Wilf teaches Zionism to the shell-shocked and sceptical

“We are living through massive transformations, a world that is in different forms of crisis. Our sense of who we are, our identity, our institutions, and our sense of self are all being undermined. And when you live in worlds of crisis, uncertainty, and rapid change, there are few certainties more comforting in the world than that the Jews did it.” 

So says Einat Wilf, former member of the Knesset, foreign policy adviser to Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres, and author of seven books, on why antizionism and antisemitism are so rife at the moment. 

“And there is, especially in the West, but now it’s gone global, this grabbing onto this certainty that tells you, ‘I don’t know anything anymore, but I know that the Jews are behind it’. It gives you a sense of control, of comfort in a world that doesn’t make sense anymore.” 

Her latest book, Teaching Zionism: Revelations from a Skeptical Classroom, co-authored with Benjamin Kerstein and released in May, explores how students engage with Zionist thought and Jewish self-determination, while also confronting the misconceptions and prejudices that continue to shape discussions about Israel and the Jewish people. 

The book was born when, in 2021, Wilf was a visiting professor at Georgetown University, teaching a course on Zionism and antizionism, which is the obsession with the non-existence of a Jewish State. The goal was to explore the arguments for and against a Jewish State by studying writers from the past century from across identities, such as Jewish, Christian, Arab, and Soviet. 

The results were surprising. Students found that these old texts resonated powerfully in their own lives, especially the critique of Jewish life in exile, the nature of opposition to Zionism, and the hope for a renewed dignity that sovereignty could bring to Jews the world over. 

“One student said the course was worth dozens of hours of therapy in terms of its value to her,” says Wilf. 

“Though I taught the course before 7 October 2023, a lot of educators, parents, and grandparents are struggling with how to teach Zionism, how to teach about antizionism, and they thought we could write a book that both describes the course, which actually teaches the material itself, but also reflects the actual process of teaching Zionism. It doesn’t just give the material and the syllabus. It actually also describes the interactions in class,” she says. 

Through her course and this book, Wilf wants students to understand that Zionism, as the political movement for self-determination of the Jews in their ancestral homeland, was presented in response to a challenge to modernity in Jewish life. 

She argues that Zionism should be understood in its historical context as one of several possible Jewish responses to the challenges of modernity, rather than as an inevitable path to the creation of Israel. She and Kerstein caution against viewing Zionist history as a straightforward sequence of successes ‒ from the ideas of Theodor Herzl through the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate, statehood, and the Six-Day War. Instead, they emphasise that Zionism emerged amid uncertainty and competing alternatives, and its eventual success was not guaranteed. 

“A lot of the work I had to do was to show that at every single moment, it was touch-and-go. That Zionism could have had a lot of other endings. We could have ended like the Armenians, or like the Kurds,” she says. 

With the bombardment of antizionist discourse, she wanted to make sure that students are reading Zionist writers in their own words. 

“What happens is that once you read the writers themselves, all this nonsense just melts away. The course showed that Zionism was very much a movement of its time. People speaking about self-determination in their homeland. And that was what everyone was doing at the time. And that antizionism as this singular obsession with the non-existence of a Jewish State, is a unique form of insanity,” she says. 

Wilf believes that by examining the original texts, people can see how antizionist discourse distorts facts. 

“Quotes get cherry-picked most terribly,” she says. 

One of her favourites is a quote from Herzl that anti-Israel speakers use, “to build a new building, we need to destroy the old one”. 

“They bring it up as an example that Herzl understood that to build a Jewish State, we’ll have to destroy a pre-existing thing. And I remember thinking, ‘That’s odd, that doesn’t sound like Herzl.’ So I went and found the quote,” she says. 

It’s a quote in his introduction to the book, The Jewish State, in which he talks to Jews about the need to destroy a mental building that keeps them trapped in an exile mindset, so that their minds are free to imagine something new. 

“That’s why it’s so powerful when you go to the original text and not just one writer, multiple writers, and you really understand what Zionism is.” 

Wilf argues that Jews whose families came from places such as the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Iran, and the Arab world are often more willing to challenge antizionism because they recognise a familiar pattern. They have a historical memory of societies claiming to welcome Jews while targeting “only Zionists”, and they know that such rhetoric often preceded the marginalisation or expulsion of Jewish communities. 

By contrast, many Jews in the United States, whose families have lived for generations in relatively secure and prosperous circumstances, may be more inclined to view Jewish identity through the lens of privilege and social acceptance. Having experienced opportunities, success, and integration into mainstream society, they may be less likely to recognise the dangers that others associate with antizionist rhetoric. 

However, after 7 October, many of these young Jews saw a complete shift in how they were viewed in the world, similar to what happens in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, where one morning the main character wakes up transformed into a giant insect-like creature. 

“All these young Jews with zero muscle memory are waking up one morning. And they’re genocidal baby killers; they’re being yelled at everywhere they go. But they’re the same person they were before,” she says. 

“Now, many young people today don’t have the muscle memory that is the Jewish condition. So they wake up one morning, and the price of being Jewish, from their perspective, I would say, just went back to its normal historical price. 

“You’ll be platformed. You can publish an essay in The New York Times. You can build an academic career. The price of standing with your people is very high. The price of selling out your people is very lucrative. And if you don’t have the muscle memory of what it means to be Jewish, a lot of young Jews, and not only young ones, are succumbing to the pressure,” she says.