More organizations are fighting surging antisemitism. But how many do we need?
In a once-niche field of Jewish advocacy, a complicated mix of interest groups is now battling hatred, often with overlapping missions and contradictory messages
(The Times of Israel) Yaron Lischinsky, a research assistant in the Israel embassy’s political section, and partner Sarah Lynn Milgrim, a member of the embassy’s administrative staff, were shot and killed on May 21 as they left an annual event for young Jewish diplomats at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.
Elias Rodriguez, the man charged with the double homicide, approached police on the scene after the shooting the young couple and told them, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” according to a court document.
While Rodriguez has not yet been tried, for Attorney General Pamela Bondi the murders were clearly a hate crime fueled by antisemitism: “This brutal, antisemitic violence has no place in our country or anywhere in civilization,” Bondi said.
In the wake of the shooting, among the statements of mourning and outrage, Jewish People Policy Institute president Yedidia Stern issued a call for the state of Israel to establish an authority to combat antisemitism.
However, his call, like others following similarly horrific incidents of global antisemitic violence, ignores the fact that such Israeli government bodies already exist — alongside dozens more Jewish and governmental organizations earmarked for fighting antisemitism around the world.
Once a field of Jewish advocacy work dominated by a small number of large organizations — most notably the Anti-Defamation League — fighting antisemitism is now a complicated matrix of interest groups of different shapes and sizes, often with overlapping missions and contradictory messaging.
This week, the Israeli Foreign Ministry held an international conference on antisemitism alongside the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, with speakers and goals that at times seemed to be responding to — or competing with— the Diaspora Ministry’s controversial conference on antisemitism held two months earlier.
Recently, within the space of two weeks, hefty antisemitism reports were published by the ADL, Tel Aviv University, Israel’s Diaspora Ministry, StandWithUs and the Combat Antisemitism Movement, each with different data and sometimes contradictory conclusions. These come in addition to countless other reports documenting the parabolic growth of antisemitic incidents throughout the world over the past 19 months of war in Gaza.
Sources within the Jewish world are concerned that contradictory messages from either side of the political spectrum drown each other out, limiting their effectiveness. There is also a wariness that some organizations may be more concerned with appearing busy for their donors than actually making an impact.
Others wonder if such a glut of agenda-driven organizations is harmful for the Jewish cause.
“I am asked by many people, including some Jews, why we have so many different institutes and agencies to combat antisemitism,” said Alvin Rosenfeld, director of Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. “There’s a sense that many of their efforts lack strategic purpose. Meanwhile, despite their work, antisemitism continues to rise, without any sign of slowing down.”
Add to that another complicating factor: The nature of antisemitism around the world has changed since Oct. 7, 2023, said Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism. However, many of the organizations dedicated to fighting antisemitism haven’t evolved to reflect the new reality.
While security officials talk about Israel fighting a war on seven fronts (Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and the West Bank), “We need to recognize that antisemitism is the eighth front, and approach it strategically as any other front,” Cotler-Wunsh told the Times of Israel. “If someone is still defending Israel the same way they were before the atrocities of Oct. 7, they don’t understand the shift that has taken place.”
Cotler-Wunsh was appointed as Israel’s antisemitism envoy by the Foreign Ministry in September 2023, just three weeks before Hamas launched its ongoing war against Israel. Already at that point, she had the goal of formulating a comprehensive battle plan to fight antisemitism around the globe. That would include mapping out the existing organizations and their initiatives, and deploying them to maximize impact and minimize overlap.
That never happened, as the war threw everything into disarray, although Cotler-Wunsh continues to call for Jewish organizations to put together a unified front. Meanwhile, the number of entities around the world dedicated to fighting antisemitism has never been as large, or, some would say, as discombobulated.
A new type of fight
It’s not hard to understand why so many organizations fighting antisemitism have popped up in recent years, said Abe Foxman, former national director of the ADL.
Jews are seeking safety and security at a time when antisemitism, whether expressed as online harassment or as physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions, is skyrocketing worldwide. A record 9,354 antisemitic cases of harassment, vandalism and assault were recorded in the U.S. in 2024, translating to more than one every hour, the ADL recently reported. Jewish communities in France, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and other countries have reported similar rises.
“We live in a democracy, and no one can prevent anyone from starting an organization,” Foxman said. “There is more money available than ever, including mega-donors who, if they don’t like the way things are being done at an organization, they’ll set up their own.”
Having more organizations fighting anti-Jewish hatred allows for different approaches to the problem, focusing on education, legal advocacy, community building, allyship with other minorities and other aspects.
