When Chef Vlad Briantsev plates a dish in a VIP suite at Inter Miami Stadium, his audience includes David Beckham, Lionel Messi and their families. But Briantsev—a 30-year-old Jewish chef who grew up in his parents’ Chicago restaurant—is thinking about a much wider table.
Through his social media content, he is quietly doing something that governments, think tanks, and advocacy organizations have struggled to achieve: making Jewish identity appealing to people who never sought it out.
He is one of a new generation of Jewish food creators carrying that message at a particularly resonant moment: Israeli cuisine, once little known beyond its borders, has emerged as one of the world’s most vibrant food cultures, and after several extraordinarily difficult years, the restaurants are opening up again, and chefs at its heart are finding their footing again.
Briantsev is one of three prominent Jewish food creators who recently completed the inaugural cohort of the Birthright Israel Onward Storytellers Program, a new fellowship designed to empower Jewish creatives and digital changemakers to share authentic narratives about Judaism and Israel with global audiences.
The others are Matt Cowan, a Jewish food content creator based in Orange County, California, who has a close working relationship with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay; and Jana Magen, a Mexico City-based cookbook author who leads culinary trips to Israel for Latin American families.
Together, they represent an emerging and largely under-covered phenomenon: Jewish food influencers who are using the universal language of cuisine as a non-confrontational, extraordinarily effective form of public diplomacy.
“Food is the most effective way to cross boundaries and barriers and touch people,” Briantsev says. “This may be the most effective public diplomacy Israel and the Jewish people have these days.”
Jewish storytelling goes digital and gets creative
The Storytellers Program was founded by Jacqueline Korren, who had been working in Silicon Valley before Oct. 7, 2023, changed the trajectory of her career, and, she says, her sense of identity.
“I lost my voice in my Jewish and non-Jewish communities,” she recalls. “I went on a journey to try to find it again.”
That journey led her to a Birthright pilot program at Reichman University focused on public diplomacy and counterterrorism, where she had a crystallizing realization: Jewish people were fighting two wars simultaneously—one military, one cultural.
“Regardless of your views on the military war,” Korren says, “we as Jews had to show up online differently. I understand that culture is the bridge. It’s what makes humans connect - our shared hobbies, interests, and the ways we share time.”
She pitched an incubator for Jewish creators as her final project during the fellowship. It was the first time in Birthright’s history that the organization agreed to test a fundamentally different kind of program. She became its founder and director.
The inaugural cohort, which concluded last summer, brought together 43 participants from the United States, Canada, Argentina, Costa Rica, Australia, Mexico, Switzerland and the United Kingdom—
all between the ages of 18 and 35. Fifty percent, Korren notes, had never done Birthright. They were not primarily Israel advocates; they were creators with genuine audiences who happened to be Jewish, trying to figure out how to wield that identity without jeopardizing everything else they had built.
“Moving away from reactive and defensive narrative and classic hasbara was a guiding principle, Korren explains. “We don’t need to explain or defend ourselves. We need to show confidence.”
The goal, she says, is to ensure that Jewish and Israeli culture enters mainstream media, not through institutional channels, but through trusted voices people already follow.
Jewish identity, plated and served to millions
Of all the creative niches represented in the Storytellers cohort, food creators occupy a uniquely powerful position. Food is intimate, shareable, and—crucially—non-threatening. It asks nothing of the viewer politically. It simply invites them to the table.
Briantsev, who competed on Season 21 of “Hell’s Kitchen,” an American reality cooking competition hosted by Ramsay, a British chef, before building a career cooking in luxury restaurants and eventually for celebrity clients, has been deliberate about how he weaves Jewish identity into his content.
“I want to present Jewish values without screaming it,” he says. “I’m talking about the values of community, support, and caring for each other. When you deliver that through food, the message comes across in a much more effective way.”
He also uses his platform to advocate for Israeli cuisine specifically. “Israeli food, in my opinion, is some of the highest-quality, freshest and healthiest food out there. I hope that through my videos I’m also inspiring other Jews to express their Jewishness.”
