Why We Are Failing in the Fight Against Antisemitism
And how we can fix it.
Antisemitism has risen sharply since October 7th. This much should be obvious to most people, although the quality and quantity of that rise is up for debate. We are seeing the rise everywhere: on the right, the left, and most things in between.
The intent of this piece is not to debate these numbers or to argue whether it’s happening more in one place or another. We have enough of these debates elsewhere.
This is about how we got here, why, and what we can do differently.
The Current Approaches: Propaganda, Shaming, and Punishment
Listen to many Jewish commentators, organizations, and leaders, and you’ll hear the same thing: This rise exists because the antisemites have propagandized the country into becoming more antisemitic. They have distorted the truth of what’s happening in Gaza and generally manipulated the rising anti-Israel sentiment in America to turn more Americans antisemitic. The issue, in other words, is largely seen as a propaganda war. One where the reaction to Israel’s actions themselves are considered a barometer of the success of this propaganda.
And so the solution is the same: spread propaganda back.
And since, in their minds, antisemitism has largely been spurred by criticism of Israel, the answer is not so much to stop antisemitism but to stop anti-Israel sentiment. This means more pro-Israel propaganda.
The investment in pro-Israel influencers is a good example. Many organizations and foundations supposedly fighting antisemitism spend a lot of money on these influencers. This year’s keynote speaker at the ADL’s national conference is Montana Tucker, a woman who spends far more energy on Israel than on antisemitism. Last year’s was Hen Mazzig, another such person. The thinking behind it seems to be that since they have big audiences, they will be able to spread more pro-Israel propaganda and thus, by the law of transference, reduce antisemitism.
(To be clear, in this context I am not necessarily using propaganda negatively. From this perspective, propaganda is just a counter-measure to antisemitic propaganda).
Beyond propaganda, there is another focus: punishment and consequences. This has been the focus for a very long time, be it around Israel or otherwise. Get people fired, deplatform them, and in more extreme cases doxx or even threaten them physically. StopAntisemitism is an organization well known for doing a lot of the “consequence” approach. Especially on X, they are well known for naming and amplifying what they interpret as purveyors of antisemitism, often leading to threats and firings.
As the Washington Post reported, the process often works like this: StopAntisemitism posts a clip of someone’s statement, tags their employer, hundreds of people flood the employer with messages, and the person is fired within hours. In one case, a branding firm announced a firing as a direct reply to StopAntisemitism’s thread on X, 15 hours after the original post. ‘Thank you for your swift action,’ StopAntisemitism wrote back.
This is not limited to small organizations, though. Some Hillels go beyond their own programming to pressure universities directly. Hillel International helped push for the suspension of a Palestinian history course at UC Berkeley. At UC Irvine, a Hillel falsely accused student protesters of threatening Jewish students, leading to a criminal referral that was dropped when no evidence was found. In both cases, the target was speech critical of Israel.
And the Anti-Defamation League itself in many ways does this as well. After Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, the ADL launched the ‘Mamdani Monitor,’ a public tracker of his administration’s policies, appointments, and actions. It was an unprecedented step: the ADL had never created a dedicated surveillance initiative for a single elected official. The hope was to shame Mamdani enough into getting him to behave.
What They Have In Common
The overarching logic of all the approaches is that antisemitism is ended through force. You outspend with propaganda. You punish anyone who spreads their own propaganda. You shame anyone left standing.
In many ways, this is connected to the larger approach to fighting antisemitism I’ve written about in the past: that might makes right, and thus the more power we have, the less antisemitism there will be. Or, at the very least, the more afraid the antisemites will be to act.
This is the logic not just around fighting antisemitism, but the entire Jewish establishment and Israel itself for decades. Build power, connect to the powerful, and overwhelm the enemy with all that power.
In other words, the approach to ending antisemitism through force is not just a set of tactics or strategy: it is baked into the entire identity, the entire structure of these establishments.
