What the Jewish People Can Learn from Bad Bunny

Every so often, American popular culture reveals something serious about power, identity, and persuasion.

This year’s Super Bowl halftime show, arguably the pinnacle cultural platform in the United States, featured Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaeton and Latin trap artist, at a moment of deep pain and polarization for the Latino community. Rather than rage. Rather than grievance. Rather than moral scolding. He chose celebration: culture, language, pride, joy, and above all, love.

It was a masterclass in moral confidence.

Bad Bunny did not deny injustice. He did not minimize fear or suffering amid ICE raids, deportations, and the protests that followed. But neither did he allow victimhood to define his people. He met a moment of anger with dignity, and a moment of division with cultural self-assurance. He reminded America who Latinos are, without begging for permission or absolution.

That choice is worth studying. Especially by the Jewish and pro-Israel community.

Recent Super Bowl halftime shows have leaned in very different directions: celebrity feuds, provocation for provocation’s sake, or apolitical escapism. This one was different. Credit may go, in part, to Roger Goodell’s interest in expanding into Latin American markets rather than to any newfound courage on immigration policy. In this case, motives matter less than outcomes. The message landed anyway.

Despite predictable backlash from President Donald Trump and the broader MAGA ecosystem, so intense that Turning Point USA staged a rival “halftime show” that disappeared almost instantly into irrelevance, the cultural verdict was unmistakable. Love, pride, and mass celebration are more destabilizing to hate than outrage ever could be.

Here is where the uncomfortable question for the Jewish and pro-Israel community begins.

What if Jews had done something similar after October 7?

I am not naive. I do not believe there was some simple, bloodless alternative history waiting to be unlocked. But serious communities owe themselves serious counterfactual exercises.

Imagine that in the days after October 7, on October 8, or 10, or 14, the Jewish and pro-Israel world had responded not only with mourning and fury, but with visible, global, unapologetic affirmation. Not just protests against antisemitism, but mass gatherings for Jewish life. Concerts featuring Jewish artists. Public Shabbat dinners in major cities. Cultural events that paired pride in who we are with a clear, public demand for peace. A message that said, plainly and without defensiveness: This is who we are. This is what we love. This is the future we insist on building. And we don’t need vengeance, we need peace and global diplomatic pressure to dismantle Hamas once and for all.

Imagine Israeli society doing the same. Mobilizing on the basis of harmony and moral clarity. Millions of Israelis publicly insisting on unity, dignity, and peace, while demanding the return of hostages and the dismantling of Hamas through sustained diplomacy, regional coalition building, and international isolation of Hamas, rather than an immediate and devastating ground invasion.

Peace-related messaging, in this framing, would not have been weakness. It would have been leverage.

Would it have worked? Maybe not.

Would the world have listened? Not fully.

But would we be standing in a different place today?

Hamas remains in power. Israel is diplomatically isolated. Antisemitism has surged to levels unseen since World War II. Israeli society is strained to the breaking point. The global imagination has absorbed a grotesque inversion. Israel is now reflexively associated not with innovation, pluralism, or Tel Aviv’s beaches, but with accusations of genocide. Qatar and Turkey, among Israel’s most cynical adversaries, have positioned themselves as indispensable power brokers in Washington. Even Iran flirts with rehabilitation.

Israel has achieved undeniable military successes. Hezbollah is weakened. Assad has fallen. Iran is exposed. Israel’s deterrence remains formidable. But soft power has collapsed. Moral capital has evaporated. And once lost, it is extraordinarily difficult to recover.

Here is the deeper tragedy.

A movement centered on Jewish pride, culture, and love, rooted in Jewish values and explicitly paired with a credible peace message, might not only have altered Israel’s standing abroad. It might have reshaped the diplomatic terrain itself. It could have forced allies to choose between supporting peace driven by Jewish and Israeli leadership, or openly aligning with Hamas. It might have narrowed the moral escape routes available to Israel’s critics.

It also might have revitalized Jewish life at home.

October 7 briefly produced a rare moment of Jewish unity across denominations, politics, and geographies. That unity was real. It was powerful. It was fleeting.

What if it had been channeled not only into fear and defensiveness, but into renewal? Into deeper identification with Jewish tradition. Into stronger communal bonds. Into a rearticulation of why Israel matters, not just as a fortress, but as a moral project rooted in life, dignity, and peace.

Bad Bunny did not lecture America. He did not name ICE officials or bait political enemies. He did not center trauma. He celebrated identity. He made culture the argument. And by doing so, he created space for empathy rather than resistance.

That is what made the performance disarming and effective.

It may be too late for Israel and the Jewish world to make this pivot in the immediate sense. Jew-hate has momentum. Narratives have hardened. Institutions have calcified. But the lesson remains.

Moral confidence outperforms moral panic and military might. Peace, when paired with pride and lived visibly, is not surrender. Love, when expressed at scale and backed by values-driven action, is not weakness. It is leverage.

At some point, perhaps sooner than we think, the Jewish people will face another inflection point. When that moment comes, the question will not be whether we defend ourselves. We always do.

The question is whether we will remember to meet history not only with strength, but with confidence in who we are, and the courage to insist on peace in the face of darkness and delusion.

Coby Schoffman is a Los Angeles–based serial social entrepreneur and the founder of The Nation Foundation (TNF), which operates project zones across East Africa. Schoffman holds an MSc in Transnational Security from New York University and a BA in Counterterrorism and Conflict Resolution from Reichman University. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of any affiliated organization.