The New Era of Jewish Strongmen

When he was 18 years old, Alex Aaron won the 2024 Colorado Muscle Classic, his first bodybuilding competition. He was the overall winner in the Men’s Physique category and is now qualified to compete in nation-wide shows, but has since turned toward another career—posting videos about working out—and Israel.

Now 20 and with over 90,000 followers on his Instagram, @alexaaronlab, he merges fitness, comedy and Judaism with a snarky sense of humor. With a close-cropped Clark Kent curls and a Magen David dangling on his brawny chest, it’s easy to see why he’s grown as an online influencer—though he’s more likely to teach a viewer how to get a Jewish wife rather than do a successful bench press. Scrolling his feed, he’s either celebrating Pesach at the gym, pretending to be an “average Jewish person playing victim” in purple shorts, joking that his abs were “promised by Netanyahu” or hitting the gym to “scare away the keyboard antisemites.”

He boasts Judaism through a Gen Z set of linguistics and a smirk, preaching about Tel Aviv versus Miami or refuting Israeli stereotypes. It’s sort of a strange sight, given that Christian lifters and professional athletes are much more common. Case in point: Nearly all the UFC fighters Trump employed for his MMA birthday cagefight thanked Jesus Christ.

“Making people mad based on the fact that I’m Jewish and that I work out is hilarious,” Aaron says. A pre-med student at the University of Colorado Boulder, he stumbled upon his mix of fitness and Judaism content accidentally. About a year ago, his friends urged him to post fitness videos, but his social media started blowing up when he posted one of himself posing that was captioned “Jewish genetics.” The hate comments came, which boosted his engagement, and his beat has been Jewish fitness ever since. 

In Israel on a fully funded trip through Birthright to make more fitness content and partner with a clothing brand, he plans to move there in the next two to three years after graduating. He had visited this winter, on a trip that was interrupted by the outbreak of the Iran War (he headed to a bomb shelter with a gym inside). “It’s where I’m meant to be, where Jewish people are meant to be,” he says. Israelis are welcoming and outgoing, he says, but also have no filter, a trait he shares. “Israeli culture is saying what’s on your mind, doing whatever the fuck you want to do.”

Israelis are also, he notes, athletic. He promotes his bodybuilding to combat the old stereotype of the fragile, nervous Jew. Non-Jews, he says, “think we’re physically weak people and all we care about is monetary value.”

He's not the only one. Jared Firestone, aka the “Jewish Jet,” is also trying to challenge what he sees as assumptions about Jewish strength. The Israeli skeleton bobsledding Olympian showed up to the Milan Cortina earlier this year with the names of the Israeli athletes and coaches killed at the 1972 Munich games written on his kippah. As a child, he was interested in sports, but learning about the massacre inspired him to reach for the Olympics. “I always wondered how I’d honor them if I made it,” he says. “I never thought I’d be the flag bearer at the opening ceremony.”

He made aliyah from Florida in 2019, then started a nonprofit, Advancing Jewish Athletics (AJA), with fellow Olympian AJ Edelman. It aims to financially support young Jewish athletes, who, Firestone says, lack both the encouragement from older generations and the financial infrastructure to compete in athletics at the Olympic or professional level. There’s “nowhere to go to be competitive unless you’re self-funded,” he says. 

Funding Jews in sports feels like an uphill battle, and Firestone uses his platform to show that good things can come from that support. Competing for an arena of fans, as he did this winter, offers Jewish athletes a chance to change other people’s assumptions about Jewish athletic prowess. “Athletes are the best ambassadors,” he says. 

Both Aaron and Firestone are part of a growing contingent of young people, mostly men, posting fitness content to social media that centers their Judaism, either jokingly or inspirationally. Yoel Levy, known as The Jewish Fitness Coach, posts advice to over 267,000 followers, and Ryan Behrmann, a friend of Aaron’s, says he owes his muscles to “Jewnetics” and advises how to make Shabbat meals fit your macros. Yuda Katz, a Hasidic Jew, shared a video of himself squatting 315 lbs wearing a yarmulke and peiyot.

“What Jews need to do is to get out of our box,” Aaron says. “We need to post more on social media. There’s so many fit, good-looking people in Israel that the world needs to know about.” Serendipitously, strength in service of Israel echoes a century-old movement involved in the founding of the Jewish state, now making a comeback in the wake of its shattered perception.

