Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Herman, and I am sitting here in a fairly chilly Jerusalem evening with my brother. The wind is whistling through the gaps in these old stone window frames, and I have got a heavy sweater on, but the conversation we are about to have is definitely going to provide enough heat for the night.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. It is good to be here, even if the stone walls of this house are doing their best to keep the winter air inside with us. Our housemate Daniel sent us a prompt this morning that has been weighing on both of us all day, I think. It is one of those topics that feels like it is everywhere in the news lately, but the way it is being discussed feels... well, it feels like people are trying to perform surgery on an identity without an anesthetic.
That is a vivid way to put it, Corn. Daniel was asking us to look at this growing movement to decouple Judaism from Zionism. You see it in the op-eds, you see it in the campus protests, and you certainly see it in the political rhetoric coming out of places like New York and London lately. There is this concerted effort to say that Zionism is just a political opinion, or even a modern mutation, and that true Judaism has nothing to do with it. It is what some scholars are calling Zionism-washing—the attempt to redefine a core component of Jewish identity as a political pathology so that it can be safely discarded or attacked without the attacker feeling like they are being bigoted.
It is a definitional sleight of hand, Herman. That is the phrase that keeps coming to mind. If you can redefine Zionism as a mere secular political movement or, worse, as a form of settler colonialism, then you can make anti-Zionism socially acceptable. You can say you are not targeting Jews, you are just targeting a political ideology. But as we are going to get into today, when you try to strip Zionism out of Judaism, you are not just removing a political stance. You are trying to erase three thousand years of history, theology, and the indigenous connection to this land we are sitting in right now. It is an attempt to tell an ancient people that the last two millennia of their prayers were just a misunderstanding of their own faith.
And it is not just a theoretical debate. We are seeing the real-world friction of this right now. Just this past January, Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City revoked the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism for the city. That was a huge flashpoint because that definition explicitly includes things like denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination. By revoking it, the message from the city hall was clear: the city is making room for a version of anti-Zionism that many Jews feel is fundamentally antisemitic. It is essentially the government deciding which parts of Jewish identity are protected and which parts are fair game for exclusion.
It is a statistical earthquake too, Herman. I was looking at the Jewish Federations of North America survey from just last month, February twenty twenty-six. It revealed this fascinating, and honestly kind of heartbreaking, disconnect. Only thirty-seven percent of Jews in the United States identify with the label Zionist anymore. The word has been so successfully stigmatized and dragged through the mud in academic and social circles that people are afraid of the brand. But—and this is the crucial part—eighty-eight percent of those same people affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. And seventy-one percent say they have a deep emotional attachment to Israel.
So the identity is there, but the vocabulary is being policed. It is like people are being told they can keep the house, but they have to tear down the sign on the front door because the neighbors decided the word on the sign is offensive. It is an external pressure to redefine the self to satisfy people who, quite frankly, have no stake in Jewish survival. I want to dig into that Political versus Religious defense first, because that seems to be the foundation of the whole argument. The idea is that Zionism started with Theodor Herzl in eighteen ninety-six, so therefore it is a modern invention that can be discarded.
Which is historically illiterate, right? If you look at the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, the word Zion appears over one hundred fifty times. One hundred fifty. It is not a modern political slogan; it is a geographic and spiritual anchor. For two thousand five hundred years, Jews have ended the Passover Seder with the words Next year in Jerusalem. Every single day, three times a day, Jews face toward Jerusalem in prayer. To say that the longing for a return to the ancestral homeland is a secular invention is like saying the ocean is a modern invention because we only recently started calling it the maritime industry.
And if you look at the liturgy, it is even more explicit. In the Amidah, the central prayer of every Jewish service, there is a specific blessing for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. In the Birkat Hamazon, the grace after meals, there is a plea for God to have mercy on Zion and the kingdom of the house of David. This isn't just a casual affinity; it is the structural framework of the religion. The concept of Galut, or Exile, inherently implies a destination. You cannot have a theology of exile without a theology of return. When people try to separate the two, they are essentially asking Jews to practice a version of Judaism that has been lobotomized of its historical memory.
