A man hangs Israeli flags near the scene following a missile attack by Iran, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Givatayim near Tel Aviv, Israel March 6, 2026. REUTERS Zionism has become a scarlet letter — a catch-all accusation hurled at protests, in classrooms and online to discredit rather than describe.
There’s no better time than this week to reflect on why.
During Passover, we celebrate Jews’ liberation from hundreds of years of enslavement in Egypt, followed by 40 years wandering in the desert.
That’s when the Jewish tribes adopted a political structure and received religious laws — acting as a nation even before they entered the Promised Land, today’s Israel.
It’s been the Jews’ ancestral home ever since, with roots going back more than 3,000 years, sustained by generations of Jewish life and pilgrimages to the Temple, the holiest site for Jews across the globe.
Celebrating Passover is an early expression of the Jewish attachment to a homeland that Zionism later formalized.
But in recent years the word has been transformed — bastardized into something hateful or violent.
Today, the label “Zionist” comes with a price.
And as a civil-rights advocate who works to combat antisemitism and protect the rights of Jewish people, I’ve been repeatedly asked whether I wish to deny that I am one.
Until now I’ve declined to say anything in response, for the same reason that some straight people decline to deny that they’re gay.
Because there’s nothing wrong with that, and why make it seem like there is?
But there’s another reason: It’s because I am a Zionist.
To some, Zionism is nothing more than the belief that Israel deserves to exist and defend itself.
It’s not a particularly inspiring sense of the term, but if that’s all it means, then it’s difficult to see why it’s controversial.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the term “Zionist” is sometimes used as a stand-in for “Jew.”
I am a Jew, proudly, and pleased to be called a Zionist by those to whom the two terms are synonymous.
Increasingly, opponents on the far left deploy Zionism as a blanket condemnation.
If that’s how you use the term, count me in.
Drawing from the Mizrachi movement, I view the flourishing of Israel as part of Jewish spirituality.
The return to Zion fulfills a promise, enables fuller performance of good deeds tied to the land, and positions the Jewish people to live out prophetic ideals of justice and holiness in a sovereign nation.
Following the great philosopher Ahad Ha’am, I see the Jewish return to the ancestral homeland as essential to reviving and sustaining a vibrant, secular Jewish culture, rooted in Hebrew language, literature, history and ethical tradition.
Without a living center in Israel, Jewish identity faced pressures of dilution and assimilation in the diaspora.
In the tradition of Theodor Herzl, I believe Jews, facing persistent antisemitism and exclusion, require sovereignty in their historic homeland to secure normal national existence, dignity and self-determination.
Herzl’s vision was a pragmatic response to persecution, a publicly recognized home where Jews could live as equals, not supplicants.
According to John Winthrop’s famous sermon, Americans aspire to be “as a city upon a hill.”
Winthrop called the new Massachusetts Bay Colony to be a moral exemplar, a model of charity and justice that would inspire the world — or, if it failed, become a cautionary tale.
In that sense, both the United States and Israel share an aspiration, however imperfectly realized, to model a society grounded in moral purpose.
Do so as an insult if you must, or as a euphemism if you need, or as a cultural or religious observation.
Or call me a Zionist because we are Americans seeking the best for our nation.
Regardless of your reasoning, I will wear the title proudly.
Because what is being labeled “Zionism” today is not simply a set of views about Israel; it is increasingly a way of singling out Jews themselves.
We are repeatedly told that Jews cynically conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism — even as synagogues in the United States are attacked, Jewish communities in the United Kingdom are surveilled and intimidated, and Jewish volunteer ambulance services are firebombed.
The same voices that insist “it’s not antisemitism, just anti-Zionism” are often the ones directing hostility at Jews in their own countries over Israel.
This is not merely a misunderstanding, it is a contradiction.
Kenneth L. Marcus is chairman and CEO of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
