On Yom Kippur, the Jewish establishment should come clean

Israelis have been calling for an accounting from their leaders for the catastrophic intelligence failure on Oct. 7. They want this now, even in wartime, and even after those same failed leaders and institutions seem to have miraculously re-established the deterrence lost on that day—through world-historic feats of pager and walkie-talkie explosions and targeted assassinations of jihadist leadership.

But what of the catastrophic failure of America’s Jewish leadership? David Bernstein of the Jewish Institute of Liberal Values writes that American Jews were caught off-guard due to an analogous “delusive conceptzia” that “blinded them to the mounting threat of antisemitism on the left.” (He might well have added “and the threat of the growing radical Muslim population” here.)

“Our leaders were asleep at the wheel,” Bernstein says, “as massive ideological shifts swept through our institutions, reprogramming the minds of young people, shutting down discourse, corrupting organizational cultures and fueling a wave of antisemitism.”

Many leaders, Bernstein says, “had an inkling” but “played along with the political fads of the day.” And so, he calls for a probe here similar to the one in Israel, a probe into our “systemic vulnerabilities so that we too can foster a culture of continuous improvement.”

The fact is that at least in Boston, and surely elsewhere, the leaders of the Jewish Federation, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Community Relations Council and many, many rabbis had more than an inkling. Jewish activists told them, warned them and begged them to defend the community from the media bias—most particularly, of The Boston Globe that poisoned much of New England against us—from the hostile professoriate at the New England Ivy League schools and beyond who intimidated and harassed Jewish students defending Israel; and from the cowardly campus administrators who would not act on Jewish student complaints and were not hearing anything of strength from Jewish “leaders.”

Every Jewish establishment leader also knew because we documented for them the anti-Israel curricula in the public high schools of Newton, Mass. They knew about the radical leadership of the Islamic Society of Boston Mosque because we held an emergency meeting, and they all attended.

In every one of these cases, they failed to act. They told their Jewish communities that they would take care of it behind the scenes, and that we should back off because this was their job and that they were on top of this. They attacked those of us who took them to task for their failures to act on clear, legitimate intelligence. All of this is documented in my new book, Betrayal–The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, written with Avi Goldwasser. We know that this was not just a problem in Boston, the book is filled with essays from Jewish activists in other areas who tell the same tales.

Even now, when some of these leaders tell us in private that we were right all along, they refuse to say it out loud. They refuse to explain how and why they were wrong, and even now, they refuse to do a major honest rethink. They refuse to allow any of us who knew and said the truth to participate in any of the new “antisemitism committees” that they have set up in response to the explosions of Jew-hatred and which have yielded little or nothing of value.

I once thought that these leaders could be persuaded, pressured, shamed, humiliated, moved and convinced to see how and why they were so wrong to have de-centered Jewish interests by instead investing so much Jewish energy, reputation, time, talent and treasure on behalf of others causes of the feminists, the Black Lives Matter folks, the LGBTQ+, the Latino lobby and Muslims—all of whom stabbed us in the back after Oct. 7. Yet, after a year, I have concluded that national efforts to make this happen has yielded very little. I now believe we need to do an end-run around these failures and create new institutions that work for Jewish interests. I see these arising throughout America.

 Wait! Perhaps I’m wrong. Yom Kippur is a time for atonement, for cheshbon hanefesh—an accounting of the soul. Is it too much to ask the men and women who have misled us despite their good intentions and desire to help us, those who can now see how they deluded themselves and have brought us into terrible harm, is it too much to ask of them that on Yom Kippur they clop their chests and say: (This is the Boston version, but it can be tailored to any other locale.)

Al Cheit, for the sin of being afraid to offend my liberal circles when they turned against the Jewish state.

Al Cheit, for the sin of being silent about the Islamic Society of Boston’s radical threat to my community.

Al Cheit for the sin of not explaining to the community how The Boston Globe cheats and lies about Israel almost daily.

Al Cheit for the sin of defaming Jewish activists who challenged us and whom events proved were right.

Al Cheit for the sin of telling the Jews of Newton that reports of antisemitic curricula were simply exaggerations.

Jews in Boston and elsewhere yearn to hear this moral cleansing, for without an admission, explanation and analysis of their failures, why should any Jew look to them for help now during these daunting times?