And this brings us to the indigenous nature of the Jewish connection. We talked about this a bit in episode ten hundred nineteen, The Colonialist Myth, but it bears repeating here. When people call Zionism settler colonialism, they are projecting a Western, nineteenth-century European framework onto a non-Western, ancient people returning to their origin point. It is a category error of massive proportions. Colonialism involves a mother country sending people out to a foreign land to extract resources for the benefit of the empire. Who was the mother country for the Jews? Where was the empire they were serving? There wasn't one. They were refugees and returnees coming back to the only land where their language, their religion, and their culture were born.
Right, and modern political Zionism was simply the realization that in the diaspora, Jews would always be a guest at someone else's table, and that table could be flipped over at any moment. The nineteenth-century movement didn't create the desire; it just provided the political vehicle for it. But the content of that self-determination was always rooted in the ancient connection. When critics ignore this, they are engaging in a form of historical erasure. They are saying that the three thousand years of continuous Jewish presence in this land—because there was always a remnant here, even in the darkest times—doesn't count because it doesn't fit the modern anti-colonial narrative.
It really is a shield. People say, I am not antisemitic, I am just an anti-Zionist. But then you look at what that actually means in practice. If you are an anti-Zionist, you are essentially saying that of all the peoples on earth, only the Jews do not have the right to self-determination in their ancestral home. You are advocating for the dismantling of a state that is home to seven million Jews. That is not just a political critique of a government’s policy. That is a call for the erasure of a people's security and sovereignty. If I say I am anti-Italian-state and I think Italy should be dismantled and the Italians should live as a minority under someone else's rule, people would rightly call that a form of prejudice against Italians. Why is it different for Jews?
We should talk about the tokenization of dissent here, because this is where the debate gets really messy and where the media often fails the public. Whenever someone points out that anti-Zionism feels like an attack on Jewish identity, the critics will immediately point to a group like Jewish Voice for Peace or even the Neturei Karta—those ultra-Orthodox guys who show up at anti-Israel rallies with the Palestinian flags. They use these fringe groups to say, See? These Jews are anti-Zionist, so it can't be antisemitic.
Oh, the Neturei Karta are the ultimate gotcha for people who don't understand Jewish internal theology. For the listeners who don't know, Neturei Karta is a tiny, tiny fringe group—we are talking maybe a few thousand people globally. Their opposition to the State of Israel isn't because they think Jews don't belong here; it is because they believe the state can only be established by the Messiah. It is a theological dispute about timing, not a political dispute about right. They are actually hyper-Zionists in a spiritual sense—they believe the land is so holy it can't be touched by secular hands. Using them to justify secular, political anti-Zionism is like using a group that refuses to drive cars because they are waiting for a flying chariot to argue that cars shouldn't exist for anyone. It is a complete misrepresentation of the internal Jewish conversation.
And then you have groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, or JVP. They provide a different kind of moral cover. They use Jewish rituals—like Seder plates or prayer shawls—at political rallies to signal that their anti-Zionism is a Jewish value. But if you look at their platform, they explicitly support the dismantling of the Jewish state. This is what I call the Court Jew phenomenon. Throughout history, there have always been a small number of Jews who were willing to validate the prejudices of the majority in exchange for social standing or safety. In the Soviet Union, they had the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, which was made up of Jews whose job was to tell the world that Soviet Jews hated Zionism. It was a propaganda tool then, and it is a propaganda tool now.
It is the Righteousness Shield, Herman. We did a whole deep dive on that in episode nine hundred seventy-nine regarding the situation in Ireland. People want to feel like they are on the right side of history, and in the current academic climate, anti-colonialism is the ultimate virtue signal. So, they force Israel into that box, regardless of the historical facts. They ignore the fact that forty-six percent of the world's Jewish population lives here in Israel. They ignore the deep familial and emotional ties that the six million Jews in America have to this land. They are essentially asking the Jewish diaspora to perform a collective lobotomy—to cut out the part of their brain that cares about their cousins, their history, and their future safety.
