0.2% of the world. 100% of the obsession.

Almost everyone has an opinion about Jews. Almost nobody knows why. What is it about the Jews?

photo: Salvatore Favata/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Tali Aynalem, an Ethiopian, Israeli, and American Jew who writes about Jewish identity and belonging.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I want to start with a question I genuinely cannot answer: What is it about us?

Seriously.

Of all the peoples, all the nations, all the histories on this earth, what is it about less than 20 million Jews that takes up so much real estate in everyone else’s head?

We are 0.2 percent of the world’s population. You could fit every Jewish person alive today into the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area and still have room for the bagels.

And yet.

The United Nations passes more resolutions about Israel than about every other country on earth combined. Combined.

College campuses that couldn’t find Tel Aviv on a map have entire organizations dedicated to its dismantling.

Dinner parties derail. Group chats explode. People who have never met a Jewish person in their lives have extremely strong opinions about what Jewish people should do, feel, believe, and apologize for.

I’m not even angry about it anymore. I’m just genuinely curious.

What. Is. It. About. Us.

Let me offer a theory: We are interesting.

I don’t mean that as vanity. I mean it as an observable fact. We have been, for thousands of years, the most argued-about, written-about, painted-about, philosophized-about people in recorded history.

Three of the world’s major religions trace their roots to us. The book we wrote is the most printed, most translated, most distributed document in human history. The arguments we started in the Talmud are arguments people are still having. The land we come from is the most contested piece of real estate on earth, not because it has oil, not because it has strategic military value, but because people have feelings about it that go so deep they can’t even explain them.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually extraordinary. We didn’t ask for this level of attention, but here we are.

Here’s the other thing about the obsession: It’s not new. Not even a little bit.

This is the part that should make you exhale, or laugh, depending on your temperament. Because if you zoom out far enough, the pattern becomes almost comedic in its predictability.

Egypt tried to destroy us. We became a people. Babylon tried to erase us. We wrote some of our greatest poetry in exile. Persia tried to eliminate us. We got a whole holiday out of it — with costumes. Rome tried to erase our memory from the land. We prayed toward Jerusalem for 2,000 years and then went back. Spain expelled us in 1492. Sephardic Jews carried their house keys with them into exile, and their descendants kept those keys for 500 years. Five-hundred years, as a statement.

The Cossacks. The pogroms. The Inquisition. The Holocaust was the most systematic attempt to destroy a people in human history, with the full machinery of a modern state behind it. Six million of us gone.

And then, 30 years later, David Ben-Gurion and other modern Zionists declared a Jewish state on May 14, 1948. The next morning, five Arab armies invaded. We won. We built a country in large part in the desert that now feeds other countries. We built a startup nation out of trauma and chutzpah and the stubborn refusal to disappear.

If you were watching from the outside, wouldn’t you be obsessed with us too?

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The Renaissance is already happening. Many people might have missed it.

So here’s what I want us to notice: Something is shifting. I can feel it and I think you can too.

October 7th broke something open. Not just in the obvious, devastating way, the grief, the hostages, the war. But in a quieter, stranger way. It woke something up in Jews who had spent years performing their Jewishness at a comfortable distance.

People who hadn’t thought about Israel in years suddenly found themselves awake at 3 a.m. reading about their fellow Jews. People who had never worn a Star of David put one on and didn’t take it off. Synagogues that were half-empty filled up. Substack essays about Jewish identity, I’m just saying, started doing numbers.

There is a generation of young Jews right now who are prouder, louder, and more rooted than the generation before them. Who are done apologizing for Israel’s existence. Who are done shrinking. Who are learning Hebrew, visiting the Jewish country, and asking their grandparents questions they should have asked years ago before it was too late.

That’s a renaissance.

It doesn’t look like the Harlem Renaissance or the Italian Renaissance with the paintings and the marble.

It looks like a 24-year-old putting on a kippah for the first time at a rally. It looks like a woman in Portland writing an essay about Ethiopian Israeli identity at midnight on a Thursday. It looks like Breaking Bread dinners bringing Jews of all kinds to the same table to remember that we are one people.

It’s happening. Right now. In real time.

So why are they obsessed with us?

Because we refuse to go away.

Because every single time history has demanded our disappearance, we have responded with creation. With scholarship. With art. With children. With tables full of food and songs that outlast the empires which tried to silence them.

Because there is something in the Jewish story that is genuinely threatening to people who believe that power is the only thing that matters, and that something is this: We are living proof that it isn’t. That a people without an army held itself together for two thousand years through the power of a shared text, a shared calendar, a shared table. That identity can be stronger than geography. That memory can outlast violence.

That’s not a small thing. That’s actually a revolutionary idea. And revolutionary ideas make people uncomfortable.

Here’s what I want you to take from this: The obsession is not a sign that something is wrong with us. It is a sign that something is right.

We are a people who have been counted out more times than anyone can count, and we are still here. Still arguing. Still building. Still feeding people. Still dancing. Still writing. Still showing up for each other in ways that make no rational sense unless you understand that we genuinely believe we are responsible for one another.

Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. All of Israel is responsible for one another. It’s not a slogan. It’s an operating system.

So the next time someone asks you why everyone is so obsessed with Jews and Israel, you can give them the long answer, the historical answer, the political answer.

Or you can give them the short one: We’ve been here before, and we always come out swinging.

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