As the leader of JIMENA, an organization dedicated to educating and advocating on behalf of the one million Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa who fled antisemitic persecution in the twentieth century, my thinking about Jewish safety and security in America rests on a particular backdrop: the living memory of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews from Arab and Islamic lands whose communities and economies were destroyed in the 20th century. Much of my work is focused on historical recognition, but in recent years, a great deal of my attention has been consumed by responding to current realities, always filtered through the lens of that history. Too often, that urgency has come at the expense of imaginative, proactive and strategic long-term thinking.

And then last summer, I was given the opportunity to enter a structured space to imagine a long-term Jewish future built on our current reality.

Wikimedia Commons

Dona Gracia Nasi in a portrait painted by Agnolo Bronzino.

In 2025, I participated in Tzomet, a Jewish “war game” organized by entrepreneur and philanthropist Phil Siegel, for which Dara Horn wrote four possible scenarios of American Jewish life in 2050 — some hopeful, some harrowing. Our job was not to debate which future was most likely, but to work backward: How do we get there, and what choices do we make to shape which future we inhabit? I loved every part of it.

Tzomet is modeled after established disaster preparedness frameworks used by the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and militaries around the world. Siegel, who created Tzomet, is also a co-founder of the Center for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response Simulations, a nonprofit that designs serious games for societal threat preparedness. 

Across virtually every field that confronts uncertainty, responsible leadership does not wait until every variable is known. They pair imagination with rigorous methodology — scenario planning, tabletop exercises, simulations and stress testing — precisely because the future cannot be predicted. The objective isn’t to guess correctly, but to build the capacity to respond across multiple possible futures.

Yet when it comes to contemporary antisemitism, American Jewish life remains overwhelmingly reactive, even as violent antisemitic assaults have reached record highs, and the political home most of us have lived in for the entirety of our lives has become unstable, changing in ways most of us still cannot fully understand or accept. We collect data, publish reports, issue statements, educate, advocate, argue internally, litigate externally and strengthen security — all of it indispensable, and all of it beginning after something has already happened. Preparedness asks a different question: What capacities should we be building today to secure our collective, long-term future? For American Jewish leaders and communities, leaning into existing preparedness frameworks like Tzomet should become a sacred responsibility.

As I reflect on Tzomet and imagine our Jewish future, I keep returning to the historical figure of Dona Gracia Nasi. She was a 16th-century Sephardic Jewish businesswoman, diplomat and rescuer who built financial networks, political relationships, commercial infrastructure and places of safety for Sephardic refugees while the dangers of the Spanish Inquisition intensified. She did not simply survive persecution: she built around it. Nasi negotiated with sultans and emperors, not because she admired them or because the Jewish people naturally trusted them, but because she understood that survival sometimes requires building across uncomfortable divides and imagining a better future. That is what preparedness looked like in the 16th century.

Today, in an interconnected world fueled by technology and innovation, we have more tools, more knowledge and more resources than Nasi could have imagined. We have frameworks like Tzomet, simulation methodologies field-tested around the world, philanthropic infrastructure, data, networks and communication tools that can move at the speed of a crisis. 

The question is not whether we have the tools we need to prepare, but whether we have the will.

The 2026 Tzomet Strategic Analysis Report found that when 230 Jewish professionals, philanthropists, and emerging leaders were given a structured space to think freely about the future, they surfaced a broad and hopeful agenda focused on growth, influence and possibility rather than just defense. But these efforts remain at the edges of Jewish communal life and have not yet been applied with urgency to the specific challenge of preparing for antisemitism and political instability. That is the work that remains undone.

It could look like quarterly scenario-planning simulations, the kind Tzomet modeled, run inside federation committees and philanthropic networks, bringing together lawyers, wealth managers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, technologists, engineers and policy experts who spend their days navigating uncertainty in every other domain of their lives. It could look like preparedness cohorts that stress-test assumptions and build contingency thinking into long-term communal strategy. It could look like seeding a new field entirely, one that draws on the full range of disciplines we already trust in every other domain of risk.

For generations, the Jewish people have been masters of remembrance, and we have grown equally adept at documenting antisemitism, analyzing it and condemning it. But trauma — historical and ongoing — does something specific to imagination: it narrows it. Communities wired for danger detection struggle to envision futures. The next chapter of Jewish leadership requires us to break that pattern, not with less memory or less vigilance, but with more strategic imagination and the philanthropic resources to build what imagination requires. The future cannot be predicted, but it can be prepared for.

Nasi built preparedness networks, forged unlikely alliances and created infrastructure for Jewish survival and continuity in the 16th century from inside a hostile Europe.

We have no excuse.

Sarah Levin is the executive director of JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa.