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........

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