Investing Strategically Against Antisemitism

Stop Funding What Isn’t Working

Two Jews, three opinions, as the saying goes. So when agreement emerges cutting across ideological and political lines, it demands a moment of reckoning. That reckoning is this: the playbook we are using to fight antisemitism is broken.

The flaw is not just in the outcomes; it is embedded in the design. What we have today was not built as a coherent strategy, reverse-engineered from a clear definition of success and grounded in proven methods. Instead, it is the accumulation of operating models shaped by bureaucracy, ego, blind spots, inertia, and decision-making by committee, aimed at achieving buy-in through internal consensus rather than external effectiveness. The result is a closed loop, assessed by echo chamber logic.

In this way, the playbook does not just produce weak results, it systematically prevents better ones from emerging. And yet, as antisemitism rises, the instinct is clear: do more, spend more, launch more campaigns, strengthen existing institutions. We are trying to win by doubling down on failure.

In the private sector, an industry producing these kinds of results would trigger a fundamental reassessment: What is not working, and why? Capital would not continue to flow toward familiar approaches out of habit or institutional loyalty.

The fight against antisemitism requires that same discipline. It requires treating initiatives not as fixed commitments, but as investments that are tested against outcomes, scaled when they work, and dropped when they don’t. That means reimagining the approach for the world as it is today, and continuously recalibrating as antisemitism and the society around it evolve. Strategy cannot be static in a dynamic environment.

Philanthropists hold the leverage. What they choose to fund will determine whether we can correct course.

Why The Playbook is Broken

The Strategy Problem

My background is in intelligence and Middle East backchannel diplomacy, including work around jihadist networks in Europe and facilitating economic negotiations between Israel and its neighbors. At its core, this work centers on how beliefs form, how trust is built, and what makes people change their minds.

From that vantage point, I watched with growing concern how communications and narrative were handled by the Jewish community and the Israeli government after October 7.

Much of the current response, while well intentioned, does not reflect how people actually form perceptions. We prove. We rebut. We demand. These responses feel morally necessary and internally validating, but they are driven more by what we feel compelled to say than by what is most likely to move the audience we are trying to reach. When persuasion takes this form, it often backfires, triggering defensiveness and reinforcing the very perceptions it is meant to change. Very little is grounded in the deeper drivers of perception, including social psychology and the types of people and environments that shape what people find credible. In investment terms, it is a portfolio built almost entirely on defense.

Part of the problem is that the strategy was built for a different era, one focused on proving to leaders in government, business, and civil society that a problem existed and pushing for institutional responses. That is fundamentally different from shaping public perception in today’s fragmented cultural landscape. It also helps explain why communications so often default to condemnation and rebuttal.

To understand this gap, I conducted a qualitative study on how Americans perceive Jews and Israel, designed to meet rigorous academic standards, including Institutional Review Board oversight in partnership with a major university. I made it freely available, self-contained, and actionable, intending to pass these insights along and return to my work in diplomacy.

What I learned next was just as instructive as the research itself.

As I began advising legacy Jewish organizations, donor groups, and government bodies, I found that the problem was not resistance to the findings. In many cases, there was near-unanimous agreement. The challenge was translating those insights into strategy. Institutions struggled to operationalize them, whether because of bureaucracy, internal politics, or the need for structural change. Across the board, organizations lacked the internal capabilities required to implement this kind of work.

This institutional stuckness is a strategic liability. The fight against antisemitism is inherently dynamic, and it requires a continuous pipeline of ideas being tested, refined, and either scaled or discarded based on real-world results.

That is why, in my advisory work, I have been focused on applying venture-style discipline to philanthropy: identifying operators in key strategic areas, evaluating them rigorously, and backing only those showing traction.

One of the most compelling initiatives I advise is the Shofar Fund. Its focus is narrative strategy, centered on the social and cultural channels through which beliefs are actually formed and replicated at scale, particularly among younger generations navigating a radically different informational landscape. This work draws on leading research in social psychology, behavioral science, and narrative formation, combined with real-world expertise in how beliefs are shaped and changed.

It operates as a portfolio model, backing multiple initiatives and shifting capital as evidence evolves. In practice, that has meant shaping how Jewish characters are portrayed in Hollywood, ensuring Israeli perspectives are present in the global news pipeline through image-driven storytelling, and building meaningful social capital through partnerships with professional athletes, leagues, and HBCU networks. The returns have been outsized and fast-moving, and it is striking how far capital can go when directed toward high-impact work led by strong operators with no bloat.

This points to a broader reality: strategic gaps exist across every layer of the fight against antisemitism. Narrative is just one domain. Similar opportunities exist across education, policy, media, campuses, technology, research, and security. Effective strategy depends on specialization and diversification, with different actors building deep expertise and reinforcing one another over time. No single organization can or should do it all, and attempts to do so tend to weaken the work rather than strengthen it.

That has implications for both practitioners and donors. For organizations, it requires discipline not only in what they build, but in what they choose not to take on. For donors, it requires a diversified portfolio mindset. Real strategy requires a layered approach, and what advances one strategic objective may undermine another if the system is not considered as a whole.

The Structural Problem

This brings us to the next problem in the ecosystem: fragmentation.

The ecosystem is vibrant and active, but disjointed. When confidence in an old model breaks before a new one has fully emerged, the marketplace of groups and initiatives becomes crowded and contested. That is where we are now.

The instinctive response is to impose order. But in transitional periods like ours, what looks like progress at the structural level can come at the expense of the experimentation needed to actually improve outcomes.