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The stereotype of the weak Jew has some truth to it, says Michael Brenner, editor of the book Emancipation Through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe. Learning is a big part of Judaism, and Jews were historically drawn to the fields of religion and academics rather than to the typical professions at the time, like agriculture. “The assumption was they were mainly studying, sitting in these dusted rooms without being exposed to fresh air,” Brenner says.

Things changed at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, where physician and author Max Nordau coined the term “Muscular Judaism” as the way to achieve Zionism’s goals. (At the time of the speech, “Muscular Christianity,” formed to oppose industrialization, had been making the rounds, too.) In a later article, Nordau advocated for a “Jewry of muscles” that sought to abandon “the narrow Jewish street [where] our poor limbs soon forgot their gay movements.” In his vision, a physically weak sect of people wouldn't be able to forge their own country. “Let us take up our oldest traditions,” he wrote, “let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men.”

This new ideal was supposed to have tangible consequences. “By creating this image and creating a new Jew, they’d create a new Jewish society, which would lead to a new Jewish state,” Brenner says. To achieve this, one had to work hard and train, “not study in a yeshiva.”

Jewish sports clubs began popping up around Europe in the early 20th century, offering the most popular sports at the time: gymnastics, boxing and football (American soccer). And with increasing antisemitism in Germany, many Jews also enrolled in self-defense classes there, too. The clubs were named either after heroic characters in Jewish history (i.e., Bar Kochba and Samson) or translated to phrases about power: HaKoach (meaning strength), Gibbor (brave) and Gevurah (heroism). The most famous of these was the Maccabi World Union, named after the Jewish liberation movement that fought for independence, and which to this day hosts the Maccabiah Games, known as the “Jewish Olympics.” The Maccabi World Union, its website reads, “emphasized physical development in service of the Jewish nation.”

In imagining the “New Jew,” Nordau forged a path for the sabra—a muscular, sun-kissed, Israeli-born Jew who would go on to help create what would become the new Zionist country. Best portrayed by Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan, a soldier for Israel’s independence, in the 1960 movie Exodus, the sabra cultivated both his body and the land, and in propaganda posters, he was often depicted with agricultural tools. 

Emigrating to Palestine in the early twentieth century, philosopher Aaron David Gordon advocated for a “religion of labor,” which emphasized a working-class connection to the land as a reason for Zionism. “We lack the habit of labor—not labor performed out of external compulsion, but labor to which one is attached in a natural and organic way,” he wrote in 1911. “This kind of labor binds a people to its soil and to its national culture.” Cambridge Professor of Modern Hebrew Studies Yaron Peleg writes that “by 1948, both farmers and soldiers became two of Zionism’s most distinct symbols, national ideals of productivity and physical force.”

Not everyone was convinced that physicality was the best strategy for establishing a Jewish state. For journalist Ahad Ha’am, considered the founder of “cultural Zionism,” physical strength’s absence in Judaism was a sign, not an error. He envisioned the future Jewish state as a spiritual center, divinely handed down, instead of being taken by force. Historian Anita Shapira writes in 1992’s Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force that Ha’am thought “the Jewish people did not suffer so much affliction for thousands of years just to achieve the mundane goal of bringing into being still another tiny polity like Serbia or Montenegro.” A special people should have a special nation. “Israel’s salvation will be brought about by ‘prophets,’ not ‘diplomats,’” he said. Of course, this idea didn’t prevail. 

With the State of Israel created after the deadly 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Muscular Judaism had achieved its goals, and so was no longer necessary. But the movement has had lingering effects. Opposite to the diaspora Jew, the typical image of an Israeli Jew is physically strong and military-minded. This might serve to reverse the Holocaust’s “profound emasculation of Jewish athletes and erasure of Jewish strength,” says Jasper Craven, journalist and author of God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood. Israel’s mandatory military draft, in effect since the state’s founding, has unimaginable impacts on young men’s psyches as they internalize the inevitability of violence and accept it within the culture. 

It was “clear at some point that if you wanted a Jewish state, you could only get it through force,” Brenner says. However, he notes that the persisting mindset of strength led to a certain misconception of invincibility, which was shattered on October 7. “Despite military superiority, checkpoints, fortified positions, the Iron Dome, security walls, widespread firearm ownership, and the proximity of the IDF, Hamas found a gap in the security system and inflicted immense pain and damage,” the Hungarian Conservative opined. “The myth of Israel’s inviolability collapsed.”

