A New Model to Empower Jews Across America
What if I told you that within one year, we could build a grassroots network of American Jews and our allies powerful enough to shift the tide of Antisemitism and anti-Zionism across the country?
I’m talking about recruiting, assigning and training Jewish organizing captains in every town, every state legislative district, and every Congressional district in the United States.
Nationally and within every state, Jewish organizations must unite to create campaigns that identify and empower organizing captains to be in charge of organizing own communities. These organizing captains, in turn, must have a direct pipeline to national and state leaders in charge of lobbying, and vice-versa.
I know what some of you are thinking: What the heck is so new about this model? Successful political campaigns have followed it for decades. You are indeed correct. The model is central to what we campaign veterans call GOTV, for Get Out the Vote.
The task now is for our Jewish community and its professional organizations to replicate it. Because we’re not, we’re getting our clock cleaned.
Since October 7, 2023, key bills in Congress and in several states to protect Jews have stalled or failed. Our opponents have even managed to stop legislation in states with substantial Jewish populations, such as New York and New Jersey. The Governor of Arizona, Janet Hobbs, vetoed a bill to protect Jewish students in a state with a soaring Jewish population. The Jewish population in Maricopa County alone grew by 20 percent from 2002 to 2019, according to an Arizona State University study.
What does this tell us? The problem is not in the numbers. The problem is that too many political leaders no longer fear us Jews as a grassroots force to be reckoned with. The most recent example? This month’s win for Zohran Mamdani, a supporter of BDS and apologist for Globalize the Intifada, in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Ten years ago, his win would have been unimaginable in the city with more Jews than any other city in the world.
We Jews are getting outorganized. And the price we’re paying is deadly.
Antisemitism is no longer confined to dark corners of the internet or the margins of political discourse. Antisemitism, often disguised as its evil twin, anti-Zionism, is shouted in the streets, discussed approvingly in faculty lounges, embedded in city resolutions, and coded into slogans that deny Jews our right to self-determination.
When Jewish students are told they can’t be both progressive and Zionist, when Israel is demonized while Hamas is excused, when Jewish institutions are defaced and Jewish voices are silenced, well, my friends, that’s not just political disagreement. That’s Antisemitism, repackaged.
We can do something about it. When I ran the statewide civil rights organization Garden State Equality in New Jersey, we grew from one member – me as its founder – to 150,000 members within a few short years. We did it by instituting the district-by-district, town-by-town, block-by-block model I’ve described. It’s how we passed more than 200 laws at the state and local levels to advance the rights of the LGBTQ community.
We enlisted the help of state and national partner organizations who united with us to create the exact organizing model – a unified grassroots model – I’ve described herein.
Our model understood that lobbying and legislative advocacy are not the same. Lobbying – the practice of talking to legislators and their staff – will never do the trick unless it’s tied to grassroots activation. That combination, along with the third plank of social media, is today’s recipe for successful legislative and political change.
It comes down to this: When legislation to help the Jewish community is in trouble, lobbyists in every state capital and Washington, DC should be able to push one button to alert organizing captains and the grassroots Jewish activists they have mobilized in advance.
We American Jews can build such a movement. We’ve helped to do it for others, and now it’s time to do it for ourselves.
