In the fight against antisemitism, passion isn’t enough

By Andrés Spokoiny - September 26, 2025

In the last few years, American Jews have experienced “the return of history.” Antisemitism, pervasive over the course of millennia, was thought to have been relegated to the dark and hidden recesses of American public discourse. Over the last decade, however, history has been creeping back. And after Oct. 7, 2023, we realized that the beautiful image we had in our heads of a world without antisemitism was nothing more than a screen saver.

Our community reacted to this with heartbreak, but also with a renewed commitment to fight antisemitism. Thus, over the last few years, an entire ecosystem has been established comprising hundreds of organizations and hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses.

While this shows that our community took the issue seriously, can we also say that we approached it smartly? We are now in the 10 Days of Repentance, a time of introspection and self-criticism; a time to evaluate our actions without self-righteousness and without apology.

We have been observing and studying the evolving field of anti-antisemitism for quite some time. Recently, my organization, the Jewish Funders Network, commissioned a study led by Eitan Hersh of Tufts University to add more rigor to our observations. The research examined 160 organizations that claim to combat antisemitism and the top 25 funders in the field. The following reflects both what the survey found and my own personal observations.

JFN is not prescriptive: We don’t tell funders what to do, and we don’t presume to own the truth. However, given our position, we hold a mirror to the community, and in the spirit of honesty, I can say that the image we see is a messy one.

The first and most obvious realization is that the field is fragmented and disorganized. The sheer number of organizations (and the ongoing emergence of new ones) makes this evident; but more problematic than the number of initiatives is the lack of coordination and the amount of duplication among them. Bear in mind that the number of organizations in our study, 160, is only a portion of the field — a very representative portion, but a portion nonetheless. Many categories of organizations weren’t included, as the decision of “what counts” as “fighting antisemitism” is not a straightforward one.

The second realization is that over 50% of the organizations we looked at haven’t established clear, realistic parameters of success. Many organizations measure success in terms of “views on social media” or “engagement,” but few, if any, examine whether their work has resulted in an effective reduction of antisemitic incidents. In many cases, people haven’t even defined what their organizations actually do. Statements like “we fight antisemitism on campus” mean nothing on their own. In our report, we outline over 60 different lines of work on campus, from faculty to administration to student activism to viewpoint diversity. Every one of those foci requires specific competencies and strategies.

Third, it was also extremely hard, if not futile, to obtain a comprehensive financial picture of the field. A majority of organizations aren’t transparent or don’t have the capacity to produce accurate reports. In that sense, the lack of data is the data. At best, it shows that the field is populated with organizations that don’t have the managerial capacity to produce timely information.

One worrying, albeit anecdotal, finding is that many funders prefer affirmation to results. Meaning, confronted with a choice between a strategy that works and one that validates their ideology, they’ll choose the latter. It seems we prefer to see messages that make us feel good, even if research tells us that they don’t move the needle in any significant way. At least, there’s a confusion between messages designed to strengthen our own troops and those that seek to reach across the divide and persuade others.

As I see it, there is an overreliance on simplistic solutions. Many seem to think that if only we could find the right turn of phrase, the right message, the right tweet, we would win. Only a minority of organizations and funders recognize how complex and nonlinear antisemitism is, and the enormity of the forces (social, economic and hostile) arrayed against us. Humility is a rare commodity in this field, where many claim that “if only everybody followed – or funded – my idea, we’d solve this problem.”

The sense of urgency that we rightfully feel around this issue often pushes us to focus on the short-term and inflate expectations and results. As such, sometimes an unhealthy dynamic develops between funders and nonprofits in which the latter tell the former what they assume they want to hear. In a similar vein, perceiving funders’ interest in supporting the fight against antisemitism, scores of organizations repackage their programs or rebrand themselves to show that they take part in that fight, further muddying the field.

It seems to me that many cognitive biases seem to operate in this space, especially confirmation bias, the tendency to filter out information to confirm preexisting beliefs. This may explain why people perceive their project as succeeding, when the overall picture of antisemitism hasn’t changed or has gotten worse. We also observe an escalation of commitment bias — the tendency to double down on failed actions because of what we’ve already invested in them and that we don’t want to lose face in front of our peers — and groupthink — the urge to follow our tribe uncritically.

Groupthink may explain why many funders and activists seem to be “moving in packs.” This results in a field that is overcrowded in some subfields, such as social media, and underfunded in others, including security, legal defense, K-12 education, and nontraditional online platforms (like gaming, Reddit and Discord). Even within a crowded area, such as college campuses, there are often underserved pockets. For example, very few campus organizations address deep institutional problems and systemic issues in academia, such as the lack of viewpoint diversity or the existence of rogue departments. Paradoxically, these underfunded areas are more easily measured objectively for successful outcomes.