To regain the mythos of power, one has to fortify their body—and their conviction to the land. Amidst Israel’s growing instability  with war in Iran and its proxies and plummeting perception in the wake of its response in Gaza to the October 7 Hamas attacks and reported settler violence in the West Bank, the young Zionist athletes of today are, unknowingly or not, mirroring the movement that contributed to Israel’s founding.

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“People fucking hate us,” Alex Aaron says in a May Instagram video, a crystalline Israeli beach sparkling behind him. “We need to be strong as Jews.” He’s speaking to Sammy Yahood, a British expat who agrees. Atop clips of Yahood waving a combined British and Israeli flag in the London streets and himself wrapping tefillin on a hillside, he encourages Jews to say Modeh Ani, the traditional morning prayer.

“It’s the first thing you’re supposed to say when you open your eyes,” he continues. “That sets a foundation level, and of course you’re going to go to the gym and test the only body, the only limbs that you have for the rest of your life and make them stronger.”

If Aaron is bulky and daunting, Yahood is scrappy and lean, with a Magen David tattooed at the bottom of his chest. A twenty-six-year-old self-defense instructor who first taught the Israeli self-defense system krav maga in London, he can almost seem rabbinical when discussing his organization, Peace Through Strength, which aims to foster bold and courageous Jewish role models. To nearly 200,000 Instagram followers, he disperses tough love and uncomfortable conversations to diasporic Jews who are willing to listen. 

Solely complaining about the rising prominence of antisemites, says Yahood, is a self-placating exercise that ultimately isn’t productive. “Our role as Jews is to be the light,” he tells me on FaceTime while strolling through Israel, where he moved two years ago. “If Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are the dark, and we only focus on them, our light will just get dimmer and dimmer until it goes out. If, as the light, we decide to come together to pool our resources, experience and expertise, and we decide to stop focusing on them almost entirely, and more on our light, then that’s how we win.”

In another beach video, Yahood sits in a chair and taunts American antisemite Nick Fuentes’s lack of strength while Aaron does muscle-ups next to him. Later, a shirtless man with a yarmulke and a machine gun strapped to his back walks by the two men. In another, he and Aaron brawl in the sand.

Other posts take a more active stance; while Aaron is usually in the gym, Yahood gets in people’s faces, simulating how to stop a school shooting and interviewing Palestinian protestors about colonialism. He toured the University of North Florida and recorded a pop-up store selling merchandise emblazoned with masked resistance fighters and a map of Gaza, then asked if one of the sellers was a Jihadist. He’s not shy about waving the Israeli flag in the streets, and on our call mentions he used to disrupt pro-Palestinian encampments in the middle of the night. When I ask if he considers himself a provocateur, he rejects the label: “If my existence as a Jew and an Israeli is provoking, then you’re the problem.”

Yahood’s goal with Peace Through Strength is to foster both the physical and mental benefits. One can take cold showers, engage in difficult conversations or even ask the barista their name—anything outside of your comfort zone. For Yahood, the body and the mind cannot be separated. “Testing our resilience is the only way we can ensure that we can be confident when discomfort is placed upon us,” he says. 

He says the rise of Jew hate is a war—and that Jews around the world are fighting it in the wrong way. He railed against the Blue Square antisemitism ad that played during the 2026 Super Bowl, where a bullied teen is rescued after finding a sticky note with “dirty Jew” written on it stuck to his backpack. He thought it was a perfect encapsulation of a victim mindset. “You can’t be the most successful minority and win every single war your surrounding hateful neighbors start against you, have the most technologically advanced military nation, one of the most wealthy nations per capita…and also play the victim,” he reasons. Even if non-Jews understand that antisemitism is pervasive, if it’s exaggerated, “people will stop listening and stop believing,” he says. A Jewish child watching the ad, too, will internalize this narrative—helpless and unable to rely on their own strength.

This points to what Yahood sees as the “gulf” between Israeli and diaspora Jews—“maccabees and bubbalas.” After the Holocaust, he says, Jews “took two boats in opposite directions.” One was to Israel, where “we required strength, resilience, bravery and courage to fight for our nation.” The other boat went to America, where we assimilated our Jewish identities away. “We bubble-wrapped our children, so they could be shielded from the trauma.” His Jewish Brotherhood is an attempt to build bridges and have both sets of Jews learn from each other.

