My colleague Jay Solomon recently wrote about the impact on Jewish students and Jewish identity of treating “Zionist” as a slur.  He shares illustrations of their experiences on campus and how students are pushing back on narratives that dismiss Jewish perspectives and trample Jewish narratives.

Part of Jay’s point bears emphasis: There’s a gap between general, philosophical discussions about definitions of “Zionism” and the practical reality of what students face on campus.

We’ve recently seen a number of conversations about definitions and perceptions of Zionism, with Bob Brym’s review of the term’s semantic drift among Canadian Jews and For the Sake of Argument’s qualitative research conversations being two examples.  These are incredibly important and help us understand how our community defines, uses, and responds to “Zionism” and related words, as well as our underlying relationships with Israel.  As a researcher myself, I’d be curious to see these investigations expanded beyond the Jewish community to better grasp how non-Jews describe “Zionism.”

In our work on campus, we’re a bit more in the thick of things than these more theoretical discussions. Yes, Jewish students are affected by how others – especially non-Jews – interpret “Zionism,” and abstract thinking is relevant to a certain degree. However, “Zionism” and “Zionist” are regularly weaponized and toxified regardless of the precise definition, with the impact on Jewish students direct, significant, practical, and negative.

The radioactivity of “Zionism” hampers student growth as Jews. From a learning perspective, they have few spaces in which they can explore the diversity of Zionism and how it meshes with their Jewish identity, and all of those streams of thought are off limits for anything short of harsh criticism outside of places like Hillel. Engaging with Zionism to enable more flexible exploration, including students’ personal relationships with the term, their relationships with Israel, the context in which Zionism arose, and implications for the future, is severely constrained, and their Jewish identities are likely to reflect those limitations and confinement.

More problematically, the broader conversations don’t reveal (and, to be fair, aren’t intended to dive into) how antagonistic understandings of Zionism make Jewish students’ lives harder by providing fuel for antisemitism on campus.  When “Zionist” is used interchangeably with “Jew,” with both having reinforcing negative associations based on superficial perceptions, students  become targets for verbal, social, or even physical abuse. Moreover, epistemic closure and a lack of intellectual humility make dialogue and exchange, and however one might conceptualize “Zionism,” it’s regularly wielded against Jewish students.

As a result of all of this, when they’re facing antisemitism – which they do regularly – the nuances and subtleties of definitions often aren’t of interest to Jewish students.

What’s needed to complement the excellent and useful overarching takes on Zionism is further investigation of the role these definitions play in Jewish students’ lived experiences, as well as their relevance in encounters with antisemitism and the impact on Jewish identity exploration and development.  By probing how definitions of Zionism play out for students empirically, we’ll be better able to support them in taking pride in being Jewish and standing up for themselves and each other.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)