Zionism Is Not Dead. Courage Is. |
Nadine Epstein recently argued that Jews should retire the word Zionism because it has become too divisive, too distorted, and too burdened to remain useful. That argument is not brave. It is a polished form of Jewish retreat. At a moment when Jewish legitimacy is under organized assault, the answer is not to abandon the language of Jewish survival, but to defend it with greater clarity and greater nerve. This is the sort of argument institutions make when they can no longer shape Jewish life through clarity or courage and try instead to make themselves relevant by staging surrender as sophistication.
Nadine Epstein’s essay in Moment, “The Word Zionism Is Dead,” is not an act of insight; it’s an act of cowardice. She is not a naive student exploring concepts too vast for her; as the editor of a Jewish publication, she has a duty to uphold moral and historical clarity. To suggest, in this moment, that Jews should retire the word Zionism is not just an analytical mistake. It’s a failure of judgment from someone who should understand what is truly at stake.
Not personal cowardice, which one can pity. Institutional cowardice, which is far uglier. The cowardice of a Jewish publication looking at the organized war against Jewish legitimacy and deciding that the problem is not the hatred directed at the word Zionism, but the word itself. The cowardice of people so exhausted by the burden of defending Jewish nationhood that they now mistake retreat for sophistication. The cowardice of surrender in a blazer.
Let us be honest about what this essay really is. It is not a serious attempt to clarify Jewish language. It is a plea for permission to abandon it. It is the old exilic reflex in its latest polished form: if a word that names Jewish dignity has become costly, controversial, or difficult to defend, perhaps we should stop using it. Perhaps we should soften ourselves. Rename ourselves. Reduce ourselves. Become less offensive to those who already despise our strength. This is not wisdom. It is appeasement dressed up as nuance.
And what makes it especially contemptible is that it comes at precisely the moment when Jewish clarity is most needed. Jews are not living through an age of excessive confidence. We are living through an age in which Jewish legitimacy is under assault in the streets, on campuses, in media, in elite institutions, and in the grammar of international morality itself. Zionism is not being misunderstood in good faith. It is being targeted because it names the one thing the enemies of the Jews cannot tolerate: the end of Jewish helplessness. It means the Jew is no longer merely a tolerated minority, a wandering conscience, a decorative victim, a body for exile, conversion, pity, or slaughter. It means the Jew returned to history as a people with memory, power, borders, and a home. That is why they hate the word. They do not hate it because it is confusing. They hate it because it is true.
And Moment looks at that reality and decides the answer is to help bury the word. That is not only weak. It is shameful.
There is also something indecent about the ease with which this argument is made. Zionism is not a fashionable label to be discarded once it becomes inconvenient in elite conversation. It is the name bound up with the return of a people to its land, the rebuilding of Jewish sovereignty, and the sacrifices made to secure it. It is tied to pioneers who built, planted, and defended; to families who endured war and terror; to soldiers who gave their lives so the Jewish people would never again be left helpless in history. One does not casually retire a word for which Jews labored, fought, and died. To do so with this kind of polished detachment is not only intellectually weak. It is morally disrespectful to the generations who built and secured the Jewish homeland in its name.
There is a particular decadence in Jewish life that mistakes surrender for refinement. It does not know how to fight, so it calls fighting vulgar. It does not know how to defend a principle, so it declares the principle too complicated for modern use. It does not know how to bear the burden of Jewish power, so it seeks relief in euphemism. That is what this essay is. Not brave revision. Not deep rethinking. A cultivated form of retreat by people who still want to sound elevated while abandoning the vocabulary of Jewish self-respect.
And there is another uglier layer to it: the sour smell of institutional irrelevance trying to masquerade as provocation.
This is not the confidence of a publication shaping Jewish life. This is the panic of one trying to reinsert itself into a conversation from which it has drifted by staging its own surrender as boldness. When a Jewish institution can no longer command relevance through moral clarity, intellectual seriousness, or civilizational confidence, it goes looking for relevance the cheaper way. It publishes betrayal and hopes the scandal will be mistaken for courage. It announces the death of a foundational Jewish idea and expects applause for daring. But the performance exposes the opposite. The very act meant to prove relevance instead proves irrelevance. Nothing reveals how little a publication understands the Jewish moment more than using its platform, after October 7, not to strengthen Jewish language, but to weaken it. Moment’s is also not a commanding institution speaking from the center of Jewish life. It is a narrower publication trying to recover relevance by turning surrender into provocation. That is what makes this essay more than wrong. It is diagnostic.
