On Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Honesty We Owe Each Other
We keep telling the world where the line is between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. But I don’t think we know ourselves.
Not because the line doesn’t exist. It does, somewhere. But because the Jewish community, full of serious, learned, deeply committed people, cannot agree on where to draw it. We argue about it at board meetings and at Shabbat tables. We accuse others of seeing antisemitism where there is only politics, or of missing it when it is in plain sight.
And then we turn to the world, and demand clarity.
The confusion is an accurate perception of something genuinely tangled. Jewish identity braids together three things that have never quite matched: a religion, a people, and, after two thousand years of exile, a people physically reconnected to a land. Those three have never sat neatly together, not for us and certainly not for those trying to understand us from outside.
We argue about what Israel means for Jewish identity at every level: denominational, political, theological. The Reform rabbi and the Satmar Hasid are both Jews who hold opposing positions on Zionism, a characteristically Jewish stance to hold more than one answer to the same question.
Which is why this line we keep drawing deserves more scrutiny than we often give it.
A professor of liturgy I studied with used to quote Abraham Maslow: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” The person who sees antisemitism in every critique of Israeli policy is wielding a hammer. So is the person who dismisses every accusation of antisemitism as deflection or special pleading. We have all got hammers. Can we put them down long enough to look closely, with discernment?
I believe there is no firm line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. There is a spectrum. White at one end, black at the other, and infinite shades of gray in between. We have been acting as if the spectrum were binary. We draw the lines ourselves, declare them bright and uncrossable, and watch for who crosses them. And when someone does, even once, even by using a trope they may not have understood, we paint them indelibly. No nuance. No return. I understand why. We have a long history and real wounds. But survival instincts aren’t precision instruments; they are built to miss nothing, which means they also detect threats that aren’t there.
No word tests this like genocide, a word a Jew invented. Raphael Lemkin coined it in 1944 after losing forty-nine relatives to the camps, and he spent the rest of his life turning it into international law: intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. That history is why hearing it turned toward a Jewish state can feel like theft. But Lemkin’s definition was legal before it was rhetorical, and a scholar arguing intent and evidence inside his actual framework is doing something different from a person reaching for the worst available word. We need to be able to tell those two uses apart. The moment the word appears, the conversation ends, and the branding begins: antisemite, before anyone has asked which one was meant.
In our tradition, the word for return is teshuvah. It is among the most radical ideas Judaism has ever produced: that a person can turn, and that return is always possible. The entire architecture of our High Holidays rests on this idea. Yet in our discourse about antisemitism, we have quietly abandoned it. Once someone is marked, they remain so.
* * *
The word “Zionism” does not mean the same thing to every Jew. It never has.
Before the State of Israel existed, a significant portion of American Jewish religious leadership was explicitly anti-Zionist. The Reform movement’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform rejected Jewish nationhood outright: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.” Return to Zion was understood as spiritual rather than political, a metaphor for messianic longing rather than a call to reclaim a territory.
The Satmar Hasidim hold a similar position today, grounded not in liberal universalism but in strict Orthodox theology. In their view, we are forbidden from hastening the end of the exile. The State of Israel violates prophecy rather than fulfills it, a premature seizing of what only God can restore.
And it is not only the world of traditional Orthodoxy that has wrestled with Zionism. A growing number of Jews, particularly on the left, are skeptical or they outright reject the Zionist project. Jewish Voice for Peace is explicitly anti-Zionist. IfNotNow takes no institutional position on Zionism, and organizes American Jews from committed Zionists rethinking the occupation to Jews who have set the label aside entirely. What both groups share is membership: Jews who grew up in synagogues, attended Jewish day schools, celebrated b’nei mitzvah, and arrived, through study, conscience, and grief, at a different place. They do not question Jewish peoplehood. They question whether the State can be reconciled with their understanding of justice.
They are Jews, and I do not believe they are antisemites. And if we say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism by definition, we have just labeled a significant part of our own community as Jew-haters. These aren’t marginal positions so much as living traditions, honest wrestlings within the Jewish world, held, presumably, by people who love the Jewish people as fiercely as any Zionist does.
The problem is that when a Jew arrives at anti-Zionism and when a non-Jew expresses skepticism about the Zionist project, we make the same move: we reach for the accusation of antisemitism before we have a conversation.
The Talmud preserves a principle that has troubled commentators for centuries: “eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim chayyim,” both these and those are words of the living God. Two rabbis argue, and both may be right. The minority opinion is recorded, not discarded, because it may one day be needed. We built a tradition on the holiness of disagreement.
In this conversation about antisemitism and anti-Zionism, we have sadly set that aside.
I’m not arguing that all positions are equally valid, or that antisemitism is merely a label applied to those who disagree with us. Antisemitism is real and present, and some of what masquerades as political critique is hatred disguised as a policy argument.
But every time we treat complexity as betrayal, every time we demand of outsiders a clarity our own tradition has never required of itself, we trade argument for accusation.
* * *
We cannot afford to lose this holy disagreement. We need to stop performing certainty we do not have and start asking the questions we have not yet been willing to ask out loud.
Our tradition calls this machloket l’shem shamayim, a dispute for the sake of heaven. The Talmudic sages Hillel and Shammai disagreed on nearly everything. Their students even argued over whether to sit together at the table. Yet the Talmud preserves both voices because each sought the same thing: not victory, but truth. The argument between them left both sharper for having had it.
We have been having the other kind of argument, that Pirkei Avot names after Korach: a dispute for the sake of position, of winning, of permanently marking the enemy. That kind of argument consumes rather than endures.
The Korach dispute failed not only because it was about position but because it was cloaked in righteousness. Korach’s certainty that he was right closed him off to anything that might have changed him. This kind of argument can feel to us like simply seeing what others are too cowardly or too compromised to see. Then, anything that questions our position becomes evidence of the other person’s bad faith, rather than an invitation for us to think harder. There is nothing to discuss, only someone to expose.
This posture has not made us safer or more right, only less able to distinguish, with precision and care, between the person who hates us and the person who has not yet understood or who disagrees.
Before we make an accusation, we must ask: Is this hatred, confusion, or a genuinely different understanding? Is their use of an antisemitic trope deliberate, or does the person using it not understand what they have said? These distinct situations call for different responses: one confrontation, the other conversation.
If it is a conversation, we should extend teshuvah genuinely to those who have gotten it wrong, a real opening to explain why they caused harm, while not erasing that harm.
Antisemitism is real, but I want us to find a vigilance precise enough to be credible, and Jewish enough to leave room for someone who got it wrong to find their way back. Not agreement. Not an end to pushing back against what you find unjust. Rather, an invitation to enter this argument with me, seriously and honestly, for the sake of something larger than any of us winning.
The Talmud tells us what became of the argument between Hillel and Shammai. The majority opinion prevailed, and the minority voice was preserved. Their students, who had disagreed on nearly everything, married their children to each other and ate together. The final decision did not silence the other voice. The relationship endured.
* * *
I write this as a rabbi who is still working this out. However, I have come to the conclusion that, if we are honest, we have not always drawn the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism in good faith. I’ve sat in enough difficult rooms to know that even the smartest, most committed people cannot agree on where this line falls, and that the certainty with which we sometimes claim to know is, too often, armor rather than insight.
Let’s lay down our armor. Not the vigilance or passion, but let’s lay down the certainty that closes the argument before it can even begin. Our tradition already knows how to have this conversation.
Are we willing to?