July 13, 2026

The Word Zionism Is Dead: From the start, it’s meant too many things. It’s time to move on. (Nadine Epstein, Mar 18, 2026, Moment)

I am editor-in-chief of a magazine with a great Jewish legacy, and I have never once in my life used the terms Zionist or anti-Zionist to describe myself or anyone else. Why? When I use a word, I want to know where it’s been and how it’s going to be understood, and with anything Zionism-related, that’s a nearly impossible task.

And so I am going to propose something that may sound radical. It is beyond time to strike the words Zionist and Zionism from modern political discourse and relegate them to history, where they belong. They have outlived their usefulness both as concepts and as terms. This means we must immediately cease labeling ourselves and others as Zionists and anti-Zionists, and use the word Zionism only when referring to the historical political movement. […]

If we believe in the right of people to form nations, which at this point of human development most of us do, then Zionism has long been a moot point. Given Israel’s right to exist, I would go a step further and say that the label Zionism has become outright dangerous. The use of the term by its very nature keeps the question of existence unnecessarily alive. It’s like a scab that keeps forming and reforming and never heals. The Zionist family of terms has increasingly become polarizing for the American public, and even worse, it is unnecessarily splintering the American Jewish community, all at a time of rising antisemitism. Wherever I go, and I travel in many circles, I hear the words Zionist and anti-Zionist invoked and hurled with equal God-like certainty, terrifying self-righteousness and perilous imprecision.

The American Jewish community is as mystified by the meaning of Zionist and Zionism as the broader public. Look at the 2026 survey conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America: Only one-third of American Jews said they identified as Zionist. At the same time, nearly nine out of ten said they supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.

A Zionism that does not intellectually make the case for Palestinian self-determination is not worth honoring.

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July 13, 2026

The Bookkeeping of Memory: Judgment and Justice in True Grit (LuElla D’Amico, July 13, 2026, Chgurch Life Journal)

Indeed, Mattie’s moral inheritance on the open road is one of grit—and I will pause here, as English professors are often apt to do, to invoke the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word itself. One 1874 definition, appearing almost precisely during the period in which the novel is set, defines “grit” as “coarse material such as gravel, sand, etc., that is spread on roads to improve traction.” In other words, grit is not merely toughness. It is the very thing that allows one to continue forward movement across unstable ground. What Mattie seeks throughout the novel is precisely this kind of moral traction amid grief, violence, uncertainty, and the lawlessness of the frontier. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, who vacillates morally and spiritually throughout his journey, or even Dorothy Gale, whose central longing is simply to return home, Mattie is governed above all by a stern sense of justice. She values duty, competence, self-command, and moral clarity. Her journey across the frontier is therefore not one of self-discovery so much as a continual testing of character. Thus, True Grit reimagines the American road narrative through Mattie Ross’s Stoic discipline, turning the frontier journey not into a story of self-discovery but a testing ground for justice, endurance, and moral self-governance.

Moreover, there is a chosen buoyancy to Mattie’s narration that is important to acknowledge. For all the violence of the text, True Grit is persistently comic without ever becoming silly. As American humorist Roy Blount Jr. observes, “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” And indeed, McCarthy’s roads (think Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men) usually end in apocalypse, nihilism, or at minimum a man staring silently into the void somewhere in Texas, wishing he were anywhere but in America or in existence at all. Portis’s roads, by contrast, still permit justice, laughter, and a fourteen-year-old Presbyterian girl who is somehow the most competent person in the territory, and in her own head, in the world. In classical comic terms, the world of True Grit bends not toward despair but toward restoration, of self and the reader.

July 13, 2026

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