What Does Zionism Mean to Canadian Jews? A Longitudinal Study of Semantic Drift
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-0925.40487Keywords:
Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Canadian ZionismAbstract
A late summer 2024 web panel survey of 588 Canadian Jews found that 49 percent of respondents do not identify as Zionists. Anti-Zionists rejoiced that rejection of Zionism is widespread in the Jewish community. Zionists took comfort from the same survey’s finding that 94 percent of Canadian Jews said they support the existence of a Jewish state in Israel. Many observers were puzzled over how both findings could be accurate at the same time. This paper begins to address that issue. It is based mainly on a January 2025 follow-up survey of 332 of the original respondents. The follow-up finds evidence that refusal to label oneself a Zionist is largely due to the increasingly negative connotation of the word Zionism—what linguists call “semantic drift.” This paper also finds that just 1 percent of Canadian Jews (4 percent of those who reject the Zionist label) say they are anti-Zionists.
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Canadian Jewish Studies/ Études juives canadiennes is a journal dedicated to the open exchange of information; therefore the author agrees that the work published in the journal be made available to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 Unported License. The publisher (Association for Canadian Jewish Studies / Association d'études juives canadiennes) recognizes the author's intellectual property rights; authors retain copyright over their work. The author grants the publisher first serial publication rights and the non-exclusive right to mount, preserve, and distribute the intellectual property. The journal is digitized and published on the open access website http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/cjs/index.
