Letter: Zionism is Judaism, Councilmember Adams

Dear Letter to the Editor:

Councilmember Taishya Adams has never learned that Zionism is Judaism. (“Councilmember Adams’s Statement on Pearl Street Attack“, BJN 6/3/2025).

Judaism is based SOLELY on the 3500 year old Jewish Bible aka the Old Testament. The Jewish Bible has only ONE foundational narrative: the Jewish peoples’ Return to Zion — what today is Israel. It is not complicated. Zionism has been Judaism for 3500 years. That is why Jerusalem is mentioned 659 times in the Jewish Bible. That is why for 2000 years at the conclusion of the Passover Seder Jews stand and loudly and proudly pray the ultimate Zionist prayer: “Next Year in Jerusalem!”

Recently New York Times columnist Bret Stephens expressed a similar thought:

“Whatever else it is, Jewish nationalism — that is, Zionism — is the oldest continuous anticolonial movement in history, starting well before the Romans sought to de-Judaize the area by calling their Levantine colony Palestina. Hanukkah, the festival of lights, is one such reminder, celebrating the recovery of Jerusalem from colonizing Greeks in the second century B.C.E. (“Settler Colonialism: A Guide for the Sincere”, Bret Stephens, NY Times, 2/6/24).

As Ben M. Freeman the author of “The Jews. An Indigenous People” has written:

“Zionism is an ideology created by Jews for Jews and is one rooted in thousands of years of Jewish history.” Freeman makes clear that Theodor Herzl acknowledges the ancient roots of his modern political aspirations.’ The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish State’…Herzl was not wrong.

Maccabees I, written 2000 years ago, affirms the ancient Jewish desire to return to OUR home: ‘We have neither taken other men’s land, nor holden that which appertaineth to others, but the inheritance of our fathers, which our enemies had wrongfully in possession a certain time. Wherefore we, having opportunity, hold the inheritance of our fathers”.

See: “The Jews. An Indigenous People,” Ben M. Freeman, 2025, page 241.

Freeman adds: Zionism is “the indigenous rights movement of the Jewish people…to allow the Jewish people to exercise their right to self determination in their indigenous home: the Land of Israel…To be masters of their own fate. This is what the Jewish people have done in Israel since 1948. It is an act of decolonization unprecedented in world history. Never have an indigenous people been colonized and exiled from their land and then able to reclaim their sovereignty 2000 years later.”

(See: “The Jews. An Indigenous People,” pp 241-244).

To put is simply to be anti Zionist is to reject the ONLY foundational narrative that the Jewish people have. That is called antisemitism.

Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida