But who was Theodor Herzl? In the following essay, adapted from her new book Teaching Zionism, retells her exploration of the man behind the legend with students she taught at Georgetown. By looking at the motives, methods, and inner thinking of Herzl, she opens a window not just to the revolution that began back then—but to the possibilities of what may yet be. Enjoy!

—David Hazony

Herzl Came to Life in My Classroom

Einat Wilf

A few years ago, I taught a fall-semester course at Georgetown University on the history of Zionism and anti-Zionism. I took the students on a historical journey, from the time of ancient Israel to the Soviet era and the Abraham Accords, offering both the primary sources of the revival of Jewish sovereignty and those that opposed it in every era.

I found during this course that students often changed their opinions after receiving the genuine narrative of Zionism, as opposed to academia’s hegemonic defamation. The course acted, as I hoped, as a kind of “inoculation,” allowing the students to make up their own minds about Zionism, favorable or unfavorable, while at least having the true facts at their disposal.

Naturally, I taught the students about many of the great figures of Zionism, from Leo Pinsker to Ahad Ha’am to Ze’ev Jabotinsky to Albert Memmi. But without doubt, the high point of the course was our section on Theodor Herzl, whose 1896 book The Jewish State and his concurrent political activism jump-started the Zionist movement and laid the foundations for the State of Israel.

One of the things I learned in teaching this section was that there is a renewed perception of Herzl’s immense significance, not only as the intellectual and activist founder of the state, but also as a man who saw things as they were and had the courage to say so. His warnings to European Jewry, that the ground was burning and the time to escape was now, were astoundingly prescient, accurate, and uncompromising.

Today, in a time of rising antisemitism, they are, sadly, as relevant as ever; Herzl’s warning is our warning. The implications of this were only vague while I was teaching the course, but in a post-October 7 world, with Jews under attack across the globe, they are as clear and significant as ever.

***

When we reached our section on Herzl, I freely told my students that I consider him an extraordinary man, one of the most extraordinary in Jewish history. Perhaps comparable to all of America’s founding fathers in one.

I highlighted this by noting the diversity of his activities. In Hebrew, he is often called hozeh ha’medina, “the visionary of the state,” but he offered much more than vision. He was not just a dreamer. He was also a thinker, writer, institution builder, politician, and diplomat.

To underscore his importance, I mentioned that in the decade before his death at just 44 years old, he had not only set out a detailed vision for a Jewish state but also established the institutions that would eventually form the foundation of that state, such as a proto-Israeli government, a proto-Knesset, a proto-national-bank, and the Jewish National Fund.

Moreover, it is common to attribute the Balfour Declaration, which established the diplomatic foundation for the international legitimacy of a Jewish state, to Chaim Weizmann—who undoubtedly deserves immense credit. But Herzl initiated the process that eventually secured British support for Jewish sovereignty by negotiating with the British—whose prime minister at the time was Arthur Balfour—about a potential temporary Jewish settlement in Uganda. In other words, the entire foundation of Zionism as a practical enterprise was laid by Herzl.

I sometimes tell students that Herzl was the first Israeli entrepreneur, and he surpasses even the creators of Waze or Wiz, because Israel itself was his startup. He accomplished the extraordinary and unique feat of creating an entire country. Herzl achieved this despite starting from virtually nothing. This is an accomplishment almost unparalleled in modern history.

***

To understand the breadth of Herzl’s accomplishments, students were asked also to understand his personality. Fortunately, his writings, diaries, letters, and other sources provide a clear picture of his thoughts, activism, and certainly his emotions.

Herzl was born on May 2, 1860 in Budapest, but he made his mark in late nineteenth-century Vienna, which was in the midst of a cultural renaissance of immense proportions. He was a strongly assimilated Jew and shared the values and ambitions of his assimilated brethren: to be accepted, to belong, and to succeed. This had been the accepted paradigm of liberal Jewish life in Europe since the Jews had been politically and socially “freed” by the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century process of European Emancipation.

Herzl certainly succeeded. Most people do not realize that, in his heyday, he was one of the leading cultural figures in Vienna, serving as a writer and editor who helped define the media landscape of the era. It was remarkable, then, that he became a Zionist who effectively rejected all of this, jettisoning assimilation to embark on what seemed to be a Quixotic quest for a new solution to the plight of European Jews.

This was not a coincidence, however. The first thing I taught my students was that the traditional narrative of how Herzl became a Zionist is, at best, half-true. This narrative usually suggests that he was a typical assimilated Jew who went to Paris to report on the Dreyfus affair and experienced a political conversion.

It is true that the affair was Herzl’s turning point. Alfred Dreyfus was a French-Jewish army officer falsely convicted of espionage in 1894. His case became a cause célèbre, and the anti-Dreyfus side of the debate was bitterly antisemitic. When he went to Paris to cover the case, Herzl was shocked by the antisemitic chants of the crowds, and he suddenly realized the necessity of a Jewish state.

