The Long Brief: The Inverted Body
American Jewish institutions still fund three separate peoples. The people targeting them have been reading a single body for fifty years.
A scheduling note — no daily brief today, so all of us can get our houses in order for the chag. This Long Brief was queued in advance and is hitting inboxes while I’m somewhere over the Rockies on the red-eye home from California. Back to the regular Sunday morning cadence this weekend.
Boker tov, friends.
About a week and a half ago I was stuck on the tarmac for a delay at LAX, and the woman [she looked was dressed in what appeared to be a sort of religious-Zionist way, and we thought she might have been Jewish—seems like she was] two seats down spent a good twenty minutes on the phone with what turned out to be her daughter.
Half of it was the ordinary stuff — did you eat, is the wifi any good there. The other half was a grandson three weeks into the army, a cousin’s wedding pushed to the fall, whether the whole family could get over for it, what the flights cost now. She wasn’t making a point. She was a grandmother whose family runs across two countries and an ocean, and who plainly does not experience that as two of anything.
She has it right. Every institution built to serve her has it wrong.
Because the institutions still count her as three. American Jewry, where she votes and pays her dues. Israel, where her grandson serves, handled like a line of foreign policy. And the communities at risk somewhere else again, Britain, France, Latin America, the old Soviet places, filed under rescue [not as though there are no issues in the US]. Three units of account. Three campaigns. Three reasons a donor gets asked to give. The grandmother at the gate is one body. The system that raises money off her is three.
The Jewish people has not been three things since 1948. It has been one center and a diaspora since 1967, visibly, and one body without argument since the morning of October 8, 2023. The grandmother lives that as a plain fact. The institutions that fundraise in her name still do not, and what they fund is the median artifact of American Jewish life in 2026. What follows is the distance between the two.
The body is one, and it inverted
Simon Rawidowicz asked the right question before either side of it had a shape. In Bavel vi-Yerushalayim he refused Ahad Ha’am’s center-and-periphery model and named the unit plainly: not a sovereign center with a fading rim, but a single people held together across borders.
At the founding conference of the Brit Ivrit Olamit in Berlin in 1931 he put it in one line. We have learned the laws of center and periphery, he told the room, and from now on we must learn the laws of partnership. When Ben-Gurion later wrote to him that locking the word “Israel” to the new state was harmless, that no educated reader would confuse the people with the polity, Rawidowicz answered that the appropriation “divides that which is one.”
He was right, Ben-Gurion was wrong, and almost nobody in the institutions that would have to live inside the answer ever read the book.
His editors, Myers and Ravid, say so directly: it stayed “linguistically inaccessible to most readers in the Diaspora and ideologically remote from most readers in the State of Israel.”
A decade earlier, in his essay on what he called the ever-dying people, he had written that each Jewish generation experiences itself as the last and that the dying is how the people keeps living. That was the seat he watched 1948 from, and he never contested the state. He contested the move that shrank the people’s name to the state’s.
His question survived him. His answer did not. He imagined two generative centers in renewed dialogue, each producing, each formally distinct, and that held in 1957. It stopped holding by the 1970s, and the number that tells the story most simply is the demographic one. In 1948 roughly six percent of the world’s Jews lived in Israel and ninety-four percent in the diaspora. By 2024 Israel held the largest Jewish population on earth, 7,153,000 against 6,300,000 in the United States, a near-even split tilting Israel’s way, with the majority projected inside a decade. Sergio DellaPergola put the inflection in cool prose in his 2024 population survey: Israel “arose again, after 2000 years, to the status of the largest Jewish community in the world.” Fertility drives it. Israel’s total fertility runs near 3.0, the highest in the developed world, and the diaspora sits below replacement almost everywhere, with Pew measuring American Orthodox families at 3.3 children and the non-Orthodox at 1.4. The only diaspora communities still actively generating themselves are the ones whose demographics look Israeli.
The money inverted on the same curve. UJA raised $175 million in the month after the Six-Day War, against a $250 million baseline for an entire year, and the Israel Emergency Fund it stood up in June 1967 hardened into a permanent channel by the time the 1973 war made it routine. The Reform movement’s own fiftieth-anniversary retrospective is blunt about what changed: 1967 “transformed Jewish culture” and “changed both the direction and focus of the Jewish communal agenda.” Israel stopped being one cause among many and became the purpose the rest organized around. CJF and UJA merged into UJC in 1999, which became JFNA in 2009, and the org chart finished what the giving had already done.