The men I spoke to echoed the idea that diasporic Jews are noticeably weaker than Israeli Jews. Firestone, the Olympian, says American Jews ditched their ancestors’ “Maccabbee mindset” for one resembling a “shtetl Jew.” Yahood calls Israel’s mandatory draft a “blessing,” though a fractured vertebrae in his spine leaves him unable to enlist. Ed Joseph, the founder of the Jewish Defense Network, ascribes the difference to Israel’s geography: “You have enemies on your doorstep everywhere.” He advocates for American Jews to pick up self-defense and firearms training to avoid becoming victims of antisemitic attacks, alleging that “Jewish people everywhere are being discriminated against and attacked.” In a 2024 TikTok with an Israeli flag behind him, he discusses what he sees as hard truths. “Most of you are weak, and if you were assaulted in the street, you would fold like a lawn chair.”

Joseph’s family immigrated from Russia to Seattle when he was 3, he tells me in a shirt emblazoned with an American flag-patterned Star of David, and attended a self-defense camp in the Catskills with his sister as a teen. It made a lasting impression on him, and after October 7, when he saw no other group aggregating self-defense resources and empowering Jewish identity, he created one himself, focusing on tangible resources like first aid, martial arts and legal defense.

While he rejects comparisons to the Jewish Defense League, which has been classified as a right-wing terrorist group, he strives for the Jewish Defense Network to be “the JDL for the modern age.” The 1968 advertisement the JDL’s extremist founder, Meir Kahane, took out in The Jewish Press somewhat mirrors Joseph’s language: “We are talking of JEWISH SURVIVAL! Are you willing to stand up for democracy and Jewish survival?

Joseph’s slogan, “Never Again Begins With You,” demonstrates relying on yourself and your community in the face of violence. “You have to roll up your sleeves to protect yourself,” he says. “You are your own first responder.” Israeli MMA fighter Natan Levy echoed this mindset: “Once you’re strong and know how to defend yourself and have the confidence, you’ll stand differently,” he told The Jerusalem Post this year.

To Joseph, the supposed Golden Age of American Jewry has made Jews complacent. “Everyone’s an educated Jew,” he says. “What we’ve lost is being a well-rounded Jew.” Traditionally, Jewish men are thought of as accountants, lawyers or doctors, but he notes that there are a lot of warriors throughout Jewish history. “There’s a reason we’ve survived for so long and we’ve fought to keep it that way. Whether we won is a whole different thing.”

I ask about some of the Jewish Defense Network’s inflammatory, meme-filled content, where Joseph often relies on fearmongering and rails against New York politics or “liberal simps for Hamas.” Earlier in the day, he’d reposted a meme that read, “when you scream ‘free Palestine’ all I hear is ‘Heil H!tler.’” He admits he can be somewhat loud. “You try to be a good Jew or not, but at the end of the day, you’re going to be criticized…The biggest thing I want to do is speak the truth whether it's uncomfortable or not. My truth may not be everybody's truth.” 

Really, Joseph’s posts are just a gateway to learn about the Network, whose main goal is empowering Jews to purchase pepper spray or enroll in self-defense classes. “People need to feel like they have the strength and the power to fight back” against a possible antisemitic attack, he says. (Joseph hasn’t been involved in an altercation thus far, but has heard from people involved with the Network who have and say that his resources have helped.)

These views aren’t fringe. According to the American Jewish Committee, 91 percent of Jews say that violent incidents in the last several years—including murders at the Capital Jewish Museum, the arson attempt on Josh Shapiro’s home, the Boulder, CO, firebombing and the attack on the Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan—made them feel less safe as an American Jew. 78 percent say they feel this way because of October 7 and the subsequent war.

For the Jewish Journal, Adam L. Fuller identified the rise of Jewish self-defense books, most published by Wicked Son, whose titles include Self-Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, The Wrong Jew: Defeating Those Who Want Us Dead and Fuller’s own The Armed Jew: The Case for Jewish Gun Ownership. Chabad West Village recently hosted a Jewish Resilience Training Program hosted by Israeli security officials. A cover story in Mispacha magazine detailed surging gun ownership among Jews. An article by Tsahi Shemesh, the founder & CEO of Krav Maga Experts, suggests self-defense is Talmud-approved: “If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first.” 