However, the Dreyfus affair was not the sole reason he became a Zionist. In fact, there was no single reason. When you examine the sources I taught my students, it becomes evident that Herzl was moving toward Zionism long before the Dreyfus affair, starting in his student years. By the time he embraced Zionism, Herzl had dedicated much of his adult life to contemplating the “Jewish Question.”

I brought in a few short passages from Herzl’s writings to illustrate this. In one, Herzl wrote:

As the years went on, the Jewish Question bored into me and gnawed at me, tormented me, and made me very miserable. In fact, I kept coming back to it whenever my own personal experiences—joys and sorrows—permitted me to rise to broader considerations.

He also presented a brief personal recollection in this context:

When, as a green young writer, I took a manuscript to the Vienna Deutsche Wochenschrift, Dr. Friedjung advised me to adopt a pen name less Jewish than my own. I flatly refused, saying that I wanted to continue to bear the name of my father and I offered to withdraw the manuscript. Friedjung accepted it anyway.

The latter passage is particularly important. It reveals something essential about Herzl’s personality, which is crucial to his reaction to the devastating impact on Jews when they first experience antisemitism: His sense of honor.

I taught my students that this was evident even in his student days. While studying law at the prestigious University of Vienna, Herzl joined a highly prestigious non-Jewish fraternity, a kind of fencing club. He was ecstatic about his acceptance. It was the fulfillment of the assimilationist quest for him—a pinnacle of belonging.

But two or three years into his university career, the renowned and antisemitic German composer Richard Wagner died. The fraternity held an event to celebrate his life, and Herzl’s best friend delivered a horrendously antisemitic speech.

If a single event in his life truly shocked Herzl, it was this speech. He was deeply hurt. He complained to his friend, who responded with the classic: “It’s not about you. You’re a good Jew.” Herzl responded by quitting the club.

It should be emphasized to students that this was a massive decision for a young Jew in Vienna at that time. It meant giving up what all Jews hoped for: acceptance into non-Jewish society. Herzl wanted that acceptance, but he was unwilling to compromise his sense of self to get it. It must be emphasized that this was not normal. Most assimilated Jews would have simply moved on, but Herzl did not.

What it says about him, I told students, is that from a very early age, Herzl had a strong sense of honor and pride, never willing to compromise his sense of personal integrity even when presented with difficult circumstances and alluring rewards. As assimilated as he was, he saw his Jewish identity as an indelible part of him. He was not going to debase himself to be accepted by antisemites.

Another example of this is related to the Dreyfus affair. After he was wrongly convicted, Dreyfus endured a humiliating public ceremony in which he was stripped of his medals and sword. In response, he said, “Vive la France!”

Some might have seen this as noble, but Herzl was appalled. He saw it as a shameful submission to antisemitism and injustice. He felt personally ashamed of it, and this was before he formally became a Zionist.

Herzl, in other words, was already an outlier among assimilated European Jews. He was unwilling to endure the kind of humiliation that many Jews had accepted. He believed Jews should not debase themselves before those who hate them.

What Herzl finally decided to do about this was a response to his sense of injustice and humiliation, similar in a way to the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie’s response to being snubbed by New York society. Herzl’s idea of a Jewish state essentially said to the antisemites: You won’t let me in the club? Fine, I will build my own and it will be better than yours. You are telling me I do not belong in your Vienna? Fine, I will build a new and better Vienna on the Mediterranean.

I emphasized to students that this did not come from just a bitter sense of betrayal. It was also an act of defiance. It was how Herzl stood up for himself and his people rather than just sit there and take it.

***

This brings us to what Herzl actually does. He understood that, above all, the Jews needed a new story, a story beyond the “success” of assimilation. This assimilationist story held that the Jews had suffered persecution and oppression for centuries, but modernity, the Enlightenment, and Emancipation had finally liberated them and given them a chance to become fully part of European society.

Herzl had accepted and lived this story, but he lost his faith in it. So, since he was a writer, he decided to rewrite the Jewish story. He sat down and wrote his famous manifesto Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State.

Reading The Jewish State today, one can easily miss what a radical and, in some ways, dangerous book it was. It was radical and dangerous because of a single line: “We are a people, one people.” He repeated this phrase in one form or another several times, and there is a reason for that: In that single line, he was demolishing the entire story of Emancipation. He was saying that Emancipation had failed, and he was saying it unequivocally.

This must be carefully explained to students, because they must understand it in its historical context. The “bargain” of Emancipation was that Jews would become “Frenchmen of the Mosaic Faith” or “Germans of the Mosaic Faith” in exchange for acceptance as equal citizens. That by confining their Jewish identity to a religion among other religions, they could fit in and enjoy equality among citizens.

Herzl was saying: No, while you might think you are fully French or German, to the non-Jews you are not truly French, you are not truly German. In the end, you are nothing other than a Jew, and the Jews are one people. We are one people. “We are a people, one people” is by far the most important and impactful sentence Herzl wrote.

Herzl went on to explain why he believed Emancipation had failed:

We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves into the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow-citizens; in vain do we strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In countries where we have lived for centuries, we are still denounced as strangers, and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already started suffering.

