October 7 Did Not Shatter Illusions. It Exposed a Broken Jewish Strategy

I am not here to reinvent the wheel, only to add my two cents. I recently listened to Bret Stephens speak at the 92nd Street Y, and I found myself agreeing with his core premise: that American Jewish life has overinvested in organizations like the Anti-Defamation League at the expense of building durable Jewish identity and continuity.

Shortly thereafter, I read an interview with William Daroff, head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, right here in The Times of Israel, describing how Jews felt “punched in the gut” after October 7 when long-standing allies turned away or fell silent.

What struck me was not the sentiment, but the timing. A familiar genre has emerged in Jewish public life: leaders of long-standing institutions “discovering” realities that many Jews have long understood. Interviews, panels, and statements now acknowledge betrayal by allies, the collapse of coalitions, and the need to rethink priorities. These observations are not wrong. They are simply late, and they come from institutions that were central to the failed strategy.

I say this not merely as an outside critic, but as someone who spent time inside the Jewish organizational world. I worked at the Anti-Defamation League and at the American Jewish Congress. I believed in the mission. I believed in the people. I believed, at the time, in the model – until I didn’t.

October 7 exposed how deeply flawed that model had become. There was a slow erosion of the organizational center. For decades, American Jewish life invested heavily in an alphabet soup of umbrella groups, coalitions, and coordinating bodies. These institutions were designed less to educate Jews than to manage relationships, smooth tensions, and signal relevance to the outside world.

They presented themselves as the center of Jewish communal life. In practice, they became buffers between Jews and reality.

From the inside, the incentives were clear. Success was measured in access, invitations, statements issued, coalitions maintained, and conflicts avoided. Jewish particularism was often treated as something to be softened, translated, or postponed in favor of broader acceptance.

What was lost in the process was not goodwill, but gravity. As Jewish identity thinned, assimilation rose. As resources flowed outward, internal cohesion weakened. When the moment of truth arrived – October 8, not October 7 – the carefully cultivated alliances proved brittle or absent. This was not a sudden betrayal. It was the predictable outcome of a strategy that mistook visibility for durability.

There was a myth that consumed generations. The animating belief of the modern Jewish organizational world, particularly in liberal spaces, was simple: if Jews stood prominently in other people’s struggles, those people would stand with Jews in ours. That belief shaped funding decisions, staffing priorities, programming, and messaging for years. Jewish institutions became fluent in the language of universal causes, often at the expense of particular Jewish ones.

I watched this happen up close. Jewish education was treated as important but not urgent. Jewish continuity was discussed rhetorically while budgets prioritized external engagement. The assumption was that influence and protection would follow.

History never supported that assumption. No community survives by making itself indispensable to others while neglecting itself. No minority secures its future by assuming goodwill will override ideology. No people retain loyalty when they teach their children that identity is secondary to acceptance.

This has nothing to do with the excesses of identity politics, which fracture nations and reduce citizenship to grievance. One can be fully American and fully Jewish at the same time—just as Muslims, Christians, adherents of other faiths, or those with no faith at all can practice their beliefs while participating fully in civic life.

Within a community, however, confidence in one’s identity is not a threat to cohesion; it is a prerequisite for it. A religious community that teaches pride, knowledge, and resilience does not weaken society. It strengthens both itself and the country in which it lives.

October 7 did not break this model. It tested it. The model failed, and there was a catastrophic cost to this misplaced spending. The real scandal is not that allies disappeared. The scandal is how much Jewish communal money was diverted away from what works. Billions have gone into coalition maintenance, intergroup “relationship building,” and professionalized organizational layers that generate meetings, statements, and reports.

Far less urgency was given to what consistently proves effective: serious Jewish education, immersive Jewish community, and sustained engagement with history, text, language, and peoplehood. When Jewish children are grounded intellectually and emotionally, they do not collapse under pressure. They do not outsource identity to slogans. They do not drift quietly into assimilation.

There is an important distinction here. Some insular communities, particularly within the Chareidi world, maintain continuity by deliberately limiting exposure to the secular sphere. That approach comes with real costs when it comes to civic engagement, integration, and how Jews are perceived in broader American society.

Yet even acknowledging those limitations, the data is undeniable. Look at attrition rates in tightly knit modern and secular-adjacent Jewish communities – Bergen, Ocean, and Passaic Counties in New Jersey, or the Five Towns on Long Island. Strong education, dense communal life, access to kosher food, and Shabbat-friendly infrastructure keep people engaged with Judaism in ways that organizational advocacy never has.

When those foundations are absent, no amount of press releases, lobbying, or intergroup dialogue can compensate.

We need to rethink the future honestly. The current conversation should not be about tweaking an existing system. It should be about whether much of that system still deserves to exist in its current form.

Do we need additional umbrella organizations whose primary function is to coordinate other organizations, or to duplicate advocacy already being done elsewhere? Do we need institutions whose relevance depends on being invited into rooms rather than building something durable of their own?

Or is it time to radically reallocate communal resources toward fewer, stronger, mission-driven efforts that shape Jewish lives in measurable ways? Many of these agencies once served a real purpose in American Jewish life. Continuing to fund them simply to preserve their existence, however, turns mission into maintenance and purpose into vanity.

Jewish continuity has never been sustained by conferences or consensus statements. It has been sustained by families, schools, synagogues, camps, study, and shared memory. It has been sustained by Jews living Jewish lives among other Jews.

That work is harder. It is less glamorous. It does not flatter professional leadership structures.

It works.

The choice in front of us is clear to me. October 7 stripped away comforting myths. The question is whether Jewish leadership responds with cosmetic adjustment or structural honesty. The future of Jewish life will not be secured by being seen as relevant to everyone else. It will be secured by investing unapologetically in ourselves.

Less choreography.
Less placation.
Less money spent managing decline.

More education.
More rootedness.
More continuity.

I believed in the old model once. Many of us did. The moment demands that we be honest about where it led – and brave enough to build something better.