We have the world’s greatest story — let’s tell it like it is

The Jewish world is awash in data. We know the statistics on antisemitism. We know the surveys on affiliation and disengagement. We know the studies about Jewish illiteracy, polarisation, loneliness, younger Jews’ alienation from institutions, older Jews’ anxiety about “continuity.”

We know quite a lot about the condition of contemporary Jewish life. And yet something fundamental is missing. An inescapable feeling that all this data,
as important as it is, does not tell us who we are.

That thought came back to me forcefully during a recent event I hosted in London
with Scott Galloway — NYU professor, business tycoon, bestselling author, podcaster with millions of followers. He’s the only public intellectual I know equally at home analysing markets and masculinity, covering complicated subjects with adroit skill and precision and without making it feel like homework. He’s also a master storyteller.

At the event, Galloway argued that if he could give young people one skill above all others, it would be storytelling. Forget coding, finance, AI. Storytelling is where it’s at. And the reason this struck me so deeply is that it’s something I’ve always believed holds the key to the Jewish future.

For Jews, storytelling is a foundational part of identity. It’s how we connect, how we remember, how we belong. And how we continue. The Torah commands us explicitly — “And you shall tell your child on that day.” That’s not a side note. That’s the whole assignment. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it simply: the great questions of human existence — who are we, why are we here, what is our task — are best answered by telling a story.

We are living in a moment when many Jews feel the weight of belonging, but not
always the substance of it. They know they care. They have vibes, nostalgia, inherited anxiety, communal loyalty — but their attachment is often stronger than their understanding. They’re not entirely sure what they’re a part of. They’re missing their story.

And when people do not know their story, two things happen. First, other people tell it for them. Second, they stop knowing who they are within it.

That’s what worries me most. The hostility from outside is alarming and must be
countered. But it’s the rootlessness on the inside that poses the real existential threat.

Rootlessness leads to disengagement. Disengagement leads to attrition. Identity
doesn’t disappear in some dramatic blaze. It erodes gradually, through uncertainty.
There is only one way to counter that drift. With a cracking story. Fortunately, we have one.

Jews have one of the oldest, richest, most generative stories in human history — one that goes well beyond a lachrymose tale of persecution and survival. It’s the story of a tiny people who altered the moral imagination of humanity. A people who taught the world that history is not an endless cycle but a drama with direction. That human beings are not prisoners of fate but moral agents, endowed with freedom and charged with responsibility. That every person carries Divine dignity. That power must answer to justice, and justice be suffused with compassion.

It’s the story of a people who, through the Torah, enshrined the categories that
shaped Western civilisation: covenant, conscience, responsibility, redemption, rest,
collective hope. It is also the story of a people who, across centuries of exile and vulnerability, refused to disappear — who insistently created: law in Babylon, poetry in Spain, philosophy in Cordoba, mysticism in Safed, commentary everywhere. Who carried, in Heinrich Heine’s phrase, a “portable homeland” in sacred words, rituals, arguments, songs, and obligations.

And then, in one of the most astonishing acts of collective return in human history,
came back to rebuild a shared national home in the land from which that story first
emerged.

Yes, it is a story of tears. But it is also a story of grandeur. Moral ambition, spiritual daring, intellectual restlessness, communal resilience, world-shaping purpose. A story big enough to humble us, heal us, challenge us. And it is ours to tell.

But we must tell it transparently, without airbrushing. We must tell the unvarnished truth: about what we have built and what we have suffered, what we have contributed and what we have inflicted, what we have gotten right and what we have sometimes gotten painfully wrong.

That means knowing Deir Yassin and Kfar Qasim and the Lavon Affair with the same fluency we know the Declaration of Independence and the Six Day War and Entebbe. We cannot let the Hasan Pikers and Tucker Carlsons of the world tell our story for us — and we cannot counter their half-truths with our own carefully curated half-truths either. That isn’t education. That’s a different kind of propaganda.

There is a teaching in Pirkei Avot — da mah l’hashiv l’apikoros, “know what to
respond to the heretic.” The Tiferet Yisrael, a great 19th-century German rabbi, has a piercing reading of this. He says the Mishnah is not commanding you to respond. It is commanding you to know. Because if the person attacking your story understands it better than you do, you are already in trouble. You don’t need to argue. But you do need to know.

Too often, we don’t. A 2024 survey found that 42% of young American Jews do not know what “Zionism” means. A study by the American Jewish Committee found that only 16% of American Jews could answer a small set of basic Israel-literacy questions correctly. And here’s a number that should stop us cold: of roughly 400,000 self-identified non-Orthodox Jewish teenagers in the United States, only about 5,000 attend a Jewish high school. In a world shaped by slogans, propaganda, and algorithmic distortion, that is a dangerous place to be.

This is one of my big frustrations with how parts of the Jewish world have responded to this moment. We oscillate between PR and panic. We reduce Israel education to defence mode — explain the war, rebut the accusation, get the infographic. And we reduce Jewish identity to trauma, as if the whole story is: they hated us, they hate us, they’ll hate us again, now please pass the fried fish.

Hasbara is not a good education. It is defensive, it is on the back foot, and it is
fighting indoctrination with indoctrination. It may help you survive one campus
conversation. It will not help you build a life. You cannot Amazon Prime Jewish identity. You cannot overnight-ship depth.

What we need is the full story — told with what I call “complexity with goosebumps.” Neither cheerleading nor despair. Trusting young Jews with the hard parts as well as the inspiring ones. Rejecting condescension, flattening, and easy sentiment. Offering substance and heart together.

To borrow writer Bruce Feiler’s phrase, the strongest families tell an oscillating
narrative: “we have had dramatic ups and downs, but through it all we remained a
family and kept going.” That is the Jewish story: neither a fairy tale of uninterrupted triumph, nor a dirge of endless victimhood, but a chronicle of real endurance — accumulated strength and purpose amidst adversity.

A neater narrative may be comforting. It will not be credible, and it will not be
compelling. Only the full Jewish story has the power to summon a new generation to be part of it.

That story is also unfinished. And that matters. Young Jews do not want to inherit a
museum. They want to join a mission. By knowing their story, and telling it, Jews can come to see themselves as characters within it — stewards of the past, and authors of its next chapter.

If you’ll allow me one moment of ‘Jewish supremacism’: we have the world’s greatest story. There’s no need to be defensive, defeatist, or reductive about it.

Let’s tell it like it is.

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.