It reveals the collapse of a whole liberal Jewish elite that still cannot admit the world it believed in is gone. For decades, it prayed to a moral order in which Jewish moderation would be rewarded, Jewish universalism admired, Jewish restraint reciprocated, and Jewish particularism tolerated so long as it remained soft enough, apologetic enough, and fluent enough in the ethics of its surrounding class. That world is over. October 7 did not merely expose the barbarism of our enemies. It exposed the bankruptcy of an entire Jewish posture. A posture built on the fantasy that the Jew would be safest when he was least himself. That Jewish nationhood could be defended only timidly. That Jewish power had to be explained in whispers. That Jewish distinctiveness had to be softened into sentiment to remain acceptable.
That illusion shattered. And essays like this are what panic looks like when written in complete sentences.
What we are watching here is not thoughtful revision. It is panic in the language of etiquette. They cannot defend the old illusions anymore, but they cannot bring themselves to renounce them either. So they do what weak elites always do in moments of rupture: they retreat into language. They rename. They soften. They blur. They tell themselves that if the banner has become too heavy, perhaps the problem is the banner. But the problem is not the word Zionism. The problem is that they no longer possess the courage, clarity, or Jewish literacy required to carry it.
And that brings us to the educational catastrophe beneath all this.
The fact that so many Jews may support Israel’s existence while recoiling from the word Zionist does not prove the word is dead. It proves that Jewish education has failed. It proves that generations of Jews were taught to affirm the substance while fearing the name. They were given Holocaust memory without Hebrew peoplehood. They were given synagogue sentiment without national consciousness. They were given Israel programming without Zionist literacy, ethics without history, identity without inheritance. They were taught how to feel Jewish, but not how to think Jewishly about peoplehood, sovereignty, return, and survival. Then our institutions act surprised when young Jews can say Israel has a right to exist, but flinch from the word that names why.
That is not semantic evolution. That is civilizational malpractice.
Zionism did not fail them. Their teachers failed them. Their institutions failed them. Their rabbis, schools, camps, philanthropists, magazines, and communal leaders failed them by treating Jewish nationhood as either too obvious to explain or too embarrassing to defend. And now, instead of confessing that failure and correcting it, some of the very same class want to retire the word itself, as if the problem lies in the vocabulary rather than in their own abdication.
We have seen this instinct before in public Jewish debate: when an exhausted establishment cannot answer a serious argument, it instead reaches for the habits of decline. Interruption replaces engagement. Condescension replaces rebuttal. Tone-policing replaces moral seriousness. It cannot defend Jewish strength, so it pathologizes it. It cannot answer Zionist clarity, so it tries to manage the atmosphere around it. And when it can no longer make itself relevant through seriousness, it reaches for controlled scandal instead, betraying the inherited language of Jewish survival and calling the betrayal brave.
But there is nothing brave here.
A nation does not preserve its dignity by speaking in whispers about its right to live. It does not survive by surrendering its banners because hostile crowds have learned to hiss at them. Only a broken elite, trained by long habits of apology, could imagine that the answer to a slandered word is to bury it. Healthy nations do not discard their founding language under pressure. They harden it. They teach it. They defend it. They force the world to confront its own distortions.
The people trying to erase Zionism are not confused by it. They understand it perfectly well. They know it means the Jew is not going back into the ghetto, not going back into abstraction, not going back into dependence, not going back into the role assigned to him by empires, churches, universities, activists, or editors. They know Zionism means the Jews came home and intend to stay. That is why they attack it. To respond by retreating the word is not sophisticated. It is a surrender to the slander.
And surrender does not buy mercy. It only invites the next demand.
First, abandon the word. Then abandon the claim. Then abandon the state. Then abandon the right to defend it. Then abandon the memory that justified it. This is how civilizational retreat works. One concession at a time, each repackaged as maturity. Each humiliation is sold as moral growth. Each collapse is narrated as enlightenment.
Zionism names one of the greatest acts of Jewish dignity in modern history. It names a shattered people refusing permanent dependency. It names the rejection of metaphysical homelessness. It names the insistence that Jews are not merely a religious confession floating through history, but a people with the same rights every other people claims without apology: to gather, to govern, to defend, and to endure. If some now find the word awkward, that is not a reason to bury it. It is a reason to become worthy of it.
No, the word Zionism is not dead.
What is dead, or dying, is something far more pathetic: the character of those who no longer have the courage to defend it. Dead is the nerve. Dead is the civilizational confidence. Dead is the willingness to speak in the language of Jewish nationhood without flinching before Gentile judgment or fashionable Jewish embarrassment. Dead is the old elite’s claim to seriousness, now that it can no longer distinguish moral subtlety from moral collapse.
A people that buries the word Zionism will not become more beloved. It will become more defenseless.
The answer is not to retire the word.
The answer is to recover the courage to say it.