Since its founding in 1993, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has a long history of bringing vitriolic anti-Israel speakers to campuses, sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Weeks, building mock “apartheid walls,” and sending mock eviction notices to students in their dorms to help them “empathize with Palestinians.” SJP members wish to live in a world where only their predetermined virtues and worldview prevail, and feel quite strongly that, in the case of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the answers are black and white, there is a moral side and an immoral side, and that anyone who does not, or cannot, see things as clearly and unambiguously as these enlightened students is a racist, an oppressor, or a supporter of an illegal, apartheid regime trampling the human rights of the blameless, hapless Palestinians.

Because they have been relentless in promulgating activism that attacks the Jewish state and anyone who supports it, SJP often finds itself defending its rhetoric and tactics from understandable criticism it receives from pro-Israel individuals and groups—invariably with SJP claiming to be victimized by “Islamophobic” Zionists who, SJP contends, are trying to silence “criticism of Israel.” In yet another revealing example of its hypocrisy and obtuseness when assessing the consequences of its own behavior, the University of Chicago’s SJP chapter is currently whining about being victimized by ideological opponents who exposed the true nature of this toxic group.

What was SJP’s complaint this time? In a letter to the editor in the university’s newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, SJP expressed its displeasure with the fact that on May 23, “the David Horowitz Freedom Center plastered more than 5,000 leaflets on and around campus demonizing Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students.”

Employing its tired tactic of whining that any effort by SJP’s critics is motivated by a desire to shut down any support of Palestinian self-determination, the letter preposterously suggested that the leaflets were posted on campus solely “in order to muzzle and disparage pro-Palestinian activism.”

More absurdly, SJP claimed that the Horowitz Center’s “work aims to censor and misrepresent our academic production and to create an environment of surveillance and fear surrounding scholarship about Palestine.”

One could make many claims about its role on the 200 or so campuses where SJP has chapters, but few would ever suggest that the toxic radicalism of the group—and the resulting effect it has on their respective campuses—amounts to “scholarship” or “academic production.” Perhaps SJP believes that by bringing perennially anti-Semitic radicals like Rashid Khalidi to speak on the Chicago campus, one of the events included in the leaflet, they are promoting scholarship, but that is not the case.

When guest speakers accuse Israel of being the new incarnation of the Third Reich and when they malign and slander the Jewish state with accusations lacking any basis in fact or history, this is not, despite SJP’s contention, an example of “scholarship about Palestine”; rather, it is hatred disguised as debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

According to the Horowitz leaflet, when Khalidi spoke in December 2020, he “demonized Israel, accusing the Jewish state of ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘occupation,’ and claiming falsely that Israel attempts to terrify the Palestinians to achieve dominance rather than to ensure the nation’s safety: ‘I don’t think it’s security [for Israel that] fully describes accurately what is at stake here. What is at stake is actually dominance and hegemony when Israeli soldiers are kicking down doors and scaring children in the night.’”

What is most revealing in SJP’s letter to the editor is its inability to see how its complaint about the corrosive effect of the leaflet on the university’s community mirrors exactly the effect SJP has had for a decade or more on the campuses that have experienced the hostility and aggression of their pro-Palestinian activism. The leaflets, SJP suggested in its letter, “go so far as to incite hostility and hate against and within our community. They inhibit our capacity to work and study, to commune, to feel safe.”

It is not clear what SJP means when they refer to “our community,” but that community clearly does not include the University of Chicago’s Jewish students, who, like Jewish students and other supporters of Israel at other campuses around the country, have been ideologically assaulted by SJP in an unrelenting campaign of lies, slanders, and distortions of history and fact; boycott resolutions; and accusations against Israel of racism and apartheid as part of SJP’s campaign to malign and destroy the Jewish state. The group clearly could not care less whether Jewish students have a “capacity to work and study, to commune, to feel safe.”

In fact, as has been documented by the AMCHA Initiative and others who track anti-Semitism on campuses, BDS activity on a campus—and especially when orchestrated by SJP or other anti-Israel groups—frequently creates a hostile climate for Jewish students and often manifests itself as raw anti-Semitism. As one AMCHA report noted, “the consideration of anti-Israel divestment resolutions in student government or by the student body was strongly linked to a surge in anti-Semitic activity,” and campuses that have an SJP chapter have witnessed a higher incidence of anti-Semitic speech and expression as a direct result of its radicalism and activism.

In November 2021, for example, as the leaflet outlined, “SJP at U. Chicago published an art zine titled ‘Cheers to Intifada.’ The zine promoted terrorism against Israel and contained violent imagery including a graphic of two lit Molotov cocktails raised in a toast . . .The zine was also rife with anti-Semitism including an image of a pig wearing a policeman’s hat with a Jewish star on it. Poems in the publication promoted ancient blood libel tropes against Jews such as one describing a Jewish teenager who held Palestinians captive and had ‘animalistic lust yearning to rape bodies.’

SJP may consider this type of perverse, anti-Semitic, and genocidal propaganda to be “academic production” and “scholarship about Palestine,” but in a sane world, it represents a poisonous and hateful ideology in which fellow Jewish students are the enemies of good, are racists, support an apartheid state, and deserve to be victims of an intifada, which has as its objective the murder of Jews wherever they are in the name of Palestinian self-determination. On no university campus, and certainly not at an institution with the reputation and quality as the University of Chicago, would this type of banal radicalism pass for scholarship, let alone acceptable academic discourse.

