Earlier this year, I sat on a stage in central London with Scott Galloway. NYU professor, bestselling author, one of the most listened-to voices in American media. Not a religious man – he describes himself as “Jewish-ish.” Before October 7, antisemitism was not, by his own admission, really on his radar.
That night, in front of 400 people, Galloway called himself “a raging Zionist”. The room rose to its feet.
I have been thinking about that moment ever since. Not because of what Galloway said, but because of what it revealed: that the Jewish story, told with honesty and conviction, still has the power to move people. Even people who weren’t looking for it.
We need to talk about that story. Because I think we are in danger of losing it.
We are living through one of the most testing moments in Jewish life in generations. Antisemitism is rising on the right and the left. “Zionist” is thrown around as an insult on campuses and in comment sections. In the weeks after October 7, “Stand with Palestine” received 3.2 billion social media impressions. “Stand with Israel” received 340 million. Young Jews are being asked to defend themselves in environments that are often openly hostile.
And yet the deepest problem is not the algorithms. It is not the campus culture. It is not even the antisemitism, as real and terrifying as it is. The deepest problem is closer to home.
We don’t know our own story well enough.
Hebrew offers a distinction that I find myself returning to constantly. Yerusha means inheritance – something that arrives automatically, whether you are ready for it or not. Morasha means heritage – a possession that must be actively claimed, owned, lived. You can receive a yerusha in your sleep. A morasha demands that you wake up.
Somewhere along the way, we started transmitting Jewish identity as a yerusha rather than a morasha. And the results are sobering. A 2024 Boundless survey found that 42 per cent of American Jews between the ages of 18 and 40 do not know what “Zionism” means. A 2021 American Jewish Committee study found that only 16 per cent of American Jews could correctly answer a basic set of Israel-literacy questions. Of the roughly 400,000 self-identified non-Orthodox Jewish teenagers in the United States, only around 5,000 attend a Jewish high school.
I do not imagine the picture is dramatically rosier on this side of the Atlantic.
This is not a failure of commitment. That same 2024 survey found that 82 per cent of young American Jews wanted to become more knowledgeable about Judaism and Israel. The appetite is there. What is missing is the story – told in a way that makes people feel they belong inside it.
The Torah understood this from the beginning. The commandment is not to remember the Exodus, but to tell it: v’higadeta l’vincha – and you shall tell your child. The Haggadah goes further still. In every generation, each person is obliged to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt. Not their ancestors. Them.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks called this the deepest secret of Jewish survival. “By making the Israelites a nation of storytellers,” he wrote, “Moses helped turn them into a people bound by collective responsibility – to one another, to the past and future, and to God.” Storytelling, in Sacks’s reading, was not a cultural preference. It was the mechanism of Jewish continuity.
The obligation, then, is clear. We cannot raise inheritors. We must raise builders.
That means telling the Jewish story honestly – without sanitising the troubling parts or flattening the complexities into heroic highlight reels. The best stories are not perfect. They have texture, rough edges, stakes. If all we transmit is triumph, people don’t trust it. If all we transmit is tragedy, people don’t want to be part of it. But if we tell the actual story – miracles and their costs, conviction and doubt, the full arc – people are drawn to it. The contradictions don’t cancel each other out. They make the story true. They make it ours.
It also means resisting the temptation to reduce Jewish identity to a posture of defence. We are organising, mobilising, uniting – but too often around what we are against. Rabbi Soloveitchik said it decades ago: Judaism was not created to fight antisemitism. Barry Finestone of the Jim Joseph Foundation put it with searing clarity: “The outside forces are always going to be larger than us. We can’t control them. But the inside – that’s ours to build.”
We cannot control how others feel about us. We can control whether our children know who they are.
Scott Galloway is right that the arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers. The Jewish story is extraordinary. The audience, I believe, is hungrier than we sometimes dare to hope.
The job now is to tell it well.
Noam Weissman, who holds a doctorate in education focused on how Israel is taught, hosts the podcast ‘Unpacking Israeli History’ and is executive vice president of OpenDor Media. The JC has today launched an collaboration with OpenDor Media.
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