The Lions Need to Roar

I sometimes go to a dark place when I think of my generation. The unfeeling protests, the brutal moral unclarity, the friendships lost. But lately, I’ve decided that I must shift my thinking and focus. Beyond the pain and the hurt, there is hope in the distance and there is gravitas in our perseverance. If only we could become more of ourselves, we could create the change we so resoundingly want to see.

So, I began to think of what was missing… the Jewish Movement. Isn’t that an awkward phrase? Perhaps because it does not exist in our reputed liberal vocabulary.

We’ve heard about the so-called Free Palestine Movement or BDS, the Feminist Waves or Me Too Movement, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the LGBTQ+ Pride Movement… but is there a Jewish Movement?

When I google ‘Jewish Movement’ in a variety of ways, I get two things… Jewish Religious Movements (i.e. Reform, Conservative, Chabad, etc.) and Zionism, the Jewish Nationalist Movement.

Oh, Zionism. This seemingly simple word has been hijacked by self-pronounced anti-Zionists and people who just don’t know any better and don’t care to.

As stated by the ADL, “Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.”

In other words, Zionism is an old movement and one that has already been accomplished. Israel has been established. People do not understand why we use a word like Zionism to proclaim our support for Israel, because it no longer has its original imperative.

It demonstrates a sense of solidarity and defiance. But when we think of a movement, we must ask ourselves… how do we want to move people? What do we want to move them toward?

A movement is of the moment and of a time. For Zionism, I believe that time has passed. What happens when a nationalist movement accomplishes its goal? It continues to demand more of us.

Zionism is thriving and has taken on more significance in our troubled times, but the phrase just feels old-fashioned. We must create something new, something now… or risk losing relatability and progression.

We don’t have to change our Jewish identity or conform to trendy standards in replacement of real social justice. We don’t have to hate ourselves and support anti-Zionism instead of actually trying to repair the world. We should think about how we can do this – how we can be true to ourselves and at the same time appeal to others.

It’s evident that my generation lives for the concept of not fitting in. So how do we show our uniqueness in a way that they’re going to appreciate? It’s not enough to establish commonality. As Jews, if we want to be smart, we must show our charms and strengths unapologetically.

When we hide, hate festers. But when we announce ourselves, it draws attention and people become curious.

We want to captivate. Right now, the backlash and hate we receive is steering our social media activism. And that’s understandable, but it’s not conducive.

As Noa Tishby said so eloquently in her book, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, “… In this new world, it was no longer a matter of days; it was a matter of seconds. For the first time, I feared for the future of my country. Israel’s PR problems were about to turn into an existential threat.”

What happens on social media amplifies what’s happening in real life and vice versa. It almost seems like the beast that can’t be tamed.

When we dismiss the protests and the boycotts, saying it’s all due to antisemitism, it’s often because we feel defeated and have concluded that the world as it is now is unfixable. But some of it isn’t.

Think of it like this… imagine Israel and the Jews as a giant corporation. People are protesting this corporation because of fake news that a rival company spread speculating that the corporation is causing cancer. People begin to boycott, stand outside the buildings with signs and chants, file lawsuits, even destroy property, or attack the employees and executives of the corporation calling them filthy names. What does this corporation do to rebrand its image, how does it utilize its PR team for some crisis control? How do they, essentially, prove their innocence to people determined to make the corporation guilty? They need to turn this crisis into an opportunity.

Antisemitism might be an unsolvable problem. But bad branding by one’s opponents is not an unsolvable problem.

If we even look at words and phrases that define the Jewish experience like Zionism and antisemitism, they are neither self-explanatory nor immediately sympathetic. Today’s standards require straightforward words to convey concepts that should already be unambiguous. Still, the word Jew is a mystery to most.

Racism is a unifying umbrella term for hate, something most people of color experience and struggle with in their daily lives. Antisemitism is, in comparison, singular, because it only relates to Jews. And as we are a very small people in the mass population of the world, it shows, and we become uncared for. They do not see us as oppressed, because our oppression does not have a name they recognize.

Keep this in mind, for the generation that hates labels… they love labels. They need labels to discern whether they are being a good person or not.

The Islamic Regime of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah have provided these for them. ‘Free Palestine.’ It’s always nice to free things, right? Free the Whales, Free our Breasts, Free the People, free, free, free… this is the land of freedom, after all. Freedom is something we have and yet don’t have, something we need to help other people get.

So they say… ‘Let’s use our voice, let’s use our power as a people that want social justice and let’s stalk people online, let’s attack people in the streets, let’s hold up signs and chant, and let’s boycott the evil Israel and the evil Jewish people, so that we can Free Palestine.’

Like I said, people like a cause.

So, stop playing into their games. We have to stop piggybacking off of other people’s movements. We say, don’t Jewish Lives Matter, too? We say, so when you say Believe Women, you mean everyone but Jewish women. We say, Free Gaza from Hamas to try and prove our own goodness, but it’s not catchy and it’s getting us nowhere. It’s a nice turn of phrase that emphasizes the real perpetrators in this war, but it does nothing else to help people understand what we truly want.

If our vision sends too many mixed signals, it’s not going to resonate. When people don’t like the look or sound of a story, or it goes against their narrative of events, they are not going to buy into it.

Like it or not, the world is a giant marketplace, and we are all trying to sell something. It could be authenticity, or sentiment, or even lies. But underlying the constant buy and sell, there is another war in human tendency at play: need vs want.

What we want from the world right now, may not be what we need from it.

We may want peace, we may want understanding, we may want support, we may want justice… but what do we need?

We need something that unifies us that isn’t trauma or traumatic. Because no one wants to go there, and no one can sustain themselves there. It’s not about what we need from them, it’s about what we need from us.

We need to celebrate who we are, and who we are in the world, even when tragedy is not upon us. We should be the message, not the response.

So, as the Jewish people, as Israel… What are we trying to tell people? Who do we want them to see us as? What light do we want to share? What space do we want to hold in this world?

The fearlessness and bravery of the Jewish people are unmatched. But our creativity is being underutilized. Gaining a foothold in the jungle of my generation is daunting. But we must catapult our joy in imaginative and magnetic ways. We must roar now, louder than ever to protect our pride.