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JTA — We tend to think of human behavior as deeply shaped by group lines. Again and again, research in social psychology and social neuroscience, along with everyday experience, shows how easily people come to see themselves as members of distinct groups, how quickly an “us” and a “them” emerge, and how rapidly loyalty on one side gives way to suspicion on the other, sometimes even when those divisions are thin or arbitrary.
As a fiction writer and a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience who studies how narratives shape our perception of the world, I think often about how events like this strain the explanatory stories we rely on to make sense of why people act as they do. These patterns of group loyalty are familiar and empirically robust. People genuinely experience themselves through group identities.
And yet sometimes a single human action cuts across these categories, exposing the limits of the narratives we use to understand how people act in the world.
That is what we have experienced this week in the story of Ahmed al Ahmed, the Muslim fruit-seller who intervened, at great personal risk, to try to stop a deadly attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney.
Al Ahmed’s action was not only an act of exceptional bravery, but a direct challenge to the worldview advanced by so many figures today. By knowingly risking his life to protect Jews outside his own group and identity, he crossed the very boundary that many insist cannot be crossed, revealing a simple truth: that human moral action cannot be reduced to rigid theories of group loyalty alone.
Racist tropes
Perhaps one of the most prominent proponents of a growing online current that frames human life as fundamentally governed by group identity is the white supremacist livestreamer Nick Fuentes. He has repeatedly advanced antisemitic claims, arguing that Jews are incapable of full civic loyalty, that they put their own group first, and that Jewish Americans are ultimately more loyal to Jews as a group or to Israel than to the United States itself. He has said about Jews, “They have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is........