On Friday evening, the popular, often boisterous grassroots advocacy Facebook group Mothers Against College Antisemitism instituted new rules: “Pausing” discussions about its “internal dispute” and prioritizing “posts that directly support our mission of addressing college and university antisemitism and supporting Jewish students, Jewish faculty, and their families.” Titled “Moving forward and Shabbat shalom,” the post was written in response to months of turmoil within the nearly 60,000-person group over an ongoing lawsuit between the founder of the Facebook group, Elizabeth Rand, and the independent board of the nonprofit that emerged from MACA, which has since taken control of the Facebook group. 

eJewishPhilanthropy has been following the “internal dispute” for nearly nine months, since issues first arose. In the wake of the Oct. 7 terror group, the Facebook group has emerged as a major force in campus conversations, informing parents about other students’ experiences, rallying advocates and raising awareness about antisemitic incidents on campuses across the country. (Critics have also accused the group members’ advocacy of stifling free speech on campus through intimidation, and former members have also accused Rand of stifling free speech in the grouup, banning people who expressed divergent views on Israel, Zionism and Palestinian rights.)

Experts told eJP that the schism within MACA is also emblematic of issues that many post-Oct. 7 initiatives are facing as they transform from grassroots efforts that emerged as a rebuke of the legacy organizations that they considered to be ineffectual into more formalized, funded organizations. Some groups have so far succeeded in doing so, while others — lacking the leadership training and organizational infrastructure that can lay the groundwork for such transformations — are struggling to overcome the infighting and challenges that these transitions can provoke. 

Problems within MACA escalated within the group after Rand transitioned it into an independent 501(c)(3) in December 2024 and stepped down as president of the board nearly a year later, after burning out and falling into a series of disputes with other board members. For the past nine months, Rand has openly grappled with the board for control of the Facebook group, which experts told eJP is legally considered an asset of the nonprofit, but which she considers to be her baby.

As the battle dragged on, Rand refused to give up administrative access to the Facebook group, leading to board members taking legal action, first in January and again in July. For months at a time, board members have been banned from the group, although, currently, they are members and two serve as moderators under Rand. Even with an ongoing lawsuit and an announcement that the group would be paused, the fighting rages on, with followers choosing sides, and many claiming to be “Team Elizabeth.”

“Who leads these startups is a really interesting issue,” Steven Windmueller, emeritus professor of Jewish communal service at the Jack H. Skirball Campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, told eJP.

Grassroots advocates often “come with good intentions, are deeply motivated to create something distinctive and meaningful, not only to them but to the circle of people around them, but leadership requires some heft, some experience,” Windmueller said. Many of these leaders don’t have the “skills or experience or the tools that will be helpful to them in building these institutions and moving them forward, so as a result, there’s a level of a lack of sophistication, a degree of naivete. The passion overwhelms the capacity to actually create.”

The MACA situation is an example of “founder’s syndrome,” Windmueller said, when a founder of a nonprofit stunts its growth because of an inability to cede control. The syndrome is not unique to the Jewish or nonprofit community; it is rife in the startup world.

“Many of these folks with great and wonderful intentions come into an idea, build the idea, create an organization, bring their friends and their associates in as board members, staff persons or supporters, and then as [the organization] evolves and gets more complex and as the stress and complexities of the organization evolve, at some point the founder either is stressed, exhausted, faces certain challenges and then seeks to give up control. Or does he or she really give up control?”

In Rand’s case, she ceded leadership of the board, feeling that “there were other people who could probably do a better job than I was doing because I work all day [as a Manhattan-based lawyer] and not everybody else on the board did,” she told eJP in December.

Although she left the board, she never handed off control of the Facebook group. In the months since, Rand used the group as a launchpad for a separate organization — named Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism — run by her, to ban users whose politics contrasted with hers and to disparage the board, whose members were also banned.

To avoid situations like this arising, Windmueller recommends that when a nonprofit is founded, bylaws should include an exit strategy that would allow the nonprofit to honor the founder, but clearly separate.

“A separation must happen for the organization to continue and for a new leadership, either group or person, to evolve it and reflect its evolution on changing leadership, changing circumstances, changing economies,” he said.

Many founders don’t even realize the support they need or know where to find it, Windmueller said. They don’t think to reach out to their local federation or realize that Jewish and secular organizations, including Leading Edge and BoardSource could provide training and resources. “Having access to those is something one has to know.”

