An Open Letter to Jewish Organizations and Leaders
After every attack you find the words. After every funeral you find the words. After every vigil…you find the words. Words aren’t the problem. You are. And you’ve had years of practice writing the perfect statement after Jews get hurt because you’ve never bothered to build a reason not to write one.
Jews are being hunted in Canada, the UK, Belgium, Australia, France, Spain, across Europe, and right here in the United States. Synagogues. Community centers. Malls. Restaurants. Early childhood classrooms. The street. The targets aren’t random and the pattern isn’t subtle. This is a coordinated, escalating, global campaign against Jewish people. And it’s working, in part, because the people and institutions that exist to stop it are too busy carefully crafting politically correct statements to actually fight back.
So this letter isn’t for the people setting us on fire. It’s for you, the ones who should’ve been standing there with the extinguisher ready.
Where are you?
Not your communications team or your social media manager. Not the black-and-white photo of your executive director with a strongly worded quote in bold text that gets shared among people who already agree with us and frightens absolutely no one who doesn’t. You. The organizations with the donor infrastructure, the government access, the institutional relationships, the name recognition that smaller organizations would do anything to have. The organizations that were built, funded, and trusted specifically to protect Jewish life.
Where’s your emergency plan?
The ADL receives over $100 million a year from donors who trust them with the single most important job in our community. They’ve got hundreds of staff, decades of brand recognition, and a database of extremist activity that law enforcement actually uses. If any organization on earth should’ve seen this coming and been ready for it, it’s them. And here’s the thing: they should’ve. Because this didn’t appear out of nowhere. The tide started turning over a decade ago. The campus radicalization, the mainstreaming of Antizionist rhetoric, the online pipelines feeding hate into the streets, this has been building since at least 2012. And it’s been visible to anyone paying attention. The ADL was paying attention. They’ve got entire departments dedicated to tracking exactly this. So where’s the emergency infrastructure? Where’s the coordinated response strategy that should’ve been built and ready to go years ago? What’s happened instead is that an organization with all the resources in the world to fight has spent significant energy managing its own political positioning, policing which Jews are permitted to feel threatened, and maintaining access to rooms where they can be seen expressing concern. That’s not protection. That’s branding. That’s posturing. That’s feeling comfortable in the lack of response response.
The ADL isn’t alone. The AJC has diplomatic reach that most governments would envy. The Jewish Federations have infrastructure across hundreds of communities. Hillel has a presence on every major campus where the next generation of antisemites is currently being recruited and radicalized. The RAC has political relationships built over decades. Every single one of these organizations has more resources, more reach, and more access than the people doing the actual fighting right now, and not one of them is operating with the urgency this moment demands.
I work in marketing. I know exactly what crisis infrastructure looks like. Every major brand has one. When something goes catastrophically wrong, there are protocols. There are people assigned to specific roles with decisions already made about when to escalate, who gets called, what actions are triggered automatically. All of these organizations exist for the single purpose of protecting Jewish communities. So where’s yours? Because what we’re watching is a PR playbook, not a protection strategy. Measured language. Diplomatic channels. Interfaith breakfasts. Speakers. Panel discussions at conferences that nobody who wants us dead will ever attend. Access politics. Donor dinners. The annual gala.
Our people aren’t waiting for the gala. They probably don’t care about galas even a little. They’re scared. They’re removing mezuzahs from their doorposts. They’re not wearing anything visibly Jewish in cities where they’ve lived their entire lives. They’re watching their kids come home from college radicalized against their own people and they don’t know what to do about it. They’re doing the math on what’s coming and the math isn’t good. And they’re looking to you, the organizations they’ve been funding and marching with and believing in, for something more than another condemnation. And it’s been overwhelmingly absent.
Condemnations don’t stop trucks. Speeches don’t protect children. A statement that’s been reviewed by three lawyers, red-lined and rewritten before it goes out isn’t protection, it’s liability management.
Stop leaving it to us.
We’re not equipped for this fight. The people on your donor lists, the ones writing you checks and showing up to your events and sharing your posts because they don’t know what else to do, they’re not intelligence analysts. They’re not lobbyists. They’re not tech strategists or coalition builders or crisis communications professionals. They’re not content creators trying every strategy to reach the unreachable, only to be circulating in their close knit echo chamber. They’re regular people who are frightened and angry and doing the best they can with no infrastructure behind them and no coordinated support in front of them. They’re not your backup plan. They’re who you exist to protect.
While our communities are fighting this with bare hands, our enemies aren’t. They’ve got bots. They’ve got coordinated networks flooding social media with disinformation faster than any individual can counter it. They’ve got sophisticated online infrastructure designed to radicalize, recruit, and mobilize at scale. They’ve got money, organization, and strategy. And we’ve got what, exactly? A strongly worded tweet that gets cross posted across all the organizations social platforms?
You’ve got the funding. You’ve got the technical talent in your networks. You’ve got the capacity to build counter-infrastructure that actually matches the threat. Counter-narrative bots. Rapid response networks. Digital coalitions that can flood the zone the same way our enemies do. Tools that exist and work and are being used against us every single day. Where are ours? Why, in 2026, with everything we know about how this fight is actually being waged, aren’t we offsetting them? Why aren’t we meeting organized hate with organized resistance at every level, online and off?
Build it. Fund it. Deploy it. That’s what the money’s for.
The Combat Antisemitism Movement is building cross-ideological and interfaith coalitions because they understand the only way to fight something this size is to make the tent bigger. Maccabee Task Force is funding counter-programming because they understand you’ve got to play offense, not just defense. StandWithUs puts actual people in actual rooms having actual confrontations because they understand that presence matters and silence costs us. These organizations aren’t waiting for permission. They’re not managing access. They’re not worried about how their response lands with people who were never going to be on our side anyway.
What’s your excuse?
A quote graphic isn’t a strategy. A press release isn’t a response. Saying “we stand firmly against hate” after Jews are set on fire, after synagogues are targeted by terrorists, after our communities across four continents are living in fear, isn’t leadership. It’s platitudes. It’s the equivalent of thoughts and prayers, and we’ve had enough of both.
This moment doesn’t need more dialogue. It needs strategy. Coalition. Counter-pressure. Coordination with law enforcement, with legislators, with community and faith leaders who’ve got platforms and influence and who might actually show up if someone with your resources and relationships asked them to. It needs organizations willing to stop protecting their tone and start protecting their people.
This isn’t slowing down. The streets of London, Brussels, Sydney, Toronto, and a dozen American cities are telling us exactly where this is going if the people entrusted with our safety keep responding with carefully worded disappointment. The history we swore we’d never repeat isn’t arriving the way we imagined it would. It’s arriving incrementally, publicly, and with impunity, and every statement that goes unanswered by action teaches the people doing this that there aren’t any consequences.
You were built to be the consequence.
Coordinate with each other. Get uncomfortable. Make the calls. Build the coalitions. Show up in rooms where you’re not welcome. Use every relationship, every platform, every dollar you’ve been entrusted with as if Jewish lives depend on it. Because, guess what? They do.
Our communities have funded you. We’ve marched with you. We’ve believed in you. We’re not asking for perfection. We’re asking you to rise up and match the urgency of this moment because this moment is no longer waiting for you to find the right words.
Fight back. Or use the funds that your donors have so generously given you to fund the organizations that will.
