A Slow-Moving Coup: Zionism's authoritarian takeover of Reform Judaism

At its 2026 gathering, the Recharging Reform Judaism conference passed a resolution demanding that HUC-JIR, the seminary of the Reform movement, stop admitting and ordaining anti-Zionists. The core intention of the conference is to assert a new enforced boundary for the Reform Movement overall: a commitment to Jewish peoplehood and to Zionism as the measure of Jewish acceptability. This organized insurgency has one goal: supersessionism - Reform Zionism swallowing Reform Judaism whole.

This is the continuation of a decades-long project of authoritarian, anti-democratic takeover within the institutions of the Reform Movement, and the pursuit of one family’s personal crusade. Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, who convened the gathering, is the son of Rabbi Richard Hirsch, who dedicated his rabbinate to tying the Reform movement to the Zionist project. The elder Hirsch set the Joint Commission on Israel in motion after 1967, pushing the movement into the World Zionist Organization, and moving the World Union for Progressive Judaism to Jerusalem. Ammiel has spent the heart of his career doing the same work, directing the Association of Reform Zionists of America from 1992 to 2004 and chairing the committee behind the 1997 platform, a document he said was meant to “entirely usurp and overturn Reform’s historical record on Zionism.”[1]

The Recharging conference is the next chapter of that multi-generational project, and a defensive one. Despite the large amounts of capital flowing to support it, it has not been and is not widely popular. By 2001 only about a fifth of self-identified Reform Jews felt strongly attached to Israel.[1] A poll released in May 2026 by the Jewish Voter Resource Center found that a clear majority of non-Orthodox Jews under thirty-five support a binational state. Support for one state among Jewish adults has nearly doubled in two years, and by the Jewish Federations’ own data only thirty-seven percent of American Jews now call themselves Zionists.[2] What is presenting itself as a bold new movement is a son’s attempt, perhaps the last, to preserve a father’s legacy against its own decline.

The Reform Movement’s original turn towards Zionism, which predates the Hirsch family crusade by two decades, was an engineered anti-democratic putsch. It did not reflect a popular movement for change from within the membership, but instead was organized by an outnumbered group seeking to force the movement to accept Zionism in spite of its unpopularity. When the Central Conference of American Rabbis voted on the Columbus Platform of 1937, which committed the organization to building Palestine as a Jewish homeland and reversed the Pittsburgh Platform’s rejection of Jewish nationhood, it carried only on the tie-breaking vote of a Zionist conference president. The historian Howard Greenstein calls the result a coup d’etat by a Zionist minority that manipulated the erstwhile democratic proceedings to get its way.[3] The insurgent Zionist group continued this tactic five years later. As Thomas Kolsky’s history of the American Council for Judaism documents, the 1942 resolution endorsing a Jewish army in Palestine broke the Reform rabbinate’s standing truce on Zionism. It was brought to the floor after most of the two hundred and thirty-six delegates had gone home, and was carried by a vote of sixty-four to thirty-eight.[4] The cynical autocratic maneuvering of the Zionist rabbis led to the formal encoding of Zionism in Reform Judaism by anti-democratic means.

Decades later, Richard Hirsch affiliated the international Reform institution, the World Union for Progressive Judaism, with the World Zionist Organization. The American Reform movement followed the lead by moving to create the Association of Reform Zionists of America. The committee to create the organization was appointed from above rather than elected, and the rabbis and lay leaders who would have contested the move were shut out from the start. Roland Gittelsohn, the affiliate’s founding president, conceded, “Their exclusion was both deliberate and legitimate. The debate on Zionism within Reform Judaism had long since concluded.” The organizers then went around a vote of the full Union Biennial to immediately affiliate the Association of Reform Zionists of America with the WZO.[5] The announced consensus had been manufactured by the people announcing it.

The processes of engineering false consensus in the movement’s institutions sought to "usurp" the historic foundations of Reform Judaism, a stated by Hirsch above. The replacement ideology was a blood and soil Jewishness rooted in an ethno-national myth - peoplehood. “Peoplehood” emerged in World War II America to reconcile Zionist nationalism with diasporic existence, particularly in the face of the likes of David Ben Gurion claiming that one can not remain in the diaspora and be a Zionist. Rabbis Mordecai Kaplan and Stephen Wise articulated this concept that flattened the diverse Jewish ecosystem into a nationalist monoculture glued together by ideological support for Zionism.[6] Rabbi Dr. Eugene Borowitz reinforced the turn in his 1976 CCAR platform asserting peoplehood and “the Jewish Homeland” as core elements of Reform Judaism. He further elaborated the theological shift in his book Renewing the Covenant, suggesting that Israel’s 1967 war “made evident what the Holocaust had made us doubt: That the Covenant between God and the people of Israel continues in full force.“[7] Richard Hirsch and his compatriots institutionalized that theology, and it is  now champing at the bit to be the exclusive ideology at the heart of the Reform Movement: Reform Zionism.