Essentially, Herzl was saying that the Jews had done everything in their power to assimilate. They had done everything they were expected to do and everything that was asked of them in hopes of receiving acceptance and equality in return, but it was not enough and would never be enough.

It was important to emphasize to my students that Herzl did not say Emancipation is not working, which implies that it could conceivably be made to work. Herzl was saying it already didn’t work. It was over. There was no point in continuing the process. Jews would never be accepted as equal citizens, no matter how hard they tried. Non-Jews were never going to hold up their end of the bargain. The Jews needed to come up with something else.

***

It is certainly important to emphasize the role of antisemitism in prompting Herzl’s conversion to Zionism, but this requires context: Antisemitism, as Herzl encountered it, was a new phenomenon.

Hatred and suspicion of Jews, along with the belief that their continued presence was problematic, had persisted for centuries in both Christendom and the Islamic world. In Europe, these sentiments were historically rooted in religious and theological contexts.

However, in the modern secular world, these old ideas had resurfaced, been secularized, and come to be called “antisemitism.” This new form of Jew-hatred billed itself as a seemingly “respectable” pseudo-scientific ideology. It exploited the respected—at the time—concept of “race” to classify Jews as belonging to a “race” inherently and immutably different from other Europeans.

Herzl was acutely aware of the emergence of this new form of antisemitism and immediately recognized its far-reaching and horrific implications. He wrote: “The world denounces the Jews resoundingly, thus reawakening this once-dormant idea [of a Jewish state]. … The decisive factor is our propelling force. And what is that force? The plight of the Jews.”

When Herzl referred to antisemitism as a “propelling force,” he meant it literally. After all, it had already propelled him. To his mind, the new antisemitism was the twin of Emancipation’s failure. Antisemitism and the failure of Emancipation were identical. And they were propelling the Jews out of Europe and towards a Jewish state.

***

Again, Herzl was rewriting the Jewish story in real time. It is no coincidence that he was a writer who understood the power of stories. And the story he was writing encompassed not only the Zionist future he envisioned but also the Jewish state itself.

What is remarkable about The Jewish State is how explicit Herzl was about what he was doing. He was absolutely conscious of the project he was engaged in. He wrote:

No human being is wealthy or powerful enough to transplant a nation from one habitat to another. An idea alone can achieve that, and this idea of a state may have the requisite power to do so. The Jews have dreamt this kingly dream all through the long nights of their history. “Next year in Jerusalem” is our old phrase. It is now a question of showing that the dream can be converted into a living reality.

In other words, Herzl understood how human beings and human societies work and how they can be brought to work together: through the stories and ideas we create. These stories and ideas are not trivial things. We kill and die in their name.

Herzl was deeply aware of this. In The Jewish State, he offered an alternative story for the Jews of his time. While he drew upon the “kingly dream” of redemption and return to the Land of Israel—a central theme of Jewish civilization—he addressed Jews who had largely abandoned that dream in pursuit of Emancipation and assimilation. He told them that the ancient dream is superior and can be revived in the form of a modern Jewish state.

This is arguably the most crucial aspect of Herzl’s new story: While the dream is ancient, Herzl was after something entirely modern. In fact, it was hyper-modern. He believed that the Jews should leave Europe and its failed dream of assimilation, but in doing so, they would be renewed. He wrote:

We are one people—our enemies have made us one without our consent, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a state, and, indeed, a model state. We possess all human and material resources necessary for the purpose. … Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.

Here, Herzl was expressing his sense of honor and pride by saying: We do not need others to emancipate us. We do not need others to give us anything. We can do it on our own. There will be a place we can call home, and we are going to be nobody’s guests.

When reading Herzl’s later book Altneuland (Old-New Land), one can see the implications of this. Herzl described a utopian Jewish state, essentially a better Europe outside Europe. Everything will be modern and monumental, with a rebuilt Temple that resembles a massive European religious structure rather than a standard Jewish synagogue.

Yet at the same time, it is the Third Temple. So, Herzl was appealing to both the past and the future. As he explicitly stated in the very name of the novel, he was building his new story on a very old story. He was telling non-Jews—whether French, German, or otherwise—that the Jews have a long and ancient history of extraordinary accomplishments. The Jews were a nation when the French and Germans were just barbarian tribes. But Herzl was also saying that the Jews are going to be a new nation as well as an ancient one. The new nation will be better than anything today’s Europeans have come up with. And we are going to do it ourselves.

***

I presented Herzl in this way so students could understand his historical moment and thus understand the present moment.

Students need to feel the immediacy of primary sources. They should see the factors at work: the fermentation of ideas, the struggle with modernity, hope, and betrayal. They must grasp the intensity of the emotions and the depth of people’s feelings.

This helps students understand that, like in every historical moment when great ideas and movements emerge, it is not just a matter of intellectuals discussing abstract ideas. Things change when humans emotionally respond to current events and struggle to cope. I wanted students to experience these emotions. They should feel the hope and the betrayal, which is how they can understand someone like Herzl, who was driven by very intense emotions.

At the same time, I wanted them to reflect on their own emotions and experiences and perhaps understand them in a new way.

