THE POWER OF WORDS
Jews had two powerful cultural holidays this week: Yom HaZikaron for fallen soldiers and victims of terror, and Yom HaAtzmaut for Independence Day. One reflects the cost of not having a Jewish State, and the other the reality of having one.
It felt heavy and I find myself increasingly uneasy—about museum project partners, about the safety of my own community, about where my kids can safely go to college—but that is not the message I want to propagate. There is enough darkness. What we need is light, and truth, which is rarely the most clickable or marketable narrative. We need to reclaim language—whether it’s the broader framing around indigeneity, colonialism, and genocide, or specific words like Zionism, which simply means the Jewish right to self-determination.
The old adage that “actions speak louder than words” feels disconnected from modern life, where ideas have become fashion statements and the narcissism of small differences dominates the airwaves. The narrative war is just as sophisticated—and just as dangerous—as the kinetic one. Words hold real power. They shape thought, influence emotion, and ultimately drive action.
You can see the downstream effects. Words, and then actions, are driving Jews out of the UK. British Aliyah has reached a 40-year high, as Jews increasingly feel safer in wartime Israel than in the societies they grew up in. Our modern culture of victimhood looks to blame Jews, foreigners, or billionaires for everything. Jews may be a convenient target—we are 0.1% of the world’s population, and we will never win the algorithm—but we refuse to be anyone’s victim.
At the same time, we are not above accountability. When an Israeli soldier defaced a Christian statue in Lebanon, it was wrong. No excuses, no narrative gymnastics. Israel does not blame AI or manufacture cover, rather enforces consequences. People are imperfect. War is messy and tragic. There will be mistakes, and when they happen, they must be dealt with seriously. I just wish bodies like the UN would follow the same rules and report corrections as loudly as they did their false accusations.
More than my own words—or those of the latest headline or social post — we need to return to older, more durable ones. Classical texts. The Bible. Great works of fiction. Foundational civics. We need attention span again. We need the ability to discern. Our education system has drifted away from this. In a recent update to alumni, Harvard University disclosed that it no longer requires students to read full books in many courses, opting instead for selected excerpts tied to course themes. That is not a small change—it is a structural one. It erodes context, depth, and the ability to reason.
Read the books that form the mind and shape the spirit! Read what our grandparents read so we can recognize historical revisionism. One great book can expand your attention span. A lifetime of them can anchor your thinking. We have to develop the capacity to think clearly before we can influence anything beyond ourselves.
Western civilization has produced some of the greatest works ever known, but it takes effort to open Homer or Shakespeare and stay with them. Jews may be the first stop on the hate train, but we are not the final destination. The endpoint is the erosion of a civilization that no longer understands itself. Wake up, West! Once a culture loses its foundation, it dies and is gone forever, the vestiges of which will remain in the books that we can’t seem to compel people to open. The Jewish history is full of existential battles, and I am confident we will endure this latest one, but I am not so sure about the West.
“Men speak today as though Europe could continue indefinitely without belief, as though laws, customs, and liberties could be maintained without a common view of man’s origin and destiny. This is an illusion. You may cut the flower from its root and it will remain fresh for a time. But it is already dying.”
— Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith