The Plight of American Jewish Activism

Over the past year, I have found myself questioning an assumption that I think many of us in the American Jewish community have taken for granted for a very long time: that our legacy institutions want, or are even structurally capable of doing, what needs to be done in the environment we now find ourselves in. When antisemitism gets worse, when Jews become increasingly uncomfortable being visibly Jewish, when another problem emerges in a school, on a campus or in a city, our instinct is usually to look toward the same institutions and assume that if we give them enough money, they will eventually make the problem go away.

I realize that even questioning this assumption can sound almost blasphemous in American Jewish communal life. These are institutions many of us grew up trusting, organizations our parents and grandparents supported, and in many cases institutions that have done extraordinary things for the Jewish people. Criticizing the system can quickly be heard as attacking the people inside it, undermining Jewish unity or failing to appreciate everything that came before us. I understand that instinct. But institutions are tools, not sacred objects, and respecting what previous generations built cannot mean placing it beyond examination when the world around us has changed.

I don’t think simply giving those institutions more money will solve the problem. That isn’t because these organizations are useless or because the people working for them don’t care. Many do important work, and many of the people inside them are deeply committed to the Jewish community. My argument is more uncomfortable than that: I think the problem goes deeper than institutional performance. Our institutions are products of the same American Jewish culture the rest of us are, and over generations that culture has become increasingly disconnected from a basic understanding of what it means to be a people.

We have spent a very long time trying to separate Jewish culture from Judaism, as though one is the food, music, humor and family traditions while the other is what happens in a synagogue. I increasingly think that distinction has crippled us. Judaism is not simply a religion in the American sense of the word, and Jewish culture is not a collection of ethnic accessories we can detach from it. We inherited a civilization. Our calendar, food, music, languages, law, holidays, literature, relationship to the land of Israel, traditions, values and even the way Jews have argued with one another for thousands of years grew together. You can be secular, observant or somewhere in between and participate in that civilization, but once we begin pulling it apart into disconnected pieces, eventually we forget how those pieces relate to one another.

That loss of fluency has consequences far beyond synagogue attendance. Generation after generation grows up knowing less about the civilization it inherited, and eventually those same generations become the professionals deciding how Jewish communities should respond to a crisis, the philanthropists deciding which Jewish ideas deserve funding and the communal leaders teaching the next generation what Jewish identity means. We shouldn’t be surprised when the institutions they lead struggle with the same questions the community itself has struggled with.

Then a moment like October 7 arrives and exposes just how serious the problem has become.

We know how to respond institutionally because institutional responses are what we know. Something happens and we issue a statement. We organize a panel. We hold a webinar or seminar on antisemitism. We increase security. We lobby an elected official. We gather Jews inside a Jewish building, often behind security, and talk among ourselves about the increasingly hostile environment outside. Then we go home and wait for the next incident.

There is a place for all of those things. Advocacy matters. Education matters. Security unquestionably matters. But we have become very good at defending Jewish life without asking whether we are producing Jews who know what they are defending.

How do you teach Jewish pride when you have difficulty articulating what Jews should be proud of? How do you restore Jewish confidence when Jewish identity is increasingly defined through antisemitism, the Holocaust and other people’s perceptions of us? How do you teach Jews to stand publicly as Jews when we have spent generations treating Judaism as something practiced privately and Jewish culture as food, humor and nostalgia?

Money cannot compensate for a loss of Jewish fluency. Without that fluency, more money can simply produce more sophisticated versions of the same response. Another communications department can produce a better statement. Another advocacy professional can build another relationship. Another conference can bring together another room of experts. None of those things answers the more fundamental question: what kind of Jewish people are we trying to produce?

I came to this realization in large part through my own experience building Jewish Frontline in Michigan. I didn’t begin with some grand theory about what was wrong with American Jewish institutional life. I saw things happening around me that I didn’t think were being adequately addressed and eventually decided to stop waiting for someone else to address them. The more involved I became, the more I found myself asking a basic question: what are we waiting for an organization to do that we could simply start doing ourselves?

If Jews were becoming uncomfortable being publicly Jewish, I didn’t want another discussion about Jewish visibility. I wanted Jews to become visible. If Jewish life was retreating behind the walls of our institutions, I wanted to bring it back outside. Put a sukkah in a marketplace. Hold a Jewish concert in a public park. Walk through our own neighborhoods as Jews. Build relationships with the people and institutions around us. Give Jews the confidence and tools to advocate for themselves instead of assuming there will always be a professional somewhere who will do it for them.