As they have on other campuses, SJP Chicago has also worked aggressively to promote BDS resolutions and to push a statement of solidarity for the Palestinian cause through its student government. “In June 2021,” the leaflet noted, “SJP published a lengthy statement calling on the College Council to ‘vote “NO” on the resolution to retract [the University Student Government’s] statement of solidarity and support for Palestine.’ SJP’s statement promoted Jew hatred and demonized Israel, calling campus supporters of the Jewish state ‘student body apartheid apologists,’ and denying Israel’s self-determination by calling for the ‘abolition of a violent political state [of Israel].’”

In April, at the behest of SJP, The Chicago Maroon, retracted an op-ed written by two students, “We Must Condemn the SJP’s Online Anti-Semitism,” who questioned SJP’s tactics and ideology.  

On January 26, as the op-ed by Melody Dias and Benjamin ZeBrack noted, SJP had posted on its Instagram page the shocking admonition, “DON’T TAKE SH*TTY ZIONIST CLASSES.” Students were asked to “Support the Palestinian movement for liberation by boycotting classes on Israel or those taught by Israeli fellows.” According to the SJP post, any students who enrolled in these classes would be “participating in a propaganda campaign that creates complicity in the continuation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine” and that, in its view, “Israeli-centered classes are designed to obscure Palestinian perspectives.”

Characteristic of their reaction to anyone who answers back to their corrosive activism, SJP was incensed that anyone had the gall to question their tactics and motives. Another post on the SJP Instagram account in response to the Dias-ZeBrack op-ed expressed the defective view often held by anti-Semites that “To frame this call as ‘anti-Jewish’ not only perpetuates the dangerous (and wholly false) conflation of Jewishness and Zionism, but also deliberately diverts attention from the ongoing ethnic cleansing that the israeli [sic] colony has been inflicting on Palestinian lands and peoples from its inception to the present.”

The widely adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism, as many know, stipulates that, in many instances, attacks on Zionism can be considered anti-Semitic, particularly when those attacks are attempts to deny Jewish self-determination or when Zionism is classified as a racist, oppressive endeavor, so despite SJP’s assertion that the claim is both dangerous and wholly false, experts in these matters—and not biased, anti-Semitic ideologues—have determined that there is support for Dias and LeBrack’s views.

Nevertheless, SJP demanded of the Maroon’s editors, “in response to these offenses,” the “Immediate deletion of the article,” a “public apology issued by the Maroon to SJP UChicago and to Palestinian students for the dissemination of misinformation and the disregard of journalistic integrity and factual reporting,” and, most ominously, “a public recommitment to ensuring that all columns and articles abide by expected standards of accuracy and truth, particularly those written by Zionist authors or on behalf of Zionist organizations.” [Emphasis added.] In other words, SJP requested a separate standard of exclusionary journalistic ethics and practice when Israel, Zionism, and Jews are involved.

Astoundingly, in response to SJP’s absurd demands, two feckless editors, Kelly Hui and Elizabeth Winkler, not only deleted the offending op-ed but published a craven, apologetic editorial of their own in which they dissected the op-ed for its perceived factual inaccuracies and justified their decision by claiming that it was the op-ed written by the pro-Israel supporters that could be the source of campus enmity, not the original action of SJP in calling for a boycott of courses about Israel.

“We condemn the pitting of Jewish and Palestinian students against one another,” they wrote, “and we deeply regret the extent to which the op-ed’s factual inaccuracies—which we should not have published—perpetuated such a harmful dynamic.” Of course, in addition to the editors’ outrageously inappropriate action in removing an opinion piece from The Chicago Maroon, written as a response to a campaign of demonization and delegitimization of Israel and Zionism by the chronically toxic activists of SJP, they compounded the offense by suggesting that sections of the op-ed contribute to “pitting of Jewish and Palestinian students against one another.” No, actually, it was SJP’s poisonous attacks on anything Zionist on campus and its initial call for “shitty” Zionist courses to be boycotted that pit pro-Israel students against pro-Palestinians, not op-eds that correct misinformation or defend Israel.

Only on university campuses where perceived victims can attack their alleged oppressors with any calumny, untruth, slander, and allegation they choose—without repercussions—could a group like Students for Justice in Palestine continue to operate with impunity, attacking Jewish students and other supporters of Israel and creating a hostile campus climate.

But SJP at Chicago clearly does not fully understand the notion of academic free speech: that the same opportunity they have to spout their hateful rhetoric and promote their toxic ideology is also enjoyed by the group’s ideological opponents. 

When pro-Israel students, guest speakers, events, courses, or even leaflets distributed around campus seek to expose SJP’s true nature—with facts and examples as opposed to lies and narratives—SJP may be inconvenienced by having to finally defend its views in a robust and equitable marketplace of ideas, not its own echo chamber where its lies are never challenged and its toxic anti-Semitism is never named for what it is.

We have spent the last decades fighting our “external enemies,” but we no longer believe that the community can prevail against the surge of anti-Semitism without the full resources of the Jewish community.

The abandonment of core principles and its job of defending Jews places the ADL on the same side of those it is pledged to fight.

At the same time that the ADL has done little to oppose left-wing anti-Semitism, which is what dominates college campuses, while criticizing the Jewish community for standing up to anti-Semitism, Greenblatt has turned the organization into an active political partisan.

