When the Jewish community decides something matters, we come together. We respond quickly. We give generously. We show up in ways that few communities in the world can match. So why, when it comes to the organized, sustained campaign to delegitimize Jews and Israel across American institutions, are we still fighting this battle one organization at a time?

It isn’t a question of resources, nor whether we have the leaders. What we do not have is a shared strategy. Without that, we will continue to lose ground on the most important reputational and cultural battle the Jewish community faces today.

There are three reasons we have not closed this gap. None of them are flattering.

The first is fragmentation. Every major Jewish organization has its own message, its own donors and its own working definition of the problem. The result is a dozen well-intentioned voices saying slightly different things to slightly overlapping audiences, often competing with each other for the same philanthropic support. Meanwhile, the infrastructure working against us is coordinated, well-funded and strategic. It operates with shared language, shared goals and a long-term plan that does not reset with every news cycle. We are answering a systemic campaign with scattered responses. No amount of individual organizational excellence closes that gap.

The second reason is more uncomfortable to name: We have become experts at counting our wounds.

We have statistics, incident trackers, annual surveys and monitoring organizations. We know, in remarkable detail, how serious the problem has become. That documentation matters, but we have not built the same capacity to assert who we are. That asymmetry is costing us far more than we acknowledge.

Jews helped build America. That is not a sentimental claim; it is a factual one. 

In medicine, Jewish scientists and researchers have contributed to some of the most important public health breakthroughs in modern history, including the development of vaccines that have saved hundreds of millions of lives. In civil rights, Jewish legal thinkers and activists stood alongside the movement’s leaders and helped write the architecture of American anti-discrimination law. In education and philanthropy, Jewish donors built hospitals, universities, libraries and social service organizations that serve all Americans, not only the Jewish community. In humanitarian aid, Jewish organizations have deployed emergency teams to more than 60 countries; they are often among the first on the ground in disaster zones with no connection to Jewish communities at all. 

Jewish innovators, educators and entrepreneurs have shaped the modern world in ways that are difficult to overstate. We do not need to justify our right to exist, here in America or anywhere. We need to say who we are, loudly, consistently and without apology — before the next accusation, not in response to it. We record our wounds with precision and our contributions with embarrassment. That must end.

The third reason is structural, and it is the one the readers of this publication are best positioned to change.

The Jewish philanthropic model was built to do something genuinely important: to renew a broad base of annual commitments and mobilize a community around shared responsibility. That model built the institutions that have sustained Jewish life in America for over a century. We should be proud of what it produced.

But a model built to sustain institutions is not the same model that builds influence. And influence is what this moment requires.

If you are a foundation leader, look at your grantee list. How much of your portfolio is funding the organizations shaping public opinion, training communicators, fighting delegitimization in courts and classrooms and developing the Jewish civic and political leaders of the next decade? If you are a federation CEO, where are your unrestricted dollars going? Into programs that serve the community you already have, or into building the infrastructure that defines what the Jewish community will look like in 20 years? If you are a major donor capable of making a transformational investment, what are you waiting for?

This is not about raising more money. Jewish donors are already giving billions. It is about changing where and how that investment goes. We spent the last hundred years building institutions. The next chapter requires building influence: in newsrooms, in classrooms, in courtrooms, in political organizations and in the cultural spaces where the story of who Jews are is being written right now, with or without our participation.

Imagine what becomes possible if the largest Jewish foundations, federations and major donors stopped solving this problem separately and started working from a shared long-term strategy.

Not a new organization. Not a committee. A genuine, coordinated investment thesis: the organizations already doing counter-narrative work, media training, legal advocacy, leadership development and civic engagement would be funded at the scale the moment demands, not the scale individual institutions can afford on their own. They would share language, align strategy and build on each other’s work instead of duplicating it. Jewish communicators trained in one city would use frameworks developed by organizations in another. Legal victories against institutional antisemitism would be documented and replicated. Young Jewish leaders moving into media, politics, law and education would emerge from a pipeline that was intentionally built, not accidentally assembled.

That infrastructure exists in pieces. What it does not have is coordination and sustained capital behind it. The gap between what the Jewish community is capable of building and what it has actually built on the influence side of this equation is not a resource gap. It is a strategy gap. And strategy gaps can be closed, if the right people decide to close them.

One piece of that strategy deserves particular attention: shared language. Not identical talking points, but foundational claims that every Jewish organization, regardless of denomination or politics, is willing to stand behind publicly: that Jewish self-determination is a moral good, that Zionism is a legitimate expression of Jewish identity, that the Jewish story is one of extraordinary contribution and requires no apology. When Jewish organizations speak in different registers on these foundational questions, the fractures become ammunition. Unity of message is not groupthink. It is the minimum viable foundation for an effective shared strategy.

Beyond language, donors and foundations must shift from emergency giving to structural giving.

Emergency funds are essential. But they are not infrastructure. The organizations building Jewish identity, fighting delegitimization and developing the leaders who will carry this battle into the next decade need sustained, multi-year commitments, not campaign-cycle check-ins and not one-time crisis gifts that disappear when the headlines move on. If you would not fund a hospital on a one-year grant, you should not fund the organizations shaping Jewish public life that way either.

Let me be direct: You are not uninformed. You are not indifferent. Most of you reading this are already giving generously. I am not asking you to give more. I am asking you to give differently, strategically, collectively and at the scale this moment actually demands.

Because here is the truth no one in this field says plainly enough: the organizations fighting this battle are not failing for lack of effort or talent. They are under-resourced relative to the opposition, under-coordinated relative to the challenge and under-asked relative to your capacity. The gap is not on their side. It is on ours.

Every year we continue working in silos, the other side becomes more coordinated. Every year we invest in sustaining what we have instead of building what we need, we fall further behind on the terrain that matters most. Every year we wait for consensus before acting, another generation of Jewish students moves through institutions shaped by narratives we did not build and have not effectively contested.

We have the organizations. We have the leaders. We have the donors. We have the moral clarity and the historical record to make this case to any audience in the world.

Knowing everything we know today — about the campaign against us, about our own fragmentation, about the gap between our capacity and our coordination — if we do not act together now, we have to ask ourselves honestly: when will we?

Hadara Ishak is the president and chief operating officer of Jewish Future Promise.