Social media is a battlefield. A breeding ground for arguments, where millions of keyboard warriors spend hours fighting with people they will never meet.
I’m one of them. Not because I enjoy it, but because there’s something I care about: the truth.
Yet even when I wander into the comments section as nothing more than a tourist, one phrase always stands out. It reveals how, once the arguments run out, prejudice is quick to take its place.
“You Jews are always playing the victim.” “Stop victimizing yourselves.” Or, for those unwilling to expend even the slightest effort, a sticker: “Victim Card: Declined.”
The irony is that few accusations are as incompatible with Jewish history as this one.
Yes, Jews have been victims. Of pogroms, persecution, expulsions and attempts at genocide—real genocide. These events are not confined to some distant past; they remain part of our actual reality. That’s not a matter of opinion. These are documented, verifiable facts.
However, being a victim is not the same as embracing victimhood.
Yes, Jews have a long memory and are committed to never forgetting. But knowing what happened is not the same as turning it into your identity.
And yet, throughout Jewish history, one pattern keeps repeating itself: Jews have always found a way to get back up and move forward.
For centuries, Jews lived scattered across the world. Every expulsion meant starting over. And starting over, again and again, taught them to adapt and to invest in the one thing that no one could ever take away from them: knowledge.
Economists and historians such as Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, authors of The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492, argue that this early commitment to literacy and education helped shape the Jewish people. Over time, Jewish communities became disproportionately represented in professions such as medicine, law, education and commerce.
It is no coincidence, then, that despite making up just 0.2% of the world’s population, Jews and people of Jewish descent have received roughly 22% of all Nobel Prizes.
The constant need to start over, solve problems and rebuild—often while facing persecution and exclusion—turned adaptability into one of the Jewish people’s defining strengths.
To accuse Jews of exploiting their suffering for moral advantage is not only historically inaccurate. It ignores the fact that, time and again, they responded to tragedy by building on top of it.
That is why pulling out the “Victim Card: Declined” sticker is an audacity. Victims exist, and so does victimhood. The problem is accusing people of the latter simply because they refuse to forget the former.
