Reid Benjamin Smith

Major: Political Science

Instructor: Jennifer Johnson

Winning paper: "What Stanford Students Mean When We Say Zionism: A Research-Based Argument on Divergent Conceptual Frameworks in Campus Discourse" 

This paper features an exploratory survey research of 53 Stanford students — 29 self-identified Zionists and 24 self-identified anti-Zionists — that asks how they define the word "Zionism." The core finding is that both groups agree on a basic definition: Zionism means support for a Jewish state. Where they differ is in what they think that definition implies. Zionist respondents largely stop there while Anti-Zionists include implications of oppression towards Palestinians as fundamental to Zionism. The paper argues that this gap helps explain why campus conversations about Zionism so often talk past each other: the two sides are using the same word but operating with different definitions of what it means.