My Favorite Thing to Ask Non-Jews

Most people have no idea how many Jews there are in the world.

The Kotel (the Western Wall) in Jerusalem (photo: Sander Crombach/Unsplash)

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One of my favorite questions to ask non-Jews is deceptively simple: “Do you know how many Jews there are in the world?”

It’s ironic; we live in a time when it seems like everyone and their mother can give you impassioned, near-eyewitness accounts of what’s transpiring in Gaza, complete with hashtags, slogans, and Hamas-run health ministry statistics. Yet when you ask them such a basic question — one that’s publicly available with a two-second Google search — they have no idea how many Jews there are in the world.

They know every accusation. They know every catchphrase. But they don’t know the most fundamental fact about the people they’re so eager to lecture, boycott, and condemn.

I like asking non-Jews “Do you know how many Jews there are in the world?” not because I’m expecting a precise census report, but because the guesses always reveal something much bigger: a world that perceives Jewish presence as vast and overbearing — when in reality, it is tiny beyond comprehension.

Most people, if they dare to answer, shoot high. Fifty million? A hundred million? A billion? More?

The truth: There are about 16 million Jews in the world today. Give or take. Fifteen million out of a global population of 8 billion. That’s 0.2 percent. Not two percent. Point two percent. One-fifth of one percent.

There are nearly 6 billion more people alive today than there were in 1939, the year the Holocaust officially started, but still 1 million fewer Jews.

And yet, this 0.2 percent, this statistical rounding error, has somehow been cast — in the imagination of empires, ideologues, and genocidal movements — as a shadowy giant controlling everything from Hollywood to global banking to foreign wars.

We are a people so small that, statistically, you could go your entire life without meeting a single Jew — and yet we live rent-free in the heads of millions (billions?) who have never so much as shared a Shabbat dinner or heard the sound of a shofar.

This is not a coincidence. It’s a feature of history. Throughout time, the Jewish People have been a mirror — sometimes a scapegoat, sometimes a moral irritant — reflecting the insecurities, failures, and hatreds of larger societies. When a civilization feels strong and confident, Jews are often tolerated, occasionally even embraced. When it starts to fracture, guess who gets blamed?

In medieval Europe, when plagues raged and economies collapsed, Jews — the consummate “other” — were accused of poisoning wells. Across the Islamic world, Jews lived under dhimmi status as second-class citizens. They were tolerated but humiliated, forced to pay special taxes, barred from positions of power, and subject to recurring waves of violence and expulsion whenever it suited their rulers.

In modern times, as nationalism, capitalism, and globalism battled for supremacy, Jews were cast as puppet-masters of each competing ideology — simultaneously too capitalist, too communist, too cosmopolitan, too tribal.

Today, the obsession simply finds a new outlet: Israel. The only Jewish state in the world — again, one state among 193 — somehow occupies a disproportionate share of global outrage.

Countries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, and Sudan can trample human rights with barely a flicker of condemnation. And then there’s Israel, a sliver of a country that you can fully drive east to west in 45 minutes and north to south in 6 hours. The Israelis are defending themselves against genocidal terror organizations, yet somehow become the world’s favorite villains.

And the irony is breathtaking: Pound for pound, Israel contributes more to global progress, innovation, and humanitarian aid than any other nation on Earth. This tiny country, borne out of eliminationist war and surrounded by cunning enemies, has given the world unprecedented advances in medicine, agriculture, cybersecurity, clean water technology, renewable energy, emergency disaster relief.

Israeli scientists have pioneered breakthrough cancer treatments. Israeli engineers have revolutionized drip irrigation, feeding billions in arid regions. Israeli tech has powered everything from the USB drive to the Waze app on your phone.

Even when Israel’s own citizens are under rocket fire, Israeli teams race across the world to set up field hospitals after earthquakes and hurricanes — sometimes treating people who refuse to recognize Israel’s existence.

It turns out that the nation accused of being the world’s greatest problem is, as a matter of fact, one of its greatest blessings.