Many funders and activists claim to operate out of frustration with so-called “legacy” organizations — the traditional large entities that have been leading the fight against antisemitism for decades. To be sure, much of the criticism of entities is warranted, especially the failure to recognize the virulence of left-wing antisemitism. However, most new organizations that claim to adopt a new approach have not and perhaps cannot show better results. Our analysis shows that many of the new organizations aren’t truly innovative, but propose “more of the same” with only minor tweaks. In many cases, organizations aren’t even aware that what they propose is already being done by others. Publicly calling out antisemitism, for example, is both a necessity and a moral imperative, but it’s not a new or unique approach: over 20 organizations already do it.

These are all complex issues that deserve more analysis than a single op-ed. My goal here is not to exhaust all there is to say about these questions, but rather to encourage funders and practitioners to have deep and honest conversations about how we are fighting this scourge.

This is a season for radical honesty, but it’s also a time for new beginnings, for thinking anew and planning ahead.

I wish I had more answers to offer, but I can suggest a few leads that come out of the data we collected.

First: We need to approach this fight with humility. It’s too big a fight for a people that represents .01% of humanity. Antisemitism has been with us for 3,000 years, and we don’t fully understand what makes it emerge and how it subsides. It’s the mother of all wicked problems, in that it defies simplistic explanations. What we can do for sure is keep our community safe from physical threats through enhanced security, expose (but unfortunately not eliminate) all the manifestations of antisemitism, educate ourselves and others, and propose an alternative vision of society. Having realistic, humble goals that build up over time can be frustrating, but it may well be the only way to achieve our aims and protect our communities.

Second: While the number of organizations is not the only measure of the effectiveness of a field, there’s no way around it — the field needs reengineering. Here too, we need to be realistic. We often hear that the community needs to speak with a single voice and a unified message. That is unlikely ever to happen; ideological differences are too vast. And needless to say, Israeli officials seem incapable of maintaining message discipline.

A more realistic approach is to use shared infrastructures and common utilities that serve many smaller organizations. Currently, there’s a lot of back-office duplication. Many organizations conduct their own market research, while many others fly blind. Many lack access to state-of-the-art technology, such as AI tools. While a completely centralized approach may be unachievable, shared infrastructure is both feasible and necessary.

Funders must be fully aware of the areas in which there’s duplication and overcrowding and use their influence to at least ensure coordination. That is not impossible: precedents like Shine a Light saw funders get organizations to cooperate and work together.

Third: We may not have all the answers, but we know that certain things do work. Muscular donor activism in universities produced more changes than we considered possible. This may teach us that our cultural aversion to the use of power needs to lessen. We know that more investment in legal defense, for example, results in more cases pursued. We know that more money for security makes Jewish organizations safer. We know that public policy and legislation are effective tools that can achieve a lot with relatively low investment. A company engaged in BDS may not be receptive to a persuasion campaign, but it will certainly respond to a state attorney general. Democracy puts tools at our disposal; we don’t need to be shy about using them. There are, indeed, questions about the long-term impact of some of these tactics, but they deserve to be considered.

Fourth: We keep fighting the last battle, especially online. We don’t want to abandon the field with regards to TikTok, but we should get ahead of the game on emerging tech. As a community, we were largely surprised by the bias that developed on Wikipedia, a key source of information for many. We need to scan the horizon and be aware of what’s coming. In some cases, like gaming, the new platforms are already here, fully integrated into the lives of several generations; but when it comes to technologies like large language models (LLMs), their place in society is still developing and there is room for us to make an impact.

Fifth: The tendency of Jews to “just focus on ourselves” is understandable and, to an extent, necessary. But if we understand that antisemitism is a function of complex social maladies, we can’t fully disengage from the rest of society. From the weakening of democracy to the decay of public discourse to the reemergence of political violence, those are issues that demand a Jewish response.

The 10 Days of Repentance are, as I said, a time for introspection and planning, but also a time for compassion — towards oneself and others. Nothing here should be seen as a critique of people’s motivations and intentions. We are all equally perplexed, and this is an issue that touches each of us personally. Our field reacted with heart and passion to a painful and protracted challenge. That is an unqualified good.

Now, we need to add brain to the heart.

Andrés Spokoiny is the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network.

Published at ejewishphilanthropy