Key Takeaways:
- Ben M. Freeman argues Jewish pride isn’t a response to antisemitism. It’s an internal project built on three pillars: inoculating Jews against shame, insisting that only Jews get to define Jewish identity, and rejecting the idea that Judaism is merely a religion.
- His anthropological work applies the UN’s own seven criteria for indigenous peoples to Jews, and builds its case on a continuous language, continuous rituals, and an unbroken connection to the land of Israel.
- Freeman, who grew up gay and Jewish in Glasgow, says he now finds it harder to be an openly Zionist Jew than to be an openly gay man in the diaspora, charting the shift from campus hostility he first encountered nearly two decades ago that has since gone mainstream.
Ben Freeman came out twice. The first time was as a gay teenager in Glasgow. The second, years later, was as an unapologetic Zionist Jew — and he says that one hasn’t gotten any easier.
“I think now it is more challenging to be a Zionist Jew than it is to be a gay person,” he says. It’s a strange inversion for a man who spent his twenties defending Israel in a hostile university seminar room, and who now spends his days trying to convince Jews around the world that pride, not defense, is the answer.
Freeman is the founder of the Jewish Pride movement and the author of the Jewish Pride trilogy. The last in the series, The Jews: An Indigenous People, makes a scholarly case that Jews meet the United Nations’ own definition of an indigenous people. A former Holocaust educator, he has recently made Aliyah, trading the diaspora he spent years writing about for a life in the Jewish state.
His argument starts somewhere unexpected: not with antisemitism, but with the psychological damage Jews do to themselves trying to avoid it.
Jewish Pride Was Never a Response to Antisemitism
Freeman gave us his “elevator pitch” for his movement: it’s about educating, inspiring, and empowering Jews to see their Jewishness as a source of pride, never shame. And while Freeman thinks it can serve as an antidote to antisemitism, it didn’t emerge as a way to fight antisemitism.
“It’s actually not about Jew hatred,” he says. “It’s not really about the non-Jewish world. It’s internal focusing.”
He built the idea around three pillars. The first is inoculating Jews against the shame that comes from being hated — a psychological cost he says exists apart from the physical violence of pogroms, the Shoah, or October 7th, and one that pushes Jews to make themselves smaller in daily life. The second is that only Jews get to define Jewish identity; non-Jewish perspectives on what it means to be Jewish, he argues, are illegitimate, even when they come from well-meaning allies. The third is the one he says he’ll “die on”: Jews are not simply a religion. That framing, he says, comes from Christianity and misses that Judaism functions more like ancient Egypt or Rome: a civilization with its own laws, land, language, and culture, of which religious practice is only one part.
Trauma Is Not an Identity
Freeman’s own background makes this next argument harder to dismiss: he spent years as a Holocaust educator himself, leading trips to Auschwitz for Jews and non-Jews alike. That’s exactly why he’s willing to say something he knows sounds provocative: that Jews have “turned our trauma into identity.” He’s careful to frame it without judgment. Every generation, he says, does the best it can with what it inherits, and the shift that took hold in Jewish education from the 1990s onward, centering so much of it on the Shoah, came from an understandable impulse.
But he argues that it’s not working on either side of the equation. Holocaust education aimed at non-Jews was supposed to build empathy and reduce antisemitism; instead, in his telling, “it makes no impact.” Turned inward, it leaves Jewish identity resting on a catastrophe instead of a civilization. “It cannot be the basis for our identity,” he says, “because we belong to an ancient civilization.” He offers his own conversation with Chertoff as the counter-example: two Jews talking, in the present tense, about what it means to be Jewish. “That’s the story of Jewish continuity,” he says. “It’s not the story of Jewish tragedy.”
The Three Ways Jews Turn Hatred Inward
Freeman says he was inspired by Natan Sharansky’s “3D” model to identify antisemitism, to create his own “3Ds”: diminishment, denial, and deployment, the three manifestations of what he calls internalized anti-Jewishness.
Diminishment, the most common of the three, is when Jews shrink themselves to be more palatable. Freeman lived it for years, even while working for a Jewish organization, while his brother served in the IDF and his sister made Aliyah.
“I used to say to people, I’m Jewish, but… I’m just like you,” he recalls. “I wanted to be accepted. I didn’t want to be marked as different.”
Denial is the historical version: severing the connection outright, whether through religious conversion or simply declaring one isn’t really Jewish because one doesn’t practice. Deployment is newer and, Freeman says, growing: Jews who weaponize their own identity against the Jewish state, using their Jewishness as cover to demonize Israel.
The pattern isn’t new, he argues. He points to Jewish men in the Hellenistic period who underwent painful surgical reversals of circumcision just to participate in Greek athletic culture, and to a 19th-century convert to Christianity who spent his life demonizing Jews while citing his former faith as authority. “Even when a Jew becomes a Christian, he still has to prove it,” Freeman says. “The goalposts are always being moved.”
Progressive Spaces Embraced His Sexuality, but Rejected His Judaism
Freeman’s own experience of diminishment began at the University of Glasgow, where he says he was marked down on an essay for refusing to call Israel “the worst country in the world” — direct feedback, he says, from a professor. It happened nearly two decades before October 7th forced anyone else to reckon with campus hostility toward Israel.
“Really, what people are experiencing now on campus, I was experiencing a photo version of that over 20 years ago,” he says. He says that at the time he attended the University of Glasgow, it was thought of as an extremely progressive campus; today, it’s considered mainstream.
What strikes him now is the asymmetry between how progressive spaces treated his two identities. As a gay man, he says, he was given total latitude to self-define, down to being asked his pronouns. As a Jew, the same spaces felt entitled to correct him. He recalls checking “other” rather than “white” on census forms, only to be told he was, in fact, white.
