Jewish joy, not fear, is the strongest weapon against hate - opinion

SEPTEMBER 14, 2026 14:00There are pro-Israel voices, and then there are the ones you actually believe.After two years in this fight, I can usually hear the difference within a sentence or two – the talking points clicking into place, the rehearsed outrage. So when I sat down with Yuval David, the Emmy Award-winning actor and filmmaker who has become one of our community’s most visible advocates, and he grinned and told me, “I’m glad you can sense the BS – I can as well; in fact, I now call it out professionally,” I knew we were going to get somewhere honest.I run IMPACT, an organization built on one conviction: fear is loud, but joy is louder. For a long time that sounded, even to me, like a line to put on a sticker. I no longer think it’s a slogan. I think it’s a strategy – and quite possibly the only one that has ever kept the Jewish people alive.Here is what the last two years have taught me: you cannot out-shout hatred. The coordinated networks Yuval told me he’s been alerted to – Islamist, Russian, Chinese, Qatari and Turkish operations that target Jewish public figures – will always have more rage than we have hours in the day. If the plan is to match them post for post, insult for insult, we lose. We burn out, and they don’t.But there is something they cannot manufacture, and it’s the thing Yuval kept returning to: joy. Simchat Chayim, he called it – the joy of life. “As long as we have life, we must find our joy,” he said.PEOPLE PARTICIPATE in a Celebrate Israel Festival event in 2016. (credit: LINDA KASIAN PHOTOGRAPHY)“We’ve been occupied, exiled, dispersed. There have been real genocides against us. Yet that is not what defines us. What defines the Jewish people is our joy, our faith, our peoplehood.” He’s right, and it isn’t sentimental – it’s tactical. A people that celebrates cannot be demoralized, and demoralizing us is the entire objective of the campaign against us.This is why I’ve stopped telling young people to simply “fight back.” Yuval put it better than I could: the tradition, he said, is “not fighting back, but fighting forward.” Fighting back is defensive; it cedes the terms to whoever swung first. Fighting forward means building – coalitions, culture, joy, institutions – so that we are not merely surviving the next news cycle but outlasting it.Take the algorithm, the battlefield where most of this actually happens. We treat it as weather, something that happens to us. Yuval’s reframe, which he traced to a briefing from the FBI, changed how I see it: get friendly accounts to follow, engage, and amplify, because that is how you shift what the machine decides to show.'Movement-building 101'“We too are the algorithm,” he said. When our enemies boost hateful content, their networks assume anyone adjacent is an ally and pile on, building the wrong audience by sheer engagement. The counter is not to argue harder. It’s to show up for each other – which, as he put it, is “movement-building 101.” Every share is a vote for which reality the machine treats as real.And it cannot only be Jews doing the sharing. The most hopeful part of our conversation was about allyship – real allyship, not the transactional kind. Yuval co-founded the Jewish and Indian Alliance, linking two ancient, indigenous peoples; he noted that one of the oldest Hebrew words for another nation, Hodu, is simply the name for India.We are building the same bridges to Christian, Hindu and Muslim partners. “We don’t only join in allyship because we have a shared enemy,” Yuval said. “We join because we have shared promise, shared hopefulness and optimism.” A coalition held together only by fear dissolves the moment the threat recedes. One held together by shared joy endures.I think about the teenagers most of all – the ones telling us they feel outnumbered and exhausted in the endless scroll. We keep calling them the leaders of tomorrow. Yuval refuses to. “You are not the leaders of tomorrow,” he said. “You’re the leaders of today. What you do today, facing the hardship and moving forward, is going to change all of our worlds.” I want every Jewish kid who has been made to feel small in a comment section to hear that and believe it.None of this means pretending the danger isn’t real. It is. But we get to decide what we lead with, and that choice has consequences. If we lead with fear, we hand our opponents the only victory they can actually win – a Jewish community too anxious to be visible, too tired to be proud. If we lead with joy, we become the one thing hatred has never, in three thousand years, figured out how to defeat.Yuval said one more thing I haven’t been able to shake. At the end, he waved off any thanks for the work he does. “Don’t ever thank me for what I do,” he said. “Join me.”Consider this my acceptance – and my invitation to you.Aaron Herman is a nonprofit fundraiser, video journalist, and growth strategist specializing in Jewish storytelling and advocacy. He is Co-Founder and CEO of IMPACT, a movement to organize, empower, and mobilize communities against hate while celebrating Jewish joy ( join the movement and follow on socials at @joinimpactnow). His reporting has appeared in national and Jewish media outlets. Aaron holds a BA from Binghamton University and an MPA from NYU’s Wagner School, and can be reached at aaronherman@gmail.com Follow us on Google