"We hate Zionism, so let's change Judaism!" ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, January 30, 2026

"We hate Zionism, so let's change Judaism!"

I found yet another academic writing - this one a chapter of a new book - written by a Jewish anti-Zionist. But this one tacitly admits something the other anti-Zionist Jews pretend isn't true: that Zionism is a part of Judaism.

The chapter of Religion, Politics and the New Materialism by Stephanie Gray has the usual dense pseudo-academic/philosophical gobbledygook:

Attention to New Materialist theories transforms how we engage with the political-material effects of religion, including the intersections of white supremacy, fossil fascism, settler colonialism, and climate catastrophe. Climate change apocalypse is both a material and a spiritual concern, especially for those left on the margins. For Judaism, what lessons can we learn from diasporic Judaism rooted in a decolonial land-based politic that would challenge a Zionist ideology that has worked to strip Judaism of its ecological imperative to be in right relationship with the land? Can a Judaism beyond Zionism provide new ways to energize discourses of political liberation, Jewish ritual and practice, and ecological relation to the earth? Here is the potentiality of a kinship that conceives new spiritual and political entanglements that in turn generate energetic possibilities through a process of teshuva, or return. This chapter draws from Jewish and and decolonial studies, to examine the world that is engaged in a genocidal war amid the inescapability of climate change, as well as the world to come, and the world as it could be, in spiritual-material terms.

Hasn't the diaspora been great for the Jews?

Gray's bio says "Stephanie Gray (they/them) ...have have been working for over a decade in grassroots organizing and non-profit consulting, with a focus on accessibility, LGBTQIA2S+ inclusion, and liberatory spiritual practices. "

She once wrote a "dvar Torah" where she found some of the parasha Matot-Masei to be wonderful, but other parts not so much:

“You shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land... and destroy all their figured objects... You shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess.”

This passage echoes the language and logic of settler colonialism and extraction.

Romans and Byzantines and Mamluks and Crusaders and Ottomans aren't settler colonialist when they conquer areas of the Levant - but Jews are.

The point is that she isn't saying that Judaism isn't Zionist. The Torah passage is clear. She is saying that she wants to make a new "Judaism" that cuts out its heart.

So in a way, the Jewish anti-Zionists who pretend to take Judaism seriously realize that the only way for it to work is to subvert the religion they claim to love.

Which means that they agree with the Zionists on a key point: Judaism has always been Zionist.