Many efforts to bring the ecosystem together create new problems. Coordination efforts often introduce a new form of competition. The groups positioning themselves as coordinators are not neutral actors. They are competing to be the center, seeking authority over the ecosystem itself, often fundraising around the promise of a singular vision. This dynamic turns coordination into a power struggle and deepens fragmentation rather than resolving it.

The current ecosystem is chaotic, but that chaos is also the mechanism through which discovery happens. It is where different approaches are tested across audiences, platforms, and cultural contexts, and where real-world feedback separates signal from noise. This marketplace of initiatives is not just a byproduct of fragmentation. It is how the system learns what works.

Premature consolidation does not just risk organizing around the wrong ideas. It suppresses the experimentation needed to find the right ones, narrows the range of approaches being tested, and creates path dependency around early assumptions. Once unproven assumptions are embedded in funding structures and leadership frameworks, they become far harder to unwind.

Coordination is not alignment for its own sake. It is alignment around strategy, and that clarity can only emerge through discovery. You cannot coherently align a system around unproven models. When you try, alignment forms around institutional power rather than effectiveness.

This is why collaboration must precede coordination. Collaboration is where trust is built, where actors begin to reinforce one another’s work, and where early signals of alignment emerge organically. It is also where the ecosystem begins to distinguish between actors driven by impact and those driven by control.

Strategic Philanthropic Investment

If the problem is clear, the question becomes: what does a more effective investment approach actually look like?

It starts with discipline. Capital should follow performance. That means identifying early signs of traction, backing them decisively, and being willing to reallocate when results don’t materialize. It means supporting emerging collaboration and investing in groups that already reinforce one another, rather than trying to impose cohesion from above.

The goal is to deploy capital not just as a means of support, but as a mechanism for learning: revealing what works, what does not, and where the system is beginning to generate real traction. That requires identifying high-potential initiatives grounded in real-world results, while also paying attention to how those initiatives interact and begin to form the early architecture of a more coherent ecosystem.

Think of it like designing a bridge before you have fully studied the terrain. If you do not know the distance it needs to span, the load it must carry, or what it is meant to connect, you may end up with something that looks good on paper but does not hold in reality.

In practice, this also requires a different leadership profile. Transparency, intellectual honesty, and genuine willingness to partner are core operating requirements in an ecosystem that depends on shared learning. The Shofar Fund treats these traits as a filter, because collaboration cannot be layered onto the system later. It has to be built into the DNA of the actors shaping it.

High-impact strategies should be identified, funded, and amplified. As they demonstrate traction, collaboration naturally forms around them, and as those collaborations deepen, more structured coordination can emerge. This feedback loop runs in both directions: what is proving itself in the real world informs holistic strategy, and holistic strategy directs capital toward what is actually working.

Groups will not rally around imposed coordination. Alignment is earned through clear results, real value from collaboration, and trust built over time.

Building the New Ecosystem

We all want an immediate, singular solution. But that solution will not come quickly or cleanly, because in a community as vibrant and fractious as the Jewish one, top-down reform is not how change actually happens.

Think of it like a market reaching maturity. In the early stages, things are chaotic and capital flows in many directions. Over time, the approaches that produce real results attract more capital, talent, and institutional support. When outside forces anoint winners before the market has discovered what works, the result is stagnation. We risk doing the same thing here.

Building the new ecosystem will look more like a renaissance. It will be messy and emergent, with strategies tested in the real world. Real reform will come when major groups and donors rally behind what has demonstrably worked, not what sounds best in a conference room. That requires acting now: immediately identifying and amplifying what works, not waiting for clarity to arrive on its own. The standard has to shift from “is this what we have always done?” to “is this generating real returns in the current environment?”

Other domains such as policy, education, law, campus life, and digital spaces require their own capable and focused actors. The path forward is specialization, collaboration, and backing high-impact initiatives led by people with vision, integrity, and a real commitment to partnership.

Investing in Results

If Jewish philanthropy is serious about building something new, it must change how capital is deployed. Funding decisions should not be driven by reflex or legacy, nor reward familiarity or institutional self-preservation. They should be grounded in performance, adaptability, and strategic clarity.

That means identifying what works, backing it early, and allowing real-world impact to determine what grows. Initiatives should be treated less like permanent fixtures and more like evolving investments, evaluated and either scaled or discontinued based on results. A healthy system is not defined by avoiding failure. It is defined by the ability to learn from it, reallocate capital, and double down on what proves effective.

At a structural level, this means supporting experimentation and entrepreneurial risk-taking where legacy strategies have stalled, while ensuring that larger institutions are ready to scale what proves effective. Innovation rarely comes from incumbents. It emerges from smaller, more agile actors that can test and prove new approaches in real-world conditions. Larger institutions provide scale, infrastructure, and durability. They are how proven models reach broad audiences and sustain impact over time. Established organizations are most effective when they recognize what works, partner with it, and expand it, not when they try to generate or control it from within.

A thriving ecosystem depends on clear roles. Builders create high-impact initiatives. Investors back what proves effective. Institutions amplify and scale what has already been validated. None of these roles is interchangeable, and none is sufficient on its own.

Strategy and structure must work together, but neither can be imposed in advance. They have to be built through disciplined investment in what actually works, tested in the real world and proven over time.

If we are serious about confronting antisemitism, we have to be just as serious about how we fight it. Strategic philanthropic investment will drive that rigor, by demanding results, rewarding collaboration, and backing what works. Only then can the fight move from reacting to the problem to outpacing it.