My Herzl Moment

Like most American Jews, I was raised to be an achievement machine, to stand out professionally while fitting in socially. I became a historian, intrigued by people who escaped the expectations of their goody two-shoes straitjackets to make history. Looking back, that fascination unconsciously foreshadowed my own Hineni moment—or, as I prefer to call it, my Herzl Moment: “coming out” as a Zionist activist in April 2001.

My first undergraduate paper explored the silence of American Jews during the early 1940s, as news about the Holocaust started filtering in from Europe. That project inspired my Harvard senior thesis about Ben Hecht, the highly assimilated novelist, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter, whose rewrites helped rescueGone with the Wind. Experiencing his own Hineni moment in the 1930s, Hecht broke the mold. Long disconnected from Judaism, he became a sharp-tongued and indefatigable activist upon learning how the Nazis were demonizing and annihilating his people. By 1942, Hecht was publicizing the Nazi mass murders of European Jewry. Later, he fought hard to help establish the State of Israel.

The more I studied history, the more I found myself drawn to people whose lives were transformed by moments like these. In graduate school, my seminar paper described how Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolinian, finally broke with Great Britain after the Boston Massacre, went on to succeed John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress, and ultimately lost both his son and his home during the American Revolution. Years later, while writing my book Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism, I studied another reluctant advocate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. This liberal, Irish-Catholic, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations experienced his Herzl moment in 1975. Moynihan spearheaded America’s fight against the Soviet and Palestinian effort to humiliate the United States by demonizing Israel, using a forum of nation-states to single out Zionism as “racist.” I didn’t know it then, but I kept writing about the same kind of turning-point: the moment an ordinary life becomes a public one.

Eventually, I had the opportunity to tell one of these stories together with the person who had lived it: In 2020, I co-wrote Never Alone with Natan Sharansky, about his persecution by Soviet anti-Semites following Israel’s decisive victory in the 1967 Six Day War. Overnight, they stopped mocking him as a weakling and began denouncing him as a bully. Learning that the mere existence of a Jewish state 2,200 miles away could so profoundly affect his life in Soviet Russia, Sharansky was inspired to dedicate himself to activism. Having started fighting for his freedom only once he discovered his identity, Sharansky embodies the Zionist idea, that a meaningful life comes from being rooted enough to defend your freedom and free enough to appreciate your roots—even if doing so costs you nine years in a Soviet Gulag.

Branding these pivots “Herzl Moments” honors Theodor Herzl, the assimilated Austro-Hungarian Jew whose own awakening gave birth to modern Zionism. Though Jew hatred haunted Herzl long before the 1894 Alfred Dreyfus trial convinced him that Jews needed their own nation-state, his life changed in 1895 when he emerged as a Zionist. While many scoffed at the notion that the homeless, powerless Jews could ever rebuild a state of their own, Herzl stood his ground, warning, as he did to a skeptic that year, that “where the Jewish cause is concerned I am not to be trifled with.” Accused of being detached from reality, Herzl insisted that standing idly by and watching when your house is burning down, “is certainly more insane than to rush up with a modern fire engine.” From that moment on, Herzl was no longer merely describing the Jewish condition. He was trying to change it.

While raised to be a passionate Zionist caring deeply about Israel, I enjoyed living the American Jewish ideal: being Jewish at home and American on the street. Proudly Jewish, I nonetheless loved my neutral name—inherited thanks to my father’s choice to perform an “ansky-ectomy” on his own last name, Troyansky. As “Gil Troy” I passed. I felt normal, all-American. Graduating with a Ph.D. from a Harvard embarrassed by its history of anti-Semitism, by 1999, I was already a full professor at McGill University, back when Canada was delightfully boring, polite, and decent. Whenever Jewish students sheepishly explained they would have to miss class for Passover or the High Holy Days, I wished them “happy holiday” in Hebrew. I enjoyed surprising them with my own Jewish identity, while—wink-wink—letting them know they belonged.

Academia’s woke anti-Zionist mania, however, doomed that life. There I was—minding my own business, happily married, raising a family, building my academic career—when, in September 2000, Yasser Arafat led the Palestinian national movement away from negotiations and back toward terrorism. Even then, as my Israeli friends were dealing with suicide bombers blowing up cafes, buses, and shopping malls, the world—including many of my colleagues—blamed Israel. Academics, capable of making anything complicated, suddenly could do no better than spout silly slogans about Israeli apartheid and Zionism as racism. Such hard-hearted soft-headedness shattered my covenant with academia. How could I remain silent while my people were once again under attack?

Rejecting the negativity, I submitted an op-ed to The Montreal Gazette marking Yom Ha’atzmaut—Israeli Independence Day, in April 2001. Titled “Why I am a Zionist,” it was not a response to the scourge of Palestinian terrorism, but a celebration of Zionism itself as an anchoring, inspiring identity. Line after line started with the refrain, “I am a Zionist because…” The conclusion must have resonated deeply with Jewish Montrealers, who emblazoned it on posters thousands of them waved during their annual “March to Jerusalem” two months later. I proclaimed: “A century ago, Zionism revived pride in the label ‘Jew’; today, Jews must revive pride in the label ‘Zionist.’” Just 800 words long, that article changed the course of my life. It was my own Herzl moment. 

Though I remain an American historian, I’ve become a Zionist activist too. Viewed as a broad, welcoming peoplehood platform, Zionism fuses the excitement of returning to our roots in our homeland and our traditional sense of community, with our old-new mission to show the world what a healthy expression of liberal democratic nationalism looks like. As Zionists, we learn from the past, keep building and being rebuilt in the present, while never, ever, stopping to dream about an even better future.

Six years after publishing that op-ed, my wife, four kids, and I took a sabbatical in Jerusalem and never looked back. Jokingly referring to our decision to stay as “the world’s longest sabbatical,” I avoided the fate of becoming a swivel-headed academic, forever looking over my shoulder, wondering what my colleagues might say about me. Instead, I allowed myself to embrace the kind of envy the Talmud praises—the kind that urges you to follow in your heroes’ footsteps. In the process, I’ve discovered who I am, where I stand, and what I stand for. 

Here I am. 

Hineni.