Yom Kippur is a time to reflect on our behavior and repent for our sins. The Jewish establishment really ought to do teshuvah, but it will not.
The legacy organizations whose duty is to represent, defend and protect the community—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, Jewish Community Relations Councils, the Jewish Federation system and even large swathes of the American rabbinate—have utterly failed us and have placed us into a dangerous, dark corner.
Antisemitism is surging from almost every powerful ideological corner, left, right and Islamist. Anti-Zionism, the “new antisemitism,” has captured the college campuses, the public schools, the media and many corporate HR departments. It energizes the most active part of the Democratic Party. Many Jews are shocked because they were totally unprepared. Our leaders didn’t warn us.
The well-funded organizations we trusted to have their eyes wide open to threatening trends and to prepare us for what was coming missed the tectonic shift in American society—the defeat of classical liberalism by a woke progressivism that has turned us, in the eyes of so many, from friends and good citizens into demons.
For the longest time, classical liberalism protected American Jews and allowed us to thrive, but it has been under siege for decades, and our leaders were willfully asleep at the switch.
Why won’t they fess up? The responsible thing would be to explain their errors, so there can be a reset and a response to the reality that is actually upon us. But don’t count on them to do it.
Here is why the establishment cannot provide the needed course correction:
- Psychological: Think how exquisitely painful it would be to admit to errors so enormous. They chose the wrong allies—the leftist identity groups and their agendas, including feminists, blacks, Latinos, gays, lesbians, transgenders and even Muslims. And they supported them with our Jewish money, passion, talent and our reputation. Yet these are the very groups who, immediately after Oct. 7, 2023, turned on us viscously, and who, today, hunt us down. This Jewish investment (a half-billion dollars?) over decades would have been better burned in a furnace than given over to our enemies.
- Political mindset: Our leaders come from the world of the left and cannot bring themselves to think the “wrong” political thoughts. They want to think that the surge in wokeness inevitably leading to Jew-hatred is just an excess of youthful exuberance. But it’s not youth. The progressivism that intends to re-tribalize America and bring it down is organized and funded by nations—Russia, China, Iran and Qatar. It is led here by the Muslim Brotherhood through its ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, and it is also funded, for shame, by far-leftist “as-a-Jew” Jews like George Soros. This means that the allies we Jews have now are on the right: conservatives, (most) Christians, patriots and, Heaven forbid, Republicans. Our leaders might prefer hara-kiri to acting based upon that reality.
- Social penalties: As people of the left, those who lead our establishment organizations get their sense of being virtuous, their positive self-image from their universalism and global politics as much or more than from their Judaism. Since the Enlightenment, universalism has been the escape route for Jews who wished to unburden themselves from the hardships of being a Jew. They learned to defend themselves from being hated as parochial tribalists who cared only for themselves. Universalism (Marxism, socialism, etc.) allows them to paint themselves as morally superior to “those Jews” who are only concerned with their own kind. They, in contrast, proclaim how much they care about “all of humanity.” Jews who choose this path find themselves comfortable in like-minded social sets. To come to the defense of the Jewish tribe, now that we are under siege, would mean they’d lose a lot of friends and family.
- Structural: The establishment groups are constituted as 501(c)(3) public charities. This allows them to give tax credits to donors, making fundraising easier, but forbids them from doing the work that our foes do to defeat us. A 501(c)(3) organization cannot intervene in political races, cannot help candidates who support us, lobby against hostile ones or fight anti-Israel legislation in city or state governments. Not having this ability, when all of our enemies are using politics to defeat us, is imbecilic. AIPAC understood this and changed course. The others work with a “big tent” philosophy that seeks to attract donors and members whose politics range as broadly as possible along the political spectrum. This means they won’t want to lose their most left-wing donors and supporters. And this paralyzes them in times of conflict.
- Organizational: Staff is policy. Even when we hear the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt say better things than in the past, things that actually touch on reality, which he has, much, if not most of his staff have not been converted away from their soft-left or even woke-progressive ideology. We know that because people who attend their workshops report that they, still today, will not teach Jews about jihadism and leftist antisemitism. The ADL still clings to the hope that it can be accepted by the left. It won’t fight DEI, which, apart from being antisemitic, is anti-American, and it still won’t tackle or hardly even mention the biggest threat to Jewish life on the planet: Islamic antisemitism.
The Jewish house is on fire. The sooner we realize that the cavalry is not coming, the better off we are. The Jewish establishment is paralyzed. It will not and cannot pivot to become the set of agencies our community so urgently needs. Jews must bypass them. We need to create a national network of grassroots activists determined to do what needs to be done.
Saddle up. We’re on our own.