Jews Need to Tell Their Own Stories – Before Others Tell Them for Us

Before people form opinions about Jews or Israelis, they absorb stories about us.

Long before anyone reads a history book, studies the Middle East, or encounters a Jewish community in real life, they have already been shaped by what they have seen on screens. Film and television create emotional assumptions before facts ever arrive. They decide who feels familiar, who feels foreign, and whose humanity is easy to recognize. By the time public debate begins, much of the deeper work has already been done by culture.

This is not abstract to me. I see it in my own home.

I teach self-defense for a living. My children grew up on the mats. They crawled across gym floors as babies and spent years surrounded by Krav Maga, students, instructors, and the daily language of discipline. Yet they resisted learning seriously for years. Because training was always around them, it became invisible. It felt like part of their father’s world, not their own.

Then we began watching Cobra Kai together (The new version about the original Karate Kid movies)

What changed them was not technical instruction. It was watching other young people struggle, fail, train, and transform. They saw characters wrestling with insecurity, fear, embarrassment, and growth. For the first time, they could imagine themselves inside that process. Soon after, they began asking to train seriously. The same lessons I had been trying to teach for years suddenly found a way in.

That is what stories do. They make transformation imaginable before it becomes personal.

This same principle applies to how entire societies understand Jews and Israelis.

For decades, Jewish and Israeli identity in mainstream media has been filtered through narrow and incomplete frames. Sometimes the Jew appears as a stereotype, a victim, a comic figure, a fanatic, or a manipulator. Sometimes the Israeli appears only as a soldier, an intelligence operative, an extremist, or a symbol of conflict. Even when these portrayals contain fragments of truth, they remain incomplete in ways that distort understanding.

A people cannot be understood through caricature or conflict alone.

Where are the stories about ordinary Israeli families trying to raise children under pressure while carrying the weight of reserve duty in the background of life? Where are the Jewish teachers, artists, doctors, immigrants, entrepreneurs, and parents whose lives contain humor, tenderness, contradiction, and moral complexity beyond politics?

Those stories exist everywhere around us. They simply do not exist often enough in the public imagination.

That absence has consequences.

When Jews and Israelis are represented mainly through war, trauma, and political crisis, the world begins to confuse fragments for the whole. Public sympathy becomes shaped by shallow reference points. Political narratives harden around images that have never allowed full humanity to enter the frame. This affects how people interpret news, how they respond to conflict, and how younger generations understand Jewish identity itself.

We are living through that failure now.

Israel may defend itself militarily and still lose ground in the moral imagination of the world if others define its people before Israelis define themselves. Facts matter. Diplomacy matters. Military strength matters. None of them can replace cultural presence.

That is why storytelling has become part of Jewish self-defense.

When I say self-defense, I do not mean metaphor lightly. I teach physical self-defense every day. I train people to recognize danger, survive violence, and protect themselves under pressure. But there is another layer of defense that receives far less attention: narrative defense.

If we lose control over how they are seen, they lose influence over how they are judged.

A false story repeated often enough becomes emotional truth in the public mind. Once that happens, facts struggle to catch up.

This is why projects like The Path of Peace make a difference.

I had the opportunity to be part of that documentary, and what makes it important is not simply its subject matter. It offers something audiences rarely receive: a human window into Jews and Israelis outside slogans, headlines, and political shorthand. It shows people shaped by values, grief, resilience, discipline, longing, and hope. It presents identity in proportion.

That kind of work reaches people in ways policy statements never can.

Someone may reject an argument and still be changed by a story. Someone may never attend a lecture about Israel, but they will sit down to watch a compelling documentary. Someone who has never stepped into a self-defense class may watch ordinary people confront fear on screen and begin imagining themselves capable of doing the same.

That matters in practical ways, too.

Many people hesitate to begin self-defense training because they cannot picture themselves inside the journey. My children needed Cobra Kai before they could imagine their own transformation. Adults are no different. Watching others grow stronger gives people permission to begin. A documentary that honestly captures transformation can become the bridge between admiration and action.

The same bridge is needed in Jewish life.

If we want the world to understand us, we cannot rely only on press releases, crisis responses, and arguments made after damage is already done. We need films, documentaries, novels, series, and art created by Jews and Israelis who know these lives from within. We need stories broad enough to contain truth and strong enough to resist distortion.

Military defense protects bodies.

Narrative defense protects identity.

A people who do not tell their own stories eventually find themselves living inside stories written by others. We are already paying the price of that mistake.

The question is whether we are finally ready to correct it.

Do something amazing, Tsahi Shemesh

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)