Too many Jewish institutions have failed this moment.

Many Jewish organizations were designed for an era when social acceptance felt permanent. That era is over.

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This is a guest essay by Melissa Brodsky, a writer focused on media literacy, modern antisemitism, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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When was the last time a Jewish institution actually protected a Jew?

I’m not talking about issuing a statement, holding a vigil, or sending a strongly worded letter to a university president.

I’m talking about actually protecting one or more Jews.

Instead, we spent 50 years teaching about the Holocaust — not necessarily what led to it, not the conditions that made it possible, but the slow erosion of civil standing, the normalization of eliminationist language, the institutions that looked away.

We often talked just about what happened: the camps, the numbers, the photographs. We taught it in schools, built museums around it, made it required curriculum in a dozen states, and told ourselves that if people understood the horror, they’d refuse to repeat it.

They understood it. Many of them just didn’t care that much.

So the question isn’t what happened. We know what happened. The question is where we go from here, because there’s a lot of damage to undo and the people who were supposed to protect us have spent a generation teaching history instead of making sure we don’t repeat it.

Here’s what this month looked like.

A hotel clerk named Johann Spischak told an Israeli couple checking into the Oceanpoint Ranch in Cambria that they were baby killers. He filmed it and posted it himself. He wrote that he’d stared into the soul of the devil.

In Brooklyn, Dan Sohail cleared the barricades outside Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters and told people to move. Then he drove his car into the entrance five times while hundreds prayed inside. He later pleaded guilty to intentionally targeting the building.

In Michigan, Ayman Mohamed Ghazali drove an F-150 into Temple Israel and opened fire, citing Hezbollah ideology as his motivation. In London’s Golders Green, a 45-year-old British Somali named Essa Suleiman stabbed two Jewish men in a declared terrorist attack. Weeks later, five Arabic-speaking men heard 22-year-old Shalev Ben Yakar speaking Hebrew outside his apartment at 2 in the morning. They chased him, dragged him across the road, formed a circle around him and kicked him until he nearly lost consciousness.

In Manchester last Yom Kippur, a Syrian-born British citizen named Jihad al-Shamie drove his car into worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation. He got out and stabbed Melvin Cravitz, 66, to death before police shot him. His name translates literally as “the Syrian.” He was wearing what turned out to be a fake suicide vest. Swastikas went up across Queens, including on a Holocaust survivor’s front door.

In Texas, a woman named Maureen Galindo won a Democratic congressional primary calling for “Zionists” (i.e., Jews) to be imprisoned. She accused them of controlling banks, media, and politicians and invoked language lifted directly from medieval blood libel. Her party called it vile. She told them she doesn’t care what Zionist-owned politicians think.

We keep calling these incidents but, really, they are a pattern with an address.

None of these people acted in isolation. Spischak filmed himself because he expected approval — and he got it. Jihad al-Shamie chose Yom Kippur deliberately. Essa Suleiman was known to police before the stabbing. Ayman Mohamed Ghazali cited Hezbollah ideology as his motivation. Galindo built an audience saying what she said and that audience voted for her. These were acts committed by people who believed they were doing something righteous in communities that had told them so.

The language isn’t new: the cabal controlling banks and media, Jews as predators of children, blood accusations woven into demands for justice. These charges go back centuries and they’re traveling right now through congressional campaigns, hotel lobbies, and residential streets without losing a step. What’s changed isn’t the hatred. It’s how comfortable it’s become in spaces we thought were safe.

British writer Melanie Phillips wrote this week that Jews are being attacked as one people, and it’s time we all realized it. The attackers already understand this perfectly. Essa Suleiman didn’t ask his victims where they stood on Israeli settlements. Jihad al-Shamie chose a synagogue on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Maureen Galindo didn’t specify which kind of Jews she wanted imprisoned. A swastika on a Holocaust survivor’s door isn’t a commentary on foreign policy.

A significant portion of diaspora Jewry still hasn’t absorbed this, and some of our own institutions are actively making it worse — because it seems they were not built for this moment. They were built for a different era. Integration was the goal.

The mission was contributing to broader society, building schools and synagogues and cultural institutions, and trusting that Holocaust education would keep the worst of it at bay. We invested heavily in explaining antisemitism, in awareness campaigns, in public condemnation, in making the case to whoever would listen. We believed that if we argued clearly enough, the trend would reverse.

It didn’t reverse — and we finally need to be honest about why.

Too many of our organizations have stopped being able to say hard things. The funding model requires maintaining relationships across the political spectrum, including with donors and institutions that have made their peace with “anti-Zionism.”

Some have gone further than that.

So the statements get carefully worded. The condemnations get qualified. The lines get blurred between criticism of policy and dehumanization of a people, because drawing that line clearly might cost someone a grant or a seat at a table. An organization that can’t call something what it is isn’t protecting anyone, just itself.

Institutional neutrality has a cost — and right now the Jewish community is paying it.

Israel did not build its security culture through awareness campaigns or strongly worded letters. It built that culture because it accepted, through hard experience, that threats are real, preparation isn’t optional, and no one else is coming. The diaspora has treated Israel as a cause to defend rather than a model to learn from.

That’s the gap we need to close.

Pride in being Jewish means knowing who you are. What comes next is building communities that can actually withstand what’s being directed at them. That means taking physical safety seriously year-round. It means building the legal, professional, and economic networks so no one faces this alone. It means educating Jewish children not just about their identity, but about the world they’re going to walk into when they leave our schools.

They already know we’re one people. Every single one of them — from Jihad al-Shamie to Maureen Galindo to the men in Golders Green — has been operating on that assumption the whole time.

The Jewish communities that survive the next 50 years will be the ones that looked at what’s actually happening, stopped waiting for institutions to protect them, and built something strong enough to last. We have everything we need to do that. What’s been missing is the willingness to look clearly at this moment and respond to it honestly.

The argument has been made. It’s been made well, for a long time and by people far smarter than the people who need to hear it. It hasn’t been enough. It’s time to build something instead.

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