Matt Cowan arrived at Jewish food content from a different direction. He had spent years building influencer programs for chefs and recognized a gap in the social media landscape. “I’ve always been obsessed with Jewish cuisine, and I realized that not many people on social media platforms promote it,” he says. “Food is one of the great unifiers in the world, and it’s also a Jewish value to feed people and invite them to a meal around the table. Food is a core part of Jewish culture.”
His experience of being in Israel on Oct. 7 and the complex aftermath—including losing friends who expressed support for Hamas—has infused his work with a quiet urgency.
Jana Magen’s path began even earlier. At 19, she pivoted from kindergarten teaching to enroll at Le Cordon Bleu in Mexico City, driven by an obsession with food she could no longer ignore. COVID-era lockdowns became a creative turning point: she threw herself into social media content and recipes, eventually writing multiple cookbooks and building a following across Latin America.
Today, she works with Israeli destination organizations to guide culinary tours to Israel for families, using food as a bridge to culture, identity, and connection. For her audience, many of whom may have limited or skewed exposure to Israel, a week of eating their way through Tel Aviv and Jerusalem markets can be quietly transformative.
The culinary landscape these creators are showcasing has undergone a remarkable transformation. Israel’s food scene—once limited in variety and ambition—has evolved into one of the most dynamic in the world, building on a rich Eastern Mediterranean tradition and the influence of waves of immigration from North Africa, the Levant and beyond.
From the hummus joints and shuk markets of Jerusalem to the inventive tasting menus emerging from Tel Aviv’s restaurant scene, Israeli cuisine has become internationally recognized as a destination in its own right.
That recognition has not been without its challenges. After years of extraordinary difficulty—
the disruption of COVID-19 followed by the upheaval that followed Oct. 7—restaurants across Israel are finding their footing again, with new openings and a renewed sense of energy in dining rooms that were, not long ago, largely empty.
For Magen’s culinary tour participants, arriving at this particular moment carries its own quiet significance: they are not visiting a frozen postcard, but a living, resilient food culture—one that is actively rebuilding and reasserting itself.
Jewish soft power: Reaching people institutions can’t
What distinguishes these creators from traditional advocates or official spokespeople is not just their medium but their audiences. People follow food influencers because they genuinely enjoy their content—not because they are interested in Middle Eastern geopolitics.
That dynamic creates a rare opening. “In influencer culture, people follow people that they trust,” Korren notes. “Creators who are Jewish and have large audiences are being followed because people like what they do and say. People find value in that.”
This reach is especially significant at a moment when institutional pro-Israel voices have struggled to break through—or have, in some cases, actively alienated younger and more diverse audiences.
Gidi Mark, CEO of Birthright Israel, puts it plainly: the program has “a long-term vision to build a community of creators and changemakers who shape the digital and cultural discourse long after the program ends.”
Korren frames the target audience carefully. “We’re not targeting people who hate us,” she says. “We’re talking to people who just didn’t know.”
The gap between hostility and ignorance is significant—and food, she and these creators believe, is one of the few cultural currencies capable of bridging it without triggering defensiveness on either side.
Jewish voices, amplified: Taking the narrative back
There is a broader argument underlying all of this, one that Korren articulates with a sense of historical urgency. Despite representing a tiny fraction of the global population, Jewish people have historically exercised an outsized influence in culture, science, business, and the arts. The Storytellers Program is an attempt to apply that same disproportionate impact to the digital sphere - and to do so on Jewish terms.
“We are the narrators of our own story,” she says. “It is our responsibility, and if we don’t do it, someone will do it for us. For the past two years, we’ve been watching many ‘someone elses’ do it for us. It’s time now for us to define our own narrative about who we are and how we want to be known.”
For Briantsev, Cowan and Magen, that narrative is being written one dish at a time—in stadium suites, on Instagram reels, and around culinary tour tables in Jerusalem. They are not politicians or spokespeople. They are people who love to cook, who happen to be Jewish, and who have realized that in a fractured world, the most powerful invitation they can extend is a simple one: come eat with us.
