Zionism For Everyone

Alana Newhouse says Zionism is for everyone. That’s a stretch.
The first problem with her essay is conceptual inflation. Once you say Milei is doing Zionism for Argentines, Modi for Indians, Lee Kuan Yew for Singaporeans, the word stops doing any real work. A concept that explains everything usually explains less than it seems.
The second problem is romanticization. Israel is unusually resilient and future-oriented in some ways, but Newhouse treats Israeli success as more unified and transferable than it is. Israel’s strengths grew from a specific history, threat environment, religious inheritance, diaspora structure, military model, and elite formation. You cannot package that and export it.
The third problem is that the essay flattens opposition. Not everyone who fixates on Zionism envies national vitality. Some carry old anti-Jewish motifs. Some push humanitarian universalism. Some work from post-colonial ideology, or domestic factional politics, or status incentives. The essay sees one big thing where there are several overlapping things.
Fourth, the historical compression is rhetorically effective but analytically loose. The story connecting postwar anti-nationalism, Soviet influence, global capitalism, digital universalism, and Western collapse has some truth in it, but it is too tidy. History is messier. The essay prefers sweeping civilizational narrative over careful distinctions.
Fifth, the essay confuses energy with wisdom. High-energy nationalism can renew a society. It can also deform one. Newhouse understands the pathology of exhausted post-nationalism far better than she understands the pathology of overheated nationalism.
Where the essay works best is in arguing that people change when they recover a sense of agency, purpose, and collective future. People do not change because someone argues them into better abstractions. They change when a new way of life becomes imaginable, honorable, and rewarded. A society shifts when its prestige structure shifts, when sacrifice becomes meaningful again, when belonging points toward a future rather than just memory or grievance.
But as an explanation of how any of that actually happens, the essay falls short. David Pinsof’s essay is sharper. He argues that people and societies move when incentive structures change.
Newhouse says they move when they recover will, dream, courage, rootedness, and future-oriented nationalism. She treats will and dream as primary movers. Pinsof argues they are usually downstream of incentives. People do not become future-oriented because someone delivers a stirring speech. They become future-oriented when institutions, prestige systems, mating markets, economic structures, security conditions, and coalition rewards favor future orientation.
The essay mistakes outputs for inputs. Take its praise of Israel. Newhouse says Israel succeeds because it has demographic vitality, military willingness, social cohesion, and a future-oriented national project. Fine. But Pinsof asks what incentive structure produces those traits. Constant external threat, dense kinship ties, religious and historical memory, strong pronatalist incentives, prestige for military service, high trust within key subgroups, institutions that reward sacrifice and competence. That is a more explanatory account.
Same with the criticism of Western elites. The essay says they lost faith in nationhood and embraced post-nationalism, borderlessness, and abstraction. Pinsof asks why. What did they gain? Status in elite institutions, moral prestige, cheap labor for business, lower friction for global capital, career advancement through universalist rhetoric, coalition solidarity among NGOs, academia, media, and managerial elites. Pinsof gives you machinery. Newhouse gives you lamentation.
That is the central weakness. The essay moralizes where Pinsof mechanizes.
On anti-Zionism, Newhouse implies it surged because Israel exposes the failure of other nations and provokes envy. There is something to that. But Pinsof maps the incentives. Anti-Zionism delivers status in universities, media, activist networks, online youth culture, some immigrant communities, and parts of right-populist spaces. It works as coalition glue. It lets people signal anti-elite authenticity, anti-colonial virtue, or anti-globalist independence depending on the audience. That is more precise than envy.
On nationalism, Newhouse treats future-oriented nationalism as civilizational medicine. Pinsof says nationalism works when it aligns incentives toward cooperation, sacrifice, fertility, defense, and trust. It fails when it becomes a status costume, a grift, or a nostalgia product. He is far less likely to romanticize nationalism as such.
On leaders, Newhouse puts heavy weight on figures like Milei, Modi, Lee Kuan Yew. Pinsof would downgrade the great-man emphasis and ask what coalitions, institutional openings, crises, and reward structures made those leaders viable. He would not deny that leadership matters, but he resists turning leaders into magical agents of renewal.
On words: the essay is itself an example of what Pinsof critiques. It assumes that giving people the right narrative about Zionism, nationalism, and the future can help reorient society. Pinsof’s point is harsher. Words matter only when people are already incentivized to hear them, repeat them, and act on them. Otherwise they are elegant noise.
The essay does fit Pinsof in one respect. It understands that people need collective projects, prestige, and belonging. It grasps that a society cannot run on abstract procedure alone. It senses that when people lose attachment, fertility, confidence, and willingness to sacrifice, something deep has gone wrong. Pinsof agrees with the diagnosis of decay. He just insists that decay is not fixed by exhortation. It is fixed by redesigning incentives.
Newhouse describes what a healthy society feels like. Pinsof explains how one is made.
If the question is which essay better explains how attitudes toward Israel and Jews might change, Pinsof wins. People will not become more favorable because they are persuaded that Zionism is spiritually beautiful. They will become more favorable when admiration for Jewish and Israeli competence, solidarity, and nationhood becomes socially rewarding in their coalition, and hostility becomes costly or low-status.
Newhouse says people need a dream. Pinsof says yes, but people only buy into dreams when the incentive structure makes the dream pay.