“I know the Zionist perspective,” a chorus of Jewish students at elite Jewish day schools across the nation continuously assure me. “We want to hear the other side. We want to know the Palestinian side.” Indeed, the tagline of one of the most virulent anti-Zionist Jewish youth groups, IfNotNow, is “no one ever told us.” 

It was my latest visit to a prestigious Jewish day school in North America that prompted me to re-evaluate how it is that we got to a place where I question the efficacy of Jewish and Israel education in America. It was at one such lecture that I had given on anti-Zionism and antisemitism that students complained of my bias, presenting me with a plethora of grievances with Israel. In that moment, I decided to switch gears: “You have presented criticisms of Israel, and you claim that you come from Zionist homes and a Zionist school. So you tell me: why should Israel exist as a Jewish country?” 

The Zionist challenge, as I have come to call it, was met with alarming rejoinders. One student proclaimed, “To be completely honest, as I am thinking out loud, I have to say, I would be willing to give up the land if human rights would be restored to the Palestinians.” Her friend further explained: “Yes, because I can pray and practice my Judaism here (America) without ever having to be there (Israel).” Another student stated: “I can’t trust Israeli courts when it comes to settling land disputes because they are majority Jewish and therefore, biased.” And finally, a student settled it all: “I don’t see a reason to call myself a Zionist. Zionism has fulfilled its purpose.”

How did we get here? How do our brightest and most dedicated Jewish students surrender the land, the trust in their people, and history? 

It used to be that within Jewish families in North America, one sensible reason to send kids to Jewish day schools, and/or to Jewish youth programs was to avoid anti-Israel bias in the classroom. This strategy, however, has proven to not only be ineffective, but more alarmingly, produced a generation of anti-Zionist Jews or as Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy call them, The Un-Jews. Likewise, having Israeli parents or joining Israeli youth movements such as tsofim provide little to no real shelter from the dangers of radical leftism, which ushers in anti-Zionism, today’s most potent form of Jew-hatred. 

A stark example is a graduate of K-12 Jewish day school, Simone Zimmerman, the founder of IfNotNow (INN), a Jewish organization whose goal is to oppose “Israeli occupation.” Zimmerman is but one, although a vivid, example of how Jewish education provides little refuge from an education steeped in Marxist thought. But the phenomenon of Jewish young adults graduating Jewish day schools and joining anti-Israel groups such as J-Street, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), INN, and even Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has been in the making for decades now. Indeed, Jewish day school graduates are at the helm of anti-Israel and anti-American movements on college campuses. They aren’t just members, they are leaders. How did this happen? 

To help answer this question, I turn to a Soviet policy enshrined during the Stalin years: “socialist in content, national in form.” Having formed a nascent Soviet government in 1918, several ethnic minorities (i.e. Jewish, Ukrainian, Uzkeb, Armenian) found themselves under Soviet rule. Party officials had a problem to solve: how to unite these diverse ethnic minorities under the aegis of a common ideology. 

What the central committee devised was ingenious: allow ethnic minorities to speak their native language, publish newspapers and books in their native language, and support the arts of the minorities. The only caveat: the content had to promote socialism. Indeed, in the 1920s and even in the 1930s, there was a burgeoning of Yiddish in the Soviet Union. This is why Jews scanning the globe in 1919 declared the Jewish future not in Palestine or America, but in the Soviet Union! How wrong they were is for another time (anti-Semitism returned in greater force in the Soviet Union with the murder of Yiddish poets, artists, and writers during Stalin’s last years in power).  

In a rather twisted turn of historic events that would make Stalin chuckle, Jewish day schools in North America practice “woke in content, Jewish in form.” Indeed, all major Jewish groups that oppose the “Israeli occupation” or promote the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement (BDS) have been started by Jews who either graduated from Jewish day schools or were involved in Jewish youth groups:

1. Jewish Voice for Peace: Founder Julie Ivny joined Hashomer Hatzair, a Jewish youth group focused on social justice and Judaism, when she was in the third grade: “The older teens in the youth group encouraged their waist-high counterparts to think and talk about the world around them, to not ignore the inequality that persisted in Los Angeles’ neighborhoods and schools.” According to the ADL, JVP is a “radical anti-Israel activist group that advocates for a complete economic, cultural and academic boycott of the state of Israel.”
2. J Street: Founder Jeremy Ben-Ami completed Hebrew school at Temple Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan, a Reform synagogue in New York. Ben-Ami founded J Street as a reaction to AIPAC, whose goal is to foster a strong relationship between the United States and Israel. According to J Street, the “ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is a major obstacle to the achievement of Israeli-Palestinian peace, is a systemic injustice violating the rights of the Palestinian people, and poses a severe threat to Israel’s long-term future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.” 
3. IfNotNow: INN was founded by Simone Zimmerman, a graduate of two Jewish day schools in Los Angeles. Calling themselves a “movement to end Israel’s occupation,” in 2018, INN held a mourner’s kaddish service for Palestinians killed by the Israeli army in a Gaza airstrike. 

