The field of Jewish public policy and community relations is navigating simultaneous disruptions. Legitimacy fracture involves the questioning or marginalizing of Jews around Israel and Zionism. This is happening across political, generational, and interfaith lines and deals in part with competing narratives about Israel, antisemitism, and the minority status of Jews.

Rising antisemitism, emerging both from the far-right and the far-left, is leading to the reshaping of strategies and conversations around managing this fight. Declining institutional trust, a phenomenon that is happening both within Jewish communities and beyond, is contributing as well to this new assault on Jews, Judaism, and Israel.

The impact of this new hate is contributing to a changing power equation for Jews. Where in the recent past the Jewish community held an access-based power position, today Jewish influence will be acquired through a relational framework, where moral power will replace traditional Jewish political power roles.

Jewish public affairs in this country historically operated through elite relationships, bipartisan access, and coalitional politics and was constructed around shared policy goals. In recent years the community has lost some of its political leverage and many of its allied connections.

In moving forward, the emerging political organizing principles will be aligned with “relational legitimacy” and “grassroots credibility” namely, what can Jewish leaders create on the ground through their personal and community-based connections? The emerging model will tend to be less focused on “who one knows” and more on “who one trusts” and how that trust can evolve.

What we have learned is that when trust is no longer present, “transactional coalitions” falter.  In their place, it is essential to construct long-term relationship infrastructures, built on promoting “thick relationships” that are bound together not by joint statements but rather by a deeper commitment to shared causes and issues........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)