From Fighting Antisemitism to Rebuilding Jewish Strength

At a recent “State of the Jewish Community” event at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Bret Stephens offered a bracing assessment: the fight against antisemitism, he argued, has largely failed. Despite enormous investments of money and attention, particularly in the years since October 7, antisemitism has surged.

I agree with much of what Stephens said that evening but I part company with Bret on one key point: I do not believe the fight against antisemitism has been futile. It has, in fact, brought huge dividends to the Jewish community and can in the future as well, if we fight the right fight.

It is certainly true that, in recent years, antisemitism has increased despite the millions of dollars poured into combating it. Jewish organizations have launched educational initiatives, hired advocates, built coalitions, filed lawsuits, and issued statement after statement condemning offensive rhetoric. And yet the problem has grown. Without question, these more recent efforts have not stemmed the rise in antisemitism.

But step back and consider the broader arc of American Jewish life.

In the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, two models of combating antisemitism helped secure the place of Jews within American civic and political life: The civil rights model and the Israel lobby model, neither of which were explicitly framed as battles against antisemitism.

In the civil rights era, Jews played a pivotal role in a movement that dramatically increased Jewish security and well-being. The dismantling of restrictive covenants, the expansion of anti-discrimination laws, and the broad cultural shift toward equal protection under the law did not just benefit Black Americans; they transformed Jewish life. Jews gained entry into professions and neighborhoods from which they had been excluded. The country’s civic ethos shifted in ways that strengthened liberal democracy and with it, Jewish security.

The rise years later of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the broader pro-Israel lobby further solidified Jewish standing and gave us the confidence to act on our own interests. This movement made Jews powerful actors in the American political arena. Jewish leaders had audiences with presidents, shaped foreign policy debates and even became effective players in international relations, leveraging both perceived and real influence in Washington to advance Israel’s ties around the world and protect Jewish communities abroad.

So what went wrong?

In many of the institutions that most shape culture–NGOs, universities, K–12 education systems, professional associations—radical activists, buttressed by foreign funding, gained the upper hand precisely where Jews were weaker and less organized. While the Jewish community remained strong in electoral politics and high-level policy advocacy, it ceded ground in the education institutions that form moral narratives and train future elites.

We assumed that our good standing in politics, civil rights circles and law would hold the line. We relied on a model built for an earlier era, one in which combating antisemitism was primarily a matter of keeping the neo-Nazi variety of Jew hatred on the margins and keeping Israel-haters out of Congress. We relied on the civil rights model for allies, many of whom stopped believing in the core liberal values on which America was built and became increasingly hostile to Jewish concerns, and we relied on the AIPAC model at the federal level to protect our position while radical actors seized control in local politics upstream of congress.

That’s not to say that some of these efforts did not work. Some lawsuits have been highly effective. Some educational initiatives have been valuable. Some of the old alliances remain worthwhile. Advocating in the halls of Congress still bears fruit.

But these strategies have fallen flat where we have lost institutional power to ideologues who reject the premises of liberal pluralism altogether.

We need to reframe the fight as a battle to regain Jewish strength in institutions where we allowed it to erode to the point that we became disenfranchised and our kids faced hostility. I propose we stop talking about the fight against antisemitism and start talking about the struggle to rebuild Jewish strength.

That means doing, at an earlier stage of the political process, what AIPAC has done nationally: building disciplined, strategic power. It means investing in school board races, district attorney contests, university governance battles, and NGO leadership pipelines. It means exposing bad actors and raising money for moderate candidates who believe in pluralism and liberal values. It means building alliances, not necessarily with the same partners of the 1960s, but with those who share a commitment to a pluralistic America grounded in individual rights and open inquiry.

In other words, we must move from a defensive posture to a power-building one.

History proves that organized Jewish action can reshape institutions and strengthen security. The question is whether we are willing to place our efforts in the right fight.

David Bernstein is the Founder and CEO of the North American Values Institute (NAVI).