Following the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, he became an ardent Zionist and helped establish the radical student Zionist organization Molodoy Izrail (Young Israel), and also participated in the 1902 Minsk Zionist Conference. The scholar Gennady Estraikh reports that in an early, unpublished article, Shtif "pioneered an ideological concept later employed by the Zionist Socialist Workers Party: emigration and colonization as a means of creating a Jewish proletariat, which, according to Shtif, could not exist in the repressive environment of Russia".