When Rabbi Brant Rosen helped to found congregation Tzedek-Chicago in 2015, it was the country’s first explicitly “non-Zionist” temple, outside of the ultraorthodox community. In just a few short years, Tzedek, Hebrew for “justice,” seems to have galvanized a movement: there are now over a dozen temples and havurot that have at least opened their doors to critics of Zionism — even if Tzedek-Chicago remains the only one with an explicitly non-Zionist charter.

Tzedek-Chicago describes itself as an “intentional” community, aligning its spiritual and communal practice around “core values” which include a rejection of borders, an emphasis on solidarity as a foundational Jewish practice, and perhaps most controversially, a rejection of the “the fusing of Judaism with political nationalism” and an open acknowledgment “that the creation of an ethnic Jewish nation state in historic Palestine resulted in an injustice against the Palestinian people.” Tzedek-Chicago flatly rejects “any ideology that insists upon exclusive Jewish entitlement to the land.”

That Zionism should come to define American Jewish life was not historically inevitable. Up to a generation ago, that any temple would need to declare itself non-Zionist would be superfluous, to say nothing of the marginality of Zionism in American life before Israel’s founding. The American Jewish Committee (AJC), the largest Reform Judaism organization in the United States, continued to reject a Jewish state in historic Palestine up through the 1960s, and many on the secular Jewish left at the time, from Jewish members of Students for a Democratic Society to the socialist Jewish fraternal order, the Workman’s Circle, rejected Zionism or at most, saw it as peripheral to American Jewish life. The Six Day War and American realignment toward Israel changed all that: Zionism has become firmly entrenched in American Jewish culture from the bimah to the seder plate, and nearly every major Jewish institution regards Zionism as central to its cultural and political mission.