and perhaps many of you, grew up with a working definition of Zionism as the right of the Jewish people to live in their historic and indigenous homeland. For many, presently some eight million Israeli Jews, that aspiration has been realized. For others, myself included, it remains unrealized, or not yet realized, but it is a right, embodied in Israel’s founding vision of a Jewish and democratic state, to be defended nonetheless, a foundational but not identical element of what it means to live as a Jew in the modern world. As a liberal Zionist, I believe that right must be defended alongside the right of another people, the Palestinian people, to claim that same land. Their claim does not negate my own, nor does my claim negate theirs. If anything, it deepens the moral seriousness of the challenge before us.
Inherited and stable as that definition may be to me, what I have come to understand is that it is not shared by all. For me, there is Judaism, there is Zionism, there is the State of Israel, there are the Jews and non-Jews in Israel, there is the government of Israel, and there are extremist elements within the Israeli government. Those categories are interconnected, but they are not synonymous. I can be a Zionist and disagree with Israelis. I can be a Zionist and oppose particular governments or policies of the state. I can be a Zionist and protest actions taken in Israel’s name. To me, those distinctions feel natural and self-evident. But I recognize they do not feel that way to everyone.
The meanings of words change, what linguistic philosophers call semantic drift. Words like “woke,” “cancel,” and “viral” mean something very different today than they once did. “Literally” literally no longer means what it once meant. And so, too, with “Zionism.” Through both nefarious external forces – those who seek harm to Israel and the Jewish people – and internally inflicted damages – the excesses and extremisms of elements in Israeli society – Zionism has, in many circles, come to mean blanket support for the most hardline elements of Israeli policy and public life. For many Jews, especially younger Jews, that definition of Zionism feels incompatible with their Judaism and moral instincts. It helps explain why recent polling shows that while an overwhelming majority of American Jews support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, far fewer are comfortable identifying themselves as Zionists. It helps explain why political leaders and candidates who would once have used the term comfortably now avoid it altogether.
The semantic ground has shifted beneath our feet. In the battle over language and meaning, we have not just lost; we have been clobbered. Zionism, once a term of pride and aspiration, has, in many spaces, non-Jewish and Jewish, become a mark of shame. I am still trying to make sense of how it happened. I only know that it did. And while I self-soothe in the knowledge that many who call themselves non-Zionists nevertheless support Jewish self-determination, I confess that I struggle to understand why a Jew would adopt the same label used by those who seek the dismantling of the Jewish state and harm to our people – all the more so after a week such as this one, saturated with libel and outrage emanating from some of our most influential media and political institutions. I am constitutionally incapable of relinquishing what has been, for generations, one of the great moral and spiritual aspirations of the Jewish people: the hope that Jews, after centuries of vulnerability and dependence, might live with dignity, agency, and responsibility in a homeland of their own. Nor am I interested in ceding that language and legacy to extremists, neither those who distort Zionism from within nor those who demonize it from without.
I am well aware that Judaism took shape over thousands of years in the diaspora, and that Zionism itself has never been monolithic. There have been serious Jewish thinkers, before, during, and after the establishment of the State, who imagined Jewish flourishing in non-statist or binational forms. I know that Judaism is not Zionism and Zionism is not Judaism and that American Jews do ourselves no favors when we collapse the two into one another. I also know that we do ourselves real damage when we insist that there is only one acceptable way to be a Zionist, namely, to endorse every policy and every action of the Israeli government. So, too, Israel does itself no favors when it gives free rein or moral cover to the most extreme elements of its society and politics. While I do not agree, I understand how, for many, particularly younger Jews, the word Zionism has come to code not for Jewish self-determination, but for extremism, occupation, illiberalism, or exclusion.
And yet, for all the complexity of the hour, I intend to remain a Zionist until my final breath. Because here, ultimately, we return to Foxman, to the substance of the issue and the nub of it all. In a sentence: We are not going back.
This morning we opened the fourth book of the Torah: B’midbar, “In the wilderness.” The thrill of the Exodus and the revelation at Sinai are already fading into memory. The wilderness generation begins to suspect that the Promised Land may never happen. There are external enemies aplenty: Amalekites, Midianites, hostile nations at every turn. But the deeper threat lies within: internal division, leadership struggles, spiritual exhaustion, and the grinding uncertainty of desert life.
And so the nostalgia sets in, as does the desire to go back. “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt,” the Israelites say. They remember the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, the garlic. What they do not remember are the taskmasters, the whips, the degradation, the surrender of their agency. The past becomes romanticized because freedom is frightening and sovereignty is scary. Dependency can begin to feel safer than the burdens of responsibility. The great sin of the wilderness generation was not any single episode – not the spies, Korach’s rebellion, or Moses striking the rock. It was something deeper: allowing an imagined past to colonize the present and obstruct the future. To paraphrase Bible scholar Adriane Leveen, the wilderness generation became trapped by a memory distorted by longing.
And I fear that some Jews today, non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, risk making the same mistake.
I am under no illusions about Israel’s imperfections. But given the choice between a sovereign and imperfect Jewish state and the moral purity of exiled powerlessness as endured by our people for two thousand years, I will choose the former every single day. Interesting as it may be to invoke non-Zionist Jewish thinkers from previous generations, there is something profoundly anachronistic about doing so, because those thinkers are not living in the category of reality we call “today.” Neither you nor I live in Israel. But eight million of our brothers and sisters do. And so, the real question before us is not whether Israel should exist. History has answered that question. The only question is whether, with all the limitations of living here and not there, we are working to help Israel become more fully what it can be: a Jewish and democratic state worthy of its highest ideals.
Will we, like the desert generation, retreat into nostalgia and abstraction? Or will we shoulder the burdens of Jewish agency and responsibility? Will we romanticize powerlessness, or engage in the difficult, compromised, sacred work of sovereignty? Some of us lean right. Some lean left. Some lean very right and some very left. Fine. As Jews, uniformity of thought has never been our strong suit. Tell me Israel is imperfect. Tell me Jews wield power imperfectly. Tell me nationalism corrupts. Fine. Just don’t tell me that Jewish self-determination itself is the problem.
We do not call fellow Jews “un-Jews.” We do not label one another “defectors.” And for the sin of disagreement, we do not diagnose each other with some ideological derangement syndrome of the left- or right-wing variety. As a synagogue, we do not platform those people who simply denounce, despair, and disengage. We champion those individuals and organizations who, as an expression of their Zionism, in all its varieties, remain committed to the difficult work of engaging, confronting, and addressing the seemingly intractable challenges Israel faces today. As the late political economist Albert O. Hirschman argued, when a community enters crisis, there is a choice to be made. One can choose exit – to walk away. Or one can choose voice – to remain engaged, to support, to prod, to protest, and to help repair that which is broken. My Zionism, our Zionism, loyal as it is, rejects exit and demands voice
“Lest We Forget.” The title of a cautionary essay written in 1958 by a young Abraham Foxman. An essay that could just as easily have been lifted from the biblical pages of the wilderness generation as from the headlines of today’s news. The fear that a generation of Jews might grow distant from the memory of Jewish vulnerability and therefore grow indifferent to the argument for Jewish self-determination itself.
Not us. Not now. Not ever. Grateful for the blessings of the present, we accept the demands of responsibility, choosing voice over exit, stepping forward as proud Zionists with courage, conviction and hope.