Stop Funding What Isn’t Working

Across the Jewish world, a rare consensus is emerging. This is not a community known for agreement. After all, two Jews, three opinions, as the saying goes. But despite our differences, a painful recognition is surfacing with unusual clarity: what we are doing to fight antisemitism is not working.

The problem is both strategic and structural. Too much of the current approach is shaped by blind spots, inertia, ego, and bureaucracy. Decisions are often made by committee and reinforced within echo chambers, rather than driven by insights that can actually be applied at scale.

As antisemitism rises, the instinctive response is understandable. Do more. Spend more. Launch more campaigns. Strengthen the institutions that have historically carried this work. But the results are in. Despite unprecedented levels of effort, coordination, and funding, we are losing ground. Scaling the same approaches is not improving outcomes. In some cases, it is making them worse.

Any serious investor would recognize this pattern. Doubling down on a failing strategy does not create success. In fact, in the private sector, these sorts of failures would prompt an immediate reassessment. When a company continues to lose market share despite increased spending, investors do not reward it with more capital. They ask what is broken. They look for those who understand the new environment, who are testing better approaches, and who are showing real traction. Capital follows performance. 

That means supporting experimentation and entrepreneurial risk-taking where legacy strategies have stalled, while ensuring that larger institutions are ready to scale what proves effective. Startups drive innovation. They are nimble, close to the problem, and free from institutional inertia. They test, fail, and refine. Larger organizations provide scale and durability once a model works.

The fight against antisemitism should be funded with the same discipline as the private sector. That means reimagining the approach for the world as it is today, not relying on derivatives of models built for a different era.

I came to understand these strategic investment failures in the fight against antisemitism through an unusual path. My background is in intelligence and high-stakes diplomacy, including work around jihadist networks in Europe and facilitating backchannel negotiations between Israel and its neighbors. That work is fundamentally about emotional intelligence and resonance. It requires understanding how people form beliefs, who they trust, and the conditions that make new perspectives possible.

After October 7, I watched with growing bafflement as the Jewish community and Israeli government approached the narrative around Jews and Israel. What became impossible to ignore was not just a failure in messaging, but a deeper strategic gap. Strategy was not being driven by insight into how beliefs actually form and change. Most efforts were reactive. Research tracked opinion polls in broad categories. Communications focused on condemning and rebutting. Very little was grounded in the deeper drivers of perception, including social psychology, cultural infrastructure, trusted voices, and the environments that shape what feels believable. Very few resources were devoted to understanding what actually shifts antisemitic beliefs at scale. In investment terms, it was a portfolio built almost entirely on defense.

To better understand this gap, I conducted the first IRB-approved qualitative study examining what Americans actually know, think they know, and feel about Jews and Israel, titled American Perceptions of Jews and Israel: Narratives of Antisemitism, Insights and Strategies for Change. The findings clarified which levers are effective. They showed how people encounter Jews and Israel through daily life, including entertainment, news, universities, places of worship, social media, and communities. These are the environments where perceptions are formed and reinforced.

The findings align closely with established research in psychology and sociology on how beliefs change. At the same time, much of what emerged contradicts conventional wisdom in Jewish and Israel communications strategy. I wrote about this research in Sapir, Bret Stephens’ journal, where it became the publication’s most-read article of 2025. The response underscored how widely this gap is felt.

What followed was equally instructive and more sobering. As I began advising legacy organizations, donor groups, and government bodies, I saw how institutions that found the research compelling still struggled to integrate it into their strategy. This is a dynamic any venture investor would recognize. There is a difference between understanding a new insight and being able to reorganize around it.

Part of this is historical. Many legacy strategies were built to engage institutional leaders in government, business, and civil society. The goal was to prove a problem existed and advocate for a formal response. That is very different from shaping public perception in a fragmented cultural landscape. The strategy was built for a different environment, and the environment has changed. There are also structural constraints. When I attempted to bring this research into organizations for implementation, many were simply not designed to absorb or apply it in a meaningful way.

That constraint points to a broader need. If established institutions are not built to operationalize new insights across different domains, then new models are required to identify what works, support it early, and help it scale.

These gaps in integrating strategy and domain expertise are not limited to narrative. They extend across the full range of domains that make up a comprehensive response to antisemitism, from education, policy and government affairs, and litigation to campus organizing, cultural production and media, institutional and corporate advocacy, philanthropy, digital platforms and technology, research and data, security, and public communications. Each of these domains addresses a real part of the problem. But across them, efforts are too often fragmented and reactive, without a clear theory of how change actually happens. There is too little coordination, too little clarity about the mechanisms that drive impact, and too little discipline in evaluating what truly works.

The work I do advising the Shofar Fund reflects one example of how that expertise and specialization model can be applied. It focuses specifically on narrative and perception, an area that has been underdeveloped relative to its importance, particularly among younger generations forming their views in a radically different cultural and informational environment. But this is only one piece of the puzzle. The same strategic discipline is needed across every domain involved in this fight.

Within the domain of narrative, the misalignment is especially visible. Much of the current communications response, while well intentioned, does not reflect how people actually form perceptions. We prove. We rebut. We demand. These responses feel morally necessary and are internally validating, but they are driven more by what we feel compelled to say than by what is most likely to move the audience we are trying to reach.

Just as important, most efforts operate downstream. They respond to narratives after they have already taken shape. The real leverage is upstream, in the environments where those narratives are formed. By the time........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)