There’s been a flurry of conversation about the new anti-antisemitism ad funded by Robert Kraft and slated to air during the Super Bowl: 

Much of the critique circles the same unease: the story it tells feels strangely out of step with how antisemitism actually unfolds in the lives of real Jewish kids today.

In the ad, a Jewish high school student is humiliated, tagged as “dirty Jew” — and then symbolically rescued when a more socially powerful peer who rises to the occasion. The emotional arc is clear. The target audience is clear, too. This is not an ad speaking to Jews so much as it is speaking past them, appealing to the imagined conscience of The Cool Kid.

Throw your arm around the puny, pitiful Jew, it says.
Be the hero.
Save him.

Not so fast. Jewish history has long resisted the victim-savior script. Cue Prime Minister Menachim Begin resisting American-style attempts at paternalism when he told Senator Joe Biden in 1982:

“Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”

We are not weak, waiting to be defended by the moral awakening of others: that is a story that satiates someone else. The core story of Jewish survival has never been one of rescue. It has been one of persistence. Creativity. Argument. Study. Defiant imagination. Community … always and relentlessly. 

And, perhaps most of all, it has been a stubborn refusal to be cool. 

For centuries, Jews have lived slightly out of sync with the cultural center. Too intellectual. Too strange. Too bookish. Too emotional. Too dramatic. Too loud and too much with all the questions. Too unwilling to accept the world exactly as it is. History’s disruptive thinkers, wild-haired philosophers, tenacious debaters, boundary-breaking artists, eccentric jokesters, so many of them shared this same uncool posture: standing just far enough outside the circle to see it clearly, standing so close without turning away as to care, really care, to see it clearly.

Conformity itself is misaligned with the deepest currents of Jewish spirit and identity. Jewish life is built on questioning, interpreting, and re-interpreting; on searching for meaning in the spaces only imagination can reach; on innovating from the tension between what is and what could be. To our strength and sometimes our detriment, simple conformity has never been our language. Yet this difference is not a call to stand alone, nor a rejection of relationship. On the contrary, it is our relational vision: a world in which each person is free to become the most authentic and loving version of who they are and where that very authenticity is what makes genuine harmony possible.

Attempts to become cool —to disappear into the mainstream, to smooth the edges, to be liked enough to be safe — have rarely protected us, and they come at a cost. Assimilation has never been armor. Approval has never been security. The promise that belonging can be earned through likability is one that Jews know, painfully, to be false and not worth the heavy price of erasure. We have earnestly, repeatedly tried, so I think we can be pretty sure about this. 

So what if the story were told differently?

Imagine the same hallway.
The same lockers.
The same murmurs.

But this time, the Jewish kid is not waiting to be saved. He walks with quiet confidence; you can feel it. It’s not arrogance that makes you want to put your head down and let him pass. It’s self-respect, and the vibe is that you want to know him. Maybe he has a violin case in hand, or a sketchbook under his arm. Perhaps a Talmudic argument still echoes in his thoughts: the sages debate about the balance between learning about something versus actually taking action … Have I learned enough about different ways we can take climate justice seriously at school before I take this fight to our school board? Perhaps there’s a dad joke on his lips, wondering if that could start the hard conversation. He is not cool in the way the hallway measures coolness.

He is something … else. Stranger. Freer. Maybe wild curls and a rock band t-shirt, but a band that most people he knows haven’t heard of that his aunt introduced him to — and not just because the bass player is Jewish.

And when the taunt comes, it does more than attempt humiliation. It tries to redraw the moral map. The accusation is not that he is weak but that he is wrong and even dangerous in his wrongness. He doesn’t belong, but they say he has made himself the problem. Antisemitism has long worked this way: casting Jews as villains, first because villains are sometimes needed when people are scared (and high school social politics are often a horror show). Conformity is safety for many people, but then there is the Jew who doesn’t see it that way and refuses to stay quiet. Violence follows, and the story is flipped, as though the one pushed out had done the pushing. In the stories of those experiencing it, antisemitism is often described as a casting out, a sometimes shockingly aggressive pattern of justifying blame, rarely a dynamic in which the bully is willing to make their power transparent.

What do we want Jewish children to actually do in moments like this: in real hallways and real digital spaces where belonging is fraught and then negotiated every day?

We want them to know who they are.To learn our stories and argue with them. 

(To even argue with us, should the argument stand for the sake of Heaven.)
To stand proud without hardening their hearts.
To keep building community even when community feels fragile.
To seek knowledge relentlessly, to trust creativity fiercely, to remain rooted in family, memory, and responsibility to one another.

To accept, as a challenge and not with despair, that to be othered is an experience we share.

We want them to live the ordinary, radical practices that have always sustained Jewish life: educating our children as an act of survival and hope; forming networks of mutual care so no one stands alone; insisting — sometimes brazenly — on joy as a moral stance toward the future. We dance. We sing. We study. We contribute, for the sake of it all, not for an easy transaction in acceptance. We make beauty in the midst of uncertainty. We elevate the small acts, knowing the space between people, the encounter, is actually where humanity lives. We know that enduring humanity does not rest in a single heart compelled to pity. And we do this without denying grief, fear, or complexity because they co-exist in that shared space.

Visually, the story shifts.

The hallway is still there, but it is no longer the whole frame. We want our Jewish kids to understand this, too. Belonging may not be given everywhere, but we carry it with us everywhere.

You see the violin practiced late at night in a cluttered living room.
A kitchen table scattered with books, laughter, and too much food.
Friends linking arms in celebration, not rescue.
Children learning ancient words and turning them into new questions.
Candles lit against the dark, small flames refusing disappearance.
Dancing that grows louder, not quieter, in the presence of history.

The power of the scene is no longer whether someone steps in to save a lonely Jewish child.

The power is that the child was never alone in the first place.

This is the story worth telling on the largest stage.
Not of pity.
Not of rescue.

But of a people who answer hatred by choosing life, again and again, in study halls and kitchens and playgrounds and sanctuaries.
A people who keep making meaning, keep making community, keep making joy within a world where these things require an active, human sense of purpose.

We are still here. Uncool. Unassimilated. Unfinished.

Still learning.
Still creating.
Still rooted.

And that is not only survival.

It is a vision of freedom big enough for us all.