Why the World Can't Stop Talking About the Jews
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Why are Jews always the story?
Tucker Carlson and Hunter Biden spent a decade despising each other. This week, they sat down together for two hours and, oddly, found common ground. Not on Trump or the media, but on Israel.
Biden called Prime Minister Netanyahu "evil incarnate" and shrugged off charges of antisemitism. Carlson insisted he isn't antisemitic either, and Biden backed him up: "I 100 percent know you're not." Two men who agree on almost nothing suddenly agreed on this. Carlson also claimed the infamous laptop scandal traces back to Israelis, not Russians.
It doesn’t matter what the plot actually is, somehow Israel finds its way into the script.
A story about a laptop, a troubled son, a presidential election, and a great deal of personal wreckage somehow becomes, in the retelling, a story about Israel. It doesn’t matter what the plot actually is, somehow Israel finds its way into the script.
Why are the Jews and Israel always the story?
Open the New York Times on almost any given day and Israel is there, covered more relentlessly than countries 50 times its size.
A few months ago, Joe Rogan was asked how many Jews he thought there were in the world. He guessed a billion, then walked it back to 500 million, explaining that if there were half a billion Jews, it makes sense they would dominate the headlines and Israel would be everywhere.
But his number was wrong. The real number, his guest corrected him, is about 15 million, roughly two-tenths of one percent of humanity. Rogan was truly stunned, because his tidy explanation had just collapsed. If the Jews don’t number 500 million, why are they always the story? He couldn’t fathom it.
Most Jews I know would rather not be the story. Every time we open the paper, we cringe…not again. We want ordinary lives: to build businesses, raise families, practice our faith or not as we choose, root for our teams, live peacefully and otherwise be left alone. We would love for the world to stop talking about us and let us get on with it.
That discomfort is old. Jews in 1890s Paris believed emancipation had settled the matter, until the Dreyfus Affair proved otherwise. German Jews in the 1920s believed their contributions to German culture had earned them a permanent seat at the table, until 1933 proved otherwise. Jews keep hoping to fade into the background of someone else’s story, but history keeps refusing to let them.
Throughout history, the non-Jewish world has kept reminding them that they are the story.
In November 1941, meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Adolf Hitler explained what he believed his world war was actually about. Germany, he said, was locked in “a life and death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia.” Two rival empires, one capitalist and one communist, and in his mind, both were fronts for the same force. “Ideologically,” he said, “it was a battle between National Socialism and the Jews.”
The Jews, he paraphrased Hitler as saying, had inflicted two wounds on mankind — “circumcision on the body and conscience on the soul."
A couple years earlier, Hermann Rauschning, a senior Nazi official who broke with Hitler before the war, put it even more bluntly: the Jews, he paraphrased Hitler as saying, had inflicted two wounds on mankind — “circumcision on the body and conscience on the soul."
Hitler was a monster, and what he built out of this idea was pure evil. But his premise that the Jews carry something the world cannot ignore, a conscience, a demand, a voice insisting that power answer to something higher than itself, was not wrong.
Antisemites understand something about the Jews that they themselves no longer understand.
Jewish tradition answered this question long before Hitler and Tucker. The Midrash says that Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was called ha-Ivri, the one who stands on the other side, because “the entire world stood on one side, and he stood on the other” (Bereishit Rabbah 42:8). Jews were given a mission to be “light to the nations”. The Torah describes his descendants as a people that “dwells alone” (Numbers 23:9), a prophetic observation about how history keeps arranging itself around us.
The Jewish mission did not come with a resignation clause, even though many Jews have preferred such an option.
From Sinai onward, Jews were assigned to carry an idea that the world has never fully made peace with: that there is a God, that morality is not negotiable, and that human beings are not free to do whatever the powerful can get away with. That assignment did not come with a resignation clause, even though many Jews have preferred such an option.
Until it is finished, the world will keep circling back to the Jews, whether in love or in hatred, in scripture or on a podcast.
Since so many Jews have forgotten that they are the story, every fresh instance of the world’s obsession catches them off guard, as though it were new, as though it were only about politics or messaging. They are confused because they don’t understand the Jewish mission in the world.
The singer Leonard Cohen said as much decades ago, addressing his Jewish audience with a blistering critique of the Jewish establishment:
“We have lost our genius for the vertical, that great vertical seizure we had four thousand years ago. We knock on our own doors and wonder that no one answers. There is an awful truth which no Jewish writer investigates today, which no Jewish poet articulates. It is a truth that the synagogues and the cultural establishment cannot efface: we no longer believe we are holy. The absence of God in our midst is a deep, rotten cavity that has killed the nerve of the people.”
After two thousand years of exile and Jew-hatred, many Jews have lost the self-understanding and the moral confidence to make sense of the world. They treat antisemitism only as a threat to survive, never as a signal to decode. But the two are not separate questions. The reason the world cannot leave the Jews alone is bound up with the reason Jews exist in the first place, to bring God and moral consciousness into a world that would often rather not be bothered with any of it.
The world isn't going to stop telling this story about the Jews. Deep down, people sense something the Jewish people themselves have forgotten: that they were given something worth noticing.
So the real question is whether Jews will step up and own their story, doing the work that made them significant enough to be envied, resented, misunderstood, and even feared, or whether they keep hoping, against 4,000 years of evidence, that if they just stay quiet enough, the world will finally let us go.
Yes, the story is about the Jews. That's not something to fear; it's something to be proud of.
Rabbi Raphael Shore is a filmmaker and the founder of OpenDor Media and the Clarion Project, and the creator of eighteen documentary films on antisemitism, radical Islam, and Jewish identity. He is the author of Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Jew: Learning to Love the Lessons of Jew-Hatred, and is currently writing his next book, The Fourth Son: Why a Generation of Jews Doesn’t Know How to Ask — and What Comes Next.