Today’s Jewish students are grappling with a novel and extremely violent species of mutated antisemitism, which manifests as antizionism on their campuses. This phenomenon is not dissimilar to how antisemitism evolved from the old theological Jew-hatred. Their non-Jewish fellow students are observing this struggle.

By reflecting on Herzl’s personal journey, students were led to reflect: How different is Herzl’s Vienna from today’s world? Is it really so different? If someone were to tell American, Canadian, British, and Australian Jews today, “the ground is burning,” how crazy would that person be considered? Students will have an emotional reaction to these questions, regardless of their conclusions. This is how they can be brought both to engage with history and to perceive the present in a new way.

My students certainly grasped how “countercultural” Zionism was. They understood why the Jews of that era wanted to ignore the reality of their situation and how Herzl’s refusal to do so made him a controversial figure—not the consensus “founding father” we perceive him as today. They understood why many Jews at the time considered him completely insane.

They also grasped a disturbing parallel to our current moment: the sense of acceptance followed by bitter betrayal. Thus, they understood why new ideas arose, albeit based on old ideas. They understood that the Jews’ place in the world remains unsettled and possibly always will be. “It was interesting to understand now how crazy the Zionists must have sounded at the time,” one of my students later said. “But also, it was just unbelievable to me how prophetic Herzl was.”

They were very moved by the issue of dignity, as well. “I was impressed,” said another, “by the characterization of the bargain of Emancipation as not being dignified; that there was a loss of honor and pride among the Jews as a result.”

They added that they now had a sense of “how crazy Zionism must have sounded at that time. Because, obviously, you don’t think of it as a crazy, radical idea now, but to put this idea forward at that time, when the Jews hadn’t been back to Israel for thousands of years, it was clear why people thought that was madness.”

However, another student was not as shocked by Herzl’s arguments or by the emergence of Zionism in general. They saw a distressingly familiar logic to it:

I think the Zionists were right in saying that liberalism was not satisfactory—especially the form of liberalism they had back then. As a result of their experiences, they were able to see the constraints of that system, which we see influencing later left-wing movements. The idea that “liberalism is not enough” was central.

At the time, liberals were essentially saying to Jews either “get over it” or “it will eventually get better,” which obviously wasn’t sufficient. Zionism naturally emerged from that dissatisfaction.

As I reflect on this section of the course today, I am still astonished by Herzl’s prescience.

***

It is, of course, easy to draw speculative historical parallels. Nonetheless, they exist. Herzl lived in a society in which the Jews appeared to have successfully assimilated, rising high in all aspects of political, cultural, and economic life. For a time, things were relatively good. Then a new form of antisemitism arose, with the rise of Jew-hating politicians and political movements, antisemitic mobs in the streets, and the seeds planted of movements that became fascism and Nazism. All of this, as we are painfully aware, eventually had horrific consequences for the European Jews.

Herzl proved right about more or less everything. But there is a dark side to this. I believe that if Herzl could come back to life and see Israel today, we cannot know what he would think. But I do believe that it is safe to conclude that he would be devastated by his failure to save the European Jews who did not heed his warnings—and distressed, if not surprised, by the resurgence of both new and old forms of Jew-hatred today.

In places like the United States and Britain, we see the same phenomenon taking place as in Herzl’s day. Despite the immense success of those Jewish communities, antisemitism is rising to unprecedented heights of venom and violence and threatening to become a hegemonic force in politics and culture.

Herzl’s legacy therefore sounds a warning and presents an ominous question: should Jews heed his warnings again, while there is still time, and make Aliyah to the Jewish state he created?

Even before October 7, I presented this question to my students and did not receive a definitive answer. I do not know if one is possible, at least not right now. But what Herzl’s extraordinary legacy makes clear is that this question must always be asked.

Nonetheless, as ominous as this question is, we should remember that, thanks to Herzl, we live in a different era today. Because of his prescience and the work he did to make his new story a reality, the Jews, whatever they decide, now have a place to go.

Dr. Einat Wilf is a former member of Knesset and founder of the Oz party. She is a senior fellow at the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities and author of Teaching Zionism: Revelations from a Skeptical Classroom (Z3 and Wicked Son, 2026).

Since October 7 we have been reeling in the face of antizionism, antisemitism, and our collective failure to prepare ourselves for the battles we now face. But the problem is much deeper than narrative wars. We have given up our collective commitments in an atomized, consumerized world. Fraiman argues that it’s time to rebuild those commitments—in our institutions and in our homes—and lays out a path that will take us there.

—David Hazony

Islands of Sovereignty

Amitai Fraiman

This past Passover, when I ended the Seder with the words “Next year in Jerusalem,” I realized that the phrase could no longer mean to me what it once had.

Growing up in Jerusalem, I found it slightly anachronistic. “Next year in Jerusalem” sounded less like national longing than a calendar note. Only after moving to America did its emotional logic, as an expression of distance and return, begin to resonate.