So, why the double standard? Because it’s never really been about what Jews do. It’s about what Jews are: a living, breathing testament to the idea that a people can suffer the worst horrors imaginable — exile, massacre, gas chambers, pogroms, mutilations, kidnappings — and still refuse to disappear.

Jewish existence itself is a defiance. Jewish sovereignty even more so. It is a declaration: “We are not just here to survive other people’s empires. We are here to build our own future.” We are not merely a tolerated minority eking out an existence under someone else’s benevolence. We are a free people in our own land. Or, to quote Israel’s national anthem:

“Our hope is not yet lost, the hope that is two-thousand years old, to be a free nation in our land, the Land of Zion, Jerusalem.”

Jewish sovereignty in Israel means that Jewish life is not at the mercy of foreign kings, popes, sultans, or czars. It means that when Jews are threatened, Jews can act. It means that the destiny of the Jewish People is once again in Jewish hands.

And for some, nothing is more intolerable than that. Because a Jew with a prayer shawl can be pitied. A Jew with an army cannot. A Jew in a ghetto can be romanticized. A Jew with sovereignty demands respect — and self-respecting Jews are much harder to control, dismiss, or destroy.

So, yes, we might only be 16 million people worldwide — a fraction so small it barely registers on the demographic charts — but now you have to respect us. You have to reckon with a people who will not beg for survival, but who insist on living with dignity. You have to contend with a nation that does not apologize for defending itself, does not shrink from its own existence, and does not ask permission to exist on its own land.

You have to accept that Jewish history no longer ends in tragedy; it continues. With agency, with power, with pride.

It continues not as a ghost story whispered in someone else’s language, but as a living, breathing nation speaking its own ancient tongue. It continues not as a people waiting for the mercy of kings or the pity of strangers, but as a people who can defend themselves — unapologetically, decisively.

It continues not in exile, not in the margins of someone else’s empire, but in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, in Be’er Sheva — cities built by Jewish hands, dreamed of by Jewish hearts across two thousand years of wandering.

We are no longer history’s footnote. We are history’s author.

For generations, Jewish destiny was written for us. Now, we write it ourselves. In Hebrew. In sovereignty. In freedom. With all the burdens and blessings that freedom brings. That is the real revolution.

Not survival alone — but sovereignty. Not endurance alone — but flourishing. Not memory alone — but future.

And that is why we must keep asking the simple, devastating question: “Do you know how many Jews there are in the world?” Because when you realize just how few we are, and how much we have rebuilt, defended, dreamed, and achieved — the myths about us fall apart.

They fall apart because numbers don’t lie, but hatred does. They fall apart because no cabal of 16 million people controls the world. They fall apart because a people who should have vanished into history’s graveyards are instead planting vineyards, launching satellites, writing symphonies, inventing medicines, and disrupting industries.

They fall apart because you cannot seriously believe that the tiniest nation among the nations — a people still outnumbered 500-to-1 — is the great “oppressor” of the earth. They fall apart because, for every slogan of hate, there are generations of Jews who chose to build instead of break, to hope instead of hate, to live instead of surrender.

They fall apart when you realize that Jewish resilience isn’t sinister; it’s sacred. That Jewish strength isn’t oppression; it’s survival. That Jewish sovereignty isn’t a threat to the world; it’s a miracle for it.

Because after everything, we did the unthinkable: We came home, we rebuilt, we began again. Not to dominate others, but to ensure that never again would others dominate us.

And that, more than anything, is what shatters the illusion, and what makes the truth stand taller than ever: We are not powerful because of our numbers. We are powerful because of our unapologetic survival. We are powerful because against all odds — against pharaohs, inquisitors, czars, Nazis, jihadists — we remain.

We live. We thrive. We build. We dream. We come home.

And so, the next time someone feels the need to explain “Jewish power” or “Jewish privilege” or “Jewish control,” I encourage you to gently (or not so gently) interrupt them and ask: “Do you know how many Jews there actually are?”

Because the answer is so stark, so jarring, so out of sync with the fever dreams that animate antisemitism.

It forces a recalibration. It demands reflection. And the whole illusion begins to crack.

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