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Here are a few issues I have with your comment:
>>"According to the American census, a person is Jewish if they practice the Jewish religion."
(1) Do you have a citation for this? I couldn't find any link that verifies your statement.
(2) [census.gov/library/visu…] does not separate Jews into its own ethnicity - so where did you get your "Jewish if they practice the Jewish religion" assessment?
"This report classifies approximately 5.8 million adults (2.4% of all U.S. adults) as Jewish. This includes 4.2 million (1.7%) who identify as Jewish by religion and 1.5 million Jews of no religion"
"People are categorized as “Jews of no religion” if they answer a question about their present religion by saying they are atheist, agnostic or have no religion in particular; and they say they had a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish; and they consider themselves Jewish in some way aside from religion, such as ethnically, culturally or because of their family background."
"An additional 2.8 million adults (1.1% of U.S. adults) have a Jewish background."
"An additional 200,000 identify as Jewish by religion but also identify with another religion, which excludes them from the Jewish population for the purposes of this report."
From all the above points, there seems no evidence for your claim that "a person is a Jew ONLY if they practice the Jewish religion" (there are Christian Jews, agnostic Jews, and atheist Jews not only in the US but in Israel also).
Hence, your logic for "far fewer Jews in the US than is usually recognized" falls flat. Who's doing the recognizing? Are they the "authority" on this supposed recognition?
>>"Can we just separate the religion from the political ideology, please?"
??? Don't understand the relevance of this statement in the context of my comment. My comment attempts to highlight why arriving at a concrete definition of "Jew/Jewishness" is challenging. It does not talk about Zionism (or any other political ideology)
>>"They're so good at confusing the issue so that they can hide under the radar."
How are they hiding under the radar? The issue was confusing even before the formation of the state of Israel.
Nothing in your comment refutes the historical reality around the identification of what/who a Jew/Jewish person is. I don't get what the point of your comment is. Are you suggesting everyone should use "Israel's definition of what a Jew/Jewish person is"? Why would you consider Israel to be the "de-facto" authority/arbitrator on this (or any) matter?