For a people with a history as old and as dispersed as ours, language has never been just communication. It has always been identity management, historical framing, and at times, survival. And much of today’s confusion around who Jews are, be it our origins, our diversity, our relationship to the Land of Israel… comes from the fact that we have been speaking about ourselves in categories that were never designed for us.

Over time, we inherited vocabulary shaped by European racial hierarchies, Arab nationalist ideologies, and colonial assumptions about geography and belonging. These frameworks were built for other peoples and other histories, yet they seeped into our own self-description.

They blur our story, dilute our continuity, and sometimes pit us against one another.

If we want clarity, unity, and confidence, especially in an era of rising antisemitism, we need to audit our vocabulary and rebuild it from the ground up.

The shift begins with a simple but profound reframing:

Diaspora is not who we are; it is where our ancestors spent their exile.

Useful as they are, the diasporic descriptions only tell part of the story. They describe where our families lived, not who we are. They speak about geography, not continuity. They reflect local adaptation, not indigeneity. And in a moment when many Jews feel unmoored or fragmented, recovering that distinction is not semantics. It........

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