The murder of a young Israeli couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, last month traumatized Jews nationwide — leaving many asking tough questions about the state of Jewish leadership in America. Their concern is understandable.
While the Hamas attack on Israel two Octobers ago thrust the Jewish nation into its longest war ever, it also ushered in unprecedented levels of antisemitism in the US. There were nearly 10,000 antisemitic incidents nationwide last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a 5% increase over the record-breaking numbers in 2023 sparked by the war in Gaza.
Those figures, while startling, fail to capture the endless examples of Jews being blacklisted, ostracized or targeted in sectors ranging from medicine to the arts. Indeed, according to the newly released 2025 blacklisted, ostracized or targeted in sectors ranging from medicine to the arts. Indeed, according to the newly released 2025 Jewish Landscape Report from the Israel-based Voice of the People Initiative, Jews worldwide now believe rising antisemitism is the most important challenge facing their communities.
Amid this surge of hate, American Jews have begun questioning whether major Jewish groups like the ADL are doing enough — and have done enough — to keep Jews safe. The answer for many — once unspoken and now increasingly reaching fever pitch — is a resounding no.
“I see the same problem that we had in the 1930s with the rise of Nazis,” said former Harvard University professor Alan Dershowitz. “Jewish leaders have been misallocating their resources, focusing on the wrong people, and are now a part of the problem.”
In the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks and subsequent antisemitism surge, American Jews were expecting accountability — and change. Instead, it’s been business as usual for major groups like the ADL, the Jewish Federations of North America and many Jewish Community Relations Council chapters: Glitzy galas, pricey celebrity appearances and slick conferences, according to critics. Meanwhile, within this void, grassroots organizations have been fighting the hate their far larger counterparts appear unable to counter.
Missteps by some of our oldest and best-funded organizations were years in the making. For at least three decades, the Jewish establishment underwent a mission drift, transforming from defenders of Jewish-first issues into foot soldiers for progressive politics and social justice causes. They refused to seriously address the toxic brew of leftist and Islamist ideologies seeping into universities. Stuck in their woke echo chambers, they sidelined voices who rejected progressive agendas, the two-state solution or insistence that antisemitism is never worse than when it’s on the right.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars went to the ADL and all these organizations to fight antisemitism, but antisemitism has only increased,” said Adam Bellos, founder of the Israel Innovation Fund. “What have they been doing for the last 20 years?”
Aligning Jewish groups with liberal causes came with a hefty price tag: The focus on antisemitism — particularly within social justice groups themselves. Take Black Lives Matter, an organization that literally enshrined anti-Zionism within its foundational mission statement. That, however, didn’t stop more than 600 Jewish organizations from signing a full-page New York Times ad in 2020 endorsing BLM’s efforts. Three years later, the movement’s Chicago chapter posted a paraglider with a Palestinian flag just days after paragliding Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel.
The ADL says it’s listening to community critique. In March, CEO Jonathan Greenblatt announced the implementation of “new strategies and new approaches to fight antisemitism.” The methods used to gauge hate in the ADL’s year-old Campus Antisemitism Report Cards, for instance, would extend to a new Ratings and Assessment Institute. The goal is “to apply this same model of rigorous, data-based evaluations to . . . state governments, public companies, and professional associations,” Greenblatt said. “We will hold them all accountable.”
Still, to many, the new ADL can look a lot like the old ADL. Those “report cards,” while perhaps helpful — Harvard received a “C”; Columbia a “D” — bafflingly assigned a “B” to CUNY Baruch College and an “A” to CUNY Brooklyn College, both sites of well documented (and often violent) Jew hatred.
Earlier this year, ADL’s New England chapter hosted a panel in Boston to discuss the rise of school-place antisemitism. But rather than drill down on antisemitism, the panel mostly focused on, what else, racism and white supremacy.
Missed opportunities like the Boston panel illustrate the ways in which Jewish groups have “disarmed their own community, blinding us to the most lethal threats” that Jews now face, said Charles Jacobs, editor of the book “Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership.”
The ADL did not provide response to repeated requests for direct comment about this story.
Not everyone has been silent, of course — but those who speak up risk swift denunciation. In 2020, president of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton Klein, was the target of a letter signed by 200 “student leaders” urging the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to censure him, citing “a pattern of racist and Islamophobic behavior.”
