Is Zionism Supersessionism Part III: What Happened to Judaism?

“The Zionist Revolution has changed history and reinvented Judaism” Yossi Shain, The Israeli Century

In this essay, I want to continue my previous discussions in “Is Zionism Supersessionism” Parts 1 and 2 that engaged Yaakov Yadgar’s thesis in his recent book To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism. In Part I (you can read it on my Substack page) I mapped out the general parameters of Yadgar’s thesis as using the category of supersessionism to adjudicate the complex relationship between Zionism and Judaism. The complexity, and precariousness, of this relationship was already noted by Arthur Hertzberg in his 1959 Introduction to his The Zionist Idea. Yadgar cites it this way,