Two Thousand Years of Prayer: Why Zionism Cannot Be Separated from Judaism

By: Gerard Filitti

There is a word being weaponized in American public life, and the word is Zionism.

Students are being told that Zionism is a colonial ideology - a 19th-century European invention with no organic connection to Jewish identity. Activists demand that Jews sever themselves from the Zionist project as a condition of moral standing. The argument has become a credential check and virtue signal at universities, in progressive spaces, and across social media.
Two Thousand Years of Prayer makes the case that this argument is wrong - and that the evidence has been hiding in plain sight for two thousand years.

Drawing on the Jewish prayer book itself, Gerard Filitti shows that the Jewish longing for return to the land of Israel is not a modern political invention. It is the daily petition of every Jewish prayer service since the destruction of the Second Temple.
Two Thousand Years of Prayer moves from the prayer book through the medieval poets and legal codifiers, through the religious return movements that preceded Herzl by decades, through the 19th-century context of national awakenings, and through the standard tests for indigeneity and colonialism - reaching the same conclusion at every turn. Zionism did not impose itself onto Judaism. Judaism carried Zionism for two thousand years before modern times gave it a name.

Written for the curious non-Jewish reader and the Jewish reader who has never needed convincing, this is the argument that needed to be made - and the book that makes it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H1SCGRL3
• ISBN13: 9798196881107
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 44 Pages
• Weight: 0.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"