Jewish Leadership Is Losing Both the Tech War and the Cognitive War in Fighting Antisemitism. Because while AI matters, without behavioral science to inform strategic thinking, little will change in meeting the latest devastating iteration of Jew-hate.

If there’s one thing that concerns me as an organizational psychologist it’s how Jewish institutions so often fail to use available knowledge in fighting antisemitism, even as our adversaries clearly draw on that information-base. Hence, we could apply cognitive science and AI to interfere with how Jew-hate spreads, its hardening beliefs against us, and reversing that behavior when it escalates at scale. Yet we don’t.

Even when recognizing Jew-hate as a problem, it doesn’t necessarily lead to an easy remedy. For years, the Jewish community’s efforts to combat antisemitism have produced diminishing returns. This is not for lack of funding. In fact, far more money is poured into the challenge than in times past. Yet as early as 2017, the Reut Institute and the ADL were asking what they called the “20X question”: why, despite massively increased investment, was antisemitism growing rather than shrinking? That question has only become more urgent since October 7 2023.

The uncomfortable answer is that it’s not primarily about money, it’s also about strategy – or rather, the lack of one grounded in how humans actually think and behave. Jewish organizations have focused obsessively on monitoring and describing antisemitism, and countering lies. But these feed short-term tactical wins, if that, when the real battle is against the transmission of Jew-hatred. Indeed, to fight antisemitism, you have to fight the spread of Jew-hate rather than countering just the lie. You can debunk endlessly and still lose, because hatred propagates socially and emotionally, not rationally.

This lack of behavioral insight is illustrated in the recent controversy surrounding Robert Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance, where air time was bought during the Super Bowl for a commercial highlighting the issue of Jew-hate. And it’s been criticized from all sides: from the left for perceived tokenism, from the right for portraying Jews as passive victims, and from the center, for its reported $15 million price tag and unclear impact. I’d go further and suggest that for that sum social media would have been far more impactful (that money buys an awful lot of TikTok and Instagram vids) if the conveyed narrative is fashioned right for deep societal penetration. Unfortunately, there is to date little evidence Jewish communities, let alone philanthropists like Kraft, have achieved that goal.

Yet Kraft himself clearly understands that antisemitism is an existential threat and that passivity is not an option. The failure lies not in intent, but in execution informed by insufficient science. A plain blue square, however well meant, as is his organization’s attempted meme, lacks what behavioral researchers call “stickiness.” It does not lodge in memory, especially amongst those who don’t already understand its meaning. Compare this plain blue square meme to the omnipresent Palestinian flags or endlessly repeated slogans that require no background knowledge to absorb and interpret.

This points to a deeper structural problem. Jewish organizations operate in silos, rarely going beyond their circle for expertise. Worryingly, they underutilize skilled grassroots professionals – access, unless you have an “in,” almost impossible. But more troublingly, they largely ignore the vast body of research in behavioral and cognitive science that explains persuasion, belief formation, and normalization. And when they talk about technology, they often confuse cyber warfare with cognitive warfare – two very different domains. Our adversaries are not just hacking systems; in the tradition of Russian psyops they are hacking minds.

Case in point: there has been remarkably little research into how mass groupings have been mobilized to march repeatedly, or how campus protests metastasize into chaos, all directed against Israel and Jews more broadly. The latest pro-Palestinian movement did not become effective overnight. Over roughly two decades, following what was learned at the 2001 Durban l forum, its leaders borrowed the moral language of South African civil rights – apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing – and embedded it through constant repetition. The result – which intersected with progressivism and further escalated – we now see in our newsfeeds and on our streets and which is not merely anti-Israel sentiment but open Jew-hate. On the one hand, it manifests as erasing Jews altogether: the BBC, for example, on Holocaust Memorial Day, January 2026, referring to the murder of “Six million people.” On the other hand, Jewish restaurants or businesses are targeted simply for being Jewish.

Most Jewish organizations however still remain reactive. They monitor antisemitism (including AI-based antisemitism), document it, and publish glossy reports. What they rarely do is become proactive, attacking the problem at source. The usual excuses are familiar: the need to preserve alliances, particularly nowadays with executives at social media companies, or the claim that Jewish communities lack the resources of hostile states. But these arguments no longer hold. The technological landscape has changed completely.

AI now offers something Jews never had in their millennia-long history of persecution: the ability to operate at scale. Used properly, AI can amplify voices, generate tailored responses, and flood platforms with counter-narratives, and at relatively low cost. But AI is a limited cure by itself in combatting antisemitism without a behavioral strategy – including with the cognitive tools available. The Palestinian leadership understood this when they borrowed the civil rights narrative, and started promoting it ceaselessly against Israel. Indeed, AI is a carrier for behavioral strategies (including PR strategies) and content that can meet the challenge antisemitism presents

Antisemitism is driven by emotion, not evidence. It must therefore be countered with emotionally-intelligent content. At CAAI, we’ve seen how AI-generated responses that challenge emotion rather than provide reasoned argument or recite statistics can disrupt hateful narratives. Confrontation, irony, humour, and social challenge, frequently work much better than facts.

AI alone is effective, albeit limited, for combatting Jew-hate. But AI combined with behavioral science is an extremely powerful weapon – one our enemies already understand and deploy against us. If Jewish leadership does not grasp this soon, it will continue to fight yesterday’s battles while losing tomorrow’s war.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)