The ADL should be “dismantled.” Fighting antisemitism has been largely a waste of time and money. And too many young Jews are building their Jewish identity around notions of victimization rather than knowledge and pride. So said Bret Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist and pro-Israel stalwart, during and after his State of World Jewry address last month. As a social scientist who has spent many years conducting research in the Jewish community, I find Stephen’s approach disconcerting on several levels. 

To be sure, there was much to admire in Stephens’ address, in particular his call for the Jewish community to strengthen itself internally by devoting more resources to Jewish day schools and cultural institutions.

But there was also much to be skeptical of, beginning with Stephen’s suggestion in a post-address interview with Rabbi David Ingber that if it were up to him, he would “dismantle” the ADL, the Jewish organization that has been fighting antisemitism for more than a century. It was a strange and disturbing choice of words for a self-described political conservative like Stephens. 

Conservatives, after all, do not dismantle organizations and institutions. They seek incremental change, conserving what they see as valuable from the past and slowly reforming what they believe is not. For what it’s worth, liberals don’t seek to dismantle organizations either, though they emphasize more change with the past than conservatives do. Talk of dismantling organizations and institutions comes from people on the far left and far right who call for defunding, hollowing out, and shuttering existing institutions, typically without a plan for what might follow. Dismantling organizations is a recipe for unpredictability at best, chaos at worst. It is not a serious strategy for addressing the challenges facing the Jewish community.

Calling out the ADL in particular followed Stephen’s more general argument that fighting antisemitism has yielded no positive outcomes. “What we call the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning, but mostly wasted effort,” Stephens said during his address. “Does anyone think the fight against antisemitism is working?”

Well, we don’t really know. Stephen’s theory of the case is that because antisemitism has not been tamed, we should conclude that all organizational efforts to combat it have been ineffective. But there is an alternative theory of the case. Antisemitism could, on the whole, be even worse, more virulent and more widespread, without the investments made to fight it. If that were true, the policy implication would be to devote more resources to the fight, not to shut it down. Testing these two theories against each other is probably unfeasible, ethically and practically. But we can realistically pursue a third theory of the case: some efforts against antisemitism are likely effective, others less so or not at all, and carefully designed studies can help us discern which are which. 

We can also test Stephens’ related concern that young Jews have increasingly built their Jewish identity around feelings of victimization. Spending resources on fighting antisemitism, Stephens told Ingber, does not help “raise a generation of young Jews who are conscious of their Jewishness as something other than the fact that they saw ‘Schindler’s List’ and they visited the Holocaust Museum. That cannot be the locus of Jewish identity. If we’re going to survive, victimization cannot be at the heart of our identity.”

It turns out Stephen’s concerns are likely unwarranted. In the Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey of US Jews, respondents were given a list of ten items and asked whether each is essential, important but not essential, or not important to what being Jewish means to them. One of those items was “remembering the Holocaust.”  Analyzing the survey data, I counted up the total number of items respondents identified as essential and then calculated what proportion “remembering the Holocaust” comprised of that total. Across four age groups–18-29, 30-49, 50-64, and 65 and older–there is no difference in the proportion. Young Jewish adults are no more or less likely to emphasize remembering the Holocaust as part of what being Jewish means to them than older adults are. Notions of what Stephens calls “victimization” appear no more central to the Jewish identity of young Jews than they do to older Jews. 

There are other reasons to question Stephen’s thinking on this issue. As the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt noted in responding to Stephen’s remarks, feeling safe and secure is a prerequisite for people to engage in Jewish life and culture. “I profoundly agree that the best defense against antisemitism is a good offense,” Greenblatt told JTA. Yet “you will not have a strong Jewish community if you don’t have a safe Jewish community. You cannot have what Bret called a thriving Jewish people if they’re constantly under threat.” 

Greenblatt is right. Surveys commissioned by the American Jewish Committee in 2024 and 2025 show most US Jews feel threatened by antisemitism and most have changed aspects of their behavior in response. In the past several years, I led Jewish community studies in Boston, Silicon Valley, Northern New Jersey, and Tulsa, and in all of them respondents prioritized spending communal resources on ensuring their community’s safety and security. It is difficult to see how dismantling the communal organizations tasked with monitoring external threats and building supportive alliances would help Jews feel safer in the places where they live, but easy to see how it would make them feel even more vulnerable.

And then there were Stephens’ follow-up comments on the podcast Call Me Back. Building on his address a week before, he critiqued US Jews for spending too much time and too many resources reacting to what others think of them and called on them to invest instead in what makes the community internally strong. He compared this to Israel, arguing that none of the country’s nation-building success “has to do with how the world perceived the Jews or the Jewish state. It had everything to do with the kind of investments that Israelis were willing to make in themselves [and] their cultural confidence.”  

Stephens’ comparison misses an obvious and important parallel. Two major investments that Israelis have made in nation-building have been diplomacy and armed defense, investments undertaken precisely because of the way the world perceives them and how their adversaries have acted against them. In the diaspora, Jews don’t have governments and armed forces to protect them from external threats. They have communal organizations that develop and leverage influence in domestic political systems and establish social alliances with allies. Suggesting diaspora Jews dismantle these organizations and the work they do makes no more sense than suggesting Israelis dismantle the Foreign Ministry and disarm the IDF.

Jewish communal organizations will continue to do their work against antisemitism, no matter Stephens’ flawed prescriptions. We can, and should, have robust discussions about the strategies and tactics that Jewish organizations use to combat antisemitism–and we should evaluate measurable outcomes of specific efforts. But voluntarily giving up the fight against antisemitism in its entirety is not an option. 

Donniel Hartman, on his podcast For Heaven’s Sake, had a much more realistic and helpful perspective than Stephens. Arguing for many approaches to the challenge of antisemitism, Hartman said, “Thank God there are multiple Jewish institutions who are each one in their own way trying to combat [antisemitism with] new strategies, old strategies, and at the end there will be a tapestry of responses.” And then he added: “I am very happy that there are a plethora of attempts and institutions working on saying, ok, this challenge – what do we do?” 

Indeed, we should all be equally happy about that.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)