Is it time to retire the term ‘Zionism’?

(RNS) — Experiencing artwork by Yaacov Agam, the iconic Israeli artist, you will see a different work depending on where you are standing. He died a few days ago at the age of 98.

Agam had a major reputation in the art world for creating kinetic images. He believed that the image, like a person, never finishes becoming itself.

I think of his Dizengoff Square Fountain in Tel Aviv. Once, vandals tore it down; the city rebuilt it, much like the dream itself, and somehow it is still recognizably the fountain, still moving.

That is the way it is with Zionism itself. View Zionism from one angle, and it is Theodor Herzl, seeking to rescue the Jews of Europe. From another, it is Ahad Ha’am, seeking to resurrect Jewish culture. From another, it is a spiritual connection to the Land; from yet another, a socialist utopia. As it is with an Agam, the images change, depending on where you are, and where we are at this moment of history.  

And, like an Agam artwork, whenever we face the temptation to dismantle that work of art, we find ourselves needing to rebuild it.

That is the subject of my podcast with Nadine Epstein, editor-in-chief of Moment magazine, and Gil Troy, the historian and Zionist educator. Several months ago, Epstein wrote a lead essay that argued, in some detail, that we should retire the word “Zionism” because 136 years of accumulated meanings can no longer clarify anything.

The Dizengoff Square Fountain by artist Yaacov Agam in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Photo by Ori Lubin/Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Troy had the opposite instinct: We don’t destroy a word just because those who hate it — and its supporters who have distorted it — have made it more challenging.

It was as if they were standing before the same Agam, seeing it from two different angles, each certain they had the whole piece in view.

Perhaps the real diagnosis does not emerge from the world of art, but from the world of business. It’s about what happens when a product needs a rebrand.

For example, Crocs — the shoe that is ugly, unfashionable and still quite comfortable, beloved by people who had stopped caring what anyone thought.

Around 2017, something shifted. Crocs didn’t disguise the ugliness. The company leaned into what made it different rather than trying to look like everyone else’s sneaker. Generation Z embraced the shoe as a symbol of self-expression — clunky, unapologetic, even a little defiant. The company didn’t build a rebrand on shame. It built one on confidence in the very features that had made the brand a joke.

For some, Zionism has been the Crocs of Jewish ideologies — an embarrassment, something you explain away, something that leads to a hedging and throat clearing: “I support Israel’s right to exist, but … ” with an apology that is part of the very structure of the noun itself.

But the Crocs lesson cuts the other way. The shoe didn’t get cool by becoming a sneaker. It got cool by staying exactly what it was and finding a generation willing to wear it loud, unembarrassed, on purpose. Zionism’s relaunch may need the same logic: not a quieter, more palatable version of the idea, dressed up to avoid offense, but a louder, more confident return to what the word actually means — Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland — worn without apology, even as a provocation.

That, in the end, is what Agam knew. The fountain doesn’t need to apologize for changing shape when you walk past it. It needs you to keep walking, keep looking and refuse to mistake the discomfort of an unfamiliar angle for proof that the whole structure has failed. Bury the word, and Israel’s enemies win the argument by forfeit. Wear it instead — ugly, defiant, alive — and let the next generation decide, the way they decided about a clog, that confidence is the only rebrand that ever actually works.