The Metrics of Success
Now, the question becomes: is this the right approach? Does it work?
These organizations and their funders clearly believe their work is valuable and effective. So let’s examine why they think that.
The best way to figure this out is to see how they measure their success. What are their metrics, and why do they see them as indicators of success?
Here are how the various organizations define and measure their success:
StopAntisemitism defines its “success rate” as how many people are fired. As JNS reported a year ago, their founder “claims a remarkable success rate: ‘We have profiled more than 1,000 antisemites. Over 400 of them have been fired.’”
Its annual report brags similarly. Beyond the firing metrics, it also is quick to point out its large social media footprint: 616 million Twitter impressions, 56 million on Instagram, etc.
The ADL has various measures it uses to measure its own effectiveness. When writer Bret Stephens argued that all funding used to fight antisemitism has been wasted, Jonathan Greenblatt argued for their own effectiveness in an op ed. In it, he pointed to their Center on Extremism’s research and its work with law enforcement that has led to arrests of dangerous antisemites. Beyond that, he describes various activities, such as a legal action network, lobbying, and education.
So, to be clear: beyond the arrests they’ve helped enact, Greenblatt’s metrics shared are not exactly results but activities. And when results are shared, it is things like laws passed and groups formed.
Other organizations like the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of the largest such organizations in America, similarly laud their access to power through their work working with governmental leaders, business groups, etc as well as various activities.
The Missing Metric
There is one notable missing measure of success in all these claims of success and relevance.
Have they reduced antisemitism?
The ADL can claim success in its ability to defend Jews through the various arrests it contributed to, and that is no small thing. But even that is retroactive success: the ability to prevent antisemitism after it has spread.
Of these organizations, not one can claim to have reduced antisemitism. In fact, along with their claims of success they themselves point out the rise in antisemitism. Assuming good faith on their part, it seems that by matching their activity to the rise in antisemitism, they are claiming to match their urgency and activity to the moment.
But how effective are the things they are doing? After all, a list of tactics is not inherently a strategy. And activity is not inherently success.
And in the case of StopAntisemitism’s reach: how do they know it is not increasing antisemitism? After all, its posts largely attract a very negative reaction even among people who aren’t antisemitic and garner negative press coverage. Reach could mean many things, but it definitely does not instantly translate to a reduction in antisemitism.
This is just as true with influencers like Hen Mazzig and Montana Tucker. In marketing, these are called vanity metrics: numbers that feel impressive but are disconnected from results.
That said, there is one thing we do know: antisemitism has risen. Astronomically. There have been various external contributions to it, such as Trump’s first election win and its normalization of the far right, October 7th and the aftermath, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and the Epstein Files. These are often pointed to as evidence that antisemitism would inevitably rise no matter what in this moment.
But does that earn the ADL $163 million in revenue and Greenblatt more than $1 million/year as a salary? Does it even justify the existence of StopAntisemitism?
This is why defining our metrics matters: because if you define success by how many things you’re doing, the ADL is doing great. If you measure it by whether it reduces antisemitism… that’s different.
They’ve Failed
The point here is not just about metrics: it is about what people think success is. And what they think justifies their approach.
It is not just that the ADL, StopAntisemitism, and countless other organizations and leaders don’t measure their success by whether they reduce antisemitism. It’s that their measures of success are also misaligned with reducing antisemitism.
They measure how many people have been fired because they think punishment = reducing antisemitism. They measure how many activities they do instead of whether those activities are effective because they think effort = progress. They measure how popular their social media and campaigns are because they think propaganda itself = impact.
As it turns out, that’s a massive mistake.
There are volumes of evidence that when you take a punitive approach in everything from parenting to the justice system, you are not only ineffective, you can often make the problem itself worse.
A dramatic example is something called “Defiance Theory.” Defiance theory claims that while some punitive approaches in the justice system can be effective at reducing future crimes by those punished, when a punishment is perceived as unjust, it is likely to create the exact opposite effect. In other words, if someone believes they have been unjustly punished, they are far more likely to actually engage in the very act they were accused of.
