Will we finally get a Jewish org that fights?

I’ve wanted a new, radical Jewish organization to arise for years. Now that it might be here, I’m not sure what to think...

After banging your head against the wall for decades, it’s sometimes difficult to believe that you might not have to anymore.

I had this distinct feeling last week when I read Jewish philanthropist Rachel Sapoznik’s article in the New York Post announcing her intention to start a new national Jewish organization.

As longtime readers know, I’ve spent years denouncing America’s establishment Jewish organizations as cowardly, ineffective, decadent, privileged, and wholly unable or unwilling to fight antisemitism effectively.

I am hardly alone in this. For just as long as we’ve been denouncing, I and many others have been calling for a new national Jewish organization that would defend the American Jewish community with urgency, radicalism, and uncompromising resolve.

As a result, Sapoznik’s article was something like a dream come true. She pledges to do everything we’d hoped for and for the reasons we’d always cited.

She writes, “For decades, I’ve proudly supported Jewish organizations. I’ve written checks, attended galas and responded to fundraising calls from groups like the Anti-Defamation League. I did it because I believed in the mission: to safeguard the Jewish people, support Israel and protect our community from hatred. But today, I say with sadness: These organizations have failed us.”

Sapoznik goes further still, dismantling the establishment organizations’ failed “strategy” and pointing out why things must change and change now:

This is a survival issue: If you’re a Jew in America today, especially an openly Zionistic or religious one, your safety is far from assured. Nor are strongly worded press releases and DEI panels remotely close to the solution. We need new leadership. We need an organization that tells the truth, fights back hard and unapologetically takes sides. That says things others won’t, like: Radical Islam is a clear and present danger in America—and the left is often a part of the problem. Because not rocking the boat in the face of evil isn’t a virtue. It’s deadly cowardice. This new movement must call out antisemitism wherever it exists.

For those of us who believe that the American Jewish community is quite literally in existential danger or, at least, in danger of total marginalization and ghettoization, this is more than heartening: It is triumphant.

Particularly encouraging for me was Sapoznik’s pledge, “This new movement must be multi-generational but led by young adults—unapologetic Jewish leaders who speak boldly and act decisively. The old guard that does little beyond begging for respect and protection from our enemies must be replaced.”

It’s been obvious to many of us for years, and certainly since the eruption of antisemitism following the Oct. 7 massacre, that if there is hope, it lies with the young. We despaired of American Jewish leadership, but found profound optimism in numerous meetings with young American Jews.

We have good reason: Trapped on the front lines on campus, in the workplace, and on the streets, these young people are not backing down. They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. Antisemitism has only made them more Jewish, and the craven reaction of those who ought to know better has only made them more determined to fight.

Up to Oct. 7, many Israelis dismissed their own young generation, believing them to be self-absorbed and decadent. They were astoundingly wrong. The young generation rose up to defend the state and has now established itself as a new “generation of 1948.” Many of us knew that the same thing would happen to the American Jewish young if they were only given a chance. Now, it appears, they may finally be given one.

However, certain concerns immediately suggest themselves. This new organization has yet to be established. We will have to wait to see if it takes shape in any kind of practical and effective manner. Assuming it does, however, it will automatically face several challenges.

First, the establishment Jewish organizations will almost certainly do everything possible to stop the organization from being created or to render it ineffective. After all, such an organization would be a direct threat to the power and prestige of many undeserving but influential people.

Leaders rarely simply submit to being shunted aside by better leaders. The establishment organizations will fight to keep a new organization from the levers of power and to marginalize it within the Jewish community.

Sadly, there is a long history of this kind of self-sabotage going back to the 1930s, and there is no reason to think that it will not continue today. A new organization will have to contend with and neutralize such opposition.

It is also not clear whether the Jewish community as a whole will embrace such a new organization. Based on personal experience, I believe they will. Nonetheless, decades of a culture of quiescence and self-victimization, along with centuries of learned helplessness in the face of antisemitism, are very powerful things.

American Jews are not comfortable with power, radicalism, and combativeness. Militancy on behalf of others is fine and even commendable, but militancy on their own behalf is all but unthinkable.

So, a new organization will have to work against not only a decadent Jewish establishment but a dysfunctional Jewish culture. This will be a long and difficult struggle, and great care will have to be taken not to alienate the majority of the Jewish community in the process of liberating it. It is a battle that must be fought with intelligence more than strength.

Above all, however, a new organization must understand what is at stake. Sapoznik appears to have a fairly good idea, but even she does not go far enough.

What American Jews are facing is not a loose confederation of radical Islamists and demented progressives. They are facing an organized criminal conspiracy, well-connected and well-funded, whose avowed purpose is to destroy the American Jewish community. We know this is the case because the criminals say so. If we take them at their word—and we should—their ultimate goal is the genocide of Israel and then the entirety of global Jewry.

American Jews are facing, in other words, a neo-Nazi movement in all but name. Indeed, its refusal to accurately label itself is simply the deference Nazism pays to virtue. And this movement has, in recent weeks, made the conscious and deliberate decision to turn from protester-terrorism to outright terrorism.

Given this, a new American Jewish organization must think big and think radical. It should not just agitate, denounce, and organize. It should demand things like congressional hearings, RICO investigations, and domestic terrorism charges. It should form a self-defense arm that will train and equip American Jews to defend themselves by themselves against antisemitic terrorism. And it should demand a Thatcherite solution to systemically antisemitic universities and other institutions, dismantling them and then rebuilding them from the ground up.

I am sure that Sapoznik and others involved in this new organization have some of this in mind, while some of the rest might repel them. That’s fine. The Jews are a disputatious people, and any new organization will be one that disputes with others and with itself.

What is all-important is for this organization to successfully arise and, hopefully, displace those who, due to their abject failure and decrepitude, should have shuffled off the stage long ago.