Of the many things Israel does well, fighting the narrative war is generally not considered among them.
The country’s response to international criticism, both broad and specific, is often faulted, even by allies, as disjointed and lacking a sense of urgency.
In a post-Oct. 7 world, much of the narrative war has taken place online, with Israel turning to a set of Diaspora influencers with large social media followings to take up the cause. However, a growing app intends to fight at the grassroots level, employing a force multiplier.
Daniel Rosen is a perfect example of the purpose of that app, called Emissary, founded in early 2024 by entrepreneurs David Kristal and David Burton. Emissary employs approximately eight full-time staff, including Rosen as co-founder and co-chair, and has thus far raised $1.8 million, including a sizable grant from UJA-Federation of New York.
Available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play, the app—with 4,000 downloads so far—delivers to users a curated stream of social-media posts from various platforms about Israel and antisemitism. Users of Emissary—cultivated from the ranks of synagogues, Jewish schools and organizations—can share those posts promptly to their own feeds.
There’s also an artificial-intelligence component called “Ask Emissary” that allows users to ask a question, after which they receive an answer based on a Large Language Model (or LLM), meaning it was built exclusively to combat antisemitism and drawn from reputable sources in the Jewish world.
Additionally, Emissary Social takes twice-daily uploaded content from a team of curators that are meant to confront hatred and lets users easily share those items across a range of major platforms.
“I think it’s really at the vanguard of how social-media users can wade into the sea of content and feel that they have a little bit of guidance on their side, as opposed to just going at it blind,” Jonathan Blake, senior rabbi at Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y., and an avid user of Emissary, told JNS.
‘Couldn’t afford to sit on the sidelines’
To drive his point home about the effectiveness of the app, Rosen said he was at an event with about 150 young people and asked them to download the app, with nearly 100 agreeing to do so.
“As they were downloading, I was asking how many people they have in their network? And the answer was invariably anywhere from 200 to 1,000 people for each person,” Rosen told JNS.
He directed the new users to a specific piece of content uploaded right before the event and asked them to upload it on their own accounts using the Emissary app.
“What happened is 100 people uploaded that piece of content to the 200 people in their network. So that’s 20,000 people who got the same piece of content at the same exact time,” he said. “I was able to demonstrate to these young people in real time the effectiveness of collective action. Now imagine if we had 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 people” creating millions or potentially billions of impressions.
“It’s great content, and it’s already memeable or postable with the click of a button,” said Blake, who encourages his congregants, especially younger ones who may not yet know where to turn for trusted information online.
He continued, saying that “it gives a curated and thoughtfully cultivated stream of pro-Israel, pro-Jewish content, none of which I have found to be inflammatory or incendiary or needlessly provocative. So it allows its users to populate their own social-media feeds with valuable content that they might not otherwise discover.”
For his part, Rosen dabbled in public support for Israel, dating back to his time as a student at New York University, when he led rallies and protests during the years of the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005.
After college, Rosen got into his family’s distribution business and has been there for 21 years.
Describing himself to JNS as “an armchair general,” Rosen conceded he’d been “totally uninvolved” on the pro-Israel side for the better part of two decades.
“Then Oct. 7 happened, and what I saw on the streets, on social media, shocked me in the sense of the brutality,” he said. “But what I saw on the streets of New York—when we saw on social media people were saying things and doing things that average Americans aren’t expected to do—I asked the question, ‘What’s going on here?’ And I understood that I couldn’t afford to sit on the sidelines any longer.”
‘Make one voice into many’
Rosen returned to the arena with a big idea: While there’s a small minority of people who are very active, loud and organized, “if we don’t become organized ourselves and start acting in coordinated ways, we’re going to leave that conversation to continue to be influenced.”
The challenge is to create a network of millions of people to work in a coordinated way to defend Israel online. It led him, with the guidance of Rabbi Reuven Fink of Young Israel of New Rochelle, N.Y., to create an organization called Minds and Hearts.
Rosen was joined by a partner, Aaron Herman. They formed a more complete team with the inclusion of Rachel Azaria, a social activist and former Knesset member; Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. (res.) Omer Dagan; philanthropist Sandy Cardin; and human-rights activist Marjan Keypour Greenblatt.
About nine months ago, Cardin, the son of former Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin, introduced Hearts and Minds to Kristal and Burton, who, Rosen told JNS “understood the same thing we understood, which was that the fight is on social media, in the minds and hearts of the average American.”
The established Emissary group had a “slightly different methodology,” said Rosen, who serves as co-chair, but the goals and missions were similar enough to warrant a merger, with Rosen serving as co-chair.
While Minds and Hearts brought their ground game, Kristal proved a means to add something lacking: the technology. He founded an employee engagement and loyalty-management program, providing social intra-connectivity to employees of high-stakes companies.
“He took his $10 million technology and repurposed it,” Rosen said of Kristal. “It had already been built and was already battle-tested.”
This is the component that makes up Emissary Connect, now being utilized in several pilot programs by a few notable Jewish organizations to help coordinate constituents. It is expected to launch in August.
Emissary Connect allows individuals who sign up to become an “emissary” themselves and be placed into a group of around 50 people, led by a group “champion.” A synagogue with 1,000 members, for example, would be divided into 20 groups of 50 people.
Many of those potential users, Rosen said, “feel like they’re by themselves. They’re alone, and we’re not really organized. And so the idea here is to make one voice into many voices, and through that, we can become very impactful.”
Each group is given a mission, directive or request based on real-life current affairs. Rosen used the examples of Kanye West’s Super Bowl ad, which was used to direct viewers to a site selling Nazi swastika T-shirts, and of CNN broadcasting falsely that Israel had struck Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in the opening weeks of its war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Once fully built, Emissary could direct groups totaling tens of thousands of people to write to the company hosting West’s website, or “we could have sent 10,000 people to the CNN page and say, ‘Hey, that’s not true.’ And we could have flooded the social-media spaces and the comment sections for CNN,” Rosen said.
He added that there are “so many different ways that we can become very effective through communal action, through coordinated action.”
‘Speaks to a need’
Emissary is engaged in pilot programs with high-profile New York City-area Jewish schools like Salanter Akiba Riverdale (SAR) Academy in The Bronx, Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn and Westchester Hebrew High School, where the junior classes at each institution have seen opt-in rates of 90% to the program. And, Rosen said, “they bring it back to their family and their communities, so we have some very real numbers to make real impacts.”
Westchester Hebrew High School was among the first schools in the app’s pilot program.
The app “speaks to a need, and it can help mobilize this younger population and empower them to take action,” Lisa Kahn Kriegel, the school’s social worker and activities coordinator, told JNS.
She said she’s encouraged that it is entering the schools and “meeting these high school kids where they’re at. I think that’s the right move to start working on the next generation.”
The start of the new school year will see a rollout to many more schools, synagogues and communities, Rosen told JNS.
“We’ve been pursuing a concurrent strategy. There’s a grassroots strategy, which is reaching out, community by community, place by place, and getting buy-in,” he said. “And then there’s the organizational, major Jewish partnership strategy,” with some 50 organizations thus far utilizing the Emmissary app.