“On one hand, you’ve given me such space to define my own identity,” he says, “but on the other hand, with regards to my Jewishness, you feel comfortable telling me what I am.”
The Case That Jews Are Indigenous, Not Colonizers
Freeman’s newest book takes the UN’s own seven criteria for indigeneity and applies them, point by point, to the Jewish people. He discards only one — the sixth, which holds that an indigenous group must be a minority in its own land — calling it incoherent for any indigenous population, not only Jews.
“It’s trash,” he says. “It was born out of this post-colonial idea that indigenous people are always minoritized, always oppressed… we cannot say that oppression is an inherent part of the indigenous experience.”
The rest of the case, he says, was straightforward to write. On language: Ladino, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic are all written in Hebrew script and built from Hebrew words, wherever Jews settled. On culture: an unbroken practice of brit milah and mikveh use, still observed today. On land: a religious calendar built entirely around a single territory, a custom of kissing the ground on arrival that runs from 20th-century Ethiopian immigrants back to Maimonides, and a historical practice of importing soil from Jerusalem for diaspora burials. On belief: a scriptural claim that the land was promised specifically to the Jewish people, a claim he clarifies is no less legitimate a marker of indigeneity than the origin stories of indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world.
He’s careful, though, to keep his book out of the fight over Palestinian identity. “I’m a Jew telling a Jewish story, and that’s my right,” he says, adding that he hasn’t done the equivalent research to render a verdict on Palestinian indigeneity and doesn’t intend to. He does raise two questions he’d want any honest investigation to answer: when did a distinct, collective Palestinian national identity first emerge (he puts it in the 1960s, though he says others place it earlier), and how much the debate is complicated by claims he considers outright fabrications, including assertions that no evidence of ancient Jewish presence exists in Jerusalem.
Where He Draws the Line on Anti-Zionist Jews
Freeman is unambiguous that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, full stop. He refers again to Sharansky’s “3D” framework: does a statement delegitimize Israel, demonize it, or hold it to a double standard applied nowhere else? Ordinary criticism of Israeli policy, he says, clears that bar easily. Claiming Israel deliberately targets Palestinian children or harvests organs does not. In his words, that’s blood libel dressed up as commentary.
He reserves his sharpest language for a specific group of Jews he argues have built platforms around demonizing the Jewish state, naming Hannah Einbinder and Peter Beinart directly. He describes them as having excluded themselves from the Jewish community — distinct, he stresses, from Jews who are simply unattached to Israel or critical of its government. “They can come back. They can make up,” he says, “but they are espousing non-Jewish, anti-Jewish ideas, and just because they’re a Jew doesn’t change that.”
It’s a position he says has hardened since October 7th, and one he’d apply institutionally, too — arguing, for instance, that no rabbinical seminary should ordain an anti-Zionist rabbi. “We are a broad synagogue,” he says, “but the synagogue has walls.”
From Playing Defense to Building the Next Generation
Freeman’s real objection to how Jewish identity is usually taught is that it’s reactive: built entirely around responding to the last atrocity or the latest headline. He wants something that would hold “whether October 7th happened or it didn’t.”
His model for that, developed after his first book, is what he calls the head, the hands, and the heart. The head is knowledge: Jewish history taught without apology. The hands are practice: the daily, doable acts of “doing Jewish,” in whatever form suits a given person. The heart, he says, is the hardest: cultivating the actual feeling of pride from childhood on, without ignoring antisemitism, but without organizing an entire identity around it either.
“We’re always on the defense,” he says, reaching for his only sports metaphor of the conversation, “and we have to be on the offense.”
That offense, for Freeman, is lived in small, specific rituals. He lights Shabbat candles most weekends, even alone. He keeps a loose version of kosher — no pork, no shellfish, but an unapologetic weakness for cheeseburgers. His home is filled with Judaica; he wears a Magen David and a Chai necklace, less as a religious obligation than as a daily, physical reminder of who he is.
He traces some of that structure to grief. His father died nine years ago, and Freeman credits the traditional Jewish mourning process — the unshaven weeks after burial, the valve of shiva, the yearly Kaddish — with giving him something he watched non-Jewish friends go without. “They felt lost,” he says. “I did not feel lost for one second, because there’s a manual for how a Jew mourns.”
Since making Aliyah, he says Israelis have told him “Welcome home” in a way that nearly brings him to tears; a sense of belonging he never fully had in Glasgow or London, however Jewish the neighborhood. It is, in the end, the whole point of the project: not a rebuttal to the world’s hatred, but a claim staked entirely on its own terms.
“The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel,” he says. “The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people, and Israel is a major manifestation of that.”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ben M. Freeman is the founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement and the author of the Jewish Pride trilogy, including his latest book, The Jews: An Indigenous People. This interview was conducted by Ben Chertoff for The Honest Take. Listen and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast streaming platform [https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm/].
📚 Ben M. Freeman — the Jewish Pride trilogy:
- Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People (2021) — https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Pride-Rebuilding-Ben-Freeman/dp/1913532135
- Reclaiming Our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride (2022) — https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Our-Story-Pursuit-Jewish/dp/1915036321
- The Jews: An Indigenous People (2025) — https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Indigenous-Ben-M-Freeman/dp/1916797474
✍️ His Substack, The Jewish Pride Press — https://ben126.substack.com/
Found this video interesting? Follow the HonestReporting page on Facebook to catch more videos, and read articles debunking news bias and smears, as well as others explaining Israel’s history, politics, and international affairs. Click here to learn more!
© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