Rand has also indicated that the legal fight has taken a financial toll on her. Last month, she launched a GoFundMe titled “Support Legal Defense for Antisemitism Group Founder,” which exceeded its original  $7,500 goal, raising more than $13,000 as of Tuesday with a new goal of $20,000. She created a new Facebook group, Parents Against Campus Antisemitism, which she has promoted in the MACA group. It has more than 300 members.

“I am asking the board on behalf of myself and so many of you to drop this lawsuit and enter mediation,” Rand wrote in a group post on Wednesday. “We have all contributed a lot to MACA. We do not have to be friends but being enemies is destroying us all.” 

On Thursday, in a post in the MACA group, she asked members to friend her on Facebook, saying, “It’s only a matter of time before I become removed, bankrupt or ill.”

Grassroots organizers like Rand and the MACA board shouldn’t have been put in this position in the first place, Laura Weisblatt, co-founder of Amidah, an Albany, N.Y.-based Israel advocacy group, who has watched the MACA situation unfold, told eJP.

Movements like MACA and Amidah are “disjointed” because regular moms “picked up the slack where [legacy organizations] didn’t immediately come out and support communities in what they were experiencing,” she said. “It never should have been that a bunch of moms had to fight that fight.”

When Weisblatt co-founded Amidah, in December 2023, she knew there was a risk that she and the other advocates could lose steam and that the fervor unleashed in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks would be short-lived without institutional funding and support.

“It was literally just a sort of patchwork group of volunteers that had been thrown together,” she said. “That these groups even are still in existence and functional in any way after three years is impressive and speaks to the commitment of the people who started the groups.”

Immediately after Oct. 7, Amidah’s planning meetings were attended by over 50 attendees; today, bimonthly meetings average 20 attendees. The organization, which is not a nonprofit and has run events by attaining small, private donations, shifted its focus from advocacy to providing professional development for schools and workplaces on antisemitism, no longer holding regular rallies or events.

Grassroots organizations like MACA and Amidah have changed the way legacy organizations work, Weisblatt said.

After the massacres in Israel, Weisblatt looked to established organizations to call out antisemitism, but was told that they were having closed-door meetings to combat antisemitism, she said. “For that moment, it wasn’t enough to have closed-door meetings. It wasn’t enough to have a private phone call with a politician. We needed to call them out publicly, loudly. We needed to have politicians standing there in the middle of a town square with a microphone and a flag.”

Nearly three years post-Oct. 7, the noise has calmed, and it’s again seen as legitimate for legacy organizations to advocate behind closed doors, Weisblatt said. They have also changed their advocacy, she said, pointing to Jewish Federations of North America’s Frontline project, a $35 million initiative that has placed 100 advocates in North American federations to combat antisemitism.

Because legacy organizations are picking up the burden of local advocacy, many of the grassroots organizations served their purpose, Weisblatt said. “I don’t think that we should have to have a volunteer-based group that’s working on a spit and a prayer in the middle of the night at 4 a.m., trying to write emails and figure out how to run an organization. We should be able to use the resources that we are putting into our communities.”

Grassroots movements often sputter out, Windmueller said. In the nearly three years since MACA formed, the “momentum has faded, and the divisions have deepened, and the tensions and challenges of fighting both antisemitism and how you market Israel and all of the storylines are much more complicated, much more complex.”

Post-Oct. 7, over 160 American organizations and 25 funders claimed to be combating antisemitism, yet there was no proof anything worked, and in the past year, there have been calls, including by New York Times columnist and Jewish thought leader Bret Stephens, to defund the “combating antisemitism complex” and instead push money and effort into initiatives that strengthen Jewish identity. Feeling that chastising people for antisemitism only causes pushback, some nonprofits that combat antisemitism have also prioritized an approach of educating, not shaming. 

Even as the movement has shifted and smaller grassroots organizations shuttered and changed, the situation with MACA is a “worst-case scenario,” Weisblatt said, especially because of MACA’s vast reach across social media.

“It just feels like really chaval [a shame] that they can’t get it together in order to serve the mission that they set out to accomplish, which is to protect kids on college campuses, Jewish students that are struggling with anti-Zionism and antisemitism,” she said. “Those are real problems. They’re only getting worse.”