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 people encounter explicit messaging, their orientation is often already set. When persuasion takes the form of proving and demanding, it can backfire. It can trigger defensiveness, harden identity, and reinforce the very perceptions it is trying to undo.

This is why the Shofar Fund prioritizes initiatives that operate upstream of explicit persuasion and work within the environments where beliefs are formed. It focuses on the social and cultural vectors through which beliefs are created and replicated at scale. The team reflects that same logic of specialization. It brings together expertise from brand strategy, legal analysis, and systems thinking, alongside my focus on emotional resonance and how beliefs shift over time.

But no single organization can address every dimension of antisemitism. It is produced and reinforced across many channels, including education, policy, litigation, campus organizing, cultural production, institutional advocacy, digital ecosystems, and public messaging. Effective strategy requires specialization. It requires an ecosystem in which different actors develop deep expertise in distinct layers of the problem, and where those efforts reinforce one another over time. The discipline lies not only in what an organization builds, but in what it chooses not to take on.

What is needed at the leadership level is humility to recognize what is and is not working, curiosity to adapt, and a commitment to impact over institutional inertia.

Addressing these strategic gaps also requires a different standard for philanthropy. It requires being both honest and demanding. It requires insisting on metrics grounded in what actually works, not what feels reactive or cathartic. It means asking harder questions. Does a given intervention meaningfully shift the landscape, or does it primarily signal moral clarity to ourselves? Could it create a broader inflection point, and at what cost? How might it shape perceptions of Jews, including the risk of reinforcing existing narratives?

It also requires a willingness to be wrong early and adjust quickly. In an environment where the right answers are still being discovered, rigidity is a liability. The ability to update based on evidence is a core strength.

This is the standard that should define philanthropic investment across all domains. It requires a clear theory of change, measurable indicators of traction, and a commitment to follow evidence over intuition. In practice, it means treating initiatives less like causes to support indefinitely and more like investments to be evaluated over time. Not every investment will succeed, but the discipline of identifying what works and scaling it is what ultimately drives impact.

This approach also shapes where capital should be deployed. Rather than concentrating resources in reactive efforts, it prioritizes interventions that engage the underlying systems through which antisemitism is produced and reinforced. In the case of the Shofar Fund, that means focusing on cultural and social environments where beliefs are formed. In other domains, it means applying the same logic to education systems, policy design, legal strategies, and technological platforms.

Established organizations are often constrained by culture, bureaucracy, donor networks, ego, and inertia. This is not a moral failing. It is an organizational reality. Large institutions rarely disrupt themselves. Meaningful innovation often comes from smaller, more agile actors that are not bound by legacy infrastructure or sunk-cost thinking. For that reason, the Shofar Fund does not build initiatives directly. It identifies operators already working in these environments, evaluates them rigorously, and backs those demonstrating early traction.

Finally, strategy must be evaluated holistically. It is not enough to measure direct outputs within a single domain. It is necessary to understand how those outputs interact across the broader system. What advances one objective in isolation may undermine another if the system is not considered as a whole. This level of discipline emerges only when specialized actors engage with one another in good faith and collaborate from a place of trust and shared purpose, rather than competing to dominate the field.

The Structural Problem

This need for expertise-driven strategy brings us to a central structural problem in the fight against antisemitism: fragmentation.

The ecosystem is vibrant and active, but disjointed. When confidence in an old model breaks before a new one has fully emerged, the marketplace of groups and initiatives becomes crowded and contested. That is where we are now.

The instinctive response to fragmentation is to impose order. It is a compelling impulse because it addresses the problem directly and creates the appearance of clarity and control. But in transitional periods like ours, what looks like progress at the structural level can come at the expense of the experimentation and discovery needed to actually improve outcomes.

In practice, many efforts to bring the ecosystem together create new problems. Coordination efforts often introduce a new form of competition. The groups positioning themselves as coordinators are not neutral actors. They are competing to be the center, seeking authority and control over the ecosystem itself, often fundraising around the promise of a singular vision or strategy. This dynamic turns coordination into a power struggle and deepens fragmentation rather than resolving it. That is why many well-intentioned coordination efforts stall or backfire.