That experience made me realize how much of our own agency we have outsourced. When something happens, we tell people who to call. Report it to this organization. Contact that professional. Let the experts deal with the school district. Let the government-relations people handle the elected officials. Let the organization issue the statement. There are situations where professional expertise is absolutely necessary, but somewhere along the way we stopped distinguishing between supporting Jews and acting in place of them.

We have built an extraordinary system for advocating on behalf of Jews without putting nearly the same resources into teaching Jews how to advocate for themselves. A successful communal organization should leave the community more capable than it found it. The parent dealing with something in a school should eventually be better equipped to organize other parents, speak at a board meeting and understand the system they are dealing with. The volunteer who shows up should eventually know how to organize others. Leadership should multiply leadership. Our institutions should be force multipliers for Jewish agency, not substitutes for it.

Once I started doing this work, I also discovered an entire layer of Jewish communal life beneath the professional infrastructure. It is the parent dealing with a school district, the volunteer spending a Sunday standing at a table, the person developing a relationship with the local police department and the organizer who can get twenty people into a room when twenty people actually matter. I have come to think of these people as the infantry of Jewish communal life, and infantry is rarely scalable.

A problem in a Michigan school district may have no national application. A relationship with one police chief isn’t necessarily a program that can be replicated in thirty cities. Putting a sukkah in one marketplace or bringing Jewish music into one public park may never become a national initiative. It may simply make Jewish life stronger in that particular community.

That should be enough.

Yet this is where the structure we have built begins working against the outcome we say we want. Much of Jewish philanthropy values scale, measurable reach, national replication and established institutional partnerships. There are legitimate reasons for that, but it leaves a blind spot around the local infrastructure being built between the individual Jew and the large institution. An organization can be doing exactly what its community needs and still find itself too local for funders looking for national scale, too independent for institutions that prefer programs operating within their own structures and too new to have developed the donor base necessary to function without either.

A strong national Jewish community is ultimately a collection of strong local Jewish communities. If we neglect the organizations building capacity at that level because they do not fit our definition of institutional success, we shouldn’t be surprised when there is nobody on the ground when we actually need them.

This is where I think our instinct to simply give the established institutions more money deserves scrutiny. If the model itself is failing to produce Jewish confidence, knowledge, agency and local capacity, increasing the budget does not necessarily change the model. It can simply produce more of it.

That doesn’t mean Jewish professionals shouldn’t be paid well. Serious work requires talented people. But we should be willing to acknowledge that Jewish communal infrastructure has become an ecosystem with its own incentives. There are salaries, donor relationships, professional influence, reputations, boards and organizational survival at stake. Infrastructure built to sustain a community eventually has to sustain itself as well, and it is naive to pretend that this cannot affect which ideas receive funding, which organizations are treated as legitimate and which new initiatives are welcomed as reinforcement rather than perceived as competition.

That last part has been one of the hardest lessons for me personally.

I expected opposition when I became involved in public Jewish activism. I expected antisemites and ideological opponents. I was far less prepared for some of my most difficult adversaries to come from within our own community. I have watched disagreements become personal. I have watched ego, access, credit and perceived influence consume people who ostensibly want the same thing. I have seen disputes escalate far beyond reasonable disagreements over tactics or philosophy.

It still blows my mind that people can become so consumed by personality, status or territory that damaging another Jewish activist, or something another Jew has built to strengthen our community, can become more important than the mission itself.

For a while I thought that was a separate problem. I don’t anymore. It is another consequence of confusing the vehicles with the destination. When donor access, organizational influence, communal legitimacy and professional standing become measures of success, territory develops around them. Another organization succeeding can begin to look like competition rather than additional Jewish capacity.

None of this requires bad people or some grand conspiracy. Nor are new organizations immune. Jewish Frontline could eventually fall into exactly the same trap. The moment our continued existence becomes more important than whether we are actually making Jews stronger, we will have forgotten why we exist too.

And this is why I keep coming back to the question of what Jewish activism is actually supposed to accomplish.

For generations, American Jewish activism has understandably developed around defense. We fight antisemitism, monitor threats, protect institutions, advocate when Jews are discriminated against and respond when Jews or Israel are attacked. We still need all of that. But defense has become so dominant that the people who hate us increasingly set our agenda. They do something and we respond. They say something and we condemn it. A controversy erupts and it consumes our attention.

At some point we have to move from defense to offense. I don’t mean aggression. I mean initiative. We have to decide what Jewish life should look like instead of allowing antisemitism to decide where we put our energy.

