Breaking the Symbol

Antisemitism is, at its core, a symbol problem.

Confronted with the sheer volume of lies and distortions circulating about Jews and Israel, the instinct is to correct the record: disprove the claim, supply the missing context, argue the facts. It is a reasonable instinct. It also does not work.

The facts were never the point. They are in service of the symbol. Every accusation and every distortion draws its persuasive power not from who Jews actually are, but from what Jews have been made to represent. Refute one falsehood, and the symbol does not disappear. It simply recruits another.

The strategic task, then, is not merely to correct individual claims, but to erode and delegitimize the symbol that gives them their force.

To see why that works, it helps to understand what the symbol actually is. This is not metaphor. It is a mechanism, and a familiar one to anyone who has studied how groups learn to hate other groups. No population can be hated as a population; it first has to stop being seen as individuals. This is the basic operation of dehumanization: a person collapses into a category, and the category hardens into a threat. Jews stop being neighbors, classmates, artists, parents, friends. Israel stops being a society of nine million ordinary, quarrelling, diverse human beings. What is left is a symbol, and a symbol will absorb whatever a given moment needs it to mean: greed, conspiracy, colonialism, the accumulated resentment of an era looking for somewhere to land.

If dehumanization is what builds the symbol, then reversing that process is what should break it. And the reversal has a clear shape. A person, unlike a category, cannot be hated on principle. Hating a person takes a reason, something specific they did. A face gets in the way of the symbol. So does a family, a private grief, a sense of humor that does not translate. A situation, unlike a caricature, has competing truths and moral residue that refuse to resolve into a clean verdict. Once Jews and Israelis become emotionally real and morally complicated, the symbol starts to crack, not because anyone argued it down, but because it no longer fits what is standing in front of you. Proximity and familiarity, under the right conditions, erode prejudice in ways that argument alone cannot touch.

This is the premise on which the Shofar Fund, the philanthropic venture fund I advise, is built: identify and back the initiatives that generate this kind of contact and complexity at scale, the ones that make it harder to encounter Jews and Israel as symbols and easier to encounter them as people.

So, practically, what breaks a symbol? Two things, in our experience: humanization and complexity. We invest upstream, at the point where perception is still forming and has not yet hardened into conviction. Each initiative operates in a different sector of American and global life, but the underlying instruction is the same: replace abstraction with human beings, and caricature with complexity. The single question we ask of any prospective investment is whether it makes Jews and Israel harder to see as symbols and easier to see as people.

Sometimes the answer is exposure, plainly understood: warmth, humor, familiarity, the slow accretion of ordinary contact that makes a person feel known rather than other. Sometimes it means surfacing what is already true and rarely depicted: resilience, creativity, the unglamorous work of building a life. And sometimes it runs the other direction, loosening the grip of stereotypes that do not survive contact with reality: insularity, greed, a claim to power that was never quite earned. The same logic extends outward, to the movements arrayed against Jews and Israel. A cause that looks unified and righteous from a distance often is not, and exposing its extremism, its performance, the outside interests pulling its strings, performs the identical work in reverse.

None of this succeeds if it reads as argument. The moment an intervention feels defensive, or agenda-driven, it triggers the very resistance it was designed to dissolve. It has to feel like something the culture noticed on its own, not something the culture was instructed to believe.

Humanization

Antisemitism depends on emotional distance, and it is sustained by a peculiar elasticity: “the Jews” can be simultaneously greedy and disloyal, powerful and tribal, coldly rational and irrationally violent, and the category absorbs the contradiction without strain. A Jewish person cannot be held inside that container. Neither can an Israeli family, an Ethiopian-Israeli athlete, or a Jewish television character whose motives have nothing to do with money.

It is worth being precise about what humanization is not. It is not positive publicity. It does not mean substituting flattering images for unflattering ones. Jews do not become more human by being portrayed as uniformly brilliant, successful, or morally exemplary; that kind of representation can preserve exactly the same distance, only with better lighting. Humanization means something more modest and more difficult: letting people encounter Jews in the full, unremarkable register of ordinary life. Funny, frightened, loyal, flawed, loving, resilient, divided, recognizable.

The Hollywood Jewish Bureau operationalizes this directly. It is the first professional, embedded system for Jewish representation inside American film and television, modeled on the infrastructure the NAACP, GLAAD, and MPAC built for other minority communities. Rather than responding to portrayals after they have already reached an audience, the Bureau intervenes upstream, embedding consultants fluent in both Jewish life and the mechanics of storytelling directly into script development, character construction, casting, and narrative design.

Film and television do not merely reflect what audiences already believe. They supply the emotional reference points on which belief is later constructed. No viewer consciously decides that Jews are cold, controlling, or foreign. But when Jewish characters recur as elites, villains, neurotics, or narrative devices rather than full people, the association settles beneath the level of argument. It begins to feel less like stereotype than recognition, which is precisely what makes it durable.

