ABSTRACT
Like many political movements, Zionism was born in a soured romance: although inspired by modernity's quest for freedom and dignity, Jews were demoralized when modernity weaponized antisemitism instead of eliminating it. The Zionist movement's founding story demonstrates how often Zionism looks like anti-antisemitism. While seeking to eliminate Jew-hatred by freeing Jews from Jew-hating countries, Zionism wanted to free Jews from Jew-hatred's fallout too. Labor Zionism's focus on farming, unions, socialist structures, secular egalitarianism, and state-building made this stream less reactive to the haters. American Zionists understood that Zionism would now be a consensus movement uniting most Jews as partners in building the Jewish state while restoring the Jewish soul. The proximity of the Holocaust's ending in 1945 to Israel's founding in 1948 tempted Jews and non-Jews to treat Israel as "the answer" to the Holocaust, thus forever defining Zionism as the answer to antisemitism.