Deploying capital toward these kinds of solutions can reinforce the very fragmentation they aim to solve. There is real wisdom in the instinct toward a big-picture coordinating vision that reduces competition and encourages collaboration under a unified umbrella. That may ultimately be the goal. But sequence matters. The challenge is how to build something effective, durable, and adaptive during this transitional period.

Transitional periods have their own logic. The current ecosystem is chaotic, but that chaos is also the mechanism through which discovery happens. It is where different approaches are tested across audiences, platforms, and cultural contexts, and where real-world feedback separates signal from noise. Strategies prove themselves, refine, or fail based on actual impact. This marketplace of initiatives is not just a byproduct of fragmentation. It is how the system learns what works. The role of investment in this phase is to engage with that process, not override it, by supporting multiple approaches within a clear thesis and allowing performance to determine what gains traction.

Every major industry disruption passes through this phase before new leaders emerge. If we rush to centralize before that process has played out, we force consolidation around unproven strategies.

The deeper danger is not only premature coordination, but premature convergence. Forcing alignment around strategies before the ecosystem has discovered what works is both a structural and an epistemic error. It locks unproven assumptions into institutions, and once embedded in funding structures, leadership frameworks, and incentives, those assumptions become far harder to unwind. Coordination is not alignment for its own sake. It is alignment around strategy, and that clarity only comes from discovery, not from theory or top-down vision. You cannot coherently align a system around models that have not been proven. If you try, alignment forms around institutional power rather than effectiveness.

Meaningful coherence will emerge from what demonstrates real traction, grounded in rigorous metrics and genuine expertise. Otherwise, echo chamber logic and untested theories become embedded in both strategy and infrastructure.

The fight against antisemitism is also not static. It evolves with culture, media, and politics, which means strategy must evolve with it. This requires a continuous pipeline of new ideas being tested, refined, and either scaled or discarded based on real-world results. Flexibility is not a luxury. It is a structural requirement. Any approach that locks in too early risks reinforcing outdated assumptions. The Shofar Fund’s portfolio model is designed to preserve this flexibility by backing multiple initiatives within a defined thesis, evaluating them through performance, and shifting capital as evidence evolves.

We see this dynamic in the private sector. Large organizations rarely generate their most important innovations internally. They work with smaller actors, invest in them, learn from them, and scale what has already been proven. Adaptive systems do not resolve uncertainty by centralizing early. They allow experimentation to unfold and then scale what proves effective.

Stewarding coordination in this context requires discipline, patience, and a clear understanding of sequence. Premature coordination does not just risk organizing around the wrong ideas. It suppresses the experimentation needed to find the right ones. It narrows the range of approaches being tested, reduces the system’s ability to generate new strategies, and creates path dependency around early assumptions. Over time, it shifts incentives away from truth-seeking and toward alignment and compliance.

For this reason, collaboration must precede coordination. Collaboration is where trust is built, where actors begin to reinforce one another’s work, and where early signals of alignment emerge organically. It is also where the ecosystem begins to distinguish between actors driven by impact and those driven by control or centrality.

The Shofar Fund works with initiatives led by people who are open to partnership, willing to share insight, and focused on impact rather than ownership. There is no room in this phase for efforts driven primarily by ego, territorialism, or the desire to dominate the field. The strength of an ecosystem at this stage comes not only from the quality of individual actors, but from the network effects created by their willingness to collaborate.

Trust and repeated collaboration are what ultimately allow groups to coalesce around what is consistently working. Over time, those relationships become the foundation for more formal coordination grounded in demonstrated effectiveness rather than imposed authority. Forcing consolidation before that process has played out does not create a stronger ecosystem. It creates a stagnant one at the moment the system most needs to remain adaptive.

Even as greater coordination eventually emerges, that feedback loop remains essential. Adaptive systems continue to evolve through experimentation, iteration, and decisions grounded in results, even as priorities shift over time.

Strategic Philanthropic Investment

Effective philanthropic investment in the fight against antisemitism is an artful balance: identifying and amplifying strategies that are actually working while cultivating the conditions under which meaningful coordination can emerge. It requires backing groups committed to expertise and impact rather than inertia. It also requires stewarding the system in a way that does not prematurely impose structure at the expense of discovery.