This is not a coincidence. This is a pattern. And it comes from Jewish educational institutions that focus not on Judaism and anti-Semitism specifically, but rather promoting anti-racist  education, restoring climate justice, gender and racial inequity. Moreover, at the root of it all, is discomfort with Jewish particularism: with a majority Jewish state, with borders and by extension, Jewish nationalism. Jewish mainstream institutions have abandoned Jewish particularism and gravitated toward universalism. Through universalism, we have re-written, so to speak, three major concepts in Judaism:  Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof, Tikkun Olam, and Derech Eretz.

1. Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof—“Justice, justice shall you pursue…”

This phrase, taken from Deuteronomy 16:18-20, appears in most Jewish schools’ mission statements, at times even emblematized on the front gates of the school. The original text reads: “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that Adonai your God is giving you.” In its entire context, it is an imperative from God that the Jewish people occupy and settle in Eretz Yisrael by appointing magistrates and officials who will “not judge unfairly.” Willfully forgetting the remainder of the passage, Jewish educators apply these words, “justice, justice shall you pursue,” as an ethical permission slip to embrace social justice causes such as racial and gender inequity, inclusivity, and immigration reform, to name a few. 

2. Tikkun Olam—“Repair the world” 

While tikkun olam is a signature theme of Jewish tradition in North America, somewhere along the way Jewish educators came to believe that the goal for the Jewish people was to help repair the world through solving world hunger, campaigning against occupations, ending gender wage gaps, and fighting climate change. However, in its original formulation, tikkun olam is achieved through ethical and ritual mitzvot such as keeping the laws of kashrut and observing the Sabbath. Similar to those who invoke tzedek, tzedek tirdof piecemeal, tikkun olam, which comes from the Aleinu, a seminal prayer in Jewish liturgy, appears in a passage that extends hope in “You, Adonai our God… to completely cut off all false gods; to repair the world, Your holy empire.” We make a grave error, therefore, in thinking that tikkun olam means embracing a woman’s right to choose, open immigration, or supporting equity of outcome policies.

3. Derech Eretz—“Way of the Land”

Although the literal translation is “way of the land,” Jewish educators have applied derech eretz to embrace compassion, kindness, and “common decency.” The problem, however, is that compassion and kindness are universal values and to each person mean different things. I once asked my students to define kindness and received disparate responses. To one, kindness was taking something from oneself in order to benefit another person; to another, it was saying kinds words in order to make someone else feel better. 

Derech eretz appears in several iterations in rabbinical literature. Take, for example, the midrash from Exodus Rabbah  (Shemot Rabbah 35:2), wherein we are instructed to “refrain from using wood from a fruit-bearing tree to build a house and calls that rule a lesson in derech eretz.” Here, derech eretz is not a commentary on kindness, but rather a frame to help people make better economic and ecological choices.  

But as I once heard among a cohort of Jewish senior educators at a conference, practicing derech eretz was finding a way to incorporate LGBTQ awareness into the Jewish middle school curriculum. 

To return to the dictum “socialist in content, national in form,” Soviet officials relied on this policy in order to unite a society around a shared system of values. In its entirety, the slogan, taken from an essay written by Joseph Stalin in 1934 reads: “The development of cultures national in form and socialist in content is necessary for the purpose of their ultimate fusion into one General Culture, socialist as to form and content, and expressed in one general language” (Marxism and the National-colonial Question). This “one General Culture” was emblematized by the “new Soviet man”—novyj Sovetskii chelovek—an archetype of the Leninist-Marxist ideals. Regardless of the chelovek’s ethnic background, he was a highly conscious individual, hyper-aware of his role to oppose private property and the greed of capitalism, and to support the worker against the petty bourgeoisie. The policy to conform was a success. Within five to ten years, ethnic minorities touted the Soviet policy line; and within fifteen to twenty years, as was planned, the “national form” had disappeared. By the 1960s, Jewish homes in the Soviet Union saw a 66 percent decline in spoken Yiddish.

But at least in the Soviet Union, it was done for a cause, granted a rotten one. What is the reason—the cause—for Jewish educators to practice “woke in content, Jewish in form”? Certainly it is not due to external forces, as in the case of the Soviet government that mandated educational policy. In North America, we cannot point to a single leader, a legislative document, or unique event that demonstrates a widespread adoption of these principles. What we can do, instead, is look to the triad—tzedek tzedek tirdof, tikkun olam, and derech eretz—and find a common denominator: the removal of God from each of the Jewish ideas. In each invocation of the triad, God is not present. The consequences of an absent God is that man must step in to restore order. Therein lies the problem: the moral compass is thus defined by individuals and not the institutional codex from which the principles emanate. The lack of explicit theological grounding allows for individuals to sanction ideologies and policies they see fit to promote. 

My recent encounter with young Jews demonstrates that in each of their articulations—from discomfort with a Jewish majority court system to enshrining human rights, and most significantly, finding no reason to be a Zionist since “Zionism fulfilled its purpose”— somewhere along the way, Jewish educators along with the institutions have dropped the ball on Jewish identity. It was most painful to hear a young Jewish student surrender one of the holiest pillars of Jewish identity, the Land of Israel, in order to restore justice and human rights to the Palestinians. And what is most painful is that behind her reasoning is a well-oiled Jewish education system that has taught this young lady that to be a Jew, she must repair the world, seek justice for the persecuted, and jettison her parochial Jewish nationalism. This young lady, therefore, surrenders the Land because she is a Jew, a Jew who has been taught social justice in content, while national in form. 