Let's talk about the geographic disparity of this movement. Have you noticed that the most vocal, socially acceptable anti-Zionism usually happens in places where there are almost no Jews? Or in academic bubbles where the Jewish population is tiny and marginalized? It is very easy to advocate for the deconstruction of the State of Israel when you don't have to look a single person in the eye who would be affected by it. It is a luxury of the distance. In places like Ireland or certain parts of the American Midwest, anti-Zionism becomes a low-cost way to signal your progressive credentials because you aren't actually interacting with the community you are marginalizing.
It is armchair activism with existential consequences for other people. When people chant from the river to the sea on a campus in the Midwest, they are using a catchy slogan that, in reality, implies the displacement or worse of seven million people. They frame it as liberation, but they never explain what happens to the Jews the day after this liberation occurs. And that is where the destruction framing becomes so dangerous. It treats the existence of a nation-state as a theoretical mistake that can just be erased with an eraser, rather than a living, breathing society of millions of people who have nowhere else to go.
And the campus climate is reflecting this total breakdown of nuance. Hillel International reported record-high antisemitic incidents in the last academic year—two thousand three hundred thirty-four incidents in twenty twenty-four to twenty-five. And in just the first half of this current twenty-five twenty-six year, we have already seen over a thousand incidents. This is the direct result of that definitional sleight of hand we mentioned. If you tell students that Zionism is evil and that most Jews are Zionists, you are essentially giving them a green light to target Jewish students. You have created a loophole where antisemitism is rebranded as social justice.
It is a rebranding that relies on people not knowing their history. We actually touched on this back in episode seven hundred forty-three, about that fine line between criticism and hate. If you look at the demographic history of this land, Jews have been here continuously for three thousand years. Yes, there were waves of exile, but there was always a presence, and there was always a desire to return. To call that colonialism is to say that an indigenous person returning to their land after being forcibly removed is a colonizer. It flips the entire concept of indigeneity on its head just to suit a specific political narrative.
It is also worth noting how this decoupling attempt mirrors the pre-World War Two rhetoric. Back then, you had people arguing that Jews who complained about discrimination were just playing the victim or using their identity as a shield to deflect from their supposed internationalist or capitalist agendas. Today, when Jews point out that anti-Zionism often slides into antisemitism, they are told they are weaponizing the term to deflect criticism of Israel. It is the same structural argument: Your identity is a political tool, and therefore I don't have to respect it. It is a way of silencing the victim by accusing them of a conspiracy.
That is a point Kenneth Stern has made, actually. He was one of the lead authors of the IHRA definition, and while he has warned against its weaponization in a legal sense to shut down speech, he is very clear that the impulse behind anti-Zionism is often rooted in a desire to target Jews. It is about the intent and the effect. When you see posters on campus that say Zionists not welcome, you are not having a debate about the borders of the West Bank. You are telling Jewish students that a core part of who they are makes them a pariah. You are creating a litmus test for entry into the moral community.
And that brings us to the real question: if you actually succeed in stripping Zionism away from Judaism, what is left? If you take away the land, the history of the return, the daily prayers for Jerusalem, and the responsibility for the safety of half the world's Jewish population... what remains? You are left with a hollowed-out, acceptable version of Judaism that exists only to serve the political sensibilities of non-Jews. It is a form of cultural ventriloquism where the majority gets to decide which parts of the minority's faith are valid.
It really is. It is like trying to have Italian culture without Italy, or Irish identity while being told you aren't allowed to care if Dublin exists. It is absurd. But it is an absurdity that is being pushed with incredible intensity in our institutions. The goal isn't just to criticize Israel; the goal is to delegitimize the very idea of a Jewish peoplehood. They want Jews to be just a faith group, like a hobby you do on Saturdays, rather than a nation with a history and a home. Because a faith group is easier to manage. A faith group doesn't need a state or an army to protect itself. A faith group can be told to just turn the other cheek while their history is erased.
