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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)