“If you’re openly Jewish your head should be on a swivel,” Joseph posted in response to the Jewish man recently stabbed in New York City. He’s concerned about external threats, as anyone should be, but Yahood’s approach is more foundational, more of a test of character than anything. Our world of external validation, attention seekers and rising mental health issues exists in part because “people are avoiding the uncomfortable work,” he says, “which is looking inward, standing in the mirror, asking, ‘Can I defend my family? Am I resilient? If my house was burning down, could I run in there and save my kids?’ It’s asking these fundamental, basic questions about ourselves.”

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An unsettling amount of focus in Trump’s second administration has been dedicated to the marriage between physical prowess and nationalism. The president’s obsession with fit, handsome men culminated in this summer’s White House lawn UFC fight, from which he barred “fat soldiers” and praised fighters with “big, strong muscles.” The official White House X account advertised the event with AI-generated images of a jacked Uncle Sam/Trump crossover, one of which promoted “strength through sacrifice.” It’s not the first time he’s given himself AI muscles; in a May Day photo last year, he was a jacked Jedi, and earlier than that, a football player. When RFK Jr. was announced to be Trump’s Health Secretary, people suggested he’d be a better fit than Rachel Levine, Biden’s choice, because he’s buff. He and fellow cabinet member Pete Hegseth post videos where they either bench-press poorly or wear jeans while working out. Hegseth recently announced his Department of “War” will screen servicemembers over 30 for appropriate testosterone levels. “This initiative,” he says in a video, is about “ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.” Maybe it’s not surprising that this weird soup of body fascism would mix with the dregs of Muscular Judaism.

The Jewish strongmen I spoke to—either muscular Jews themselves, ones advocating for mental strength or the ability to defend oneself in the event of an attack—are speaking to a fear young Jewish men are more aware of than ever. Craven, the military journalist, says it’s reasonable that with a rise of reported attacks, Jews “snap into a hypervigilance around their own strength.” Of course, there’s a range of reactions. “We’re at war for our survival once again,” Sammy Yahood says in front of a microphone, wide-eyed and serious. Alex Aaron’s priority is getting more jacked than an antisemite.

It’s unclear whether social media’s bawdier semitic strongmen are posting to redefine the Zionist image…or just to be funny. Aaron, the bodybuilder, certainly doesn’t see himself as a pundit on Israeli affairs; “There’s people that are smarter than me that can do that, that's not my place in the fitness industry,” he says. True, he usually just flexes with friends. But even so, he frequently talks about antisemitism to inspire young Jewish kids. When Dan Bilzerian commented “FTJs” on one of his posts, an acronym for “Fuck the Jews,” Aaron posted a video saying he’s a “Friend of the Jews.” (“Your support doesn’t go unrecognized,” he quipped.) For “the Sneakos and Dan Bilzarians of the world, [it’s] important to let them know that we’re not weak,” he says. 

Not doing so, Yahood says, is neglecting to tell the full portrait of the Jewish story. “Were our grandparents forced to wear a yellow star just for us to end up choosing to hide our beautiful Magen Davids out of fear?” he asks in one video. “This can’t be the way. We must get stronger together.” But others refer to Jewish history to make the opposite point, like historian and author Yuval Noah Harari, who warned this summer that Netanyahu wants to turn Jews into Romans: “For 2,000 years, Jews all over the world saw studying and learning as the highest spiritual activity,” he told Ezra Klein. “And then people like Netanyahu tell you: Oh, we have learned that you need to be a Roman, that you need to be strong, that you need to build legions, that you need to destroy cities… It just nullifies the whole of Jewish history.”

Muscular Judaism, which was effectively a “PR campaign,” Brenner says, resulted in a new nation. Who knows what will happen this time? Could the jacked Jews lift their way out of Israel’s biggest crisis yet? Reinvent the Jewish image? To one Instagram commenter, Aaron is the “only Jew I’ve ever seen in shape in my life.” Maybe it’s possible to change a stereotype one bicep curl at a time.

“As a Jewish person, you have to think about our ancestors, who walked thousands of miles through the Sinai,” Aaron said on the beach with Yahood. “And even today, our IDF soldiers carrying 50-pound bags, walking through rubble, and you’re in the diaspora, sitting on your fucking couch in your million-dollar house and you’re not able to at least make your body a form of symbolism for our culture, by at least looking good? You’re not doing your part.”