What then is the answer? How do we treat this alarming malaise? First and foremost, we address the root cause: discomfort with Jewish nationalism. Next we unpack Jewish nationalism by reminding American Jews that we are first and foremost, a people, and not a religion. We are an indigenous people from the Land of Israel; the reason we have been dispersed around the globe is because we were exiled from our national homeland. 
We need to stop capitulating to the zeitgeist, that is the desire to fit Jewish identity into a woke framework. Yes, Zionism is a movement of justice, yes Zionism sought to restore power to the persecuted Jewish people. But this is partial. We must inspire our Jewish youth in the idea that we are living in the most miraculous moment, a most supreme Zionist moment. Through Zionism, Jews have returned to history: we are not being written about, but rather are the scribes of history. What is Zionism? Zionism is a national Jewish movement: it is about returning the Jewish people to their homeland, with self-determination, with power, and with secure borders.

If the Jewish community’s greatest allies within Muslim and Arab populations are in fact the “modern,” “liberal” reformers who stand up within our own faith and ethnic communities against the anti-Semitic, Islamist, and Arabist demagogues—then they must be supported and augmented, not marginalized.

How did we reach this point where political ideology outweighs what should be unified Jewish support for Israel?

A few years ago, it became apparent that Reform Judaism—through the efforts of its rabbinic and lay leaders—was moving away from these core Jewish beliefs. Reform Judaism is embracing the values and teachings of political progressivism, while moving away from Jewish values and teachings derived from Jewish texts.

Things have gotten worse. That’s undeniable. The spirit of Haman has gotten stronger over the years and it’s a stain on the honor of the American republic and a threat to our future. We’re at a ‘We know not Joseph’ moment.

“Deadly Exchange” is an anti-Semitic campaign that blames Israeli and American Jews for police assaults on American black people. It promotes the false claim that American police departments that take part in counter-terrorism and leadership training in Israel are actually trained to “terrorize black and brown communities” here in America.

Soon, if “Ethnic Studies” is not exposed as viciously divisive and stopped, a large proportion of the state’s school children will be “learning” that the Jewish state is inherently racist and cruel, and that the Jewish students sitting in their classroom support such evils.

In reality, JCPA has become just another woke progressive organization whose political activism is abetted by the self-selected members of the local JCRCs.

Thus Satan said:
This besieged one – how can I overcome him?
He has courage, talent
And the implements of war and resourcefulness.

Jewish advocacy has gone corporate, answerable to a Board of Directors, fearful of fickle consumers, and obsessed with product placement. Calling attention to African-Americans or Muslims assaulting Jews will lead to accusations of racism or Islamophobia. And that would be bad for their brand.

This poem was written in tribute to the victims of the Kishinev pogrom. Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;Into its courtyard wind thy way;There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,The spattered blood and dried brains of the…

In the 21st century, a utopian discourse that deconstructs power and prejudice and detects their workings everywhere, has spread from radical pockets of academia to become the coin of the realm.

What most American Jews are really shocked by, but couldn’t see until it became inescapably obvious, is the fast-growing, unabashed anti-Semitism of the American political left, where they themselves reside.

“…[W]hat physicians say about consumptive illnesses is applicable here: that at the beginning, such an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognized or treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.”
​—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

This is not the country we grew up in. The Jewish community is under siege. According to the FBI, Jews are the primary targets of hate crimes in America. An analysis of their reports reveals that a Jew is twice as likely to be a victim of a hate crime as a black person or a Muslim, ten times more likely than an Asian or a Latino, and twenty times more likely than a non-Hispanic white.

Jews are being beaten in the streets of New York City, murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Jersey City, stabbed in Boston, taken hostage in Texas, and harassed and bullied on college campuses across the country. In more than a few places, Jews live with rising anxiety. Most Jewish community buildings require security. Israel, the Jewish state, is defamed and demonized by the mainstream media, and maligned in both the U.S. Congress and the United Nations, as anti-Zionism becomes the new anti-Semitism.

Semitic hate crimes in New York City were up 409 percent. A recent American Jewish Committee (AJC) poll found that four in ten Jews avoid making themselves identifiable as Jews, avoid going to Jewish events, or refrain from posting Jewish-related content online. Ninety percent of Jews think anti-Semitism is a problem in America.

In what seems like a perfect storm, Jews face assaults simultaneously from four major ideological camps. Lethal white nationalists attack them in the name of white supremacy, blaming them for supporting multiculturalism and rising Third World immigration. Radical black nationalists—including Farrakhan-following celebrities, academics, and politicians—attack Jews in the name of black liberation and “equity.” Radical progressives and segments of the Democratic Party promote the genocidal BDS movement and anti-Jewish critical race theory, inciting an ideological assault on Israel and Jews in the name of “social justice” and Palestinian nationalism. This new assault is a kind of “virtuous Jew-hatred,” socially acceptable and even fashionable, not easily countered by facts, logic, or reason.

Finally, radical Muslims, many from anti-Semitic cultures, embody an ancient religious hatred (the Jews rejected Muhammad) and are further inflamed by their tribal support of Palestinians. Islamic anti-Israel movements are funded by petro-dollars mostly from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Dozens of imams in American mosques can be seen in videos preaching incitement and hatred of Jews. Muslims have attacked Jews on America’s streets.

