Only a couple of thousand people were in Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 10 for an event billed as “Stand Together: An Event of Unity, Strength and Resilience.” And maybe as many as half of that number were associated with the organizations sponsoring the gathering rather than rank-and-file members of the Jewish community who responded to the appeal. So, as photos of the much-ballyhooed rally illustrated, it might be said that most of those who attended it came disguised as empty seats.
The largely vacant stadium was more than a measure of the disappointing turnout for a pro-Israel gathering a year after some 290,000 people showed up for a previous unity rally held on the National Mall a year ago on Nov. 14, 2023. It was an apt metaphor for the equally disappointing response of both American Jewry and the leading organizations that purport to represent them during a genuine crisis.
Some hoped that the horrors of Oct. 7 might galvanize American Jewry in the way that both the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War did more than a half-century ago. The initial response to the massacre in southern Israel carried out by Hamas terrorists and other Palestinians was promising in terms of fundraising and public actions like the unity rally on the Mall. But what followed in the ensuing months—even as the surge of antisemitism in the United States steadily grew in the streets of major cities and on college campuses—demonstrated that the Jewish community was far too divided by politics to stand together against a deadly threat to not just Israel but to their own security and that of their children.
A year of crisis
The current war on Israel continues into its second year, with Hamas terrorists seeking to retake parts of the Gaza Strip in the south, coupled with the launching of rockets and missiles into the Jewish state from Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon to the north. Their paymasters in Iran also still present a deadly threat. But most American Jews spent this year far more focused on domestic partisan politics and debating whether Israel deserved their support than rallying to aid it.
Just as depressing has been the response of the Jewish world to a surge of antisemitism here in the United States. The takeover of numerous college campuses by pro-Hamas demonstrators advocating for Israel’s destruction has had a devastating impact on many Jewish students. But again, the reaction from the organized Jewish world has been largely low-key, and more importantly, mostly ineffective in demonstrating a willingness to fight back against open antisemitism or even to force change at institutions that were unable or unwilling to defend Jewish students.
It’s true that the organizers of the event at Nationals Park were not seeking to rival last year’s rally in terms of attendance. Instead, they apparently just wanted to have something that would serve as a pep rally for those who were attending the annual General Assembly of the JFNA. Yet by choosing a venue that can accommodate up to 41,000 people and deliberately hyping it as a major event, they set themselves up for both failure and ridicule at a moment in time when that is the last thing the pro-Israel community needed.
To be fair, anyone who thought American Jewry could duplicate or even come close to the responses to crises in 1967 and 1973 was dreaming.
Changes in the community since then made that impossible.
American Jews have changed
In the 1960s and 1970s, memories of the Holocaust were still fresh. Israel’s vulnerability and the possibility of its Arab foes making good on their pledges to create another Shoah by destroying the Jewish state was very much on the minds of American Jews, who didn’t just speak up with one voice in response to those wars but also raised astounding amounts of money to aid it.
But the American Jewish world of that era is gone.
Part of it is generational, as many of the Jews who came of age since then think of Israel as a regional superpower rather than an embattled and besieged nation. The most common expressions of Jewish identity in the first decades after World War II were about remembrance of the Holocaust and support for Israel. But that has been largely discarded. Jewish peoplehood can only be instilled in young people through education and a positive vision of Judaism. That doesn’t involve solely recalling a tragic past or living vicariously through the deeds of Israelis, who are built up as larger-than-life heroes, such as those in Leon Uris novels that were once influential in America but are now ignored.
More troubling is the fact that more Americans have been subjected to decades of media bias against Israel as well as the indoctrination in woke ideologies that falsely label it an “apartheid” or “white” oppressor state in educational settings.
Demography is the problem
Criticism of Israeli policies and settlements—and, of course, of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—has been blamed for a decline in interest and even support for the Jewish state among the majority of American Jews who are neither Orthodox nor politically conservative.
Yet the real problem is demographic, not political.
The American Jewish population has become increasingly assimilated. That’s due to reasons such as widespread intermarriage, and the fact that more and more Jews are unaffiliated with synagogues, organizations and causes. Many now define themselves as “just Jews,” or as the demographers put it, “Jews of no religion.” The ties of those who fit in this category to other Jews, let alone Israel, have been frayed to the point of disintegration. That is the price of liberty as Jews are free in contemporary America to leave the community and disappear into the rest of the population.
Yet despite that, the initial response to Oct. 7 was encouraging.
