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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The Jewish world has too many historians and not enough game theorists.
That is not an insult to historians. Few peoples have had greater reason to study history than the Jews. We remember expulsions, pogroms, inquisitions, blood libels, ghettos, emancipations, and betrayals because forgetting has rarely been an available luxury.
History tells us where certain ideas came from; why conspiracy theories about Jewish money resemble medieval fantasies about Jewish usury; why accusations of dual loyalty have such an unpleasant pedigree; why the Jew has alternately been blamed for capitalism and communism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, war and cowardice, racial contamination and excessive clannishness.
Historical knowledge helps inform our decisions. Yet it is not the only discipline that can do so. The Jewish world must spend more time with game theorists.
Game theory is concerned with strategic interaction: what happens when my behavior changes yours, yours changes mine, and both of us anticipate what the other will do next when we may or may not have the same knowledge. It asks about incentives, signaling, deterrence, credibility, escalation, cooperation, defection, and repeated encounters.
Instead of asking whether something is right, historically recognizable, or intellectually defensible, it asks whether it works. Things that work are in short supply in the battle against antisemitism.
Jewish advocacy groups are outstanding at documentation. Organizations count incidents, classify rhetoric, publish surveys, trace ideological lineages, educate journalists, brief politicians, and explain how contemporary language echoes older hatreds.
The data are grim. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in 2025. That was down substantially from the extraordinary levels of 2024, but it was still the third-highest annual total since records began. Physical assaults on Jews rose to the highest level ADL had recorded. The data are similar in Canada, Britain, France, Australia, and across the West.
The problem is clear, but strategies to stop it are less so.
Suppose Jewish university students hold an event and antisemites disrupt it. The Jewish students call it out, the event becomes national news, and Jewish organizations issue furious statements and secure an emergency meeting with university administrators. Days of argument and memes ensue on social media.
What lesson has been communicated? Jewish organizations may believe they have demonstrated vigilance in drawing attention to antisemitism. The Jew-haters may conclude that they have discovered an excellent publicity machine. That is a game-theoretical problem.
The alternative is to ask what would change the payoff. Before their next event, the Jewish students might talk to administrators first, and then insist upon written enforcement protocols, predetermined consequences for disruption, security arrangements, and clear escalation procedures if administrators refuse to enforce their own rules. If the rules are subsequently ignored, the response should move automatically from persuasion to whatever legitimate institutional, legal, or regulatory mechanisms are available.
The objective is not to win an argument about whether Jews can hold meetings. It is to create an expectation that disrupting the event — or permitting its disruption — carries a predictable cost.
The same is true for the politician who learns that issuing a generic statement condemning antisemitism satisfies communal leaders enough to shut them up. And the university president who discovers that commissioning a task force buys six months of not having to make a difficult decision. None of these actors needs to be sitting in a vape-filled room conspiring against Jews. They are simply responding to incentives.
Reward and punishment can shape actions. Reward a behavior consistently and you should not be surprised when you receive more of it. In behavioral psychology, this is termed operant conditioning.
Jewish advocacy groups often behave as though drawing attention to antisemitism represents victory. A speaker makes an outrageous claim. Jewish organizations amplify it while denouncing it. Journalists call. Social media explodes. The offender becomes famous. Their followers multiply. Donations arrive. Everyone congratulates themselves on having exposed antisemitism. Who, precisely, lost?
Consider the obscure online provocateur who posts something grotesquely antisemitic to his audience of 8,000 people. Ten major Jewish accounts quote-post him in outrage. Journalists pick up on it and his post then reaches two million people. He has discovered that baiting Jews is excellent for business.
The strategic response may sometimes be the opposite. Document the material. Report it where appropriate. Contact an employer, university, platform, or relevant authority if a genuine rule has been broken. Warn the people who need warning. Yet deny the provocateur the mass audience he seeks to manufacture. The calculation changes entirely once Jewish outrage ceases to function as free distribution.
This requires judgment. A major politician spreading an antisemitic conspiracy cannot be ignored. Nor can a genuine threat. Yet a movement that treats a cabinet minister and an anonymous account with 600 followers as requiring the same public mobilization has abandoned strategy for reflex.
Silence is not always wiser. Sometimes exposure is essential and embarrassment is the only thing that will make an institution act. Sometimes public attention protects people.
Game theory does not issue commandments. It asks questions. What behavior are we rewarding? What behavior are we punishing? What precedent does our response establish? What will a rational opponent do the next time?
Those questions are too absent from modern-day Jewish advocacy. History has trained Jews to explain themselves. For centuries, misunderstanding could be lethal, so Jews became accomplished at apologetics in the original sense: the disciplined defense of a position. A false accusation was met with evidence and a theological attack received argument.
This instinct survives. Some fool claims Jews have no historical connection to Jerusalem, and Jews produce archaeology. A clown distorts Zionism and Jews explain Theodor Herzl. An unknown cretin invokes international law, and Jews respond with actual international law.