The ongoing demonization of Jews in the media, on college campuses, in Congress, and, most recently, in K-12 education is ominous. History does not offer many examples where rising anti-Semitism resolved itself peacefully. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, as his daughter Susannah remembered, often taught that the Holocaust “did not begin with the building of the crematoria,” but with the “defamation” of the Jews.

The animus behind these tribal, theological, and ideological assaults did not suddenly appear, but has been openly building over decades. The resulting crescendo of hate was predictable, but the “red flags” were mostly rationalized away, minimized, or ignored by most mainstream Jewish leaders. Based on their actions and priorities, Jewish leaders seem to prefer to devote precious Jewish resources to virtue-signaling activities for all but Jewish causes. Within the establishment Jewish leadership, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has been the lone, unfaltering exception.

The abolitionist leader Fredrick Douglass understood the consequences of failed leadership. He said: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them…”

There are many reasons for the current Jewish predicament. Many are not within our control, but one thing truly ought to be: Jewish leadership.

The simple truth is that those Jewish establishment organizations whose mission is the defense and well-being of the community—the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Federations, and the networks of Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs)—are failing to protect American Jewry. The leadership seems both ideologically conflicted and conflict-averse. Most significantly, our leaders and their major donors are not being held accountable for these failures. After decades of Jewish success in American society, Jewish leaders have grown complacent — or perhaps corrupted by our good fortune. Today, most of our Jewish leaders and their major donors are part of the economic elite and are not directly affected by the rising hatred and violence. Self-indulgent, sometimes arrogant, they suppress dissenting voices and diverse opinions. They often seem more preoccupied by their social standing than demonstrating real concern for the Jewish community’s predicament.

In a nutshell, Jewish establishment leaders are stuck in a comfortable older strategic paradigm. For decades, they promoted policies that allied Jews with blacks, and then with other disadvantaged minorities, in their struggles for civil and equal rights. They justified these policies, and the resulting outlay of precious Jewish resources, not only as consistent with Jewish values but also as protective of the community. The assumption was that our compassion and magnanimity towards others would reveal our goodness to all, and thus engender reciprocity and solidarity from these groups. Ignoring tribal self-interest and projecting their Jewish values onto their “allies,” they pursued a naïve and simplistic strategy: “We will help them and they will support us.” Predictably, they were wrong.

Not surprisingly, there was no reciprocity and no solidarity. With very few exceptions, physical and ideological attacks on Jews did not elicit the expected condemnations of anti-Semitism from their alleged “allies.” Our leaders seem to have missed the dramatic shift in America’s cultural and political landscape, which has taken place over the last several decades. The liberalism of the past that made long-standing Jewish policies sensible has been replaced by a radical and insidious ideology, one that resembles a theology. “Post-modernism” and “progressivism,” whose adherents are called “woke,” label Jews as “privileged white oppressors.” This ideology has captured and energized the progressive left. It has also infected too many Jews seeking acceptance and an escape from the burden of being Jewish.

Not only do Jewish leaders seem willfully blind to this mass cultural change, they seem oblivious to the damage they cause by their stubborn refusal to be “mugged by reality.” One shameful consequence: they fail to react with passion against attacks on Jews from their imagined ideological partners. Like “generals fighting the last war,” they cling to a more comfortable misunderstanding of the threat by focusing mainly on the extremist right, the small gangs of violent thugs who have minimal support compared to the vast influence of major media, college campuses, Islamists, and “progressive” politicians. So they simply look for Nazis everywhere. They have painted themselves, and us, into a corner. Even more ominous in the long term is the failure of Jewish leaders to stop the drift of Jewish youth, educators, and even our rabbis away from Judaism into progressive ideologies, which are most often anti-Zionist. Young Jews are not educated to understand Jewish peoplehood, and that being Jewish is more than being observant. It’s being part of the long history of the Judean people with a unique and amazing culture.

When challenged about this new reality—in which the reigning ideology of their “allies” divides America into oppressors and oppressed and consigns Jews to the former class—Jewish leaders often seem to be in outright denial. Some will grudgingly acknowledge the problem, but we have seen none who shows a willingness to consider the need for a serious re-think, a new strategy. Mostly they are doubling down on their failed policies or going through the motions of “rethinking” by organizing taskforces and committees. Most important, there is little evidence that our leaders or donors are being held accountable for their massive negligence and failure.

Several strategic leadership failures have severe long-term consequences for the community. These must be addressed immediately.

Failing to stop demonization of Jews in the media when the problem was limited.

This failure to address the demonization of Israel in the media, which now extends to most of the mainstream media, meant that Jewish leaders, especially the ADL—the “Jewish Defense Department”—failed to understand that the ideological assault on the Jewish state was the “new anti-Semitism.” Anti-Zionism made Jew-hatred culturally and socially acceptable under the guise of human rights and free speech. Every major Jewish legacy organization, except for the Zionist Organization of America, failed to see the long-term consequences, and thus refused to expose and combat it.

In 1989, as The Boston Globe was bashing the Jewish state on practically a daily basis, Andrea Levin and I, Charles Jacobs, contemplated forming a media watchdog group that would expose and combat media bias against Israel. As they were forming the Boston branch of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, they were asked by New England’s ADL representative, Lenny Zakim (of blessed memory), and by the former leader of AIPAC, Steve Grossman, to let the ADL do this task instead. Zakim and Grossman argued that since the ADL spoke with the voice of the Jewish people, if Abe Foxman, the ADL’s legendary head at the time, explained to the public that the media was lying about the Jewish people, it would be more powerful than if a new start-up did. But Foxman declined without any explanation. What was lost on him and the Jewish establishment was the strategic significance of how the media and other key public and cultural institutions influence our political leaders and the general public. This was an historic blunder.