Rising hatred is driving a hunger for new approaches. Fifteen years ago, when Rosenfeld opened his institute for the study of antisemitism at Indiana University, there was only one other such program in the U.S., at Yale University, he said. “Since Oct. 7, there is a lot of ambitious fundraising for similar programs at other universities,” he noted.
Generally speaking, Foxman said, there are four main organizations leading the battle against antisemitism in the U.S. — the ADL, the AJC, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Federations of North America, in addition to many newer “single issue” organizations established in recent years as a response to rising antisemitism. In many other countries, there are organizations representing the local Jewish community’s needs.
Meanwhile, a plethora of smaller organizations have sprung up, not all with clear or achievable goals. Some operate primarily in the social media space, or target specific niches that they believe are underserved.
Rosenfeld mentioned a number of smaller organizations that he felt were doing particularly good work on U.S. college campuses, including the Amcha Initiative, the Brandeis Center and the Academic Engagement Network. He also noted the Combat Antisemitism Movement‘s worldwide efforts to tackle projects that other organizations aren’t, such as working with mayors of different cities to fight hatred in urban centers.
None of the sources The Times of Israel spoke with were willing to call out any individual organizations for being particularly ineffective. One thing they all agreed on, though, was that we don’t need more work gathering and describing the data.
“How many reports do we need to describe how bad things are getting?” Foxman shrugged.
Changing times
In addition to the trauma of exploding antisemitism, Foxman said, one reason many new organizations have sprung up is that since Oct. 7, many Jews have expressed dissatisfaction with the way that the established legacy Jewish organizations have handled the attack’s aftermath.
During the past 60 years, organizations like the ADL have primarily fought antisemitism using a strategy of containment, Foxman said. “There was an understanding that antisemitism cannot be eliminated, but we could take steps to contain it and make sure it didn’t have negative consequences.”
During the 1980s, when Foxman took the helm of the ADL, the landscape of Jewish organizations in the U.S. was much simpler, and American Jews enjoyed almost unprecedented acceptance in larger society, he said.
“In my early days, even if we didn’t like the other organizations, because we were fighting for the same dollars from donors, we would still work together,” Foxman said. “There were fewer than a dozen significant organizations, and we had a sort of unofficial separation of jobs. We all had our expertise, and we all worked together when an issue presented itself, like the plights of Soviet Jewry or Ethiopian Jewry.”
That model worked well at the time, Foxman said. “We did a pretty good job of breaking down barriers that Jews faced in many areas of life, from cultural acceptance to success in political, academic, and corporate life. The fact is that from the murder of Leo Frank in 1913 until the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, only three Jews were killed in the United States because they were Jews. [Several more have been killed since then.] But the younger generation doesn’t appreciate that history.”
After Oct. 7, however, things have changed, and people demand new approaches, Foxman conceded.
“We didn’t fail. The world changed,” Foxman said. “The containment strategy assumed that we could use truth and civility to fight the big lies that caused hate and antisemitism. Now, however, answering lies with truth doesn’t work anymore, because the lies are a tsunami spread everywhere over the internet. When the respect for truth is destroyed, education is no longer an effective tool to fight the lies.”
Increasing divisions along political lines make it more challenging than ever to educate against hatred and ignorance, Foxman said.
“There is no more bipartisanship,” said Foxman, who handed over the reins of the ADL to its current CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, in 2015. “There’s an ongoing war between Jews on the right, including those supporting [President Donald] Trump, and those on the progressive left, and they are very distant from each other on Jewish issues, speaking different languages. It’s tragic how large the differences have become, and that makes leadership that much more difficult. There’s an urgent need for the community to come together — first to provide immediate security and then to contain disinformation, conspiracy theories and lies on the internet.”
Foxman stressed the importance of defining goals in fighting antisemitism, and expressed discomfort with certain initiatives that, he said, could set back the acceptance of Jews into broader American society. He cited the ADL’s “report card” of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses as an example.
“We worked for 50 years to get Jewish kids into the Ivy Leagues because, like them or not, they open doors for greater success,” he said. “If you start giving Columbia University and Harvard Ds and Fs — do we want to give the message that Jews shouldn’t go there?”
Foxman added that a future-looking strategy should include more focus on outreach to U.S. Latino and Hispanic communities.
“A lot of our future success depends on building relationships with them,” he said. “We need a strategy for that.”
Cotler-Wunsh, like Foxman, believes it is key for organizations to cooperate on a comprehensive strategy that would define clear goals and streamline efforts.
“We need an international platform for a comprehensive strategy in addition to national strategies,” she said. “This isn’t something any single organization can tackle alone. The state of Israel is ready to take the lead in creating a plan. We just need to get everyone on board.” PJC
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