A canary in a coal mine doesn’t sing to save itself. It sings so the miners still have time to climb out. 

Consider this our song.

Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

University of Washington student and Revolutionary Communist International member Will Boyer, 23, holds a publication as pro-Palestinian protestors demonstrate at the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington on April 29, 2024.

We are not a cohort of former ambassadors, senators, rabbis or dignitaries. We are you: community members who feel that something isn’t right. We are politically engaged Jews in Seattle who are terrified by the lack of urgency from our neighbors and our leaders to address a growing anti-Jewish consensus where we live. We have been watching and feeling the quiet but steady expulsion of Jews from so many walks of life. We are longtime champions of coalition-building, who watched as Jews were forced out of the local Asian American history museum’s “Confronting Hate Together” exhibit, without any of the vigorous pushback we saw against antisemite John Galliano’s planned exhibit at the Met in New York. We are believers in universities where students of all backgrounds are welcome and their safety and security equally assured, who heard from University of Washington campus administrators that “kill your local colonizer” graffiti wouldn’t be removed because the cleaning crews couldn’t be kept safe; and from local prosecutors that they cut a deal with campus protesters who occupied a building, set fires and caused an estimated $1 million in damage. And we are deeply involved leaders in local legacy Jewish organizations, who have watched those same entities excuse inaction. 

Many concertgoers at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey were disgusted when the rapper Macklemore recently took to the stage to chant “Free Palestine” and accuse Israel of genocide as footage rolled of the campus protests against the Gaza war. But did you know that long before his vitriol went international, he was declaring “F— America” from the stage of the Palestine Will Live Forever Festival in his hometown of Seattle, in the city’s most concentrated Jewish neighborhood? The rot that social media has injected into a propagandized populace has penetrated deeply here. Hate, violence, vandalism and ostracization too often go ignored and unprosecuted.

So what, you might ask. Seattle is a weird part of the world, and it’s far from me. Their problems are not my problems, and their future is not my future.

Maybe you are right. Maybe this is unique to the Pacific Northwest, which has always been a hotbed of leftist activism, from the anti-war protests of the 1970s to the anti-globalization riots of the 1990s. Maybe it will go away and prove to be a bump in the road of an otherwise uninterrupted journey through the golden age of American Jewry; it would save us a great deal of tsuris, and let our voices recover after years of shouting ourselves hoarse.

We don’t see it that way. 

We see Seattle not as an anomaly but as a laboratory. Here, new tactics and new messages are tested to discover just how far the scapegoating of Jews can be taken. In a city known for its aerospace and tech inventions, the new frontier for innovation seems to be antisemitism and anti-Israel brain rot. We recognize, of course, that the majority of non-Jews don’t spend their days consumed by thoughts of Jews and Israel, positively or negatively. But the people in power, increasingly, default to the anti-Jewish posture we saw dominate campus debate over the last three years, and which has come to eclipse the current political discourse in both parties today. Politicians on both sides of the aisle play footsy with hateful commentators like Tucker Carlson and Hasan Piker, and the infrastructure of civic life — bar associations and teachers unions and political parties, and even sidewalks — grow more hostile to Jews by the day. The “expressions of deep concern” published by Jewish organizations in Seattle and across the country are falling on deaf ears, or on hostile ones. 

Where we live, we are watching these people march into power in functionally unchallenged elections. Jewish community efforts to oppose them are too little and too late, overdependent on the ads purchased in the weeks leading up to the election, when in reality smart, left-wing ideologues have won long before a single vote has been cast. 

We didn’t fully understand the depth of our problem, but we do now. Sara Forman and others have documented the takeover of the Democratic Party in particular by extremist elements. When this happens, endorsements, field organizers and small-dollar donors are locked in years before a seat even opens up. Quietly, the people who adopt curriculum in public schools, prosecute (or decline to prosecute) hate crimes and fund or defund police departments are being steeped in vitriol and educated to avoid or oppose what they see as the “Jewish agenda”: this year, school board and state legislature; next year, Congress and the White House.

There is another way, but it requires a mindset shift. 

American Jews — in Seattle and everywhere else — must adopt a whole-of-community posture to professionalize our political engagement, especially at the state and local level. We are too dependent on volunteer leadership, and this work is too important to be done only when time allows. We must raise real resources, beginning at the local level and matched by national support, to staff around-the-clock operations to identify and educate viable candidates, take down our political opponents and turn out voters in low-turnout elections. We need clear leadership from our organizations and unity between them, and we need an end to turf protection and scarcity-mindsets. 

Some of this work has already begun, in Boulder, Colo., Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Chicago. Those communities are forging a path for fighting back, rejecting complacency and urging their neighbors to do the same. Too often, they are under-resourced or ignored.

What is being tested in Seattle will not stay in Seattle. It is being readied for your city, your school board, your synagogue, and the only question is whether you will have built something to meet it before the air runs thin. Don’t wait for the singing to stop.

Sam Jefferies is the founder of a pro-Jewish political action committee in Washington state, a former board president of the American Jewish Committee – Seattle region and a public affairs professional with deep experience at the local, state, national and international levels. 

Joe Schocken a retired investment banker and a longtime Jewish community and Democratic Party activist. He is a former chair of AIPAC NW, co-founder and former CEO of Broadmark Realty Capital (NYSE) and a former presidential appointee to the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.