Failing to stop demonization, harassment, intimidation, and exclusion of Jews on campus when the problem was limited.

In 2003, we were asked by Jewish students at Columbia University to help them deal with anti-Israel professors who were harassing and intimidating pro-Israel Jewish students. Nobody in leadership positions in New York City, the most populous Jewish city in the world, would help the students: not the Jewish professors, not Hillel, not the ADL, not the Federation, not the AJC.

Our documentary, Columbia Unbecoming (2004), recorded the abuse of Jewish students and the failure of the university to stop it. The documentary received major press coverage, including TV news reports. For the first time, many in the Jewish community learned about the hostility faced by Jewish students. Sadly, the events at Columbia failed to get the Jewish establishment mobilized. They told us the problem was not so bad, and that bringing attention to it would only make it worse. They preferred to handle the situation quietly, with the university administration, behind closed doors. They told us to go away, and let them handle the matter, implying that we were intruding on their turf. David Harris told us that his American Jewish Committee only does diplomacy and would not get involved on campus. Now, twenty years later, many of the diplomats the AJC faces have been “Palestinianized” on campus. The vacuum created by failed Jewish leadership resulted in grassroots efforts to support Jewish students, including The David Project, ZOA, StandWithUs, CAMERA on Campus, Aish ha-Torah, Students Supporting Israel, and others.

We hoped that Columbia Unbecoming would awaken Jewish leadership and the public to anti-Semitism masked as anti-Zionism. It mostly failed to accomplish this goal. Only in 2021 did the ADL finally acknowledge the campus problem. Only in 2021 did the ADL finally acknowledge the campus problem. Failing to deal effectively with Columbia University’s egregious behavior emboldened the Jew-hating radicals. There are now dozens of “unbecoming,” i.e., hostile universities. As with an untreated infection, the poison spread aggressively.

Lack of action by Jewish leadership has contributed to the fact that 50 percent of Jews on campus now feel that “they must hide who they are out of fear,” according to a recent AJC poll. This failure to address the hostility on campus has allowed the metastasis of a malignant academic culture that has led to the takeover of departments of Middle East Studies by radical anti-Semites, the growth of Students for Justice in Palestine promoting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, the infiltration and corruption of Jewish Studies programs, and the exclusion of Jewish students from fully participating in campus activities.

Failing to stop anti-Israel education in high schools now exploding across the nation via ethnic studies curricula and critical race theory.

Leveraging their campus successes, anti-Zionists then extended their efforts to K–12 education with funding from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and progressive think tanks. In 2011, informed by parents, we discovered that a Saudi-funded text—The Arab World Studies Notebook—was being used as a history text in high schools in Newton, Massachusetts. The Notebook was part of a curriculum taught to teachers across America by an anti-Israel Arab organization. Newton teachers were trained at an event sponsored by the anti-Israel Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The Center’s director, Paul Beran, an anti-Israel activist for several years, was an organizer of BDS campaigns against Israel. One “lesson” used the Hamas Charter as a primary source, but the Newton version of the Charter was doctored. It erased the original language that called for the murder of every Jew on the planet, by substituting the word “Zionists” for Jews. The teacher’s guide explained that the unit’s purpose was to show the conflict as a resolvable land and border dispute and not a complicated religious conflict. A grassroots effort to find out what else was being taught in the schools was stymied when school administrators rejected transparency and refused to make their teaching materials public. None of the established Jewish organizations in Boston would help us. In fact, they supported the school committee, claiming that we were exaggerating. To date, the curriculum is still not transparent. More recently, with the introduction of California’s “ethnic studies” curriculum, the assault on Jews and Israel has become “turbo-charged.” Most of Boston’s establishment Jewish leaders are being co-opted with vague promises of phantom “guardrails” to prevent anti-Jewish or anti-Israel indoctrination.

Again, we are witnessing gullible or delusional Jewish leadership failing to protect the community as the next generation of Americans is being groomed to be hostile to the Jewish community. This situation is being made far worse with the widespread introduction of critical race theory and “ethnic studies,” which reject merit in favor of tribal quotas and identity politics. Historically, Jewish success was based on merit while Jewish exclusion was based on quotas. Many Jewish leaders feel trapped by the conflict between their universalist and utopian impulses and their fiduciary responsibility to the Jewish community.

Failing to recognize the long-term threat of the growing radicalization of the American Muslim community.