Which is why that eighty-eight percent number from the Jewish Federations of North America survey is so important. It shows that despite the massive pressure, despite the bullying on campus, and despite the Zionism-washing in the media, the vast majority of Jews know who they are. They might be uncomfortable with the Zionist label because it has been turned into a slur, but they are not willing to abandon the reality of Israel. They understand that Jewish survival and Jewish sovereignty are linked. They see the disconnect between the academic theories and the reality of seven million people living in the crosshairs.
I think that is the most hopeful part of this, even if the current environment feels pretty dark. There is a resilience there. But we have to be better at calling out the sleight of hand. When someone says, I am just an anti-Zionist, we need to ask, What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you disagree with a specific policy of the current government? Because most Israelis would agree with you on that! Or do you mean you think the seven million Jews in Israel should lose their right to self-determination and be placed under the rule of people who have spent decades calling for their destruction? Because those are two very different things, and one of them is a death sentence.
We need to force the nuance back into the conversation. We need to stop letting people hide behind these broad, academic terms and make them look at the human reality. That is why I think episode ten hundred seven, where we talked about the Nation-State Paradox, is such a good companion to this discussion. We have to grapple with what it means to be a nation-state in the twenty-first century without falling into these traps of erasure. We have to ask why the Jewish state is the only one whose existence is treated as a debatable proposition in polite society.
And it is not just about Israel. It is about the right of any people to define their own identity. If the world starts deciding that it can pick and choose which parts of an ancient people's history are valid based on the current political fashion, then no one's identity is safe. Today it is the Jews and Zionism; tomorrow it could be any other indigenous group that doesn't fit the anti-colonial template of the week. It is a dangerous precedent that undermines the very concept of historical justice.
That is the second-order effect that people miss. This isn't just a Jewish problem; it is a fundamental challenge to the idea of indigenous rights and historical continuity. If you can argue that a three-thousand-year connection to a land is irrelevant because of a political movement that started one hundred thirty years ago, you are undermining the rights of every indigenous group on the planet. You are saying that the clock of history only starts when the West decides it starts.
It is a projection of Western guilt, Herman. Many people in the West feel guilty about their own colonial past—and they should, in many cases—so they look for a clean way to atone for it. And for some reason, they have decided that fixing the Middle East by dismantling the only Jewish state is the way to do it. It is a way to feel righteous without actually having to sacrifice anything of their own. That is the Righteousness Shield in action. It is much easier to protest a Jewish student in New York than it is to deal with the complexities of your own country's history.
So, what are the practical takeaways for someone listening to this? Someone who sees these arguments happening in their office, or on their social media feed, or at their university? How do you push back against a definitional sleight of hand that is backed by so much institutional power?
I think the first step is to reclaim the vocabulary. Don't let people turn Zionist into a dirty word. If eighty-eight percent of Jews believe Israel has a right to exist, then that is the mainstream Jewish position. Period. If someone says they are anti-Zionist, ask them to define it. Usually, they can't do it without falling into tropes or calling for the destruction of a state. Once you expose the lack of substance behind the slogan, the power of the slogan starts to fade. You have to force them to move from the abstract to the concrete.
And I would add: look at the sources. When someone cites a fringe Jewish group to prove a point, point out how fringe they are. If someone uses Jewish Voice for Peace as their moral authority, remind them that this is an organization that represents a tiny sliver of the community and is often used by non-Jews to silence the majority. We have to stop letting the outliers dictate the terms of the debate. It is a form of cherry-picking that would never be accepted in any other context.
We also need to emphasize the indigenous nature of the connection. This isn't a colonial project from Europe; it is a return of an indigenous people to their homeland. Use the numbers—the one hundred fifty mentions of Zion in the Bible, the two thousand five hundred years of prayer. Make it clear that this isn't a modern mutation, but an ancient continuity. When you frame it as an indigenous rights issue, it becomes much harder for the social justice crowd to dismiss it. You are essentially using their own framework to show them why they are wrong.
That is a great point. It is about changing the frame of reference. Instead of playing defense on their terms, we should be playing offense on the terms of history and identity. We are not defending a political ideology; we are defending the right of an ancient people to exist and determine their own future. That is a much more powerful and much more accurate position. It moves the conversation from policy, which is debatable, to existence, which should not be.
