Being a fierce advocate for Israel is nothing new for Aviva Klompas. Long before she became the co-founder and CEO of Boundless Israel, Klompas was the associate vice president for Israel and Global Jewish Citizenship at Combined Jewish Philanthropies in Boston and was the director of speechwriting for Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York City, where she helped craft the message that advanced Israel’s policies and informed public opinion.
Klompas will be speaking at a St. Paul Jewish Federation event on Wednesday, Dec. 4, at Mendakota Country Club. Before she arrives in St. Paul, Klompas talked with TC Jewfolk about the work she does at Boundless Israel, her new book ‘Stand-Up Nation: Israeli Resilience in the Wake of Disaster,’ and working in a post-truth social media environment.
The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
TC Jewfolk: How would you describe the work you do at Boundless Israel?
Aviva Klompas: We describe ourselves as a think-action tank, and our core areas of work are twofold: One has to do with education, and one has to do with understanding public opinion, or the narrative war. My business partner and the other co-founder of Boundless, Rachel Fish, works on the education side, and I work on fighting the narrative war. So you might call it advocacy, but the reason I wouldn’t is because we do it very much through a data perspective: We study the science of social media to understand what is going on, in terms of each of these platforms and their algorithms, that’s making this all harder for us.
TCJ: What does an example of what that looks like?
AK: About one-quarter of the conversation relating to the Israel-Hamas war is inauthentic or bots, so there’s a one in four chance people are arguing with a robot when they’re arguing online. And these are the sorts of things that we’re studying to understand. It’s obviously a complicating factor if you think you’re talking to a human and you’re not. We also do a lot of work of trying to understand public opinion polling. Just baseline: What do Americans know about Israel, about Jews, about Zionism and all these different things, and we take those learnings to inform how we do education and how we combat this narrative war.
TCJ: What is the most challenging piece of trying to do the work you’re doing right now in terms of helping people understand?
AK: We live in this sort of post-truth environment where facts don’t matter. And that’s that’s obviously enormously troubling. And the second is the existence of echo chambers. People will talk a lot about the echo chambers that exist on social media, but the reality is, people live in the real world in echo chambers. We surround ourselves by people, for the most part, that have like-minded thoughts and opinions. We’re coming off an election, and anybody that follows elections know polling and message testing is sort of the bread and butter of what they do, and that’s relatively simple. What’s hard is dissemination. Meaning, when I post something on social media, it’s not the communities we’d want to persuade of anything that are listening to me. It’s mostly the Jewish community that’s listening to me, and a lot of bots. So that’s an ineffective way to do this work. Social media is a terrible form for education, but it is a forum from which a lot of people are getting an education. So all those components, going back to the what’s happening in terms of the algorithms, is complicated. People believe in whatever facts they want, that’s complicated. And the existence of many echo chambers is very complicated.
TCJ: it feels like the impact that you’re having gets tamped down a little bit because of how the audience is being manipulated, in a way.
AK: It’s true for all of us. That’s the dissemination, that’s the central challenge. You don’t have to work at a think tank or be a researcher to say the measure of success is whether Jewish kids have to hide their Jewish identity, if people can proudly identify with Israel and Judaism in public. So obviously, no, we’re not doing well on that front. That’s — in my mind — the entire measure of whether, as a Jewish community, we’re successful in this work.
TCJ: You released a new book earlier this year that I’m guessing was turned in before Oct. 7?
AK: I submitted the manuscript for the book six weeks before Oct. 7. And then you’re supposed to spend months doing edits and the work with your publisher. I ignored my publisher for, I don’t know, four months, until they’re like, ‘you actually have to finish your book.’ I rewrote the whole introduction. My book is about the history of Israel and international development, and I interviewed about 20 different people in Israel and around the world that are doing work in disaster relief and international development. So I went back to everybody, actually Israelis and non-Israelis, and asked if they wanted to write a postscript, of which most of them did.
We’re talking about like an Indonesian agricultural student who studied in Israel and Indonesia has no diplomatic or political ties with Israel, and her reflections after October 7. IsraAID helped to rescue all sorts of Afghanis after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, like the girls robotics team and a lot of judges and human rights activists – people that would have been executed by the Taliban. The former Afghani ambassador to the United States wrote a postscript, with his reflections as an Afghani on Oct. 7.
One of the people I’d interviewed in the book before Oct. 7 is a woman named Shoshan Haran who was one of the people taken hostage. She was taken with her daughter, with the grandchildren, sister, niece; and the women and children came back, and her son-in-law is still there. So all of that becomes a component. It was very, very, very much rewritten and influenced by Oct. 7.
TCJ: Did you keep the spirit of the book you originally turned in?
AK: Yes. The UN has a million different topics, but international development always sort of took up more of my time and attention because I was so fascinated by the story of Israel as a developing country when it’s 10 years old and it’s desperately poor and still fighting wars and amid all this, it founded an International Development Agency. Nobody knows the story and most Israelis don’t know the name of Israel’s International Development Agency. And I’m like, ‘How is this story not known to Jews that have been to Israel dozens of times, and to Israelis?’ That’s why I started writing the book, and that’s why, in answering it, I profiled all these different people.
In the introduction I rewrote, I write about how Israel, in the 1950s, is fighting wars of annihilation. It’s economically under siege. It’s diplomatically and internationally isolated. It’s being attacked legally, economically. You know, it’s not such a dissimilar situation from what we see today. And so then, why is it that Israel continuously chooses to engage with the world that’s, at best, indifferent and, at worst, incredibly aggressively bigoted against it. The book seeks to answer that question through the people that I interview. And so in the core component of why we choose to engage with the world and how and the motivations, that’s not different. But if anything is amplified in this moment, it gives you insight into the choices we’ve made in the past and how they can color how we make choices today.
TCJ: Zionism has become such a loaded term over these last 14 months. How do you go about talking to people who have a visceral reaction to that word?
AK: We just did a big study on “Zionism” – and I put that in quotes (editor’s note: Aviva used air quotes while saying the word) because, it’s about that word. What we learned is that 66% of the American public say they don’t know what it means, 34% say they do know what it means. When we ask those 34% tell me what it means, you get a lot of people saying, ‘Okay, actually, I don’t know what it means.’ Or you get people defining it wrong. So the true number of Americans who know what Zionism means is 14%, so we’re spending a lot of time talking about something that people for the most part have no idea.
And the problem is, in the absence of knowing what it is, they are very susceptible to believing rhetoric that it’s essentially says that Zionism is white Jewish supremacy. That is the myth that circulates. And so what we did is we, we defined it for people and really simply: ‘Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to a state in their ancestral homeland.’ Boom. That’s it. You quadruple the number of people that identify as a Zionist with one sentence. Imagine if we gave people one article or one lecture what that would do, and then once they know what Zionism is, you see these amazing downstream effects in terms of their favorability towards Jewish people and Israeli people, and a belief that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.
This is actually the heart of what I do. I’m not trying to just figure out, for interest’s sake, where people stand on these various issues. I’m trying to find those really high-impact returns on investment that tell me: educating about this one term has enormous ramifications in terms of Jewish safety and security and Jewish life in America. And that’s really what we work on at Boundless.
