'We feel alone often': Israeli entrepreneur-activist tells Canadian Jews their social feeds aren't real life

Jews often feel alone in these times of rising hate, an Israeli-American entrepreneur and activist told an Ottawa crowd, but he insisted that “algorithms don’t reflect reality” and it’s imperative to live openly and proudly as Jews.

“I think I can speak for everyone in this room when I say we feel alone often,” Hillel Fuld, a longtime tech consultant and advisor who largely shifted to Israel advocacy after October 7, 2023, told one of two talks in Ottawa last week organized by Friends of JNF.

The emotional toll of the online battlefield can bring a sense of isolation for Jews watching the news and their feeds, he said.

“I have to tell you something that not many people know. The algorithm’s work is to make you feel alone. They send you and show you things that they know are going to anger you, so you stick around, and read more. And the other side sees the exact opposite,” he said. “But it is extremely important that we understand that these algorithms don’t reflect reality.”

Fuld leverages a following of about a half-million, with around five billion views or engagements, to defend Israel and offer hopeful Zionist messaging. It is a mistake to believe that even a modest online following cannot make a difference, he said.

“That’s not how social media works. Even if you have five followers – if you share something, other people share that too, and that travels outside your followers. Everyone has to speak up. And that applies to both Jews and Christians.”

It’s perspective that the Jewish people need at a time like this, he suggested, when the headlines and the hostility can easily eclipse any sense of hope.

“People say to me: ‘Give us a reason to get up in the morning.’ There’s a lot of positivity happening. And that doesn’t take away from the devastation. But we need a feed of positivity because the positivity is all around us.”

The odds have been stacked against the Jewish people many times over the course of 3,000 years – such as the Maccabees fighting the Roman army, or Queen Esther trying to save Jews from annihilation, or after 200 years of slavery in Egypt. “If I had told you back then we were going to celebrate one day, you would have thought I was nuts,” he said.

“I think it’s definitely a Jewish phenomenon that we don’t see what’s happening around us. But we have to remember all of our holidays. This is not our first rodeo. It ends well. But we also have to recognize the miracles all around us, because this isn’t the first time we’re making this mistake that we don’t notice the miracles around us.”

He encouraged listeners to be emboldened by the notion that there is a different Hebrew interpretation of the Biblical verse of “God will bless those who bless the Jews, and those who curse the Jews will be cursed.” It’s one where the last “cursed” shares the root for “light” — inferring that the haters will eventually turn a new leaf. “They’ll see your delegations. They’ll see your unity. They’ll see the incredible nature of the Jewish people.”

He told the Ottawa audiences that Western societies are becoming morally confused, which increases the need for Jews to remain visible, principled, and unambiguous about who they are.

“There’s never been a better story than the Jewish people. And not only are we not good at it, but we’re ashamed. We’re embarrassed. We don’t want to own it. And it’s, ‘Oh, what are they going to say about us?’ It’s terrible, right?” The answer, he said, is not to shrink in the face of fear.

“‘Let’s just be like them,’ people think, as if assimilation lowers antisemitism. But the more we assimilate, the more they hate us,” he said of history’s proof. “So we have to own the narrative. We have to own the story, which is, again, an amazing story. And stop being ashamed and embarrassed to say it. You know what? If they don’t like it, screw them.”

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