The success of last year’s rally was remarkable, even if the tone of the gathering was deliberately kept as politically neutral as possible to allow the participation of groups and religious denominations that have been critical of Israel.
The Jewish Federations of North America, which along with the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations were the principal co-sponsors of this year’s disastrous rally, must also get credit for stepping up and prioritizing Israel in their fundraising efforts. The $850 million raised for JFNA’s Israel Emergency Fund was impressive, given the general decline in giving to federations in recent years, indicating that their core donors were capable of understanding the threat to Jewish life and acting on it.
But whatever enthusiasm for Israel’s cause that existed a year ago has been diminished by the events of the last 12 months during which the Jewish state has been falsely accused of “genocide” of Palestinians during its counter-offensive against Hamas in Gaza. The on-and-off again support for Israel of the Biden administration, which at times was exemplary and at other times sought to derail efforts to defeat the terrorists, was a good indicator of how much leverage its intersectional left wing had over the Democratic Party and its presumably more centrist leadership.
Liberal Jews, who remain dedicated partisans, were caught in the same crossfire as they were often unwilling to express clear-throated support for Israel’s war while also being appalled by the thuggish antisemitism of those who voiced the “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” chants on college campuses and the streets of America’s cities.
Paralyzed by consensus
Rather than being able to mount a strong response to the takeover of so many college campuses by pro-Hamas mobs, the organized Jewish community found itself unable to speak with one voice on the issue. Just as Jewish students were sometimes told to “shelter in place” rather than vocally confront the Jew-haters, so were all too many in the Jewish establishment. Groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, which should have been at the ramparts challenging haters of Israel, were hampered by their past endorsement of the same toxic woke ideas that have been fueling the surge in Jew-hatred.
Perhaps the real problem for those seeking to mobilize American Jewry is that they remain hampered by an institutional need for consensus that allows those least interested in a robust expression of support for Israel’s war against Iranian-backed Islamist terrorists to have a veto over the message that is being sent to the administration and the world.
This is a terrible mistake—not just because it undermines Israel at a moment when it needs its foreign friends and the Jewish community to speak up against the smears and blood libels that the left is hurling at it. It’s wrong because it misunderstands the current dilemma facing American Jewry.
All too many leading Jewish groups are still stuck in the mindset of supporters of a Middle East peace process begun in Oslo in 1993 that was literally blown up by the Palestinian terrorism in the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, and whose death was further confirmed by what happened in Gaza after Israel withdrew every soldier, settler and settlement from it in the summer of 2005.
Obsolete debates
The atrocities of Oct. 7 were the final confirmation for anyone who is paying attention that the old arguments about settlements, borders and a two-state solution that divided Israelis and American Jews for decades are officially obsolete. The only argument about Israel that matters is the one about whether one Jewish state on the planet is one too many or if the plans of Israel’s foes for Jewish genocide (for which Oct. 7 was only the trailer) will be allowed to be fulfilled.
Yet instead of focusing on the debate over the legitimacy of Israel and its right of self-defense, the Jewish community seems more worried about being labeled as accomplices to Netanyahu and the lies about “genocide” in Gaza. Rather than taking a bold stand in favor of the justice of the Zionist cause, some are on the sidelines judging the Jewish state’s life-and-death battle against enemies that want to slaughter all Jews and defeat the West.
Just as bad is the fact that many in the community are more worried about virtue-signaling their opposition to the incoming second Trump administration. That’s a stand that is all the more mistaken given the clear pro-Israel tilt of all of Trump’s choices for his foreign-policy team.
A failure of leadership
The result of all these factors is an American Jewish community that has demonstrated an inability to stand up for itself against an unprecedented attack from antisemites and Israel-haters that threaten its own security more than that of Israel.
Institutions that fail to lead in a crisis have lost their credibility and reason to exist. If the organized Jewish world and its establishment can’t shed their consensus-ridden inability to act decisively in defense of both Israel and American Jewry, then they won’t have to wait for their critics to topple them. They will have destroyed themselves.
If an empty ballpark is an apt metaphor for the failure of American Jewry, then it is the fault of those who have been tasked with leading the community. That’s a tragedy since American Jews currently have neither the time nor the resources to build new institutions to represent them. In the coming year, it’s up to the Jewish establishment to prove that it is worth saving. We can only pray that they succeed; however, given the evidence of the last 12 months and so much else that has happened in recent years, it’s hard to be optimistic about their future.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
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