Zionists are currently experiencing a profound and public crisis of narrative control. This was made startlingly clear by former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz, whose recent remarks at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly served less as a warning and more as a frantic public admission that the official pro-Israel narrative has collapsed, particularly among younger generations.
The Crutch of Mainstream Media is Broken
Hurwitz’s most revealing comments center on the seismic shift in media consumption. She lamented that it “used to be that the news you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream; you know, it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views.” This statement is a candid acknowledgment that, for decades, the mainstream legacy media acted as a crucial filter, protecting the public—and young Jews—from exposure to critical or “anti-Israel” perspectives. By framing this media control as a good thing, she confirms a long-standing critique: the Zionist narrative relied heavily on the suppression of Palestinian voices.
The problem, as Hurwitz sees it, is that social media has shattered this system. It has become a global medium whose algorithms are shaped by billions worldwide. As she puts it, “You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media… so you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.” The key difference is that Palestinians now possess the tools to expose the unvarnished truth of Israel’s actions directly to the world. For Hurwitz, the problem isn’t the abuse; it’s that people are seeing it. She highlights the desperation of those who try to offer “data and information and facts and arguments,” only to be met with a mental “wall of carnage.” It is a chilling picture of narrative spin rendered utterly “obscene” by raw, undeniable video evidence of massacres and mutilation.
The Great Moral Clarity Backfire
Perhaps the most astonishing part of Hurwitz’s admission is her critique of Holocaust education. She suggests that the “very smart bet” made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education is “beginning to break down” because it is causing “confusion.”
The “confusion,” according to Hurwitz, is that young people are applying the core moral lesson of the Holocaust—that genocide is wrong and the powerful should not systematically hurt the weak—directly to the current situation in Gaza. They learn about “big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews” and correctly infer the principle that one should fight the “big powerful people hurting the weak people.” When they see “powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians” on their phones all day, the resulting moral equation is simple: “I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel.”
The outrage here is not directed at the carnage itself, but at the moral clarity of those observing it. Hurwitz and those she represents are essentially admitting that their carefully constructed moral lessons are backfiring because people are applying universal ethics rather than ethno-nationalist exceptionalism. They are not denying Israel’s abuses; they are mourning the fact that people are obtaining information and moral clarity about those abuses.
Family Loyalty Above Morality
Hurwitz concludes her remarks by pivoting to an intensely nationalistic and tribal argument, lamenting that Western Jews have “re-imagined Judaism as a Protestant-style religion” focused on social justice. This, she argues, is a “category error.” She asserts that the seven million people in Israel “are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings.”
This framework is a desperate attempt to create an unquestionable duty of loyalty that transcends morality. The implication is that world Jews should be loyal to the State of Israel, not because its actions are moral or truthful, but because they are “family.” This is the final collapse of the narrative: when the moral and factual arguments fail, the defense defaults to pure tribalism. However, as any ethical person knows, genocide doesn’t magically become acceptable if the perpetrators are one’s “siblings.” In fact, a genuine commitment to morality would demand a special responsibility to oppose one’s own family if they are committing atrocities.
The frantic scrambling of figures like Hurwitz—frantically trying to manage perceptions and manipulate minds—is the clearest possible sign that the narrative of Zionists is in retreat. The quiet parts are being said out loud, and the truth is finally finding its way into the light.