This requires treating capital not just as a means of support, but as a mechanism for learning: deploying it in a way that reveals what works, what does not, and where the system is beginning to generate real traction. It requires an investment model that can operate across both dimensions at once. It must both identify high-potential initiatives grounded in real-world traction, while also paying attention to how those initiatives interact, reinforce one another, and begin to form the early architecture of a more coherent ecosystem. This is the balance the Shofar Fund is designed to hold in practice.

Collaboration and coordination are not the same thing, and they operate on different timelines. Collaboration is early, flexible, and voluntary. Coordination is more structured, emerging at a later stage once there is enough clarity about what actually works to justify formal alignment. If we frontload structural consolidation, we lose strategic insight and suppress innovation. We must cultivate cohesion through the coalescing of collaboration, but we cannot mistake that process for coordination before its time.

In practice, this requires a different leadership profile. Transparency, intellectual honesty, and genuine willingness to partner are core operating requirements in an ecosystem that depends on shared learning. The Shofar Fund treat leadership traits as a filter, prioritizing operators who meet this standard, recognizing that collaboration cannot be layered onto the system later; it has to be built into the DNA of the actors shaping it.

The answer is not to choose between strategy and structure, but to build a feedback loop between them. High-impact strategies should be identified, funded, and amplified. As they demonstrate traction, collaboration naturally forms around them, and as those collaborations deepen and begin to generate real value, more structured coordination can emerge. This feedback loop runs in both directions: what is proving itself in the real world informs holistic strategy, and holistic strategy directs capital toward what is actually working.

The Shofar Fund operates this way as a portfolio. It identifies initiatives with clear theories of change and early signs of traction, invests in them, and pays close attention to where synergies emerge across those efforts. It is not only investing in individual initiatives, but in the relationships between them, where the ecosystem begins to cohere.

Groups will never rally around a centralizing force when they see a disconnect between top-down strategy and what is working on the ground, or when that centralizing force is competing against them. Coordination cannot be designed and then adopted. It has to be earned. Actors choose to align when they see clear evidence of effectiveness, when collaboration creates real value, and when trust is built through repeated results.

That has direct implications for donors. The most meaningful impact right now comes from backing initiatives that are already showing real results, and from paying attention to how those efforts begin to reinforce one another. Those points of overlap are where coordination starts to take shape, grounded in what is working rather than imposed in advance. This requires a shift in how funding decisions are made. Instead of prioritizing scale, familiarity, or institutional legacy, capital should be directed toward performance, adaptability, and strategic clarity. Initiatives should not be treated as permanent fixtures, but as evolving investments that are funded, evaluated, and either strengthened or stepped back from based on results.

The Shofar Fund applies this discipline explicitly. It conducts rigorous due diligence on leadership, theory of change, and early traction. It backs multiple approaches within a defined thesis, recognizing that not every investment will succeed, but that a portfolio approach allows the system to learn. It prioritizes operators capable of execution, open to iteration, and willing to engage in genuine collaboration. And it maintains the discipline to stop funding what does not work, however compelling it may sound in theory.

Think of it like designing a bridge before you have fully studied the terrain. If you do not know the distance it needs to span, the load it must carry, or what it is meant to connect, you may end up with something that looks good on paper but does not hold in reality. Premature coordination works the same way. It creates structure before the function is clear. And once that structure is in place, it becomes much harder to change, because the system builds its own incentives, dependencies, and echo chamber logic.

At the same time, waiting for perfect information is not an option. The terrain is not static, and neither is the problem. The task is to act under uncertainty while preserving the ability to learn and adapt. A portfolio approach makes that possible. By backing multiple initiatives, tracking what happens, and adjusting over time, it becomes possible to build insight while still moving the work forward.

The mistake is not acting too early. It is locking in too early.

When regulators, in the name of cohesion or discipline, anoint winners before the market has actually discovered what works, the result is stagnation. We risk doing the same thing here. The task for donors is not to rush toward the biggest structural solution in the room. It is to invest in strategy, expertise, experimentation, real-world traction, and the feedback loop that allows bottom-up results and top-down strategic refinement to inform one another.