But after thirteen years of Jewish life in the United States, the phrase has come to trouble me for a different reason. I have watched it become routine in some settings, recited because it is what Jews say at the end of the Seder, with little awareness of what it demands. In other settings, I have seen people soften it, skip it, or explain it away, embarrassed by its particularism or unwilling to say aloud what Jewish memory still insists upon.

To say “Next year in Jerusalem” after the return has already begun cannot mean only the preservation of the memory of exile. The return remains incomplete, and the prophetic vision of redemption has not reached its final form. But Jewish sovereignty is no longer only a dream, a prayer, or a deferred hope. It is a fact of Jewish history.

The early Zionists understood that exile was not only a geographic condition. It had created a diasporic consciousness. As early as 1882, Leo Pinsker explained the nature of this consciousness: European Jews, he argued in his book Auto-Emancipation, had preserved themselves as individuals while weakening their national bond as a people. “In the diaspora,” he wrote, “we maintained our individual life, and proved our power of resistance, but we broke the common tie of national consciousness.”

Writing after the First Zionist Congress, Ahad Ha’am sharpened Pinsker’s critique. Political refuge alone, he warned, could not repair the inner habits of exile. True liberation required “the strengthening of our national unity by joint action in every sphere of our national life.”

Pinsker believed that the broken tie of national consciousness could be repaired through political sovereignty. He was right, but only in part. Jews can now shape history in ways his generation could only imagine. Yet, as Ahad Ha’am foresaw, the achievement of statehood has exposed a deeper problem: political sovereignty restores power, but it cannot by itself teach Jews how to live as a sovereign people.

Jewish life is still speaking in categories shaped by exile: distance, dependence, vulnerability, and return. Sovereignty has changed the basic conditions of Jewish existence, but Jewish self-understanding has not caught up. The problem is no longer the absence of Jewish sovereignty. It is that Jews have not yet fully internalized what sovereignty requires.

***

That failure manifests itself differently in Israel and North America. In Israel, it is expressed by the struggle to use power without needing to prove strength again and again, to accept the obligations of sovereignty rather than evade them, and to embrace Jewish power and particularity without embarrassment. In North America, it appears in the habits of a Jewish life too often received, supported, visited, or consumed rather than built.

In North America, this failure is intensified by a surrounding culture that reinforces and rewards diasporic consciousness. Consumer culture teaches us to treat nearly every part of life as something to be chosen, purchased, improved, or abandoned. That habit is especially corrosive to Judaism, which depends on obligation, shared responsibility, and communal authorship.

Jewish institutions did not set out to commodify Judaism. They adapted, understandably, to a world in which belonging became voluntary rather than assumed. Institutions professionalized, programs multiplied, fundraising became central, and the work of sustaining the Jewish community increasingly became the work of specialists serving the masses through transactional and one-directional structures.

The results became clear only in retrospect. Jewish life, once held together by obligation and shared responsibility, began to resemble a marketplace. The question shifted from what Jews owe one another to whether Jewish life feels meaningful, accessible, and worth the cost. When the market becomes our rabbi, Judaism becomes a product, judged less by whether it forms a people than by whether it satisfies a consumer.

***

This can be seen in two of the most successful models of modern Jewish engagement: Birthright and Chabad. Neither is a failure. The opposite is true. Each begins with something Jewish life genuinely needs. Birthright offers immersion, encounter, and the experience of Jewish public life. Chabad offers warmth, access, religious seriousness, and recognizable Jewish depth. The problem is that under the market conditions of consumerism, even powerful forms of Jewish experience can become substitutes for the harder work of building and sustaining Jewish life.

Birthright Israel offers a revealing example because it seems, at first, to point in the opposite direction. Birthright is one of the great successes of the past two decades. For many participants, it has helped create a lasting attachment to the Jewish state and the Jewish people. It also offers something many North American Jews rarely experience at home: a glimpse of Jewish life as integrated, immersive, and public. In Israel, Jewishness is not only a program or an identity choice. It is language, land, calendar, politics, memory, grief, celebration, and argument. It is public life.

But in today’s consumer culture, even that encounter can become a curated intervention, aimed at the individual, staged elsewhere, and detached from the ordinary communities where Jewish responsibility must be learned and expressed. Birthright gives participants a trip, memories, and often a network of friends, but not a community that holds them accountable. It can make Israel feel immersive, social, and fully alive, while the communities to which the participants return often feel optional, fragmented, and self-directed.

It is not just that Birthright has a follow-up problem. It reveals a deeper issue with the North American Jewish ecosystem. Its success forced us to ask how we might create more powerful Jewish experiences in other settings. But creating experiences is not the same as forming communities. An experience can move a person, awaken memory, and create attachment, while still leaving that person outside the habits and obligations that sustain Jewish life. Birthright’s power lies in showing participants a more integrated Jewish world. Its limitation is that even in its best version, it cannot create that world for participants once they return home.

Chabad represents a more complicated version of the same problem because, at first glance, it does not appear to fit the pattern. In many ways, it seems to solve it. Chabad is warm, accessible, nonjudgmental, and serious in its Jewish presence. I am personally grateful for what Chabad has given me. It has built one of the most effective Jewish outreach movements in modern history by meeting Jews exactly where they are while offering an experience of Judaism that feels serious, recognizable, and alive.