Klein’s crime was suggesting it was inappropriate that a historically Jewish-focused immigration society was almost entirely aiding Muslim immigrants. Two months later, Klein was nearly ousted from the JCRC of Greater Boston after tweeting that Black Lives Matter was “Jew hating” and “promoting of violence.”
Bias against conservative voices persists in mainstream Jewish organizations. “You’re never too left. You’re always too right,” said “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Siggy Flicker, recently appointed by President Trump to the board of the National Holocaust Museum. Jewish organizations “say they want unity,” Flicker adds. “What they really want is conformity.”
On college campuses, too, legacy organizations may be most remembered for their absence rather than action. As they face well-financed groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish students had been given little more than pamphlets to support their cause. Campus activist Shabbos Kestenbaum — who sued his alma mater Harvard last year for failing to protect Jewish students — said he regularly receives calls from Jewish student groups lacking funds for the speakers or table displays needed to counter anti-Zionist protestors.
“I think there needs to be an inquiry as to how these nonprofits raised so many millions annually,” Kestenbaum said to The Post. “When students needed them the most, so many were MIA.”
The Jewish establishment cannot claim campus ignorance. Producer Avi Goldwasser documented increasingly vicious campus antisemitism in “Columbia Unbecoming” in 2004, followed by “Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance” in 2016.
“This was a five-alarm fire [to Jewish leaders]: Do something!” Goldwasser told The Post.
“We’re in a fight for our lives,” adds California State Prosecutor Rick Moskowitz, who’s helping to combat antisemitism at his alma maters, the University of Pennsylvania and University of California, Los Angeles law school. “When are we going to get Jewish leadership that is prepared to act as though it’s not business as usual?”
That “when” is beginning to look like now as anger over institutional inaction shifts from merely polite to vocal and public. In April, the JCRC of Florida’s Gulf Coast sent an urgent email to William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, demanding action. “For the last 30 years, no serious counter-offensive to the anti-Israel politics and accompanying antisemitism in the US has been mounted,” the JCRC chapter wrote. It begged, “Please don’t leave us leaderless any longer.”
Daroff never responded to the JCRC — nor to The Post’s request for comment.
Within this void, scrappy grassroots organizations have begun to emerge. Unfettered by stale political loyalties or slavish devotion to identity politics, they are nimble are bold.
JewBelong began in 2017 by putting up billboards nudging disengaged Jews to rejoin with Jewish life. But in 2021, co-founder Archie Gottesman also began tackling antisemitism with zingers such as: “We’re just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out Jew hate isn’t an overreaction.”
To date, the group has mounted more than 1,000 billboards with an estimated 2.8 billion views — all on an annual operating budget of about $3 million. (The ADL, meanwhile, had nearly $60 million in expenses in 2023, according to its annual report.) Gottesman often hears, “I love your billboards — why isn’t the ADL doing this? Why isn’t [the American Jewish Committee]?” Her response: “I don’t know. But this needs to be done, so we’re doing it.”
Then there’s End Jew Hatred, launched in 2020 by the New York City-based Lawfare Project. End Jew Hatred’s community of WhatsApp groups now have 45,000 registered users, said director Michelle Adhoot. “We’ve built up the network of thousands of activists we can mobilize with one text,” she says.
If monoliths that shaped Jewish American life cannot reinvent themselves, they may end up running their course. But like the ADL, many organizations insist they’re evolving. The Jewish Federations of North America, for example, now partners with Be the Narrative, a national organization helping Jewish kids explain Judaism to peers in their classrooms.
The JCRC of Greater Miami is now training Jews to give free multimedia presentations on Israel in churches as a way to reach new allies. And in August, Tyler Gregory, CEO of the JCRC of the Bay Area, launched Bay Area Jewish Action, a political nonprofit to back pro-Israel candidates in local and state races.
It’s all part of a critical pivot — both post- Oct. 7 and following the DC murders — to develop solutions needed to reverse (or at least stem) America’s antisemitism crisis. Gregory views this as a process of “learning lessons and adapting accordingly; shame on us if we do not.”
Others, however, are demanding more radical action.
“Too many have thought the status quo is OK: Don’t rock the boat,” said Dershowitz. “But they don’t realize the boat is sinking.”
Kathryn Wolf was formerly director of community engagement at Tablet and a staff reporter at the Miami Herald.
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