And it is not just “punitive” approaches in the sense of arrests and imprisonment. When any consequence is applied that (such as shaming) feels unfair, the person is more likely to transform the anger they feel about the injustice of the consequence and later do the very thing they are accused of as a form of defiance. Even the manner in which such a person is shamed or otherwise targeted affects things. If it feels arbitrary, disproportionate, or disrespectful that alone can make things worse.
And that gets worse too. If a group from one community targets another community, then everyone in the community who witnessed the targeting and agrees it is unfair will have their own reaction as well. They then lose respect for the group that targeted the person and ultimately lose faith in the legitimacy of the accusation itself and the social taboo weakens.
The result: you haven’t just targeted one person. You’ve set the groundwork for losing legitimacy among anyone who considers themselves attached to that person.
Now, consider a post like StopAntisemitism’s response to Mahmoud Khalil’s release from ICE detention, which called a keffiyeh “the appropriated symbol of Jew-haters” and framed his release as “a slap in the face to every Jewish American.”
The post got over 100,000 views. The comments split exactly as defiance theory predicts: supporters called for deportation, while critics dismissed the framing entirely and in some cases responded with overt antisemitism. What was meant to land as moral authority landed as propaganda, and the social taboo weakened a little further.
And those are just around direct targeting of specific people. Expand that to the influencers, leaders, and others who make it a practice to make broad accusations of antisemitism and one can imagine the scale at which they have contributed to a vast increase in antisemitism.
There is an important thing to note here: someone may argue against all this by saying “just because someone perceives something as not being antisemitic doesn’t mean it isn’t antisemitic.” In fact, I’d argue this is the normative way all of us discuss antisemitism, no matter which stance we take. We obsess over what we define as an objective measure of antisemitism and then decide consequences based on that measure.
Defiance Theory points to something else: the distinction between someone who perceives themselves as antisemitic and those who don’t. And more importantly, this would thus apply to someone who does not want to be antisemitic.
In other words, the accusation could be accurate. Someone may have shared an antisemitic trope. For example, a Soros conspiracy theory or a claim that Israel controls the world.
This person does not think they are being antisemitic, but they have been taught an antisemitic trope. They are now at a delicate moment: will they be further radicalized or will they be guided away from the precipice of overt hate?
To shame them or punish them works to radicalize them further. To do so publicly is to lose legitimacy among all witnesses who identify with that person.
And yet these organizations point to their work as a success.
Given all this, what can these organizations actually point to as evidence they are helping?
The only actual evidence the ADL can provide of its success is its defense against violence: a real metric and an important one. But even that is relatively sporadic and even if not, purely defensive after the fact. If you are increasing the likelihood of attacks while helping defend against them, you might as well be named Netanyahu. Not surprising, since they share the same logic of protection against hate.
A New Approach
Punishment and spreading self-affirming propaganda feel more moral than education. They feel more fair, less debasing. But if our goal is to actually reduce antisemitism, then whatever works is by definition more moral. My feelings about what justice looks like are not only irrelevant, they may be distracting me from what actually helps.
It is difficult to directly measure whether a specific action has reduced antisemitism. But there is a difference between measuring the effect of one tactic on an entire population and measuring whether tactics work generally. And for that, we have plenty of evidence.
A number of studies and meta-analyses have shown ways to reduce prejudice as well as alternatives to the negative tactics that lead to defiance.
As we know, antisemitism often does not first manifest as hatred against Jews. This is particularly important since we know that Defiance Theory states that targeting people who don’t see themselves as antisemitic makes things worse. When you combine that with the fact that antisemitism largely isn’t overtly hateful against Jews on an even wider range than other forms of prejudice due to its connection to conspiracy theories, we have to engage in tactics that are not about centering Jews specifically in the first place.
