Will Anyone Listen This Time?

Will Anyone Listen This Time?

I copied a Substack article written by Melissa Brodsky, with her approval, as I believe it should be published in Israel.

Someone with money and a platform stands up and says what the rest of us have been saying from our kitchen tables and our laptops at midnight. The room applauds. The press covers it for a day. Jewish social platforms amplify it. And then the news cycle moves, the ballroom empties, and nothing gets done.

Ronald Lauder did it Sunday. Frank Luntz did it in 2003. Gary Wexler did it in the 1990s, except he wasn’t giving a speech — he was sitting across from the man who was building the machine and watching him describe, in detail, exactly what he was going to do to us.

Nobody built anything then either.

This Has Happened Before

Lauder stood at the Jerusalem Post Conference in New York and said what needed to be said. Since Oct. 7, Jewish organizations in the United States have spent more than $600 million fighting antisemitism through advertising, media campaigns, and public messaging. “Has it helped?” he asked. “Has all that money stopped, or even slowed down, the hatred against us? The answer is no.”

He called for a $1 billion global communications network. He said diaspora Jews need to be partners in the fight. He said Israel is winning on the battlefield and losing the information war.

He’s right. He’s also the latest in a line of people who have been right about this, out loud, in public, for decades, and watched nothing get built in response.

In the mid-1990s, Gary Wexler, a marketing consultant working with major Jewish organizations, sat in a meeting in Israel and watched the blueprint for what became the global campus movement against Israel get laid out in front of him. He came back and tried to warn people. What matters for this conversation is what happened next.

Nothing.

In 2003, Frank Luntz was commissioned by prominent Jewish philanthropists to find out why American Jewish college students weren’t pushing back against campus criticism of Israel. His research found the community was speaking entirely to itself. He built a language guide. He explained that messaging had to reach people who didn’t already agree, that the persuadable middle was reachable but only if someone actually tried.

The organizations took the report and went back to their galas.

Now Lauder is standing in a conference room in 2026 saying the same thing with a larger price tag attached. The question that has never been answered is not whether the warnings were clear enough. They were. The question is why the people with the resources to build something have never built it, and who has been doing the work while they deliberated.

While the Institutions Deliberated, Someone Had to Show Up

I know, I know…I talk about this ad nauseam. After Oct. 7, something happened that didn’t make the news. Ordinary diaspora Jews, most of them unknown outside their own circles, decided they weren’t waiting anymore.

Writers. Researchers. Educators. People who had never thought of themselves as advocates found themselves becoming one because the gap was there and nobody was filling it. They learned the architecture of what was running against their communities. They tracked narratives as they shifted. They built audiences on platforms actively working against them and showed up in comment sections where coordinated disinformation went unanswered, because the alternative was leaving the field to people who had been working it for 30 years.

They have no organizational backing. No coordination. No budget. They work at midnight and on weekends. They take the threats, the mass-reporting campaigns, the suspended accounts, the death threats, lies, and the accusations that they’re getting $7,000 a post from the Israeli government — a smear designed to make audiences distrust the messenger before the message can land. It gets deployed because it works often enough to be worth deploying.

These people are exhausted. They are not stopping. And they are doing, without resources, what $600 million in institutional spending failed to do with them.

It’s an indictment of every institution that left them standing there alone.

Counting Hate Posts Doesn’t Weaken Them

Published the same day as Lauder’s speech, a piece in the Algemeiner by organizational psychologist Dr. Jonathan Myers names the structural failure directly. Jewish organizations have spent years monitoring antisemitism, documenting it, publishing analyses, and reporting it to platforms. Monitoring creates awareness, not influence. Counting hate posts does nothing to weaken their persuasive power.

The deeper problem is the assumption underneath all of it: that facts change minds. They don’t, not when views were formed through emotion and narrative. Antisemitism spreads through feeling. It gives simple answers to complex problems, which is why it resurfaces during moments of tension and travels faster than any correction. Trying to counter it with a fact sheet isn’t a strategy. It’s the same reflex that’s been failing since Wexler came back from that meeting in the 1990s and nobody moved.

The 2025 Nation Brands Index, surveying 40,000 people across 20 countries, ranked Israel last among 50 nations for the second consecutive year, the steepest single-year decline in the index’s nearly 20-year history, below Russia, below Kenya, below Namibia. Global sentiment has shifted from criticism of Israeli policy to hostility toward Israeli civilians as a category. That’s what three decades of coordinated disinformation looks like when the warnings were heard, documented, and filed away.

Build the Machine or Keep Writing the Eulogy

Lauder is calling for $1 billion and a PR operation run by someone who actually understands media. Myers is describing the behavioral science that should drive it. What they’re outlining together is what Wexler tried to explain in the 1990s and Luntz documented in 2003 and the independent writers of the post-Oct. 7 diaspora have been building from scratch ever since, because no one else was doing it.

Those people aren’t asking to be replaced. They’re asking not to be the last line of defense. They’re asking for coordination and resources that turn individual effort into something capable of reaching the scale of what’s been running against it for 30 years.

Last year, 21 Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks across the diaspora, the highest number in 30 years. In Toronto, Jews make up 3.6 percent of the population and were the target of 35 percent of the city’s hate crimes in 2025. Jewish students are hiding their identity on campuses in cities their families have called home for generations. The ideology driving those numbers was seeded deliberately, over decades, while the institutions that were supposed to respond held fundraising dinners.

Lauder said Sunday, “We have a voice. We have a voice, and that voice must be heard.”

There are people using it every day. Without backup. Without infrastructure. Without anyone in a position of power appearing to notice. They were using it before Sunday’s speech. They’ll be using it after, if the pattern holds.

The warning has been on the table since the 1990s. The research has been done more than once. The behavioral science is documented. The tools exist. The people doing the work have been doing it for years without being asked.

What’s been missing, for 30 years, is the decision to act on any of it.

The room applauded on Sunday. The news cycle will move on.

Will anything be different this time?