This is also why Chabad works so well in America. It offers what consumer culture most wants but rarely produces: an experience that feels authentic. An encounter with Chabad can provide warmth, access, meaning, and a sense of recognizable Judaism. It is immediate and available, without requiring an individual to help build the world that makes the experience possible.

For Chabad, however, the encounter is understood differently. Chabad is not about service delivery. It is animated by a theological mission. As Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson put it in Likkutei Sichos: “When a Jew arouses… his quintessential Jewish spark, so that it governs his thought, speech and action, this is an act of individual redemption. Through this he… hastens the advent of the all-embracing Redemption, with the coming of Mashiach.”

Chabad pursues this mission through a structure in which the shaliach, or emissary, does not simply host programs or provide Jewish experiences. He seeks to draw the Jew closer to God, the mitzvot, and redemption. For the Jew, the encounter may offer comfort, connection, and Jewish depth. For Chabad, it is part of an eschatological mission: one more mitzvah, one more Jewish spark awakened, one more step toward redemption. The sincerity of both sides does not change the structure of the relationship.

That structure is a limitation. Chabad offers Jews a moving religious experience without asking them to take responsibility for a community they govern or shape. The experience can be meaningful and even transformative, but the Jew enters Chabad’s world rather than a shared community he or she is asked to help build. A Jew may become deeply attached to Chabad, but the relationship remains largely one-directional. Chabad provides a fully formed Jewish world, and the Jew is invited into it.

If the choice is between disaffection and Chabad, Chabad is the more serious answer by far. It gives consumer-age Jewish life theological depth and institutional coherence. But it cannot serve as an aspiration for Jewish life as a whole. The danger is not that Chabad lacks depth. It does not. The danger is that its depth can obscure the passivity built into the relationship. Judaism is not meant to leave Jews as recipients of someone else’s Jewish world. It is meant to form adults: people who understand that their choices carry consequence, that Jewish life makes claims on them, and that they are responsible for building and sustaining the communities that shape them.

This is why the rest of Jewish life cannot simply become Chabad. It is also why reducing Judaism to a purely religious framework is too narrow an approach. Judaism is larger than any one movement’s theological imagination. It is the civic, cultural, textual, political, spiritual, and communal life of a people. No single movement can carry the whole Jewish people, nor should it.

Synagogues, JCCs, federations, schools, camps, and cultural institutions cannot compete with Chabad by becoming better vendors of Jewish experience. They must do something different: formulate a serious account of what they are for and raise Jews who understand themselves to be responsible for the communities that shape them. When Jewish life is reduced to discrete religious moments, excellent programs, meaningful services, or powerful experiences, participation becomes possible without ownership. The institution may remain busy even as the community it was meant to form grows weaker.

If Birthright reveals the limits of experience without accountable community, and Chabad reveals the limits of depth without shared civic ownership, then the answer cannot be better programming or more effective outreach alone. It has to be civic institutions where Jews create Jewish life rather than consume it, make decisions about shared public life, and take responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.

***

The institutions American Jews inherited were not failures. They sustained Jewish life for generations and brought us to this moment. But they were built for a Jewish world in which Jews did not exercise sovereignty anywhere. They must now meet the demands of a world in which Jewish sovereignty is a fact, not by reducing Jewish identity to the State of Israel or denying the legitimacy of diaspora life, but by forming Jews who see themselves as agents and builders where they are.

The answer is neither to reduce North American Jewish life to Israel advocacy nor to sever it from Israel and what Jewish sovereignty now makes possible. North American Jewish life needs what we might call islands of sovereignty: the closest approximation, outside Israel, of a Jewish civic life in which Jews experience themselves not as consumers of identity but as participants in a shared Jewish world. These are concrete Jewish places where Jews learn to take responsibility for one another, inherit obligations they did not invent, and become builders of Jewish life rather than clients of those paid to sustain it.

These islands should not be retreats from the world or substitutes for Israel. They should be places where Jews learn, argue, organize, celebrate, grieve, and make decisions together in person; where Israel, memory, and peoplehood are not special programs, but part of how the community understands itself; and where belonging comes with obligation. Sovereign Jewish life requires a public square because Jews cannot learn shared responsibility from those who already agree with them. Jews must be close enough to disagree, bound together enough to compromise, and committed enough not to retreat into separate corners when Jewish life becomes difficult.

An island of sovereignty is not defined first by institutional form, but by what it asks of those inside it. It is a place where Jewish life makes claims on people: to show up regularly, sustain ritual, care for others, teach children, help clean up after the gathering, and make Israel part of the community’s moral and cultural life. It cannot mean only more committees or more opportunities to express Jewish opinions. Jews do not become sovereign by being consulted. They become sovereign by being responsible.

The strongest candidates for creating such a space are not necessarily the places with the strongest ideology or the most intense programming, but the places broad enough to bring different kinds of Jews into shared responsibility.

