What Does Zionism Mean to Canadian Jews? A Longitudinal Study of Semantic Drift
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A late summer 2024 web panel survey of 588 Canadian Jews found that 49 percent of respondents do not identify as Zionists. Anti-Zionists rejoiced that rejection of Zionism is widespread in the Jewish community. Zionists took comfort from the same survey’s finding that 94 percent of Canadian Jews said they support the existence of a Jewish state in Israel. Many observers were puzzled over how both findings could be accurate at the same time. This paper begins to address that issue. It is based mainly on a January 2025 follow-up survey of 332 of the original respondents. The follow-up finds evidence that refusal to label oneself a Zionist is largely due to the increasingly negative connotation of the word Zionism—what linguists call “semantic drift.” This paper also finds that just 1 percent of Canadian Jews (4 percent of those who reject the Zionist label) say they are anti-Zionists.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".