American Jewry’s Anti-Semitism Reckoning

“Where did all that money go?” asked the CEO of an American Jewish federation earlier this year, referring to the immense financial resources invested by Jewish organization over the past many years in combating anti-Semitism. He already knew the answer: “It went to reports that no one read. Conferences that changed nothing. Trainings that were too timid to call Jew-hatred what it was. Initiatives that bent over backwards to avoid offending the very people we needed to stand up to. Bureaucracies that prioritized prestige over impact. Organizations that raised money in the name of safety but spent it on vanity projects and dinners with politicians who offered empty promises.”

This veteran professional is far from an outlier in his grim assessment, which I’ve heard variations of in dozens of conversations and extensive reading over the past many months—coming from heads of major organizations, right-wing critics of those same organizations, and everyone in between. Alan Dershowitz expressed a widespread sentiment when he wrote that “Jewish leaders have been misallocating resources, focusing on the wrong people, and are now part of the problem.” But if there is general agreement that what’s been done in the past hasn’t worked, there is little if any consensus about what should be done now, or even about what exactly went wrong.

The problem is not one of insufficient capabilities or resources. American Jews bring considerable assets to the fight against anti-Semitism: a Jewish population comprising tens of thousands of individuals who hold significant leadership positions in finance, law, business, legacy and online media, medicine and scientific research, the academy, and popular culture; as well as many Jews (and many of their friends) who are well-connected to elected officials in the highest echelons of national, state, and local government—and therefore presumably in a position to influence policy decisions. But this seems to have done little.