Shaping the Jewish Future

In a recent round of “war games” convened by Jewish philanthropists, nonprofit leaders and communal strategists, participants from across the ideological spectrum were asked to imagine what American Jewish life might look like in 25 years. The exercise explored both utopian and dystopian possibilities — revival and flourishing on one side, fracture and rising antisemitism on the other. Yet one of the bleakest of those scenarios, drafted only months ago, already feels disturbingly less hypothetical. America and American Jews seem to be accelerating toward it, raising the urgent questions of if and how we can still change course.

Participants in the exercise were given several fictional “GroundTruths” — snapshots of the future — and were asked to reverse-engineer how American Jews might have arrived at each one. Over and over, participants in the exercise approached us to say the same thing: GroundTruth C, the darkest scenario, felt not only plausible, but increasingly inevitable. They expressed a fear that Jewish life in America is heading directly toward it.

The scenario envisioned a country where AI tools, sock-puppet social media accounts and deepfakes routinely target Jews, making it nearly impossible to distinguish foreign agitators from domestic extremists. Terror attacks on Jewish institutions and individuals occur with alarming frequency. Civil unrest dominates major American cities where Jewish life once thrived, accelerating a migration to cities like Dallas, Miami, Charlotte, Atlanta and Las Vegas. Jews who do not or choose not to pass as non-Jews cluster within sprawling, gated “kibbutzim,” complete with their own schools, restaurants, synagogues, offices, commerce, greenspaces and even colleges. Online Jewish life, fenced off for safety and policed by “data-detox teams,” is derisively referred to as the “digital ghetto.”

When asked hypothetically to explain how we arrived at such a diminished and precarious state, participants pointed to the whiplash of rapid political cycling between far-right and far-left governments. Jews find themselves increasingly alienated from hostile forces in both political parties, with each side scapegoating Jews for different reasons. At a recent forum, a Jew from Brazil described strikingly similar dynamics in South America’s largest democracy: rapid political oscillation generates profound insecurity for Jews, who never know which ideology will target them next. That same instability, participants feared, is now taking shape in the United States — only sharper, faster and more ideologically charged.

And since the exercises in May 2025, this dark vision has come into even sharper relief in the Diaspora. During this past Hanukkah alone: a father and son carried out a deadly jihadist attack that killed and wounded Jews in Australia; Orthodox Jewish subway riders were brutally assaulted in New York; a peaceful Hanukkah celebration was violently disrupted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Amsterdam, forcing police to physically encircle Jewish families for protection; a Jewish family’s home in California was riddled with gunfire, with one of the attackers shouting “Free Palestine”; planned Islamist terrorist attacks were thwarted at Christmas markets in both Poland and Germany; and France ultimately canceled its New Year’s Eve celebrations altogether due to heightened terrorism concerns. In recent weeks, synagogues in Michigan, Toronto (two separate attacks), Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Liège in Belgium have all been targeted by terrorist attacks.

On the political left, the election of Zohran Mamdani — a democratic socialist who has characterized Zionism as “settler-colonialism” and mainstream Jewish institutions as reactionary — as mayor of New York City has sent tremors through Jewish communities nationwide. Combined with administrations now governing Chicago and Los Angeles, the three largest cities in America are run by leaders whose ideological frameworks often portray Jewish concerns as forms of privilege and Jewish communal security as politically inconvenient. The tolerance — and in some cases, legitimization — of extreme anti-Israel activism on campuses, in certain DEI programs and police protests has deepened fears that the activist left’s hostility toward Israel and Jewish particularism is becoming institutionalized. Entire departments of some universities have entirely anti-Zionist faculty.

On the political right, the assassination of Charlie Kirk created a vacuum, unleashing more radical voices seeking to take his place in defining the next chapter of populist conservatism. The recent Heritage Foundation controversy surrounding the comments of its CEO, Kevin Roberts, about “the globalist class” and “venomous coalitions” were widely interpreted as echoing antisemitic tropes, fueling additional alarm. Tucker Carlson has increasingly amplified antisemitic, far-right voices, pushing once-fringe rhetoric into the bloodstream of conservative discourse. Vice President Vance added to Jewish unease when, at a Turning Point USA rally at Ole Miss, he declined to condemn a questioner who claimed that Jewish elites were sabotaging America from within; his silence was celebrated across far-right online networks as tacit validation.

