Where is the joy of Jewish culture?

Turn on the news, or scroll through your feed. When you see a story about Jewish people, what is it about? My guess is that it’s about conflict. About antisemitism on the rise. About a campus argument, a defaced synagogue, a security briefing. It is a story of grief, siege, or defence.

This is, to be sure, a real part of the Jewish experience. It is a heavy and necessary burden. But it is not the whole story, and the problem is that it’s the only one we seem to file under the ‘Jewish’ category in the public library of ideas. It is a narrative that elicits sympathy, and sympathy is a useless currency for building any real understanding.

Sympathy is feeling for someone. It maintains a safe distance. It allows the sympathiser to look down from a position of comfort and pity the subject of their gaze. It reinforces the otherness of the group in question. Empathy, by contrast, is feeling with someone. Empathy requires a shared reference point, a hook, an entry. It needs a bridge between two experiences, and sympathy alone cannot build one.

So where are the bridges? Where are the parts of the culture that let outsiders in, not as patrons of sorrow, but as welcome guests?

Where is the art, the fashion, the food, the humour, the mysticism? Where is the chaotic, argumentative, surrealist joy of a Purim festival? Where is the profound, systems-level thinking embedded in Talmudic debate? Where is the work of Marc Chagall, of Leonard Bernstein, of Isaac Bashevis Singer? These are not simply Jewish artefacts; they are human invitations, expressed through a Jewish vocabulary.

The real, showable, sharable face of a living culture is not in its defensive crouch but in its creative output. It lives in the self-effacing, observational humour of Larry David or the anarchic satire of Sacha Baron Cohen. It is in the patient, fragrant process of a brisket slow-cooking for a family meal. It’s in the intellectual vertigo of kabbalistic cosmology. It is in the things you don