It’s 2050, and the American Jewish community is popular — so much so that its primary concerns are no longer antisemitism, assimilation, Israel advocacy, but gatekeeping to keep out those with only tenuous claims of Jewish identity. It’s 2050, and Jewish religious and cultural life is thriving — so much so that American Jews are increasingly siloed because non-Jews just can’t understand them. It’s 2050, and American Jews are under attack by both left-wing and right-wing groups, leading to effective digital and physical ghettos, albeit well-resourced ones. It’s 2050, and antisemitic fervor grips America, rooting out all but the most devoted communities, making Haredim the largest denomination and prompting a Jewish spiritual revival amid rising poverty.

These are the four scenarios — some more utopian, others dystopian — that dozens of American Jewish leaders and experts contended with last week as part of “war games,” organized by Jewish entrepreneur and philanthropist Phil Siegel.

“The type of game we settled on is called a target state game, where you write future scenarios and you make the players work their way backward. How did we get there?” Siegel told eJewishPhilanthropy this week. “One of the hopes is that people will spend more time thinking about what we want to have happen over the next 25 years. … We need to be starting to think about our 25-year plan so that we can control our own destiny.”

Siegel, among other things, started a war games nonprofit five years ago called the Center for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response, or CAPTR, which creates and runs simulations focused on societal emergency preparedness, with clients such as the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and other emergency preparedness groups around the world. 

“That was chugging along, and I started to think, ‘Maybe that’s something that can be applied to thinking about how do we prepare for the future here in the U.S. for American Jews,” Siegel said. “And one of the things that’s great about gaming or war-gaming is you can take a very diverse group of people that maybe wouldn’t normally find themselves together and put them together in a room with a task that’s fun, that’s interesting, that’s very challenging. And they can come up with something that is quite interesting.”

The first person he recruited was Rabbi David Wolpe as a “kind of chairman for the project,” Siegel said. Wolpe was followed by author Dara Horn, who was tasked with creating the one-page end-result scenarios, along with a short accompanying story to flesh out the concept. Siegel also brought in David Bernstein and his North American Values Institute (formerly the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values); Adina Poupko, executive director of the Natan Fund; and Jared Stone, a researcher with NAVI. 

Through Wolpe, the group invited 150 people to participate in the games, which were held last week in Manhattan from Sunday night to Tuesday. Ultimately, some 50 people took part in the event, dubbed Tzomet Games, including William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents; former U.S. antisemitism envoy Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt; Zoya Raynes, chair of the Jewish Funders Network; actor and Jewish activist Jonah Platt; and Gali Cooks, CEO of Leading Edge.

“We had an incredibly diverse group of people from the U.S. Jewish leadership, all the way to political figures, academics, business people and philanthropists,” Siegel said.

“It was a very, very good balance. I think we ended up with 25 men and 25 women, which was great, and [we had] pretty good political diversity as well,” he said, noting that the goal was not to include the extreme poles of the political spectrum but a range within the mainstream. Siegel added that while a large contingent came from New York City, there was geographic diversity as well, with participants coming from the Washington area, West Coast, Southeast and the Midwest. 

One of the participants, Barak Sella, an Israeli educator, researcher and community organizer who splits his time between the U.S. and Israel, told eJP that the other players were “serious people who had strategic vision.”

The event launched on Sunday evening, with an introduction to the games and remarks from Wolpe and Horn. On Monday, the participants played through three rounds of games, giving them a chance to go through three of the scenarios.

Siegel said that he and Horn had decided to have her create two utopian and two dystopian scenarios, though he and Sella noted that not all of the participants necessarily categorized it that way. (“One man’s heaven is another man’s hell,” Sella quipped.)

In each round, they were split into 10 new groups of five, giving each player a chance to meet and play with new people. In the first game, as the participants learned the rules, they were given 2 hours and 45 minutes. In the third, they were given 1 hour, 30 minutes. The games were analog, with participants writing out their moves on sticky notes and placing them on boards made of butcher paper.

“People came to work, and it was work. In total, it was seven, eight hours of really hard, thoughtful work,” Sella said.

Siegel said that he and his team are working to analyze the games, photographing the completed boards and running them through artificial intelligence-powered programs. Once they’ve completed their review and presented the findings to the participants, Siegel said he plans to spread his war games in the Jewish community, offering the platform to various organizations and groups and encouraging people to take the format and write their own scenarios for it.

On Tuesday, participants who were able took part in a debriefing. 

According to Sella, the participants thought more deeply about the trends and events that the Jewish community has control over and those that it does not. 

The Jewish community may not have direct control over nuclear war, global demographic trends or international trade wars, for instance, even though these have a profound influence on the Jewish community. (Most of the scenarios include a geopolitical element as well, such as peace in the Middle East in the first one or an acute housing crisis in Israel that prevents American Jews from emigrating despite harsh conditions in the U.S. in the third scenario.) However, the Jewish community does have control over creating new organizations and initiatives or coordinating existing ones. 

“The game itself and the scenario itself were less important. It was more about how people think — What types of things influence us? Do we have more or less agency over them?” Sella said. “Is there an optimal scenario and does the Jewish community have a 2050 outcome that we are working toward?”

He compared Horn’s simulations and the war games to Zionist leader Theodor Herzl’s book Altneuland, a utopian novel imagining a future Jewish state. 

“If I see value in the game, it is mostly that. Let’s train American Jewry to think about what’s the scenario we want to get to and what gets us there,” Sella said.