Jewish leaders enamored of and relieved by simplistic feel-good solutions to complex social problems preached the gospel of interfaith dialogue as the magic formula for resolving tribal conflicts. In 2003, The Boston Herald reported that Islamist radicals tied to terrorism were planning to build a mega-mosque in the Boston suburb of Roxbury. Included on the mosque’s board was the “spiritual leader” of the Muslim Brotherhood (a radical Islamist, terror-approving group) Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, whose preaching—easily accessed online—calls for the murder of Jews and gays worldwide. Based on documents we obtained, it was clear that the goal of the mosque’s owners was to radicalize the historically moderate Boston Muslim community, as well as proselytize in Boston’s black community where the mosque was to be located. Concerned with these developments, we organized a meeting of Boston Jewish leaders including executives of Boston’s Federation (Combined Jewish Philanthropies, or CJP), the ADL, the AJC, and local JCRC. We presented evidence regarding the ownership and control of the mosque, their hateful ideology, and their connections to terror groups. The Jewish leaders, displaying a significant deficit of imagination and courage, believed that the only proper response was to engage more intensely in interfaith dialogue. “What else can we do?” they asked. They refused to consider educating the Jews and the public about the threat posed by radical Islam. We urged them to share what they knew about the funders and officials of the mosque with Boston’s well-intentioned but naïve mayor, or with Massachusetts’ governor. They refused. They were reluctant to use their political capital on this matter. By 2015, more than a dozen congregants of the Islamic Society of Boston’s mosques were in jail, deported, on the run, or dead from their connections to terrorism

The Jewish leaders were not influenced by hard evidence, such as copies of checks from terror groups to the mosques or from the mosques to the terror groups. We showed them anti-Semitic writings, sermons, and videos of anti-Semitic harangues. We showed them instructions on the mosque’s website on how husbands, displeased by their wives’ conduct, should beat them. Nothing, it seemed, would cause them to deviate from their comforting dogmatic beliefs that “mutual understanding” and dialogue would mitigate any threat. They also refused to learn the lessons of Muslim migration to Europe and its resulting violence against Jews. They were more concerned with offending a “vulnerable minority” than the long-term safety of their own community. Their mantra was, “If we are nice to them, they will be nice to us.” Facts be damned.

What is to be done?

Most mainstream Jewish leaders are promoting universalist fantasies—but to bring “kumbaya” to the arena of identity politics is to unilaterally disarm.

On these matters, our leaders prefer not to “follow the evolutionary science,” which teaches that tribes are more likely to seek dominance than equality. Tribes are formed to provide protection to their members, and are dependent on strong leaders for survival. Tribes are not guided by global moral principles and ethics, such as compassion or reciprocity. Instead, they are motivated by concrete tribal interests. Our Jewish leaders have projected their own values and ethics onto other groups, ignoring the reality that politics and warfare have always been about tribal power conflict. Many European Jews hoped that the “international community” would save them from the Nazis. Today, many American Jewish leaders place their bets on “allies” whom they mistake for partners. They failed to learn the clearest lesson of history: no one will fight to protect the Jews but the Jews.

For decades, we have been fighting our external enemies—the biased media, the professoriate, the weak-kneed college administrators, leftist anti-Zionists, high schools with poisoned “lesson plans,” radical Muslim anti-Semites, and followers of Farrakhan. We have finally concluded that the Jewish community cannot prevail against this organized rolling tsunami of hatred with the existing misguided establishment leaders who lack courage and imagination and are beholden to a progressive ideology that limits their range of effective actions.

It’s well-known that Jewish leaders are not elected but are anointed by wealthy donors, who are often part of the country’s ruling elites. They are conflicted between their fiduciary responsibilities to the community, their progressive ideology, and how their actions may negatively impact their social standing. They are often forced to rationalize why their efforts to maintain the status quo and their personal power are actually good faith attempts to live up to their responsibilities to fellow Jews.

It’s irrational to continue with the current policies and leaders and to expect different results. For the benefit of the community, Jewish leaders must acknowledge their failure—and not just privately. Many Jewish leaders, however morally confused, delusional, utopian, or in denial of the painful realities, believe they are well-intentioned people. Given the recent upsurge in anti-Semitism, however, and the rebranding of Jews as adjacent white oppressors, one can only hope they are (internally at least) going through a reassessment of the root causes of their failures, without which new strategies cannot be developed. Forming committees is not the answer. Leadership is about having a vision as well as the ability to inspire people to act on that vision. It is possible but unlikely that the same leaders who got us into this crisis are capable of getting us out of it.

Jewish leaders need fresh ideas. The Jewish community needs to engage in open discussions, by encouraging broad community participation about the crisis we face.

To help promote this process we are forming a national network of Jewish community activists, many of whom have been generally ignored, canceled, or suppressed by the Jewish establishment. These activists are interested in promoting creative new strategies for their communities by challenging local Jewish leadership—their rabbis, local Federations, the ADL, AJC, and the JCRCs—to break out of their failed ideological strait jackets and explore new thinking. To help organize such an effort, we have created a new initiative: the Jewish Leadership Project (www.jewishleadershipproject.org).

Given today’s realities, we urge Jewish leadership to take the following ten actions:

• Immediately declare a state of emergency and mobilize the community.
• Increase physical security to protect Jews, not just Jewish institutions.
• Prioritize Jewish communal resources for the protection of the community.
• Educate the public about the nature of today’s anti-Semitism, and deconstruct poisonous academic and social theories which demonize and marginalize Jews.
• Re-think Holocaust education and make it relevant to contemporary Jew-hatred.
• Educate Jewish youth about the threat to their future.
• Make Jewish education affordable.
• Build alliances based on mutual interests and honest reciprocity.
• Prioritize Jewish communal resources for the protection of the community.
• Experiment with alternative solutions to find what is effective.
• Develop a new leadership class which is willing to fight for the community.

Not for the first time in Jewish history, are we at a watershed moment. But we are an accomplished community, with very talented individuals. We can and must find proud, brave, and competent leadership to secure a better Jewish future.