The months after October 7 showed that Jews still want to be with other Jews, and they revealed which institutions many Jews trusted with that need. According to JFNA research on Jews newly engaging at a high level, informal and interpersonal connections remained dominant. But when Jews turned to institutions, they turned most strongly to Jewish Community Centers (JCCs). Seventy-seven percent reported engagement through a JCC, compared with 56 percent through Jewish Federations, 24 percent through national Jewish organizations, and only 10 percent through local synagogues or temples.

The data does not mean that JCCs automatically become islands of sovereignty. It means they are one of the few institutions that can effectively do so.

This is why JCCs deserve special attention. After October 7, Jews were looking for something broader than denominational belonging and more concrete than online connection: a Jewish public square. In many communities, JCCs came closest to meeting that need.

At their best, JCCs are not merely program providers. They are civic institutions, places where Jews come together despite the differences that elsewhere divide them. JCCs’ strength is not only that they serve many kinds of Jews, but that they bring those Jews into proximity with one another. Children, parents, grandparents, Israelis, Americans, religious Jews, secular Jews, newcomers, staff, volunteers, donors, and community leaders all move through the same shared Jewish space. That breadth is not incidental. It is what makes the JCC capable of becoming a shared public square rather than another niche institution.

JCCs should not replace synagogues, schools, camps, or federations. They should give the broader community a shared center. Synagogues remain essential for religious life, schools and camps shape the next generation, and federations help organize communal resources. But no single denominational, educational, or philanthropic institution can serve as the civic home of the whole community by itself. Without a shared center, aspects of Jewish life may flourish, but Jews do not become responsible for one another as a community.

However, even the strongest civic institutions cannot bear sovereign responsibility on their own. Jews who do not build Jewish life at home cannot sustain the institutions that islands of sovereignty require, and institutions that make no claims on people cannot generate the Jews who carry those claims into their own lives. The relationship between community and home is mutually reinforcing. Jewish life must be built at both ends.

One of the places where this responsibility is practiced is the Shabbat table. Abraham Joshua Heschel called Shabbat a palace in time, a form of sanctity that, properly inhabited, can hold many dimensions of Jewish life at once: ritual, family, language, learning, hospitality, argument, song, and the welcoming of strangers. A Shabbat table is not one piece of Jewish life among others. It is Jewish life compressed into one location and brought into being by the people sitting at it. The same is true of a holiday meal, a study chavruta, or a parent teaching a child. Jewish life cannot be reduced to transactional or episodic experience. It runs through every scale of Jewish presence, from global peoplehood to the individual, and at every scale it asks to be created rather than consumed.

Islands of sovereignty require more than institutional structure or household practice. The deeper question is covenantal: what does Jewish responsibility now require of us? After October 7, many Jews rediscovered peoplehood through advocacy: rallies, letters, donations, public statements, and political pressure. Those acts are necessary, but reaction to crisis cannot become the substance of Jewish life. A sovereign Jewish consciousness must rebuild the forms of Jewish life that make responsibility habitual before crisis makes it urgent.

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The work of building islands of sovereignty in North America is one expression of a larger Jewish task. The failure to internalize sovereignty is not only a diaspora problem. It is a generational Jewish problem, appearing differently in each center of Jewish life. North American Jewry’s challenge is to create the conditions in which Jews stop outsourcing Jewish life and become agents and builders of a Jewish world they are called upon to sustain. Israel’s challenge is different: to ensure that political sovereignty becomes a disciplined form of Jewish power rather than power alone.

Former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein once recalled a joke his father used to tell: “For two thousand years, Jews prayed for a sovereign state. Did it have to happen in our generation?” The joke lands because it points out the gap between longing for sovereignty and knowing how to live with it. Political sovereignty can be reclaimed in a generation. Sovereign consciousness takes longer.

In Israel, the failure to internalize sovereignty is expressed by the struggle to use power without being ruled by it. Israel lives under threat, and realpolitik remains an essential tool of survival. But survival alone cannot constitute the whole of Jewish life. A people that does not survive cannot exercise its moral voice at all. Yet when Jewish power loses moral discipline, it begins to consume the people it was meant to protect.

The failure to internalize sovereignty appears in different forms across Israeli society. Among some religious Zionists and nationalists, Jewish power can become a way to prove, again and again, that Jews are no longer weak, even though sovereignty should already have made that clear. In some Haredi communities, sovereignty can be refused as though Jews were still living under conditions of exile, perpetuating exilic reflexes inside a sovereign Jewish society. Among some secular and progressive Israelis, Jewish particularity and Jewish power can become sources of discomfort, as though Israel would be better off becoming a normal Western liberal society rather than wrestling with what it means to be both Jewish and democratic.

Jewish life in the diaspora, shaped by minority conditions, can make the opposite mistake. It can confuse Judaism with moral purity, as though a tradition built around law, obligation, action, failure, repair, and teshuva could remain Jewish while avoiding the moral risks that come with acting in history. Judaism is not a religion of pure intention. It is a discipline of commanded action in an imperfect world. A Judaism that refuses to risk applying itself to the real world becomes theoretical. A Judaism that seeks innocence over responsibility ceases to be Judaism at all.

