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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 machinery is formidable: antisemitism commissioners and special envoys, monitoring centers and research institutes, parliamentary inquiries and university task forces, Holocaust-education programs, interfaith initiatives and government strategies.
Conferences convene experts to discuss the findings of previous conferences. Working groups establish frameworks for future working groups. Organizations publish annual reports showing antisemitism has again reached alarming levels, whereupon governments announce initiatives ensuring that next year’s report has an even longer section describing everything being done about it.
The latest challenge to this elaborate edifice arrived on Tuesday, courtesy of the American electorate in the midterm elections.
In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed won a U.S. Senate seat, becoming the first Muslim elected to the chamber. His victory came despite his blatant antisemitism and criticism of his response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue. A year earlier, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, despite being strongly anti-Zionist, which is a form of antisemitism.
The uncomfortable question is why antisemitic politicians are proving electorally popular. What happens when ideas the fighting antisemitism industry has spent decades trying to discredit cease to be politically disqualifying and become electorally advantageous? What, exactly, do we have to show for all this?
This is not an argument against organizations fighting antisemitism. Some perform indispensable work protecting synagogues, assisting victims, training police, documenting incidents, challenging discrimination, and maintaining expertise that governments lack.
In Britain, for example, the Community Security Trust (a charity that protects British Jews from antisemitism, hate crimes, and terrorism) does more than publish reports. It provides security, investigates incidents, supports victims, and works with police.
Yet useful work does not exempt institutions from scrutiny. If antisemitism is serious enough to command enormous amounts of communal money, government expenditure, philanthropic capital, and human effort, it is serious enough to ask whether it the methods used against it work.
The results hardly scream victory. Britain recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total ever reported to Community Security Trust. In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 incidents, down from 2024 but still far higher than a decade earlier, while assaults reached a record level. Data from France, Canada and Australia tell the same story.
Meanwhile, surveys show many Jews have changed their behavior because of fear, including avoiding wearing visible Jewish symbols or situations where their identity might make them vulnerable. If the purpose is to reduce antisemitism, these are awkward numbers.
Electoral evidence introduces another disturbing dimension: the failure to prevent antisemitic ideas, imagery, and rationalizations from becoming politically respectable.
In New York City, Zohran Mamdani entered City Hall after a campaign marked by controversy over his views on Israel. He resisted condemning the slogan “globalize the intifada.” He has questioned the legitimacy of Israel’s specifically Jewish national character. Once in office, he revoked his predecessor’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. Mamdani even rejects a relationship between anti-Israel demonstrations and attacks on Jews in New York, a patently absurd position that only a nasty antisemitic piece of work would advance.
In September, he then unveiled a strategy against Jew-hatred, including security funding, education, and assistance for Jewish institutions. The irony is too exquisite for satire. New York City’s mayor was announcing an elaborate strategy against the very antisemitism his own rhetoric had helped stoke.
In Michigan, after the March attack on Temple Israel near Detroit, El-Sayed said “hurt people hurt people,” explaining the attack in terms of a wider cycle of violence. Critics heard it clearly for what it was: an attempt to contextualize, and potentially excuse, an assault directed against a Jewish religious institution.
His election cannot reasonably be attributed to antisemitism. Voters were preoccupied with inflation, the Iran war, and dissatisfaction with the Trump Administration. Nevertheless, his victory shows that despite decades of work, the fighting antisemitism industry has failed to make holding antisemitic views politically consequential.
Across the pond in Britain, several independents defeated Labour Party opponents in 2024 after campaigning against Israel’s war in Gaza. One was Shockat Adam, who unseated a senior Labour figure in Leicester South and declared, “This is for the people of Gaza” — despite having no power to do anything about Gaza.
In September 2025, Adam described the Israeli military’s “blood-soaked tentacles” extending toward Qatar during a parliamentary debate in a clear throwback to the old antisemitic visual vocabulary depicting Jewish power as a monstrous, grasping octopus.
Another Gaza-focused independent, Adnan Hussain, won Blackburn in 2024. The campaign revived attention to a 2014 speech in which he declared, “Now let’s make Israel burn.” Hussain said that the remarks had been made in intense emotion and that his speech, considered as a whole, conveyed a positive and inclusive message.
Britain has Holocaust education, parliamentary scrutiny, antisemitism monitors, government strategies, and specialist organizations. Yet politicians can enter Parliament on intensely anti-Israel platforms, using plainly antisemitic language and imagery.
Australia supplies another variation. Senator Fatima Payman was elected for the Australian Labor Party in 2022, broke with the party over Palestinian statehood, and established Australia’s Voice, seemingly to provide representation for Muslim views. She attracted intense criticism in 2024 for using the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” — which anybody smarter than a jellyfish recognizes as a call for Israel’s destruction and the displacement, if not genocide, of its Jews.
The antisemitism industry has spent years warning about the dangers of political language that denies Jewish rights while presenting itself as emancipatory. Its warnings have not obviously been successful.
Antisemitism survives by adapting to the prevailing moral vocabulary. It has been religious, racial, nationalist, socialist, conspiratorial, and revolutionary. Today it adopts the language of human rights and anti-colonial liberation, presenting hostility toward Jewish national self-determination as a uniquely enlightened position.
That is where the professional apparatus should demonstrate clarity and persuasive effectiveness. Instead, much of its energy is spent debating terminology while political movements develop alternative vocabularies in which objections from Jewish institutions can themselves be dismissed as attempts to suppress debate. The results expose a neglected outcome measure: whether the wider society has absorbed enough historical and moral knowledge to recognize antisemitism when it arrives dressed as contemporary political virtue.
That question belongs in any assessment of the billions spent fighting Jew-hatred.