It is not difficult to see how these two accelerating currents – the far-left anti-Zionist project and the far-right conspiratorial nationalist movement – risk forming the long feared ideological horseshoe and, at times, even merging into one. Though seemingly diametrically opposed, both amplify narratives that cast Jewish identity as inherently political, Jewish institutions as dangerously influential, and the Jewish state as illegitimate or malign. In such an environment, Jews do not merely lose allies; they lose the political “center” that once offered stability, fairness and civic protection. The result is shrinking space where Jews can comfortably or safely participate in American civic and political life.

But dystopian scenarios are cautionary tales, not destiny. Jews have flourished in America not by accident but because American liberalism — constitutionalism, pluralism, individual rights — created an environment where minorities could thrive without surrendering their identities. If that tradition is to endure, the Jewish community will need to act with greater clarity and purpose. To avoid a GroundTruth C type future, Jewish communities and leaders must:

1. Reclaim the Best of American Civic Culture

• Reassert allegiance to core American principles: equal protection, free speech, civic nationalism.

• Refuse ideological capture by either the identitarian left or the nationalist right.

• Actively model a pluralistic vision of American citizenship rooted in shared civic values rather than ethnic blocs or ideological camps.

This is not nostalgia but strategy. The more America fragments into identity-based camps, the more Jews become politically vulnerable without a camp to land in. The more we return to civic normalcy, the more secure we are.

2. Strengthen Jewish peoplehood

American Jews must conduct long-term planning that emphasizes the common bonds of peoplehood:

• Invest in cross-ideological Jewish literacy and peoplehood, not just parochial causes.

• Build coalitions across Jewish denominations and political divides, strengthening internal social capital.

• Cultivate leaders fluent in both Jewish tradition and American civic life, able to articulate Jewish interests without ideological absolutism.

• Proudly celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.

This “broad Jewish middle” is the antidote to the horseshoe.

3. Focus on the future of American Jewish life

Instead of reacting defensively to each crisis, Jewish institutions should:

• Develop 25-year strategic plans for communal security, education and civic engagement.

• Scenario-plan regularly — not to catastrophize, but to prototype solutions.

• Create regional Jewish hubs not as gated enclaves but as engines of Jewish creativity, social entrepreneurship and civic engagement.

• Conduct new “war games” exercises and planning based on extreme scenarios, such as the need to quickly relocate large Jewish communities in this country or abroad.

The Jewish future must be proactively built, not anxiously awaited.

4. Forge New Alliances — Not Just the Old Ones

Many of the alliances of the 20th century — labor unions, civil-rights coalitions, mainline Protestant denominations — no longer reliably align with Jewish interests.

New alliances should include:

• Diaspora and Israeli intellectual partnerships,

• faith-based pro-pluralism networks,

• immigrant communities with parallel experiences,

• tech leaders concerned about AI-driven hate,

• and local civic organizations committed to free expression and the rule of law.

Jewish security in America will increasingly depend on creative coalition-building. We will need to catalyze new creative organizations, much as Jews did in the early stages of the civil rights era, rather than relying solely on longstanding institutions, some of which no longer are optimal for the new approach. Some of this coalition-building will also need to begin at the level of person-to-person relationships, rather than through the more familiar organization-to-organization partnerships.

5. Reclaim Jewish Agency

Perhaps the most important point: Jews must treat themselves as agents of their future, not as victims of political tides.

This means:

• building communal infrastructure with long term horizons,

• forming independent civic organizations,

• strengthening Jewish education and identity,

• teaching young people to lean into their courage, not their fears,

• and engaging American society with confidence, not fear.

A community that sees itself primarily as threatened will retreat. A community that sees itself as agentic will build and continue to thrive.

GroundTruth C may feel uncomfortably close, but it is still only a hypothetical endpoint. The future of American Jewish life remains unwritten. If Jews reclaim the best of American civic culture, reinvest in Jewish identity and cohesion, and build new alliances anchored in shared national values, the coming decades could look radically better from the dystopia we fear. We are still early enough in the story to change the ending.

David Bernstein is the Founder and CEO of the North American Values Institute (NAVI). Phil Siegel is a serial for-profit and nonprofit entrepreneur, private equity investor and philanthropist based in Austin, Texas.