The danger to Israel is power without conscience. The danger to the diaspora is conscience without consequence. Each center reveals what the other is tempted to forget: their relationship cannot remain ornamental. Jewish life cannot be built on power without conscience or on conscience without consequence.

For much of the twentieth century, American Jews and the State of Israel operated within a framework that made sense for its time. The 1950 Blaustein-Ben-Gurion understandings codified a delicate balance: Israel would not undermine the civic security of American Jews by treating them as Israelis-in-waiting, and American Jewish leaders would support Israel without formally claiming authority over Israeli policy. That arrangement was necessary, but over time its limits became clearer. It allowed Israeli sovereignty and diaspora life to coexist without forcing either one to reshape the other. Israel could become a state without requiring American Jewish institutions to rethink the meaning of Jewish power. American Jews could support Israel without asking what sovereignty demanded of their own Jewish life.

But coexistence is no longer enough. If sovereignty is now a fact of Jewish history, then the two centers of Jewish life must become conscious partners in shaping the next era of Jewish life. Ahad Ha’am imagined a Jewish cultural center radiating renewal outward, but Simon Rawidowicz, the twentieth-century Jewish historian and philosopher, offers a better paradigm than that of center and periphery. In his essay “Two That Are One,” Rawidowicz described the Jewish people as “an ellipse with two foci”—the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. But he refused to turn that structure into a hierarchy. “There are not, nor should there be, absolute givers and takers among Jews,” he wrote. Each center of Jewish life carries its own creative responsibility, and no part of the Jewish people can fulfill the obligations of another.

This is why the usual family metaphors are no longer enough. Israel and the diaspora are not siblings, cousins, or spouses negotiating affection, loyalty, and distance. They are chavrutot, bound not by sameness but by the demand that each help the other see more fully. The rabbis put the stakes starkly: o chavruta o mituta, either chavruta or death. Chavruta is not a gentler metaphor than family, but a more demanding one, requiring mutuality, accountability, commitment, and enough trust to expose the other’s temptation without walking away.

Yossi Klein Halevi has put the distinction sharply: Israel gives Jewish life depth, while the diaspora gives it breadth. Israel gives Jewish life the depth of majority existence: land, language, power, consequence, and the density of a full Jewish public square. The diaspora gives Jewish life the breadth of minority existence: translation, encounter, creativity, moral imagination, and the capacity to carry Judaism into the wider human story.

Internalizing sovereignty does not collapse the two centers into one another. It allows each to become more fully itself without mistaking itself for the whole. Israel must learn that power remains Jewish only when it is answerable to conscience. The diaspora must learn that conscience becomes Jewish only when it accepts consequence. Each center holds a truth the other lacks, and each prevents the other from transforming its own condition into an ideology.

Jewish life has never been well served by one Zionist idea alone. Herzl was right that Jews need power. Ahad Ha’am was right that power alone is not enough. Rawidowicz was right that Jewish life cannot be organized around one center. Each saw part of the truth, and each part becomes distorted when it is asked to become the whole. A state can protect Jewish life, but it cannot by itself form a Jewish people. Culture can deepen Jewish life, but without power, it cannot secure it. Two centers can correct one another, but only if each becomes responsible for the form of sovereignty entrusted to it.

The question is no longer whether Jewish sovereignty exists. It does. Nor is the question whether we must secure it. We must. The deeper question is whether we are ready to internalize sovereignty: not by simply longing for return, since the return has already begun, but by building the Jewish life that return now makes possible. If we succeed, the next stage of Jewish life will not simply repeat the old arguments between Israel and the diaspora. It will be shaped by a people capable of letting each center challenge the other, correct the other, and take responsibility for building a Jewish future neither can create alone.

Rabbi Amitai Fraiman is founding director of the Z3 Project.

David H.—What are the most important new ideas coming out of the Jewish world?

I launched “Jewish Priorities” in 2023 as a showcase for the essays appearing in the book Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, published later that same year (about two weeks after October 7, actually). I’ve long believed that unlike books, which require a reader’s commitment and focus that work best in print, essays have found their natural home online—where they can be instantly shared, discussed, rebutted in real time, and where with a simple link they can serve as validation for a whole worldview.

After October 7, it became clear that the Jewish community is filled with questions about our future, and not enough answers. And so, in 2024 I joined the Z3 Project and helped launch the Z3 Institute. Since then we’ve brought together an amazing group of scholars and writers, each of whom is working on a book of significance for our collective Jewish future. So far, in addition to Jewish Priorities, we’ve published six new books, including 4 since last fall.

I’m thrilled that we’ve decided to re-launch “Jewish Priorities” to provide new content from our fellows and a selection of the most influential writers and scholars, with the aim of asking hard questions, and offering new answers, about Zionism, Judaism, communal life, philanthropy, education, and more. Each month we’ll post an original essay, alongside cross-posts from our fellows’ Substacks, short pieces, excerpts, announcements, updates, and more.

And if you’d like to meet the fellows in person, be sure to come to the Z3 Conference in Palo Alto November 1—most of them will be there!

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Stay tuned.

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