The Roadmap: Community Relations in a New American Era

The field of Jewish public policy and community relations is navigating simultaneous disruptions. Legitimacy fracture involves the questioning or marginalizing of Jews around Israel and Zionism. This is happening across political, generational, and interfaith lines and deals in part with competing narratives about Israel, antisemitism, and the minority status of Jews.

Rising antisemitism, emerging both from the far-right and the far-left, is leading to the reshaping of strategies and conversations around managing this fight. Declining institutional trust, a phenomenon that is happening both within Jewish communities and beyond, is contributing as well to this new assault on Jews, Judaism, and Israel.

The New Reality:

The impact of this new hate is contributing to a changing power equation for Jews. Where in the recent past the Jewish community held an access-based power position, today Jewish influence will be acquired through a relational framework, replacing traditional Jewish political power roles.

Jewish public affairs in this country historically operated through elite relationships, bipartisan access, and coalitional politics and was constructed around shared policy goals. In recent years the community has lost some of its political leverage and many of its allied connections.

In moving forward, the emerging political organizing principles will be aligned with “relational legitimacy” and “grassroots credibility” namely, what can Jewish leaders create on the ground through their personal and community-based connections? The emerging model will tend to be less focused on “who one knows” and more on “who one trusts” and how that trust can evolve.

What we have learned is that when trust is no longer present, “transactional coalitions” falter.  In their place, it is essential to construct long-term relationship infrastructures, built on promoting “thick relationships” that are bound together not by joint statements but rather by a deeper commitment to shared causes and issues embraced without preconditions. What will be required are durable alliances, built around shared risk and trust.

In this age, it will be incumbent to accept asymmetry, namely that not all communities or leaders will agree on Israel, prioritize antisemitism, or see Jews as vulnerable. Such disagreements ought not lead to disengagement but rather focus on shared concerns, where alignment is possible around hate crimes, support for pluralism and democracy. In this time frame, the Jewish community will no longer expect full concurrence or agreement on such issues. Instead, the instruments of community action will need to accept “conflict-capable relationships.” This will involve leaders learning to live with “structured disagreements” and operate in spaces for candid conversations around Israel or Zionism without the threat of a relationship disrupture.

In an earlier essay, co-written with Doug Kahn, we framed a “reasonable standards test” for communal partners.

—Unambiguous condemnation of major terror attacks directed against Israel.

—Reaching out to Jewish community allies with personal messages of concern and solidarity.

—A willingness to speak out swiftly and forcefully against overt acts of antisemitism.

—A commitment not to publicly endorse anti-Israel statements or take positions that oppose Israel’s right to defend itself.

—Demonstrating willingness to actively seek to forestall anti-Israel resolutions in their arenas of influence.

Such future partnerships will be issue-specific and reciprocal. Further, this implies the capacity for Jewish leaders to move from a practice of “defense” where uniformity of agreement is expected to a place of “differentiation” and analytical clarity.

Beyond the public square, there needs to be a serious investment in intra-Jewish pluralism. One can argue that if Jewish institutions cannot hold ideological diversity internally, they will struggle to represent the community externally. Jewish policy organizations must hold legitimate space for disagreement on Israel and avoid institutional litmus tests that only serve to shrink the tent. The new consensus must acknowledge the ideological, generational, and political diversity that now defines the big-tent Jewish space.

It will be essential, as well, to move away from the “old” language of “pro-Israel” and “anti-Israel” as such rhetoric is off putting in this new space. Nuanced narratives about peoplehood, safety, democracy, and self-determination will be required.

In reframing antisemitism, it must be noted that if the community is desirous of garnering broader support, this issue must not be seen as just “a Jewish problem” but as a threat to democratic pluralism.

Looking Elsewhere:

The unfolding of these new threats resemble patterns seen by other groups that experienced a shift from relative influence to a time frame of contested standing. In the post-Civil Rights era, the African American community faced fragmentation, backlash, and shifting alliances. Several takeaways from this experience might suggest that the Jewish community invest in grassroots leadership pipelines and build independent narrative power on social media as a way to garner cultural influence.

After 9/11 the American Muslim community experienced sudden stigmatization, security concerns, and loss of public trust. In responding to these challenges, Muslim Americans developed successful strategies including the development of a civil rights and advocacy infrastructure, strategic coalition-building with other minorities, and a conscious effort in promoting storytelling, seeking to humanize the Muslim story. In a post-crisis setting, the Jewish community can extract some helpful insights on how to manage its organizing resources.

The Jewish Marketplace:

A different organizing model will be required around shared strategic tables where core goals and outcomes along with institutional assignments are created. The establishment of a pool funding initiative built around cross-organizational programs represents another effective intervention. Finally, the creation of a “non-compete zones” agreement around key issues could fundamentally reshape this field. Funders can play a major role by requiring partnership proposals and by establishing incentive collaboration grants with measurable outcomes. None of this can or will happen unless there is a collective recognition of the structural and institutional barriers that today inhibit and paralyze the possibilities for innovation and collaboration.

Moving Forward:

In moving forward, there will need to be a multi-tiered response. In the immediate term, the creation of “rapid response teams” will be required.  Listening campaigns even with estranged allies across ideological divides ought to be seen as helpful in understanding how other organizations and leaders, both within and outside the Jewish community, perceive this moment and the state of intergroup relations.

From history we learn that moments like this, while destabilizing, can force greater clarity about values, more authentic partnerships, and less reliance on fragile, elite-driven systems. We can produce a more grounded and durable form of communal power as a result. The next phase of Jewish community relations will be directed toward protecting Jewish communities, physically and politically, building selective, value-aligned coalitions, representing internal diversity without fragmentation, and focusing on grassroots energy and policy expertise. Leadership development programs including Jews and non-Jews must be seen as essential, along with an investment in developing a narrative strategy in dealing with social media. Creating a broader, more resilient set of networks and relationships as a core organizing outcome.

The emphasis here will also be to ultimately develop a new Jewish public philosophy that addresses the issues of ethical leadership and minority/majority dynamics. In this new reality moment, American Jewry will need to rediscover their political power, leveraging communal influence while reframing their role within this nation.