Only about one-third of American Jews are Zionists, according to a recent survey conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America — the first major survey of American Jews in a long time to ask explicitly about Zionist or non-Zionist identity. Yet the same survey finds that nearly nine in 10 American Jews believe “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.”

To many observers — especially within organized Jewish and pro-Israel advocacy circles — this looks like a contradiction begging to be resolved. The most common resolution is tidy and reassuring: Most Jews are Zionists without realizing it. They support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state; therefore, they must be Zionists, even if they resist the label.

That conclusion is no doubt comforting for many pro-Israel Jewish groups, but it is wrong. What the survey actually reveals is not mass confusion, but a growing insistence on nuance. American Jews are not secretly Zionists who have forgotten the definition. They are Jews with varied, thoughtful and sometimes conflicted views about peoplehood, democracy, nationalism and power, views that no longer fit neatly under a single ideological banner.

The key mistake made by many advocacy groups today is to treat “Zionism” as a static synonym for believing Israel should exist. As a scholar and educator on European Jewish intellectual history, I know that the truth is far more complicated than that. When I study debates about the possibility of creating a Jewish state from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when “Zionism” first became a political label under which people organized, I find that some of their positions are so far afield from where this term has ended up that it hardly makes sense to speak of them under the same singular rubric. I see this range of meaning among my students, too, who learn about the history of the many different forms Zionism has taken, and often tell me they feel too conflicted to easily characterize their views.

Historically, Zionism has never been one single concept. It has been a family of arguments, not a single creed: political Zionism, cultural Zionism, religious Zionism, socialist Zionism, revisionist Zionism, and more. To say “Zionism” without adjectives is already to erase its internal diversity.

But in contemporary discourse,........

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