'Our enemies have never had an answer for our joy' – Hen Mazzig on Jewish defiance
In an age of rising antisemitism, Jewish joy may be the one thing hatred cannot overcome
Follow us on GoogleHen and Marc at their sunset wedding ceremony on September 20, 2025, in Thira (Santorini), Greece. (photo credit: Yotam Schwartz)ByHEN MAZZIG
Recently, I announced a short documentary about my wedding. It’s called Uninvited, and the wedding is almost incidental. The film is about a guest list and the strange arithmetic my husband, Marc, and I performed as we wrote it: crossing off name after name of people who had once been close to us, people who decided, at some point in the last few years, that they could no longer be friends with a Jew who declines to apologize for existing.
Marc never chose a public life. He fell in love with a Jewish man who came with a target on his back, and the target found him, too. We told that story honestly, grief included, because grief is now part of being openly Jewish. But we also told it as a wedding: two grooms under a huppah, breaking the glass, unembarrassed by our own tradition. Once the film entered the world, the response exceeded criticism by an order of magnitude. A film about two men getting married produced a volume of death threats I would not have believed had I not read them myself.
We had not published a political argument. We told a love story, and the love story was treated as the greater provocation. Why should a wedding enrage people more than an op-ed ever did? Because an argument can be rebutted or outvoted. A Jew living contentedly inside his own life yields nothing and offers nothing to seize. The fury this provokes is the fury of a worldview confronting evidence against itself.
Visibly Jewish
On July 4, I spoke at London’s third annual Jewish Pride. The event is three years old because it had to be. For two years, there was no Jewish contingent at London’s Pride; organizers would not guarantee our safety and treated the request for it as an imposition. The premise beneath that refusal was familiar: Jews may belong, provided we check the inconvenient parts of ourselves at the door.
This year, the Jewish bloc marched again, flags out, a few hundred Jews walking past thousands lining the streets. Some cheered. A few shouted.
Later, at a street party outside Miznon in Soho, one man screamed “Free Palestine” at hundreds of people dancing beneath Jewish stars and Israeli flags. He went hoarse. The dancing continued.
This is what Jewish safety has looked like across our history: the willingness to occupy a public square as ourselves, whether or not the square approves.
Hen and Marc at their sunset wedding ceremony on September 20, 2025, in Thira (Santorini), Greece. (credit: Yotam Schwartz)
I know something about taking space that would prefer your absence. During Iran’s attacks this spring, I was in Israel, running to shelters more times in a week than I could count. On Purim, in the middle of a war, I found myself in a parking garage-turned-shelter, where somebody’s cousin had produced a speaker and a hundred strangers danced beneath a borrowed strobe light until the sirens released us.
The scene held a symmetry too neat for fiction: a holiday about a regime that tried to erase us, celebrated underground by people sheltering from a regime still trying. When I wrote about it afterward, the piece traveled further than nearly anything I have published. Readers recognized the oldest Jewish technology there is: defiance disguised as a party.
The same conviction animates my online series, And They’re Jewish. I built it because every public conversation about Jewish identity had come to begin and end in trauma. My guests are artists the audience already loves, and they do not come on to discuss October 7 or the war. They come to explain why their Jewishness is a wellspring rather than a wound. That, too, turns out to be an answer nobody expects: no rebuttal, just visible joy.
Beyond defiance
Here is what this argument is not. Joy is not a strategy, and I distrust anyone selling the idea that the right framing will get antisemites to leave us alone the way other movements have learned to isolate their opponents. That playbook fails us because antisemitism differs from other hatreds in kind. It functions as a theory of the world, an explanation for whatever has gone wrong in a society, and it adapts with equal ease to Jews who are powerless or thriving.
You cannot shame a worldview into silence with a slogan; the entire logic of slogans is to compress problems into a line a crowd can chant, and history suggests who that compression tends to blame. So no, our joy will not convert the people who hate us. What it refuses them is the deeper victory: a Jewish life organized entirely around their obsession, a people shrunk to the shape of the accusation against them.
Hen Mazzig participates in an Oxford Union debate in June. The debate focused on the motion: This House believes Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine. Mazzig spoke in opposition to the motion. (credit: Courtesy)
This is why I accepted the Oxford Union’s invitation to debate last month, knowing what it would cost. I stood in that chamber opposite people who have built careers on the proposition that Jews are the last acceptable colonizers on earth, and I talked about my grandmothers: one expelled from Baghdad, one from Tunisia – refugees before the word “Nakba” had entered anyone’s vocabulary.
I told the room that it did not get to vote on whether my family lives, and that I had stopped requiring its permission to exist. We lost the vote. In that room, we always do. But people found me afterward to say something had shifted for them. The arguing is not optional, however much it costs. It is for the undecided listener, quietly making up her mind, as much as for anyone in the chamber.
But the argument is the smaller part of the inheritance. The debates and the endless correction of the record are necessary work. They have never been what keeps the Jewish people alive. The mother raising Jewish children in a hostile city is doing enough.
The playwright writing a Jewish story with no antisemitism in it is doing enough. We cannot abandon the fight to persuade. Neither can we let it consume the thing it defends: the plain, stubborn right to live inside our own tradition, joyfully and on our own terms.
Our enemies have a thousand answers to our arguments. They have never had one for our joy.■
Hen Mazzig is an Israeli-raised author and social critic redefining Jewish advocacy through his social media laboratory TLVi.org.