To put it more bluntly, one of the most effective tactics we can take is reduce beliefs in conspiracy theories, since they are one of the most common gateways to antisemitism.
There are plenty of studies about how to be effective in this regard, they just aren’t always framed specifically around antisemitism.
One small example is a study run by someone who himself was influenced by his own family’s deaths at the hands of Nazis: in it, they found that when people were given an “inoculation” against conspiracy theories, by first warning someone they are being manipulated followed by sharing a weak example of a conspiracy theory and how it manipulates, they were able to reduce conspiratorial thinking overall (this is called “prebunking.”) This is, in a sense, also propaganda: persuasion at scale. The difference is that it’s designed around evidence of what actually changes minds, not around what makes us feel like we’re fighting back.
Education, in other words. And, specifically, effective education. An example of a method that has evidence backing it up. One that, by the way, does not involve shaming or punitive actions.
The ADL used to put out more educational work themselves, specifically through the Center on Extremism. But as they’ve moved towards a more authoritarian and overtly pro-Israel/anti-critique model, they’ve become less and less effective in this regard. They’ve deleted their own “extremism glossary” with over a thousand pages of education after backlash led by Elon Musk. Among other retreats. And their punitive approach has led to so much loss in trust that they would not be trusted by many of the people who need to hear from them anyway.
Imagine if the likely $20,000 spent on Montana Tucker’s ADL keynote was spent on prebunking videos.
There are also many other metric-based examples of ways to reduce prejudice after people have already become prejudiced. Things like “intergroup contact” (aka interfaith dialogue) have decades of proven effects. They don’t alone end prejudice, and are often banged against as failures when conflicts emerged while other tactics are kept unquestioned, but they are one of the few that actually lead to change.
And to be clear, this contact requires more than some nice meetings, a common issue. They require real dialogue, the kind that today would likely lead to the loss of funding by major donors (I am in close contact with an organization called NewGround, which does exactly this, and you would be amazed how much smaller their budget is than other organizations engaged in shallow forms of dialogue).
These are just a few examples. I do not mean to make them sound in any sense as a be all and end all, but rather as examples of what occurs when you measure things by the success they provide instead of metrics completely disconnected from their supposed goals.
We can also learn lessons from criminology and Defiance Theory. While punishment that feels unjust and from outside the community can lead to worse outcomes, there is evidence from many different fields that treating people with respect, maintaining their dignity, and treating them as human beings with agency who can change as opposed to inherent failures who need to be managed leads to far more positive outcomes.
This is true in examples of restorative justice as an alternative to the current justice system. It is also true in cases of addiction research, which shows that “confrontational” approaches to treatment are far less effective than those that are empathetic and “active” (eg dialogue as opposed to videos).
On and on. There are lessons to be found everywhere. And while we have, unfortunately, not done enough research when it comes to antisemitism itself in this regard, it is bizarre to use approaches that fail in favor of those that have history of working elsewhere.
It is bizarre, though, only when you measure things better. When you care about reducing antisemitism instead of punishment, you do better work. When you measure your success by the same metrics as your actual activities, you are just talking to yourself.
One is solution and evidence based. The other is disconnected from reality and attached to imagined morality and old habits of a culture used to thinking of force as equated to change.
The End
It is hard to imagine a world without antisemitism. I think this is the hidden reason so many people choose to punish instead of dream of change. They have a bias that informs their approach: one which assumes the world will always hate us, so we may as well punish those we can and build our own power in the meantime.
The irony is that it is that view that has no evidence to it. And it distracts us from the very real solutions right in front of us.
It can also push us to go even deeper. Research tells us people don’t believe conspiracy theories because they are inherently conspiratorial. They believe them because they need a sense of control, because they need their group to feel significant, because they need community. Those are human needs, not character flaws.
Which means the deepest work is not just smarter tactics. It is building a world where people don’t need conspiracy theories to feel safe or significant. Making a better world overall, in other words. That feels like the best metric of all.