Look. The people who built the conceptual room for this were not writing about Jews. Stephen Krasner, in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, was writing about the gap between what states swear to and what they actually do, and about what international-relations theorists call informal empires — real authority exercised over populations that are, on paper, citizens of somebody else. Saskia Sassen was writing about sovereignty leaking out of the nation-state. Israel runs inside what they described. The application to the Jewish case is mine, not theirs. But the books are on the shelf, and the institutional class allocating American Jewish capital against a 1957 model hasn’t seemed to have cracked them open.
The 1950 Law of Return gives every Jew the right to come [subject, however, to interminable bureacracy it would seem], and the 1970 amendment widened it to a Jewish grandparent and to spouses, broader than halacha and broader than any citizenship offer any other state extends to a people abroad. The 2018 Basic Law made immigration-to-automatic-citizenship exclusive to Jews and wrote it into the pseudo-constitutional layer.
The operating side matches the legal one. The Jewish Agency works in more than sixty countries on a budget north of $300 million, ties forty-five Israeli communities to more than five hundred diaspora ones through Partnership2Gether, and embeds its shlichim inside diaspora schools and youth movements. Mosaic United, stood up in 2015 by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry as a joint Israel-government and diaspora-philanthropy initiative, funds identity programming on American campuses at tens of millions of dollars. Foreign Minister Sa’ar quadrupled the public-diplomacy budget to roughly $730 million for 2026, twenty times the pre-October-7 figure, and defended it in the same breath as “jets, bombs, and missile interceptors.” That is a sovereign treating diaspora-facing work as a function of the state. Sa’ar is not subtle in this. The MFA understands what the diaspora institutions still call partnership.
When the bodies are physically threatened, the center acts as if they are its own. After the 1992 embassy and 1994 AMIA bombings in Buenos Aires, Mossad gathered intelligence and prepared retaliation, then called it off for fear of provoking further attacks on Jewish targets. The capability was there, and so was the standing. Israel’s ambassador said in 2014 that most of the AMIA perpetrators had been tracked down and killed. Thirty years on, Argentina’s Court of Cassation ruled Iran responsible and Hezbollah the executor, and passed a law to try them in absentia. The coordination is bilateral and old, and nobody calls it by its real name.
October 8 through 14, 2023 is the week that settles it. Israeli decisions — mobilization, hostage policy, the Gaza plan, emergency aliyah planning — moved every American Jewish institution inside a window measured in days. Federation campaigns, denominational liturgies, security-grant requests, all of it fell in behind.
The coordinator on the Israeli side never had to ask the diaspora institutions for consent, because the relationship runs on mobilization. And the institutions mobilized.
JFNA’s emergency campaign passed $850 million by day 300 and closed near $908 million, the largest single-purpose American Jewish fundraising event ever run. [Though not quite at the level where the Jewish people were told to stop giving–still a once-in-an-eternity case from the Torah.]
The Jewish Agency coordinated. JFNA raised. Decisions flowed out of Israel and money flowed in, and the people doing it kept describing it as a partnership of equals.
No modern parallel carries the inversion this far.
The Babylonian and Palestinian centers ran in tandem for a thousand years with no sovereign power in either, held together by text and law.
The colonial templates everyone reaches for, Britain and its dominions or France and Algeria, put the sovereign at the metropole and the subjects at the rim. This runs the other way. Other peoples have a homeland and a diaspora. None of them pairs a sovereign center that claims every member by right of return with distributed communities that hold full citizenship in other states, coupled to the center by its constitutional law and its operating budget.
The metropole here is the sovereign body. The rim holds the foreign passports. And the people who call this colonialism, Israel reaching over borders to “represent” Jews who are citizens elsewhere, have the picture upside down.
Informal empire covers it without the colonial frame, because the diaspora institutions were not conquered. They signed up. Mosaic is co-run. The Jewish Agency partnerships are co-funded. The security protocols are bilateral by signature and design. The diaspora institutional class is operating inside this and paying for it, and still will not name it.
David Biale dismantled the myth of the powerless diaspora and read 1948 as recovered sovereignty, stopping at the line where the genuinely new thing begins. Salo Baron broke the lachrymose history and folded Israel into one continuous Jewish story — which is exactly the move that cannot read 1948 as the break it was.
DellaPergola has produced the densest demographic series anyone has on the post-1948 people, and presents Israel and the diaspora as two populations to compare.
