Are We Still Zionists?

Jewish Life in the Age of Sovereignty

A reflection on the theme of the Z3® Conference 2026

“Are we still Zionists?” sounds like a question born of this moment, but Jews have been asking versions of it almost since Zionism began. Herzl himself described Zionism as an “infinite ideal” that would continue even after the Jewish people attained the land. His point was that statehood would not end the Zionist argument; Zionism would still have to say something about the society Jews built once sovereignty had been achieved.

In 1956, less than eight years after Israel’s founding, Eliezer Livneh asked almost our question outright in the pages of Moznaim: “Is Israel Still Zionist?” Livneh knew how strange the question sounded. Israel had been created by Zionists, had already absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jews, and would not have existed without Zionism. But that told him where the state had come from, not what it was becoming. A Jewish state could be the product of Zionism without that fact alone settling whether it remained Zionist.

Seventy years later, the conditions are different again. Israel has lived through the catastrophe of October 7 and the years that followed, which have exposed both the persistence of Jewish vulnerability and the enormous capacity of a sovereign Jewish state to act. Diaspora Jewish life, especially in North America, has developed forms of freedom, institutional strength, political access, and agency that earlier generations of Zionists could scarcely have imagined. We are asking an old question in a Jewish world very different from Herzl’s or Livneh’s: what is Zionism for under the conditions we actually inhabit?

When we chose “Are We Still Zionists?” as the theme of this year’s Z3 Conference, we meant the question seriously. I am not asking whether Israel should exist as the sovereign homeland of the Jewish people, or whether Jews should have the ability to shape our collective future. I believe both. I am asking whether Zionism still tells us enough about what Jewish self-determination demands when sovereignty is a fact rather than a goal.

For centuries, Jews built law, culture, institutions, and communities under governments we did not control. We negotiated with power, protected one another, and sustained a people across enormous distances. Israel did not invent Jewish agency or render Diaspora Jewish life secondary. It changed the scale and consequence of Jewish action. Questions that had lived in prayer, philosophy, and political aspiration became questions of borders, budgets, armies, citizenship, immigration, law, and public institutions. Jews in a sovereign Jewish state now had to decide, and then live with what those decisions produced.

October 7 made the oldest Jewish fear terrifyingly immediate again. A sovereign Jewish state had failed in its most basic responsibility to protect its citizens, and Jews around the world were confronted again with antisemitism, exclusion, and violence. None of what has happened since erases that vulnerability, but the years since have also made it impossible to understand Jews only through vulnerability. Israel can defend itself, exercise force, govern, negotiate, recover from catastrophe, and make choices that affect millions of people. Survival can tell us why a state must defend itself; it cannot tell us what kind of society we are trying to preserve, what should constrain its power, or what citizens owe one another when survival is not the only question we have to answer.

You can hear those arguments in Israel’s election campaign. Some political leaders are explicitly campaigning for a “Zionist government,” while disagreeing over who belongs in one. Haredi enlistment, military and national service, and whether Haredi or Arab parties should be part of governing coalitions have all become part of that argument. In this debate, Zionist is being used to argue about who serves, who governs, who shares the costs of sovereignty, and what membership in the Israeli political project requires.

American Jews are having a different argument. In JFNA’s March 2025 national survey, 37% of Jewish respondents to the Zionism identity question identified as Zionists; in a separate question, 88% said Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state. The label and the underlying commitment clearly no longer map neatly onto one another. The JFNA controversy last month turned that ambiguity into a public fight.

The American Jewish question is larger than whether we still use the word Zionism. Diaspora Jews possess agency of our own. We build institutions, educate children, allocate resources, create culture, exercise political influence, and decide what Jewish life will look like in the places where we live. Much of the Israel-Diaspora relationship has been organized around a familiar set of verbs: support Israel, defend Israel, criticize Israel, fund Israel, distance ourselves from Israel. Those describe a relationship to Israel, not an account of Jewish life here. We should be asking what we intend to build with the freedom, institutions, and resources we already have.

The answer to our conference question may be no. Perhaps Zionism was a historical movement whose central political task was establishing a Jewish state, and different terms can now better describe Jewish Peoplehood and collective responsibility. If so, I want to know what replaces it. Rejecting the word because other people have poisoned it does not tell us much about the Jewish future.

Nor am I interested in an automatic yes. Calling oneself a Zionist cannot mean only believing Israel should continue to exist, much less defending whatever an Israeli government happens to do. If the word still names something essential, it should be able to tell us something about what Jews are responsible for doing with the power, freedom, and institutions we now possess.

For the first time in twelve years, I think we are finally holding a conference about the question that has been underneath Z3 all along. We began with the conviction that Israel and the Diaspora should encounter one another as two active centers of Jewish life, not as actor and audience. Over the years we have used that frame to talk about security, democracy, antisemitism, politics, religion, culture, and Jewish Peoplehood. This year, the underlying question itself is the theme: what should Jews with very different kinds of agency be building, and what do we owe one another while we do it?

The calendar makes all of this unusually concrete. Israelis will vote on October 27, five days before we gather in Palo Alto. Two days after the conference, Americans will vote in the federal midterm elections. We will meet between those two votes, with Jews in Israel and the United States participating in very different political systems and carrying very different responsibilities.

I don’t expect everyone to leave Palo Alto with the same answer. I do want the answer to “Are We Still Zionists?” to tell us more than which camp we belong to. If you still call yourself a Zionist, what does that require of you now? If you don’t, what takes its place? On November 1, I want us to argue about that together.

The Z3 Conference returns to the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto on Sunday, November 1, 2026.

Z3 Project is an initiative of the Oshman Family JCC. Z3 is a registered trademark.