The good news is that nine in 10 American Jews are Zionists. The bad news is that only a third of American Jews say they’re Zionists.

The data come from a survey by the Jewish Federations of North America, whose chief impact officer, Mimi Kravetz, recently wrote in JTA that the seeming contradiction comes down to “how Jews today understand what the term ‘Zionism’ means.”

According to Kravetz: “Only about a third of Jews believe that the definition of Zionism stops at Jewish self-determination. Many believe the term also means supporting the policies, decisions, and actions of the Israeli government, including actions they strongly disagree with. Others believe it entails claiming exclusive Jewish rights to the West Bank and/or Gaza, endorsing inequality between Jews and Palestinians, or embracing specific political ideologies.”

In other words, a great many Zionists don’t know they’re Zionists. Kravetz says that when you ask the specific question of whether they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, most everyone says yes. That, of course, makes them Zionists. The bloated interpretations of Zionism are more often than not the result of anti-Zionist projection.

Is this as bad as it sounds? It is. There’s an argument to be made, but it should be discarded, that the important thing is that American Jews are Zionists by definition regardless of what they call it in various peer settings. Jews are a minority, and the foundational biases against Israel in the media and academia mean that anti-Zionists have a built-in advantage in shaping narratives, so they can expect to be outvoted in such debates. And while anti-Zionism is rigidly enforced in progressive institutions, it is not, by and large, colonizing the minds of Jews: 70 percent said they felt emotionally attached to Israel, according to JFNA.

Further, says Kravetz, the Jewish world’s actions during the war correspond with the more optimistic numbers in the survey: “Across differences in politics and ideology, Jews came together to advocate for the release of the hostages, support their families, and stand with Israelis in moments of profound grief and uncertainty. That shared commitment did not require uniformity or the suspension of concerns — only a willingness to act together around what people broadly agreed on: Israel’s future and care for its people.”

But there are two ways to understand the self-identification disparity, and neither should be sugarcoated. The first is that, in the public debate over the term “Zionism,” the truth is getting clobbered and even Zionists don’t know what Zionism is anymore. The second is that Jews know they’re Zionists but don’t want to say so.

That this is “bad for the Jews” strikes me as obvious—both options show that anti-Semitism is surging, just to different degrees. A crisis of self-identification, furthermore, is necessarily a crisis of self-education. Every Jewish institution in the country should be asking itself what it is doing to reverse the plummeting understanding of Zionism in America.

I think we also should acknowledge that such trends are catastrophic for wider American society—as they would be for any society. America is historically a Zionistic nation—unusually so, when compared to the rest of the world. Further, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism are correlated: All you have to do is listen to the self-proclaimed anti-Zionists talk about America and you will hear a plain hatred for the United States as well. Why should Americans concede the intellectual playing field to those who fervently hate it and call for its destruction?

One more point: If most Jews know they are Zionists but say otherwise in public, the anti-Zionists have succeeded in pushing the truth underground. Again, these anti-Zionists continue to set the terms of the debate in America’s educational institutions, which means both Jews and non-Jews are being taught to “speak Bolshevik,” as scholars of Soviet authoritarianism like Stephen Kotkin have termed it. In such an atmosphere, self-preservation requires following a very specific speech code, one that penalizes honesty and the pursuit of truth.

That isn’t a problem that only Jews should care about. Yet again the Jews are an early warning system that society ignores at its peril.