Yerushalmi mapped Jewish memory against modern history and never reached the third thing sovereignty produces, where the mundane fact of a state and the long covenantal time of the people fuse back together.
The body is one. It inverted two generations ago. The institutions still fund three.
What the money is funding
Start with the first error in how she gets counted. We argued in The Wrong Map that the diaspora runs on four trajectories, four different relationships to the center, and we logged the odds: full continuity around ten percent, tiered continuity around thirty, managed contraction around twenty-five, and a momentum path, contraction continuing because nobody redirected it, around forty.
A budget that books “American Jewry” as a single line is implicitly betting on the ten-percent outcome. The momentum path, the worst aggregate result, sits at forty. The institutions are over-funding the least likely future and under-funding the most likely one. That is what the median Federation budget is, stated as a wager.
The clearest artifact is JFNA’s Israel Emergency Fund grants report from February 2024. The allocations are competent and well-disciplined. Lifeline services. Economic relief. Mental health and trauma. Community resilience. Every category points at need inside Israel.
Not one line addresses the four-way split among the communities that raised the money. The most consequential allocation document in American Jewish life in two years has no way to think about the bodies generating the dollars. The dollars went out fine. What went unread was the question of who was giving and on what trajectory.
Eric Fingerhut gave the rhetorical version in his February 2026 “State of the Jewish Union.” The state of the union is “strong, but it is being tested.” One allocation category, in the most important institutional speech of the cycle. Six security recommendations to Congress, a billion-dollar grant ask, an education-tax-credit push, and no four-trajectory differentiation anywhere in it. The “but” gives it away, and I will come back to it.
One denominational decision reads the demographic curve honestly, and it is the one that looks like a defeat. Hebrew Union College has, if lawsuits don’t stop it, ordained its last Cincinnati class, after a hundred and fifty years. Enrollment ran 214 in 2006 and roughly half that by the 2022 restructure, and when the doors close every major American rabbinical seminary, across denominations, will sit on a coast. Cincinnati is where Isaac Mayer Wise built American Reform. Its closing is the demographic verdict on mid-tier non-Orthodox life in the interior, the same interior the Federation budgets still book as undifferentiated “American Jewry.”
The AVI CHAI census already showed where the next generation is: more than two-thirds of day-school enrollment sits in Orthodox, yeshiva, and Chassidic schools, and barely a tenth in non-Orthodox ones. The budget that funds “American Jewry” as one envelope cannot see this, because the envelope was built for a community that stopped existing around 2015.
The security side is where the misallocation has the most unfortunate repercussions. The Secure Community Network, built in 2004 by JFNA and the Conference of Presidents, runs a national operations center in Chicago and a federal line most faith communities do not have. It works. It is also undersized and politically exposed.
The federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program ran about $274 million in FY2025 against JFNA’s own estimate of roughly $765 million to protect Jewish communal life, under forty percent coverage, and DHS pushed $94 million to 512 Jewish organizations in a single June 2025 cycle, a one-time answer to a standing problem.
Then the FY2025 grants came conditioned on ICE cooperation, DEI restrictions, and anti-boycott compliance. The federal track that funds Jewish communal security is now partisan-conditioned, which means it cannot be relied on, which means the bilateral relationship with the center becomes the thing actually holding the line whether the institutions running it name that or not.
And the population the money represents has split underneath it on the central question.
Take a moment and go take a Tums. I’ll wait.
Polling reported last year by the Washington Post found 61 percent of American Jews saying Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, and 39 percent saying genocide. Set the merits aside.
The point for the budget: the people writing it preside over a community bifurcated on the question that defines the politics, and the budget has no category for bifurcation. It was built for a single addressable “American Jewry,” and that body is gone.
The fix follows from the diagnosis.
Split the single American-Jewry line into the four it already contains.
A full-continuity line that puts growth capital where the demographics are actually building, which is the Orthodox communities. A tiered-continuity line for the flagship-metro Conservative and Reform institutions whose density holds over a fifteen-year horizon — and work hard to build up those communities and institutions. A managed-contraction line for the mid-tier communities planning an honest transition, with HUC’s Cincinnati decision as the model and not the embarrassment. And the momentum line, the one that currently happens by default, brought into the open so it has to win the budget meeting instead of drawing the others down in silence.