To me, this is also where Zionism belongs in the conversation. We too often reduce Zionism to a political position on whether the State of Israel should exist. But at its core, Zionism was also a reclamation of Jewish agency. It rejected the assumption that Jews were destined to remain passive subjects of history, dependent on the goodwill of rulers and neighbors for our safety, and asserted that the Jewish people had the right and responsibility to shape our own future in our ancestral homeland.

Israel is the sovereign expression of that idea, but Jewish agency should not disappear when we leave Ben Gurion Airport.

For American Jews, Zionism should carry a lesson about how we understand ourselves here as well. We do not need sovereignty in Michigan or New York, but we do need agency. We should not build a Jewish life in which somebody else is always expected to protect us, represent us, speak for us or decide how visibly Jewish we are allowed to be. We should know how to organize our neighbors, advocate in our schools, engage our local governments, build our own institutions and create Jewish life in public without waiting for permission or professional intervention.

That is what I mean when I talk about ending the exile mindset. It does not mean rejecting America or believing Jewish life outside Israel has no value. It means rejecting the idea that diaspora Jewish life must be passive. We can be fully American while understanding ourselves as members of a people capable of acting on our own behalf.

In that sense, the same principle that restored Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral homeland should restore Jewish agency wherever Jews live. Israel answered one historical question: whether Jews could once again become actors in our own history. American Jewish life now faces a smaller but related question: whether we are willing to act like it.

But agency without identity is hollow. We cannot teach Jews to stand confidently as Jews if we have failed to teach them what being Jewish means.

We have become very good at teaching Jews what has been done to us. We teach the Holocaust, pogroms, expulsions, antisemitism and now October 7. We must teach those things, but persecution is not Jewish culture and victimhood cannot sustain an identity. Our story did not begin in Poland, Russia or Germany. It did not begin on the Lower East Side or when our grandparents arrived in America. We inherited an ancient civilization rooted in the land of Israel that carried its culture, languages, law, literature, music, food, arguments, humor, rituals and collective memory across thousands of years and somehow brought all of it into the modern world alive.

If a young Jew knows every reason someone might hate him but very little about what he inherited, we should not be surprised when Jewish identity feels like a burden.

This is why public Jewish life matters to me. I want our neighbors to hear Jewish music and eat Jewish food. I want a sukkah somewhere people don’t expect one. I want Jewish families at a concert in a public park. I want our children to grow up seeing Jewish life as something that naturally exists in the places where they live, not something primarily practiced behind the walls of a synagogue, school or community center. Our neighbors should encounter us through our culture and our contributions to the places we share, not primarily through news reports about antisemitism or the latest political controversy involving Israel.

That is what moving from defense to offense means to me. We still defend ourselves when necessary, but defense exists to protect something. If all our energy is consumed by people who hate us, eventually they become the center of our Jewish experience. The objective of Jewish activism cannot simply be less antisemitism. It has to be more Jewish life.

And that brings the argument back to money, because donors have enormous power to determine what kind of Jewish community we build. Before automatically writing the same check to the same institution because that is where Jewish philanthropy has always gone, ask what you are actually trying to produce. Maybe the answer is your local Federation. Maybe it is the Chabad down the street, the day school teaching the next generation, a synagogue creating meaningful Jewish life or the local organization doing work nobody else is doing.

The point isn’t to replace one automatic destination for Jewish philanthropy with another. Follow the dollar to the outcome. Does it build Jewish knowledge? Does it create community? Does it make Jewish life more visible? Does it give ordinary Jews greater capacity to act? Does it develop people who will know what to do when the next crisis arrives?

If it does, fund it. If it doesn’t, we should stop assuming another check will eventually produce a different result.

Our institutions should make Jews stronger. Our philanthropy should resource the people building Jewish capacity. Our professionals should transfer knowledge and capability into the communities they serve. And our communal culture should be confident enough to support independent Jewish initiative without first needing to control it.

Most importantly, we have to know ourselves well enough to know what we are trying to preserve.

There may never be a world without antisemitism. We should stop making its disappearance a prerequisite for living confidently as Jews. We can fight it without allowing it to define us and remember everything that has been done to us without allowing those experiences to become the entirety of who we are.

Our predecessors built extraordinary institutions because they understood that institutions were necessary to sustain a people. We inherited those institutions.

The question now is whether we still understand the people well enough to know what they are for.

The institutions are infrastructure. They were built to serve the Jewish people. The Jewish people were never meant to serve the infrastructure.