The results are measurable. Cultural impressions accumulate one such choice at a time, across millions of viewings. The Bureau is not inserting propaganda into entertainment. It is removing the flattening that was already there.

Project MAX works on the vector of sports to engage Gen Z and the African American community through firsthand relationships: sending Black athletes, professional and collegiate, on delegations to Israel, where they meet Israelis and Jewish communities directly, then carry what they saw back into the networks that already trust them.

Antisemitism is rising among Black Gen Z, and the conventional tools of Jewish communal outreach are proving inadequate to the shift, for a structural reason: this generation forms belief less through institutions than through trusted cultural voices, among them athletes, peers, clergy, and campus networks. When narratives about Jews and Israel circulate through these channels, typically via social media, they rarely trace back to a real relationship or firsthand encounter, and once such narratives take hold, they are reinforced socially and become difficult to dislodge.

Project MAX intervenes at the actual site of influence: sports culture, through a deliberately layered model. Professional athletes across the NBA, NFL, and Olympic ranks generate visibility at scale; when they speak from firsthand experience, that testimony travels through broadcast media and considerable social followings. Black collegiate athletes, particularly at HBCUs, drive the peer-to-peer transmission that actually moves belief within these communities: locker rooms, campuses, churches, families. Both populations participate in immersive experiences with Jewish communities and Israel, as lived relationships. 

Traditional Jewish outreach into Black communities has too often taken the form of institutional messaging: an organization explaining what people ought to believe. Even where well intentioned, this register can feel transactional, and can end up reinforcing the very suspicion it was meant to dispel. Project MAX begins from a different premise entirely: relationship rather than instruction. It connects professional and collegiate Black athletes with Israelis and Jewish communities through sport and shared experience. No one is recruited as an advocate. No one is handed talking points. They simply meet people.

The distinction matters because trust is not distributed evenly across a society. In the communities where Project MAX operates, athletes, coaches, clergy, and family networks carry more authority than any institution can claim. When a respected athlete describes whom he met and what surprised him, he is not repeating an argument supplied to him. He is reporting what happened to him, which is a different order of testimony entirely.

The underlying mechanism, in every case, remains personal. Someone who once knew Israel only as a symbol now knows Israelis.

Complexity

Antisemitism runs on emotional distance, but it depends equally on explanatory simplicity. It converts history into motive, social pattern into conspiracy, political conflict into moral essence. Jews, in this account, do not merely work in certain industries; they control them. Israelis do not merely live under a government; they become indistinguishable from every action that government takes. Jewish communal cohesion, forged across centuries of exclusion and danger, is reinterpreted as evidence of secret coordination.

Complexity is the corrective to this kind of explanation, and it is the specific work of TPS-IL, Israel’s wire service inside the global news infrastructure.

Most readers imagine news as something each outlet reports independently. In practice, a small number of wire services, AP, Reuters, AFP among them, supply the raw material that most of what the world reads is built from, and thousands of outlets simply run with it. Whichever photograph, headline, or account arrives first carries disproportionate power, because it establishes the frame through which everything that follows will be read.

TPS-IL operates at precisely that point of entry. Its network of more than four hundred journalists and photographers produces verified reporting, images, and video from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, and distributes this material through the same infrastructure the major international wire services use. The objective is not “pro-Israel content.” It is ensuring that facts and lived realities otherwise absent from the pipeline reach editors before an incomplete story hardens into the only story anyone tells.

Consider May 2026. An NGO circulated a report accusing Israeli settlers of raiding a Palestinian village, stealing livestock, and killing a teenager. TPS-IL had already documented a fuller sequence of events: roughly a hundred and twenty sheep stolen first from a Jewish farm, security forces intervening, and the fatal shooting occurring only after those forces came under attack while withdrawing. Because the verified account already existed within the news system, reporters were not forced to choose between a misleading story and no story at all. The fuller version was already there, ready to be used.

This is what complexity looks like in practice. It does not require anyone to deny Palestinian suffering, and it does not require anyone to excuse Israeli conduct. It requires only that context exist at all, so that a single image or a single accusation cannot substitute for the whole picture. TPS-IL now reaches close to eleven thousand media outlets across multiple continents; national news agencies and the European Parliament have both sought access to its reporting. What matters most, however, is not reach but timing. Complexity has to arrive while a narrative is still forming, not after it has already set.

The Long Game

None of these initiatives is trying to argue anyone out of an opinion, and this is, in some sense, the entire point. An argument meets the symbol on its own terrain, which requires accepting the symbol’s premises long enough to rebut them, and rebuttal rarely dislodges anything. Humanization and complexity operate at a different level altogether. They do not contest the symbol directly. They simply make it harder to hold.

This is slow, unglamorous work, and it happens upstream, which is very likely why so few funders undertake it. Reacting to antisemitism after it surfaces is easier than investing years in advance in the writers’ rooms, locker rooms, and newsrooms where a symbol either takes hold or does not. The Shofar Fund exists for that earlier moment. Its purpose is not to win the argument. It is to shrink the number of people who ever need to be argued with in the first place.