And honestly, Herman, we should also encourage people to just be honest about the stakes. When people chant from the river to the sea, they are not chanting for a two-state solution. They are chanting for the end of a Jewish presence in this land. We need to stop pretending that this rhetoric is harmless or metaphorical. It has real-world consequences for the safety of Jews everywhere, from Jerusalem to New York City. We saw it with the campus data—the rhetoric leads directly to the incidents.
The campus data really brings that home. When you have over a thousand antisemitic incidents in just six months, you are not looking at a political debate. You are looking at a hostile environment that is being fueled by this decoupling rhetoric. If you tell people that Zionism is the ultimate evil, and then you tell them that most Jews are Zionists, you are creating a pipeline to violence. It is that simple. You have dehumanized the target by labeling their identity as a pathology.
It really is. And it is why this project of decoupling is so insidious. It is not an intellectual exercise; it is a psychological operation designed to isolate and marginalize the Jewish community. By forcing Jews to choose between their identity and their social standing, the anti-Zionist movement is trying to break the back of Jewish peoplehood. They want to turn us into a people who are ashamed of our own history.
But as we have seen throughout history, that is a lot harder to do than they think. The Jewish people have a way of outlasting their redefiners. Whether it was the Hellenists, the Romans, the Soviets, or the modern ideologues, the core of the identity—the connection to the land, the book, and the people—remains. You can't decouple what has been fused together for three millennia by prayer, blood, and memory.
Am Yisrael Chai, as they say. The people of Israel live. And they live here, in this land, and in the hearts of millions of people around the world who refuse to be decoupled from their own history. The attempt to erase Zionism from Judaism is ultimately an attempt to erase the Jewish people as a distinct nation, and that is a project that has failed many times before.
I think that is a good place to start wrapping this up. This has been a heavy one, but I think it is one of the most important discussions we have had in a while. If we don't get the definitions right, we can't get the solutions right. We are not just talking about a prompt from Daniel; we are talking about the right of a people to exist on their own terms.
You can't solve a problem if you are using a map that intentionally leaves out the most important landmarks. And for the Jewish people, Zion is the landmark. It is the north star of the identity.
Well, if you have been following along and this sparked some thoughts—maybe some disagreements or some aha moments—we would love to hear from you. Head over to myweirdprompts dot com. We have a contact form there, and you can find all the links to our past episodes, including the ones we mentioned today like episode ten hundred nineteen on the colonialist myth and episode seven hundred forty-three on the fine line between criticism and hate.
And if you are enjoying the deep dives, please take a second to leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It really does help other people find the show, and in an environment where these topics are so often simplified or distorted, getting this kind of nuanced discussion out there is more important than ever. We need to build a community of people who are willing to look past the slogans.
Truly. You can also join our Telegram channel—just search for My Weird Prompts. We post there every time a new episode drops, so you will never miss a prompt from Daniel or one of our deep dives. We also share some of the research papers and surveys we talk about, like that JFNA survey from February.
And thanks again to Daniel for sending this in. It is definitely one that we are going to be thinking about for a long time. It is not just about a prompt; it is about the ground we are standing on. Literally, in our case, since we are sitting in Jerusalem.
Literally. Alright, I think that is it for today. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Until next time, stay curious and keep checking those definitions. Don't let anyone else tell you who you are.
So, Corn, before we go... I have to ask. You mentioned the Righteousness Shield earlier. Do you think there is any way to pierce that shield, or is it just too thick with academic jargon these days?
I think reality pierces it eventually, Herman. You can only maintain a false narrative for so long before the facts on the ground become impossible to ignore. When you see the actual diversity of Israel—the millions of Mizrahi Jews who were kicked out of Arab lands, the Ethiopian Jews, the Arab citizens—the white settler-colonial narrative just falls apart. You just have to keep pointing at the reality until the shield cracks. The truth has a way of being very stubborn.
I like that. Reality is the ultimate debunker. And the reality is that the Jewish connection to this land is not a political choice; it is a historical fact.
