Why Storytelling Matters
By Glenn Fishkin Stories are how humans understand one another. Facts inform. Stories transform. I spent much of my career believing in the power of facts, which are the foundation of journalism. They hold institutions accountable, expose wrongdoing and create a record of what happened. But after decades of telling stories, I’ ve learned something else: facts rarely change hearts by themselves.
A statistic can tell us antisemitism is rising. A headline can tell us another Jewish school, synagogue, student, business or family has been threatened. A survey can measure fear, anxiety or the number of people hiding visible signs of being Jewish. We need facts, data and documentation. But metrics alone do not always help people grasp what it feels like to live inside those data points. And that’ s where stories matter.
Since Oct. 7, many Jewish people have experienced something difficult to explain to those outside the community. There was the horror of the attacks themselves. Then came the shock of denial, distortion, justification, conspiracy theories and the speed with which antisemitic rhetoric spread in public life and online.
For many Jews, the experience has not been limited to one event or one headline. It has been cumulative. A comment from a friend. A silence from someone expected to speak. A child asking whether it is safe to wear something Jewish in public. A student wondering whether a classroom conversation will turn into a judgment about their identity. A parent noticing the police presence at a Jewish event and feeling grateful yet unsettled.
Those are not statistics. They are lived experiences. And if we do not ask people to tell us what they have lived through, we miss the human story. That is why Voices Against Hate is built around interviews, not arguments.
We need to hear from Holocaust survivors because their memories help us recognize how hatred becomes normalized over time. We need historians, because context matters and memory without accuracy can become sentiment instead of education. We need educators, because they are on the front lines of helping young people distinguish fact from propaganda.
We need community leaders, because they see how institutions respond when fear becomes part of daily life. We need influencers and public voices, because social media is now one of the places where identity is shaped, misinformation spreads and hate can move at extraordinary speed. And we need ordinary community members, because they often express the truth most plainly.
One person may not be able to explain an entire crisis, but an individual story can make a larger reality visible. In television news, we often report on one person’ s experience to help viewers make sense of a much larger issue. The individual story gives a human face to a larger reality, transforming abstraction into something people can recognize, connect with and remember.
We can know something intellectually without ever feeling its human impact. Film strengthens that connection because it preserves more than words. It captures the moments between words: a hesitation, a breath, a look away, an emotion that passes across someone’ s face when they describe something they have carried for years.
When we speak with another person, we read their face, hear the nuances in their voice and notice what their silence communicates. Film allows future viewers to witness those moments, revealing not only what someone said, but what it cost
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them to say it.
Stories help us remember, deepen our empathy and step into another person’ s experience without pretending it is our own. They cannot replace facts, however. Stories require truth, context and discernment. Facts without stories can remain distant. Stories without facts can become manipulation. And this very responsibility to bring them together feels especially urgent now.
Storytelling, done honestly, slows us down. It asks us to seek understanding before we judge. It asks us to see the person behind the narrative. It reminds us that antisemitism is not only a political topic, a campus debate or a data point. It is something people absorb in their homes, schools, workplaces, synagogues and public lives.
As we gather during the High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur call us to remember, reflect and account for our actions. We confess in the plural because responsibility is communal. Storytelling, at its best, asks the same of us: to listen, bear witness to one another’ s experiences and recognize our shared responsibility for the future.
The goal is not to make people afraid. The goal is to make people aware. Voices Against Hate exists because we need more than a reaction. We need memory. We need context. We need credible voices. We need people willing to say what they are seeing and feeling, and what they fear may become normal if too many others look away.
Facts inform. Stories transform. And as a new year begins, stories preserved with honesty and care do something else: They make silence harder.
To learn more about Voices Against Hate, please visit voicesagainsthate. org