During the recent Recharging Reform Conference, Andrew Rehfeld, HUC-JIR's president, tried to hold the middle. He declared the seminary a proud Zionist institution that believes in Israel’s right to exist. He also refused to make anti-Zionism a bar to ordination, calling such a move Jewish McCarthyism. The resolution’s defenders answer that the seminary would not ordain someone who rejected the dignity of LGBTQ Jews, so Zionism should be no different. The faultiness of this parallel is laughable. Refusing to ordain those who would deny LGBTQ people their dignity protects those LGBTQ people inside the community. Refusing to ordain those who question Jewish nationalism enforces loyalty to a state as sacrosanct. One guards the vulnerable; the other guards power. But both the demand to exclude and the offer to merely tolerate still treat the anti-nationalist position as a deviation, and a negative one at that, when it is the movement’s own founding principles.

If we look back to the time of this takeover, we see its opponent ideology has always been a Torah of solidarity. The ACJ’s founders wrote, in the height of Nazi antisemitism, that no single people or group can hope to live in freedom and security when their neighbors are in the grip of evil force, and that the problems of Jews constitute no exception to that rule.[8] Jews, like any other people, can not be separated from the contexts in which we live. They called for a democratic Palestine of shared government and equal citizenship for Palestinians and Jews, and rejected an exclusively Jewish state as an undemocratic betrayal of Judaism’s universal calling.[9]

This tradition of solidaristic Judaism, well predating the ACJ, produced teachers the Hirsch litmus test would officially ban. The rabbis who built the primary institutions of American Reform Judaism, like Isaac Mayer Wise, David Einhorn, Samuel Adler, and Kauffman Kohler, patriarchs of the Reform Rabbinate, as well as later leaders like Rabbis Judah Magnes, who sought a bi-national state, and Elmer Berger, who sought a fully democratic state, would be deemed unfit. It would, of course, also bar their heirs today.

Classical Reform theology asserts that the kingdom of God is built by human hands, here on earth, towards the remaking of human society on new foundations of social justice. They did not reach this by liberal sentiment, but through core sources of Jewish tradition, from Hillel’s whole-Torah-on-one-foot to Rabbi Simlai’s teaching that the Torah begins and ends with lovingkindness. From the mitzvah to leave gleanings, to the system of the Jubilee. From the story of Exodus, to the commandments it generates to not wrong the stranger. The Jewish particularity of Torah guides these matters as the form through which the work is done, but the goal is universal.

The Torah is the source code for that work, and, read on its own terms, it is an abolitionist tradition. The thing that connects Jews worldwide is this Torah of solidarity, not blood, a flag, or a government. It is wide enough to contain opposing voices and still choose one for any particular context; It is a work in progress, revealed continuously, through the work done in conjunction with our neighbors and our mission in the world to bring about, through human effort, a world founded on social justice for all people. How this looks in practice, how Abolition Judaism reshapes a holiday, a liturgy, a community’s actual obligations, is work I have begun elsewhere, with Dania Rajendra in our TruthOut pieces on Yom Kippur[10] and Shavuot[11], as well as in my essay on Judaism Beyond Nationalism for Rosh haShanah[12].

The Recharging Reform conference paves the way to a movement organized solely around defense of a state and its nationalism. This type of movement is policed by donors, and measured by who it keeps out. The road the founders of Reform Judaism actually laid leads toward a community organized around the obligation to build a better, more just world for everyone in it, without exception of lineage, citizenship, or creed. Zionism may be one mode of Judaism. It is neither the only one nor an integral one, and we are watching its outcomes precipitate in real time. It is now the choice of those at the helm of the Reform Movement to choose: Will your future be Reform Judaism, rooted in our highest aspirations, or Reform Zionism, which is seeking to expel all other commitments?

Notes
1. Michael Satz, A History of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, https://arza.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/History-of-ARZA-thesis-MIchael-Satz.pdf

2. Arno Rosenfeld, The Forward, May 27, 2026, https://forward.com/news/827329/poll-american-jews-binational-state-anti-zionism/

3. Howard R. Greenstein, Turning Point: Zionism and Reform Judaism, p. 30.

4. Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

5. Satz.

6. Noam Pianko, Peoplehood: An American Innovation, and Magid, “Judaism Is a Map, Not a GPS,” https://arcmag.org/judaism-is-a-map-not-a-gps/

7. Eugene B. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant, pp. 44-45.

8. American Council for Judaism, founding statement of principles, 1942, https://www.jta.org/archive/non-zionists-rabbis-issue-statement-of-principles-define-attitude-to-palestine

9. Kolsky.

10. https://truthout.org/articles/during-the-high-holidays-this-year-we-are-reaching-toward-an-abolition-judaism/

11. https://truthout.org/articles/jewish-holiday-of-shavuot-links-economic-justice-with-expanding-social-freedom/

12. https://religionnews.com/2025/09/23/rosh-hashana-helps-us-envision-a-judaism-beyond-nationalism/