Much of this is intellectually necessary, but it contains a strategic trap: Every answer tacitly accepts that the accusation merits an answer. Provide enough answers and an asymmetry develops: One side makes allegations at virtually zero intellectual cost, the other side must produce a doctoral thesis, by which time the attacker has moved on to telling other lies.
As befitting a people who value learning so highly, Jews treat it as an exercise in scholarship. It should just be about the economics of communication.
Game theorists have shown that power frequently resides less in what one possesses than in the expectations one creates. Deterrence works when the other party believes certain behavior will predictably produce an undesirable consequence. Credibility matters more than indignation. Jewish organizations understand this in physical security. A synagogue does not deter attackers by explaining why attacking synagogues is antisemitic. It installs barriers, bollards, cameras, guards, and procedures to alter the attackers’ calculations.
Strangely, this strategic clarity evaporates in the cultural sphere, where the preferred weapons remain statements, seminars, and moral instruction.
The same principle applies in workplaces. Imagine Jewish employees repeatedly encountering discriminatory treatment while the employer learns that the likely consequence is a meeting with human resources and a rehashed internal memo about inclusion. Nothing in that equilibrium requires the employer to change very much.
But if documented discrimination predictably triggers formal complaints, litigation, regulatory scrutiny, professional embarrassment, or substantial financial liability, the calculation changes. An employer would understand that protecting Jewish employees is less costly; so has an incentive to act.
The Jewish reluctance to use game theory more aggressively reflects a flawed but deeply ingrained assumption that if people understood antisemitism properly, they would stop being antisemitic. That is an attractive idea, but wrong. And it certainly will not work in an environment where antisemitism provides social rewards.
If hostility toward Zionists brings status inside someone’s political tribe, increases his online following, demonstrates ideological purity, and wins peer approval, sending them a link about the blood libel’s history is not going to achieve anything. Their problem is not inadequate information. Their incentives are functioning perfectly. This is critical for Jews to grasp because much contemporary antisemitism operates inside prestige systems.
Certain beliefs confer admission to particular social worlds and demonstrate virtue. The individual does not arrive at the position through reason. They just notice what earns applause. Humans are social animals and exquisitely sensitive to applause and feelings of belonging. Condemnation from the enemy may even make that applause louder. It can even be a badge of honor. “The ADL says I am antisemitic” can function as a credential within certain circles. The traditional weapon has reversed polarity.
So a functioning strategy needs more than moral clarity; it requires a theory of behavior and a clear vision of the desired outcome. Fewer attacks? Institutional sanctions? Social stigma? Better police enforcement? Greater Jewish confidence? Reduced recruitment into extremist movements? Less amplification of fringe actors? Stronger alliances? Those are different objectives and may require contradictory tactics.
An organization cannot intelligently choose a strategy until it knows what victory looks like as an outcome. If the number of antisemitic attacks rises every year despite Jews becoming more reluctant to display Jewish symbols, it suggests that not wearing Jewish symbols does not stop antisemitic attacks, although it may reduce risk at the individual level.
There is another game theory insight that Jewish organizations should take more seriously: Repeated games are different from single encounters. Most Jewish institutions interact repeatedly with universities, governments, media organizations, and civil-society groups. Everyone remembers previous behavior, meaning that precedent matters.
If an institution learns that mistreating Jewish students produces three angry meetings followed by reconciliation without consequence, it has learned something. So have the students and other institutions watching. Conversely, when antisemitic behavior reliably produces reputational, legal, professional, or institutional costs imposed through legitimate processes, future actors incorporate those costs into their decisions.
Politics offers an especially clear example. A politician attends a Jewish communal dinner, says antisemitism has “no place in our society,” receives enthusiastic applause and photographs, then does nothing when Jewish institutions ask for action six months later. If the politician is invited back the following year, the politician has learned something useful: Rhetorical solidarity is sufficient.
A strategic community would distinguish systematically between words and costly action. Politicians who intervene when institutions discriminate, support effective law enforcement, defend Jewish citizens when doing so carries political risk, or translate promises into policy receive access, praise, and cooperation. Those who offer ceremonial sympathy while repeatedly declining meaningful action do not get the same treatment. It is elementary incentive design.
This produces a different playbook for confronting antisemitism. Do not:
Automatically amplify people seeking attention
Give politicians the same communal rewards for words that you give them for action
Repeatedly negotiate institutional boundaries whose violation carries no consequence
Spend 20 pages rebutting an accusation whose author spent 20 seconds inventing it
Instead, decide first what behavior you want to change, identify what rewards that behavior, and then alter the reward structure wherever legitimate means allow. It could mean education, exposure, litigation, disciplinary action, political pressure, withdrawal of cooperation, or deliberate silence.
The important thing is that the response should follow from the objective rather than from habit.
Memory without strategy carries its own dangers. It can leave a community knowledgeable about how its enemies behaved in 1890 — while remaining clueless about how to combat them in 2026.
https://l.smartnews.com/p-8FKmdvc4/fkqXH3
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