The Jews Are Not the Target. The West Is. Can Zionism Save It? | With Alana Newhouse
Alana Newhouse founded Tablet Magazine in 2009 and has spent the years since arguing that the things holding modern life together have quietly come apart. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" gave that condition a name — flatness — and her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" turned the diagnosis outward: Zionism, she argues, is not a slogan or a grievance but a technology for national renewal, and the reason it enrages people has less to do with Jews than with what its success implies about everybody else.
Ben Chertoff sits down with her for a conversation that runs from why Gen Z readers demanded a print edition, to the line about envy that lit up Jewish Twitter, to whether the word "Zionism" should be retired, to what she'd tell a 25-year-old journalist trying to build something real in a collapsing media landscape.
Her answer to the last one is the same as her answer to the first: figure out what is distinct about you, build a vision around it, and jam on it every single day.
Alana Newhouse is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, which she launched in 2009 and which relaunched in print in 2025 on the strength of demand from its youngest readers. She grew up in Lawrence, New York, and was educated at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, Barnard College, and the Columbia Journalism School. Before Tablet she covered religion and then edited the culture section at The Forward, and edited Nextbook. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" introduced the idea of flatness and gave rise to what's since been called brokenism; her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" argues that Zionism is a technology of national renewal available to any people willing to use it.
Alana Newhouse is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, which she launched in 2009 and which relaunched in print in 2025 on the strength of demand from its youngest readers. She grew up in Lawrence, New York, and was educated at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, Barnard College, and the Columbia Journalism School. Before Tablet she covered religion and then edited the culture section at The Forward, and edited Nextbook. Her 2021 essay "Everything Is Broken" introduced the idea of flatness and gave rise to what's since been called brokenism; her March 2026 essay "Zionism for Everyone" argues that Zionism is a technology of national renewal available to any people willing to use it.
- Zionism is a technology, not a slogan. Newhouse's argument is functional, not sentimental: national renewal requires distinctiveness, a vision of the future, and ruthless pragmatism about getting there. Israel has all three, which is why it works — and why watching it work is unbearable for societies that have discarded all three.
- Antisemitism is a symptom of a sick society, not a freestanding disease.When you ask what someone is actually feeling when they say Jews kill babies, she argues, what you find underneath is envy — and envy points at a lack in the person feeling it.
- The fight is not really about the Jews. "The target here is the West. We are just in the way." The Jewish state is the first line of defense in an argument about whether any people is entitled to be particular.
- Retiring the word "Zionism" would be a mistake. Against the argument that the term is a liability, she holds that it is not a marketing choice picked up recently and discardable now — it names something real and old.
- Flatness is the underlying condition. The 2021 essay's diagnosis — systems optimized until all friction and texture are gone — is the same diagnosis she applies to nations that have sanded off their own distinctiveness. October 7, in her reading, was the shock that broke a lot of people out of it.
- Diasporism is a costume. The revival of Bundist doikayt on the Jewish left is not, in her view, a Jewish argument at all — it's a Jewish door into an ideology the arguer already wanted.
- The media collapse is an opening, not an ending. Legacy institutions are losing their monopoly, independents are inheriting the audience, and the two sets of norms are merging. She builds tools for the people who will do the work — "I make pens for creative people."
- The method scales down to one person. Everything she says about nations she means about individuals: know what is distinct about you, build a vision around it, and show up to it daily.
Links
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🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-take/id1896315802
Guest:
• Tablet Magazine — https://www.tabletmag.com
• "Zionism for Everyone," Alana Newhouse, Tablet, March 2026 — https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/zionism-for-everyone
• "Everything Is Broken," Alana Newhouse, Tablet, January 14, 2021 — https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken
• Alana Newhouse on 18Forty — https://18forty.org/podcast/alana-newhouse/
• Alana Newhouse on The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum — https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/p/alana-newhouse-flatness-broken-systems-tablet-magazine
Referenced in this episode:
• Daniel Gordis's response to "Zionism for Everyone" — https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-think-israelis-would-have-a-hard
• Irwin Kula's response, via Shaul Magid — https://shaulmagid.substack.com/p/irwin-kulas-response-to-alana-newhouse
• "Is jealousy the root of anti-Zionism?", Jerusalem Post — https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-893186
• Gil Troy on the argument for retiring "Zionism," Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2026 — https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-899675
• Columbia Journalism Review on the American Jewish press after October 7, January 2025 — https://www.cjr.org/world/front-row-seat-polarization-american-jewish-press-october-7-hamas-israel-zionist-coverage.php
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