“My sense is that they believe that events are proving they were right all along,” Jonathan D. Sarna, a historian at Brandeis University and author of the seminal book “American Judaism,” said in a telephone interview. “Everything they prophesied  dual loyalty, nationalism being evil  has come to pass.”

Image Stephen Naman, president of the American Council for Judaism, which was formed in 1942. Credit... Lori Moffett for The New York Times

“I would be surprised if vast numbers of people moved over to the A.C.J. as an organization because of its reputation,” he continued. “But it’s certainly the case that if the Holocaust underscored the problems of Jewish life in the diaspora, recent years have highlighted the point that Zionism is no panacea.”

Mr. Naman grew up in a Texas family deeply involved in the council, and as a result he has lived through the swings of the political pendulum.

“We were ostracized and maligned,” he said. “But we felt back then, and we feel now, that our positions are credible. They’ve been justified and substantiated by what has occurred.”

On that matter, to put it mildly, there is disagreement. If American Zionists who oppose the West Bank occupation face withering criticism from the conservative part of American Jewry, which has tended to dominate the major communal and lobbying groups, then the unapologetic foes of Zionism in the council are met with apoplexy and indignation.

The rejection of Zion, though, goes back to the Torah itself, with its accounts of the Hebrews’ rebelling against Moses on the journey toward the Promised Land and pleading to return to Egypt. Until Theodore Herzl created the modern Zionist movement early in the 20th century, the biblical injunction to return to Israel was widely understood as a theological construct rather than a pragmatic instruction.

Most Orthodox Jewish leaders before the Holocaust rejected Zionism, saying the exile was a divine punishment and Israel could be restored only in the messianic age. The Reform movement maintained that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality.