Guest Post: Creating Worlds with Words

Combating Antisemitism and Defining Zionism

Twice a week, Dr. Michael Oren and I get together to record a new podcast episode of Boundless Insights that aims to make sense of the headlines affecting Israel and the American Jewish communities. Recently, we addressed the question, “Is Israel winning the war(s)?” The answer to that question, as Michael put it, “is dependent on how you define winning,” a complex task we spent the rest of the podcast unpacking.

Michael and I are both former speechwriters for Israel at the United Nations, and we share a fascination with words and their meanings. Words are now more important than ever, but how we use them has changed over the course of the last 14 months. Online conversation about Israel, Zionism, and antisemitism has grown exponentially over that time period. College campuses in America are now hotbeds of discontent — where a majority of Jewish students feel neither safe nor welcome — as students and faculty contest the many meanings of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Disinformation is everywhere. As James Rubin at the U.S. State Department has said, “we’re in an undeclared information war with authoritarian countries.” Whether from the mouths of bots or bigots, words are weaponized. It is within this context that Boundless Israel undertook a study on the views and sentiments towards Zionism and Israel among the U.S. population. The results were startling.

For example, only 14% of Americans can accurately define Zionism. (For the purposes of the study, Zionism was defined as “a movement that supports the Jewish people having a state in their ancestral homeland, Israel.”) In addition, 54% don’t recognize genocidal rhetoric — “from the river to the sea,” “intifada, intifada,” “we want 48” — as being problematic. Most troubling still was the fact that only 40% of Americans are willing to report antisemitic incidents. In these examples, and others the research uncovered, we see the power of words in the negative.

But there is hope. The research also showed ways in which the power of words can change the game around Zionism and antisemitism. For example, a small amount of education on what Zionism actually is — simply using the one-sentence definition given above — quadruples the number of Americans willing to identify as a Zionist. (Imagine what could be achieved with an informed discussion!) In addition, a small amount of education directed toward those who cannot accurately define Zionism (86% of respondents) significantly increases that group’s favorability toward Jewish people. Finally, explaining what phrases like “from the river to the sea” and “by all means necessary” really mean makes those phrases significantly less acceptable to Americans.

Jews have long been known as “the people of the book.” It was with words that Moses descended Mount Sinai, words that Jews have wrestled with and fought over for millennia. As a diaspora — disenfranchised from land ownership and political office — we prized words as a sort of alternative to power and for the sense of identity and belonging they furnished us with. Even today, as a nation rooted in our ancestral homeland, words have not lost their preciousness or power.

The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a member of the British House of Lords, once said, “We create worlds with words…When we speak disparagingly of others, we diminish them, we diminish ourselves, and we damage the very ecology of freedom.” When we tolerate antisemitism — be it unknowing, casual, or hateful — we don’t simply diminish Israel or Jewish identity; we damage the fragile ecology of freedom that Western civilization has established.

It is, therefore, more important than ever for us to use the power of words to create a world where antisemitism is understood and denounced, and Zionism is seen as the simple desire to establish and maintain a Jewish homeland in Israel. I personally work toward these goals with a great sense of hope in my heart — and with a great sense of gratitude for those willing to listen. Together, the opportunities to create a better world are boundless.

---

Aviva Klompas is the former director of speechwriting at the Israeli Mission to the United Nations and co-founder of Boundless Israel, a nonprofit organization that partners with community leaders in the U.S. to support Israel education and combat hatred of Jews. She is co-host of the Boundless Insights podcast.