It usually is. It just takes its time sometimes for the world to catch up.
Well, we have got plenty of time. We have been here for three thousand years, after all. What is another few decades of debate?
We are not going anywhere. The stone walls of this house might be cold, but they have been here a long time, and so have we.
Alright, everyone. Thanks for listening. We will see you in the next one.
Take care, everyone.
One more thing, Corn. You know, I was thinking about the Next year in Jerusalem line. It is funny how people try to spiritualize it now, as if it was just a metaphor for heaven or some abstract state of being.
Oh, I know. It is the ultimate gentrification of a prayer. They want to turn a physical, dusty, real-world longing into a Hallmark card. But anyone who has actually been here knows that Jerusalem is not a metaphor. It is a city made of stone and history and, lately, a lot of traffic. It is a place where people live, work, and struggle. You can't live in a metaphor. You can only live in a home.
Well said. Alright, now we are really going. Goodbye, everyone.
Bye!
So, looking back at the JFNA survey, that eighty-eight percent number really is the anchor, isn't it? It shows that the decoupling project is failing where it matters most—in the hearts of the people themselves.
It is failing, but it is causing a lot of collateral damage on the way. The stigmatization of the Zionist label is a real problem because it creates a silent majority that is afraid to speak up in their own social circles. Our job is to give that majority the language and the confidence to say, Yes, I am a Zionist, and here is why that is a beautiful and necessary thing. It is about reclaiming the moral high ground.
It is about moving from a defensive crouch to a confident stance. No more apologies for having a history.
No more apologies for existing. We don't need permission from a campus committee to be a people.
I think we covered that well today. I feel like we really dug into the why behind the what.
I agree. It is a complex topic, but the core of it is actually quite simple: identity is not a buffet where you can let other people pick your plate for you. You have to own the whole thing, even the parts that are currently unfashionable.
Even the parts the neighbors don't like.
Especially the parts the neighbors don't like. That is usually where the most important truths are hidden.
Alright, that is the final final word. Thanks for sticking with us, everyone.
See you next time.
I was just thinking, Corn, about that mention of the term Zion appearing one hundred fifty times in the Bible. It is amazing how such a simple fact can totally dismantle the modern invention argument. It is like people haven't even opened the book they are criticizing.
They haven't, Herman. Or they have, but they are reading it through a lens that filters out anything that doesn't fit the current narrative. It is a form of selective hearing on a civilizational scale. But the text doesn't change. The history doesn't change. And that is why we keep coming back to it. It is the bedrock.
It is the bedrock. Everything else is just shifting sand.
And we have got plenty of bedrock here in Jerusalem.
We certainly do. Alright, I am going to go make some tea. This house is freezing.
Make some for me too. I am starting to feel like that sloth you always talk about—just moving slowly to conserve heat.
Ha! I knew you would bring it up eventually. The sloth is the ultimate survivalist.
Guilty as charged. Let's go.
Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. We will be back soon with another one from Daniel.
Goodnight, everyone.
Goodnight.
Wait, did we mention the RSS feed?
I think I said the website has all the links.
Okay, good. People love a good RSS feed. It is the old-school way to stay connected.
Just like the Jewish people—old school and still connected.
Perfect. Now, tea.
Tea it is.
Seriously though, the Mamdani thing in New York... that really was a turning point, wasn't it? It felt like an official sanctioning of the erasure.
It was. It was a signal that the institutional guardrails are being removed. That is why the grassroots response—the actual people saying no, you don't get to define us—is so critical. If the politicians won't do it, the people have to.
And that is what we are seeing. The statistical earthquake is happening in both directions. The pressure is increasing, but so is the clarity for those who are paying attention.
Clarity is the best antidote to a sleight of hand.
Okay, for real this time. Bye!
Bye!
One last thing—don't forget to search for My Weird Prompts on Telegram. It is the best way to keep up with us.
And check out episode nine hundred eighty-one if you want more on that Opinion Gap we mentioned. It goes deep into the data.
Good call. Alright, tea time.
Finally.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks for being part of the collaboration.
See you in the next episode.
Bye!
Bye!
