Let me be contrarian here.
Jewish groups have never assumed the responsibility of trying to stop antisemitism. We are about to read, during Passover, about the inevitability of of this disease. They can’t stop it from occurring. Their strategy has been to carefully pick which battles to fight. For many years, the act of refraining from labeling every linguistic slight or country club ‘restriction’–refraining from creating a constant din of accusations–has been quite effective.
The strategy was no match for the amount of petrodollars that flooded into the country, into the academy, into any number of ‘grassroots’ organizations, whose members gradually moved into news organizations–the sole purpose has been to destroy the State of Israel–by portraying Israel as the majority oppressor in the middle east. The Jewish groups were taken by surprise as antisemitism morphed into anti-zionism, and now, it’s back again as anti-semitism.
And besides, if Jewish organizations needed to devote all of their time and energy debunking a myth that any sentient being can see is false simply by looking at a map–then the problem has grown to proportions beyond their ability to effectively deal with it.
Right now, it appears that these organizations are trying to hunker down where they are strong, in the Democratic Party, for instance.
That being said, Jewish groups, to generalize, like to think of themselves as modern, and today modern means not being religious. Well, if a Jew doesn’t want to be religious, then define ‘Jew’. This is tantamount to Spiderman getting caught in his own web.
And that is where the problems truly have their roots–in the inability of Jewish educational institutions, that is, Hebrew schools, day schools, and pulpit rabbis, to effectively teach Jews themselves who we are, why we are, and what we are about. Consequently, this lets other folks do a more effective job of defining us. And this has never worked to our benefit–that is, it has always had disastrous consequences.