If we do this well, the coordination that is actually needed will become increasingly obvious over time. It will emerge from trust, from repeated collaboration, and from demonstrated effectiveness. The ecosystem will not coalesce around what is most prestigious or best branded. It will coalesce around what works. The system cannot meaningfully consolidate without a parallel process of experimentation and validation that makes that consolidation worth doing. Otherwise, it risks entrenching ineffective strategies rather than reinforcing effective ones.

Building the New Ecosystem

We all want an immediate, singular solution. But that solution will not come quickly or cleanly. Because in a community as vibrant and fractious as the Jewish one, top-down reform is not how change actually happens.

Think of it like a market reaching maturity. In the early stages, things are chaotic and fragmented. Capital flows in many directions and most experiments fail. Over time, the approaches that produce real results begin to attract more capital, talent, and institutional support, and the ecosystem starts to organize around them on its own. That kind of consolidation holds because it is earned. When consolidation is imposed instead, it often falls apart once it is tested in the real world.

Building the new ecosystem will look more like a renaissance. It will be messy and emergent, with strategies and ideas tested in the real world. Real reform will come when major groups and donors rally behind what has demonstrably worked, not what sounds best in a conference room.

That kind of earned renaissance takes time. But it requires us to act now: immediately identifying and amplifying what works, not waiting for clarity to arrive on its own. Not the inertia of continuing what once worked, not incremental tweaks, but genuine openness to fundamentally different approaches when they prove more effective. The standard has to shift from “is this what we have always done?” to “is this generating real returns in the current environment?”

Narrative strategy is one part of the picture. Other domains such as policy, education, law, campus life, and digital spaces require their own capable and focused actors. The path forward is specialization, collaboration, and backing high-impact initiatives led by people with vision, integrity, and a real commitment to partnership. No single organization can be the answer to everything, and trying to be usually weakens the work rather than strengthens it.

If Jewish philanthropy is serious about building something new, it cannot be built by rewarding familiarity, scale for its own sake, or institutional self-preservation. It has to be built by identifying what works, backing it early, strengthening it intelligently, and allowing real-world impact to determine what grows.

This requires a shift in how capital is deployed. Funding decisions should not be driven primarily by reflex or legacy. They should be grounded in performance, adaptability, and strategic clarity. Initiatives should be treated less like permanent fixtures and more like evolving investments, supported, evaluated, and either scaled or discontinued based on results.

That does not mean legacy institutions are irrelevant. To the contrary, in every functioning ecosystem, large, established players play a critical role. They provide scale, infrastructure, and durability. They are how proven models reach broad audiences and sustain impact over time. Startups do not replace them. They expand what is possible for them to scale.

But the ecosystem is only healthy when when the roles are clear. Innovation rarely comes from incumbents. It emerges from smaller, more agile efforts that can test, refine, and prove new approaches in real-world conditions. Established institutions are most effective when they can recognize what works, partner with it, and scale it, not when they try to generate or control it from within.

The work now is to fund initiatives grounded in how people actually form beliefs, to invest in genuine specialization, and to support collaboration over competition. It means directing capital toward initiatives that demonstrate traction and larger organizations that are effectively scaling.

This also requires discipline. Not every initiative will succeed. But a healthy system is not defined by avoiding failure. It is defined by the ability to learn from it, to reallocate capital, and to double down on what proves effective.

In our corner of the fight against antisemitism, the Shofar Fund is holding itself accountable every day to put its money where its mouth is, with discipline around impact and a commitment to collaboration without control. We are not the initiatives, and we are not the ones who will scale. Our role is to find what is working within the domain we understand best, back it early, and help it grow alongside others doing the same in their own areas.

Because this fight is not one strategy. It is many. Education, policy, technology, culture, law, and more. Each operates differently. Each requires its own expertise. No single organization can do all of it well, and attempts to do so tend to weaken the system rather than strengthen it.

A system only begins to work when its roles are clear. Builders focus on creating high-impact initiatives. Investors back what proves effective. Institutions amplify and scale what has already been validated. None of these roles is interchangeable. None is sufficient on its own. 

That is how a fragmented ecosystem becomes a thriving and powerful one in the fight against antisemitism. Dynamic, innovative, and self-reflective, able to bring what works to scale, and not just respond to the problem, but outpace it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)