This does not mean that the organizations involved are useless. Antisemitism responds to wars, extremism, social media, economic upheaval, and forces beyond Jewish institutions’ control. Without their efforts, it is entirely possible that matters could be worse.
Yet “it would have been worse without us” cannot become an all-purpose institutional get-out-of-jail-free card. If that is the claim, demonstrate it. If an intervention protects Jews without reducing prejudice, say so. If a program is educational, define success. If it is intended to reduce incidents, show whether incidents fell among the populations reached. Any institution allowed to define every possible outcome as evidence of its own necessity has escaped accountability. That is how causes become industries.
An industry does not require cynical people sitting around hoping the problem continues. The people working in this field are sincere. Institutional incentives require no villains — just salaries, departments, reputations, budgets, and a desire to survive.
The problem is structural. Institutions have little incentive to announce that their methods do not work. Programs acquire constituencies. Conferences acquire sponsors. Departments acquire directors. Educational packages acquire trainers. Reports acquire annual release dates. Eventually, the machinery takes on a life of its own. Antisemitism then becomes simultaneously the enemy and the business model. That formulation will anger people, which is why it deserves examination.
The nonprofit and governmental ecosystem rewards activity more reliably than effectiveness. A foundation can count students attending a seminar. A government can count teachers completing training. An organization can count meetings with ministers, reports downloaded, social-media impressions, incidents documented, and people reached.
Measuring whether anybody became less antisemitic is much harder; so is determining whether a workshop altered behavior six months later, whether a Holocaust lesson changed attitudes rather than just transmitted historical knowledge, whether another ministerial declaration deterred anyone from harassing a Jew, or whether a university antisemitism strategy made Jewish students safer rather than simply proving that the university has an antisemitism strategy.
So the easiest things to count become the things institutions celebrate. Activity impersonates achievement.
This is obvious in official descriptions of progress. Governments announce strategies, coordinators, working groups and action points. These are administrative milestones that tell us nothing about whether people have become less hostile toward Jews. Security spending exposes the distinction even more starkly. Governments are spending more to protect Jewish schools, synagogues, and community centers. That money is justified. If Jews face elevated threats, protecting them is among the state’s most fundamental duties.
Yet there is something damning about measuring progress against antisemitism by the thickness of the security arrangements required for Jews to attend synagogue. A guard outside a Jewish school may be highly effective while representing a catastrophic social failure. The security cameras can work perfectly. The barrier can stop the vehicle. The police officer can deter the attacker. Society has become better at protecting Jews, not necessarily less antisemitic.
Much of what passes for combating antisemitism is managing it. One branch documents it, another teaches about it, another secures buildings, another advises government, another supports victims and another defines it. All may be necessary; none should be confused automatically with reducing the underlying phenomenon.
Education deserves especially close scrutiny. Holocaust education has expanded across the West as antisemitism has returned in new ideological forms. Britain has an extensive Holocaust-education infrastructure, yet its Jewish population continues to face extraordinary hostility. This suggests that teaching people about Auschwitz and inoculating them against contemporary Jew-hatred are different tasks.
Students can know Nazis were evil while believing Jews possess sinister political power. They can condemn racial antisemitism while adopting political forms of demonization they regard as virtuous. They can absorb the lesson that genocide is evil without learning how conspiratorial thinking, scapegoating, and collective blame work.
Holocaust education is often most comfortable when antisemitism is presented as a historical pathology committed by recognizably monstrous people in black-and-white photographs. The harder antisemitism is the version that believes itself righteous. How much education addresses that problem? More importantly, how much of it is tested?
Any pharmaceutical company announcing that its medicine had been administered to millions while the disease continued spreading would eventually be asked for clinical outcomes. Nobody would be satisfied by hearing how many brochures had been distributed. Jewish organizations should demand the same discipline of themselves.
That means being willing to discover that cherished programs achieve little, comparing interventions rather than assuming all awareness is useful, and distinguishing between committed antisemites, persuadable people, institutional leaders, and ordinary citizens who know almost nothing about Jews. Those are not the same audiences, so it should not be a given that they require the same remedy.
Jewish organizations should welcome scrutiny if it brings about better results. If a program works, prove it and expand it. If policing reduces repeat offending, demonstrate it. If educational interventions shift attitudes durably, replicate them. Compare university policies where Jewish students feel safe identifying openly with those where conditions deteriorated. If social media campaigns produce only satisfying engagement among people already onside, admit that too.
None of this will eradicate antisemitism. The perfect seminar will not defeat a hatred that has survived Christianity, Islam, nationalism, communism, fascism, capitalism, monarchy, democracy, prosperity, depression, Jewish weakness, and Jewish sovereignty.
Ironically, many organizations monitoring antisemitism already have the machinery required for such an audit. They already collect data about the problem. They should turn that apparatus inward. Institutions prefer auditing antisemitism to auditing themselves. One produces urgency, funding, and moral authority. The other may discover that a beloved initiative has underperformed.
Antisemitism is too serious to become a permanent professional ecosystem whose principal metric of success is how much everyone is doing to fight it. If statistics worsen as the apparatus grows and threatening rhetoric becomes politically ordinary, the answer cannot forever be another summit, coordinator, glossy strategy, or declaration that this time society really means it.
Sooner or later, somebody has to ask: Is it actually working?
The Democratic systems in many western countries are more amenable to exploitation from fundamentalist groups based on the naivety of Universalism and “ human rights “. More than ever Jewish /Israel interest groups must engage other communities to promote understanding. Just talking amongst ourselves leads nowhere.
Thank you Nachum. The problem is not (only) antisemitism it is the rise of radical Islam. Until we refocus our efforts and call out this scourge, the results will be empty language without results.