Teaching Judaism, Missing Jewish Identity

A year ago, I had the privilege of speaking with Tamar Schwarzbard–the former digital diplomacy leader at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs–on behalf of Jewish National Fund-USA. She spent eight years helping shape Israel’s global digital presence, leading high-impact communications during some of the country’s most consequential moments.

We spoke of the overwhelming wave of misinformation and rise of antisemitism across the globe. While we agreed that pro-Israel advocates are now quicker to counter falsehoods and are better at humanizing stories, these gains are overshadowed by the sheer scale and resources of the opposition. As she puts it: “On a good day, there are 16 million Jews in the world, and we’re talking about billions of other people who are sharing a very different narrative.”

Meanwhile, I have come to question whether we have prepared our own Jewish voices to speak on behalf of Israel. 

In my personal Jewish circle, based in “Jew” York City (it’s a joke, laugh), the conversations I’ve had regarding Jewish identity and Israel have alarmed me.

Young American Jews, across all religious dominations, are taught to celebrate Jewish holidays, keep the mitzvot and love Israel. 

Full stop–that’s it.

However, this has created a disconnect.

Many of these young American Jews don’t understand the depth of their Jewish roots to Israel, nor how to feel connected in the Diaspora. Worse, they don’t even know how to talk about it–some even classifying “Israeli” as an ethnicity or feeling they need to be on Israel’s offensive all the time.

The Jewish-American education system is failing its youth. Left unaddressed, that failure will continue to fuel a lack of objective political discourse and an identity crisis, ultimately resulting in full assimilation.

Before we can expect young American Jews to defend our story to the world, we must ensure they understand it themselves. 

Because before we can answer accusations about who we are, aside from religion, we have to answer a much more important question: Who are we?

Who are the Jewish People?

The Jewish people are an indigenous Levantine people whose origins trace back to the ancient populations of the Land of Canaan. Thousands of years ago, twelve Israelite tribes emerged as a distinct federation within the broader Canaanite world, developing a shared identity rooted in ancestry, language, traditions, and spiritual practices.

These tribes eventually formed the Kingdom of Israel around 1200 BCE, the first nation-state in the Land of Canaan. Following its division in the 10th century BCE, two smaller kingdoms emerged: Israel and Judah. It is from the Kingdom of Judah that the Jewish people derive their name and continuous national identity.

As foreign empires conquered the region, many Jews were displaced from their ancestral homeland, beginning centuries of Diaspora.

Yet the Judean ancestry, spirituality, traditions, language, and collective memory did not disappear. They became a portable inheritance—carried across continents like a suitcase–and preserved through what the world came to recognize as Judaism.

What is the Diaspora?

The Jewish Diaspora refers to Jewish communities living outside of their ancestral homeland of Israel following successive waves of exile and dispersion.

To survive in host countries, Jews added to what they carried in their portable cultural suitcase—preserving their Judean identity while adapting to the societies around them.

Over time, major Diasporic identities emerged—not as separate peoples, but as communities who packed that suitcase differently based on the world around them. Some of which include the following:

Ashkenazi Jews trace their Diaspora roots to Central and Eastern Europe. They eventually became a major part of Jewish life in North America.

Sephardic Jews descend from the Jewish communities who fled to Spain and Portugal. Following the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century, many rebuilt Jewish communities throughout North Africa, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire.

Mizrahi Jews come from the Diasporic Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Many remained closer to the broader region of the ancient Jewish homeland.

Beta Israel refers to the Jewish community of Ethiopia, which after exile lived for centuries in relative isolation.

These terms do not denote race. Rather, they describe where Jewish communities fled and their unique historical experiences–and how they preserved Judean customs from thousands of years ago.

For example, many Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish communities consider rice kosher for Passover, while many Ashkenazi communities traditionally refrain from eating it. These differences are not evidence of separate origins, but of the many ways Jewish communities remembered the same core traditions in different environments after thousands of years.

So if these terms are not meant to describe race, why do some Jews look different from others?

Human populations are not frozen in time. Physical traits can change across generations, especially when communities are geographically separated, undergo violence or interact with surrounding populations. Therefore, after more than 2,000 years of wandering and persecution, it should not be surprising that Jews today can have a wider range of appearances.

But Jews have never been a monolith anyways. The ancient Levant itself was home to a wide range of physical features long before foreign influence and the Diaspora. King David of ancient Israel, for example, is traditionally described as admoni—a Hebrew word often interpreted as “ruddy” or “reddish.” Today, a Mizrahi Jew may have blue eyes and blond hair, while an Ashkenazi Jew may have darker skin and curly hair. Although some isolated Jewish communities may have developed different average physical characteristics over time, there is no single set of features that can reliably identify whether a Jew’s ancestors lived in Yemen, Portugal, Russia, or elsewhere in the Diaspora. Just 80 years ago, however, Nazi racial ideology claimed the opposite—promoting the pseudoscientific belief that Jews could be identified by their stereotypical Levantine features alone, despite the remarkable diversity that has always existed within the Jewish people. 

It is also possible to join the Jewish people through conversion, a rigorous process that traditionally involves study, communal participation, and rituals overseen by Jewish religious authorities. This further demonstrates that Jewish identity is not determined by blood quantum alone. Converts are absorbed into the Jewish people and become part of the same peoplehood, traditions, and collective history as Jews born into the community.

It should be stated that Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. The Jewish people have historically focused on preserving their ancient covenant, sacred traditions, unique relationship with G-d, and responsibilities to better themselves, contributing positively to the world around them as a “chosen people.” As a result, conversion remains a longstanding but rare and relatively small pathway into Jewish identity, representing a minority of the global Jewish population.

Despite phenotype evolution from the catalysts above, studies still show that Jewish DNA around the world have more measurable genetic commonalities tracing back to the Middle East and each other rather than with their non-Jewish neighboring counterparts.

At the end of the day, all Jewish communities remain part of the same continuous Judean people—connected through shared ancestry, spirituality, tradition, language and collective memory. 

While I hope this background helps young American Jews better understand their core roots and reverses the path towards total assimilation, I challenge them to explore Judaism not only as a religion, but in its original form as an indigenous peoplehood. I also hope this serves as a starting point for deeper conversations about the complexities and historical layers intertwined with the homeland of the Jewish people as it exists today.

I also challenge Jewish institutions, especially those focused on education, to teach Jewish youth from this same standpoint. Reemphasize holidays as celebrations of Judean history. Reemphasize mitzvot as practices that connect generations. Reemphasize Israel as the land in which we belong, not simply as a state that we have ownership over. And encourage the hard questions about what it truly means to reclaim our homeland after thousands of years—how it has impacted people, shaped geopolitical realities and created new responsibilities that come with carrying Judean legacy forward.

Understanding who we are beyond faith alone, especially in an age where scientific frameworks often shape how people understand politics and identity, gives us the tools to engage with the modern world and recognize when others attempt to define or erase who we are for us.

Want to learn more?

Read “So…You Want to Globalize the Intifada?” for a deep dive into historical forces that have shaped Israel, the Jewish people and the “Free Palestine” movement—including Arab colonialism in the region and the rise of Islamism around the world.