Naming the fourth line is the whole move. The allocation that currently happens because nobody decided anything becomes the line item that has to defend itself out loud against the other three. And this should not be read as a call to give up — quite the contrary. We need to be brutally honest with ourselves and build the future we want. Tonight, at my shul’s Shavuot event [with a theme centered on the Jewish future], I’m talking about part of the book of Ruth… the stayers. We all need to be stayers.
Sorting communities into those four takes a real test, and we laid one out in The Wrong Map: five indicators read together, never one alone.
Day-school sustainability, meaning the enrollment trend, the tuition-to-income ratio, the scholarship depth, the teacher pipeline.
Communal-security capacity, the per-capita spend and how professional it has become.
Physical clustering, how many families live inside walking distance of a shul.
The leadership pipeline, ordination rates and the age curve of the lay board.
And the political environment the institutions sit in, which moves faster than the other four put together.
Read as a set, they place a community on its trajectory. Read one at a time, they mislead. And the test runs on communities, never on individual Jews, because the moment it gets pointed at persons it curdles into the diaspora-is-over elegy we have absolutely refuse to write.
Refusing to look does not unmake the body. It guarantees that next year’s budget repeats this year’s, and that the trajectory the money was supposed to slow keeps moving at the speed contraction moves when you fund the wrong category.
The “but” is the symptom
The thesis we own as the American Jewish “but” is the linguistic surface of all of this.
A leader affirms Israel, then qualifies the affirmation against a domestic constraint.
It exists only because the speaker is working a two-centers model. If you accepted that the body has one political center, the qualifier would be unnecessary. If you accepted that the diaspora is structurally distributed, the qualifier would be impossible.
The “but” is what is left of the model after its analytical content has run out, and it is failing now because the audience it was built for has split.
J Street is the cleanest case of that [amongst others] failure. In mid-April Jeremy Ben-Ami announced the group would stop supporting U.S. assistance for Israeli defense systems when the current MOU expires in 2028, on the reasoning that Israel, with a nominal per-capita GDP above Britain’s and France’s, can pay for its own.
Fifteen years of “pro-Israel, pro-peace” required that the defensive systems be a marginal case. Iron Dome is the system that stops the Qassam from landing on the Sderot kindergarten at seven in the morning. Withdrawing support for that, in the name of pro-Israel, is the “but” with the affirmation finally stripped out. Disgustingly, the opposition was never about offense, and the interceptor is the proof.
The ADL ran the same move until it broke in its hand. Greenblatt told the Knesset in January 2025 the group had failed to put out the post-October-7 fire, then two months later pulled out of an Israeli antisemitism conference over the guest list — pro-Israel cooperation on Jew-hate, but not photographed next to politicians with diverging policy views on other things. It worked. He got out of the room. What he could not do was reach the audience the “but” was built for, because that audience is now two audiences. We named them in Two Middles: one moral vocabulary hears “we support Israel” and stops there, the other hears the qualifier as the real position.
One sentence cannot serve both.
Zohran Mamdani’s office supplies the end state of the move, calling synagogues that host pro-Israel events violators of “international law” — the “but” with the affirmation gone entirely, and the buffer-zone politics that follow it.
On the parliamentary surface the same split shows in the count. We tracked in The Fifty Year Front the Senate Democratic votes against Israeli arms moving from 19 in mid-2024 to 27 in July 2025 to 40 of 47 this April on the Caterpillar D9 sale, with 36 against the bomb package.
The “but” rides on top of those votes. The votes underneath carry the real position.
And it is not a one-party story. To paraphrase my rabbi [who has a great track record on being correct—even if he thinks I’m too pessimistic], both parties should make us ashamed.
We have argued before that what looks like abandonment is really a partisan sort, and the sort runs through both sides. The qualifier that used to live on the Democratic left is now audible on the Republican right too, at the donor level, on the record. The middle the “but” was built to address did not collapse. It divided, and one sentence is still being aimed at both halves of it.
An institutional class working a single-body model would not need the “but” at all.
It reaches for it anyway, because the failing model is the only one it knows how to operate.
The adversary has been reading it correctly for fifty years
Here is what the same few weeks looked like from the other side of the table.
Last Saturday two demonstrations arrived in central London on one day: Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally, the larger of the two at tens of thousands, and a smaller Nakba 78 march. The Metropolitan Police ran its biggest public-order operation in years, roughly four thousand officers, 31 arrests, and a new dedicated Community Protection Team standing up specifically to protect Jewish communities. The unit did not exist a month ago. It exists because the demand on London’s protective capacity outran what the CST and ordinary policing could absorb.
