“Imagine you were a family in Eastern Europe during World War Two or during the Holocaust, and you had tremendous wealth, and you had houses, or you had gold in the bank, or money in the bank,” said Josh Varon. “All of a sudden, all you could leave with was a backpack, a coat, and a hat on your head.”
This week, I spoke to Varon, who started BHforBitcoin, an online course where users can learn to understand Bitcoin, money, and global change. He does so through a specific lens: through the context of Jewish historical vulnerability to confiscation and monetary debasement, and the significance of Jewish self-determination in a shaky world.
“We don't know which country's money will get inflated,” he added.
”We don't know which country we might be kicked out of again. And we can say it's not going to happen, but we also know that it has happened.”
It’s only been a few generations since Jews had their homes, finances, and assets taken from them by the Nazis. Today, we can see how civilians caught in conflicts around the world can suffer the same fate. Even in stable democracies, access to financial systems can become politicized through practices like “debanking”, often conducted by the Biden Administration before legal protections were put in place.
He recently launched an online course titled Bitcoin and the Future: Why Jewish History Makes This Technology Impossible to Ignore. For him, Bitcoin is not primarily a speculative asset or a get-rich scheme - and he isn’t out to try to get people to stock up on the asset. Instead, he frames it as a conversation rooted in Jewish memory.
“Wherever the Jewish people have gone in their history, they’ve been entrepreneurs, they’ve created their own businesses, they’ve done well economically,” he said. “They’ve created wealth for themselves and their families. But we also see that there’s been, obviously, antisemitism that we’ve been dispersed from countries that we’ve lived in.”
Here’s the primary value for Varon, who has been following and investing in Bitcoin for eight years. “Imagine you were able to take that wealth with you and have a seed phrase or a code in your brain, in your mind, where you can show up in this new country. You don't have to start over.”
His course is concise, aimed at beginners, and is explained through the context of the Jewish experience. It is an introduction to fundamentals: supply caps, decentralization, and monetary policy - and explores why those ideas might resonate with a people shaped by exile.
He describes Bitcoin as freedom from dependence on institutions that history shows are fragile, operating in empires that eventually fall. “No empire in the world has not fallen. It's a fact,” Varon said. “We have seen that empires fall.”
Critics, of course, would point to volatility. Bitcoin has experienced dramatic booms and crashes - at the time of writing, it sits at around $67,000, half of what it was worth at its October 2025 peak. Varon does not deny that. Instead, he describes it as an early-stage technology in price discovery and believes that its omnipresence alone signals its long-term health.
When pressed to define Bitcoin in one sentence, he offers a single word: “Freedom.”
His course is available via the link: https://bhforbitcoin.thinkific.com/products/courses/bitcoin-and-jewish-history?ref=a82aff