Three thousand miles west, Mohamed Soliman pleaded guilty two weeks ago in a Boulder courtroom to firebombing a Jewish gathering on Pearl Street. He told officers his target was “all Zionist people,” and he had planned it for a year. The state sentence is life without parole plus more than two-thousand years. The federal hate-crime case is still live, where the death penalty remains on the table.
Five months earlier, during Hanukkah, the Akram father and son terror duo shot fifteen Jews dead at Bondi Beach, and Australia’s first Royal Commission on antisemitism opened its hearings, where the Executive Council of Australian Jewry testified that documented incidents had roughly quadrupled in the year after October 7.
That is one register, and there are others, all inside the same stretch. Italy’s Meloni suspended automatic renewal of the 2005 Italy-Israel defense memorandum in April. AOC, Khanna, Lander, and Mamdani converged on opposing Iron Dome funding, the same interceptor test J Street had just failed. Rashid Khalidi pulled his Columbia course over the university’s adoption of the IHRA definition.
A diaspora-security register, an allied-government register, a legislative register, an academic register, four faces of one thing.
The diaspora institutions still have not read themselves as one body. The people targeting that body have read it as one for fifty years.
One target
The model for how cross-border activist networks gain political weight is not exotic, and it diagrams the asymmetry exactly. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink named it in Activists Beyond Borders: the transnational advocacy network, actors “bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services.”
They identified four working tools — information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics, and accountability politics, the last of which turns a target’s own stated principles back on it — and a geometry they called the boomerang.
A domestic actor blocked at home routes the claim outward through allies abroad, who press their own governments and the international bodies, which then bear down on the original state from above. Sound familiar?
The target reads a domestic complaint it thinks it already settled. The network reads a transnational claim it can move through entirely different doors. Which grievances become network output is decided by the best-connected nodes, by position, not by the merits.
Watch it run on Israel.
An Israeli-Arab advocacy group that loses an argument in a Jerusalem courtroom does not stop there. It files in Geneva, where a friendly rapporteur [now, who might that be?] writes it up, where European foreign ministries cite the writeup, where the citation comes back down on Israel as outside pressure. Israel reads a domestic case it already adjudicated. The network reads a global claim with four more doors to walk through. The tools fan out across the network. One files the report, one hangs the banner, one moves the divestment, one turns Israel’s own stated commitments back on it. Nobody in the chain has to share the next one’s reasons.
This is the move that matters, and it is why we read hostile coalitions as instruments of pressure before we read them as a conspiracy.
The four tools work from any corner of the network without the actors sharing a motive. A scholar applying an academic boycott, a city councilman pushing divestment, a UN rapporteur filing a report, and a campus group hanging a banner can produce coordinated output while wanting different things.
Malice exists, and we name it where it lives. But malice is the second explanation. The first is that the structure produces the targeting, and the test is simple: does the output change when the personnel change? It does not. The slot-holders rotate and the product stays the same. Naming this as structure is the precondition for any response that is not one more round of the moralizing the diaspora institutions have already exhausted.
And this is not classified. It is undergraduate political science. Anyone who wrote a thesis on transnational advocacy in the last twenty years passed through Keck and Sikkink, and the framework is taught at Georgetown and Columbia, the same campuses whose chairs sit at the center of the network it diagrams. The institutions most exposed to the thing have read the diagram and not recognized themselves in it. Peer-reviewed work has already caught up, naming BDS as a textbook case.
The system that has been running since 1975
The standing thing all these registers run on was installed in 1975, and we named it in The Fifty-Year Front. On November 10 of that year the UN General Assembly declared Zionism a form of racism, 72 to 35 with 32 abstentions. That text fell sixteen years later, revoked 111 to 25. The text fell. What 1975 also built did not.
The same month, Resolution 3376 created the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, renewed every year since for fifty years.
A 1977 resolution stood up a Special Unit inside the Secretariat to “promote maximum publicity” for the Palestine question, which grew into today’s Division for Palestinian Rights, its mandate renewed in December 2024 with a new directive to commemorate the Nakba annually. [As if you needed more of a reason to hate the shambles the UN has become.]
A 1993 resolution created the Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories and made the mandate open-ended, alone among every country-specific rapporteur, all of which renew on a one-year cycle with a tenure cap.
The comparison carries the claim. There are country rapporteurs for Afghanistan, Belarus, Burundi, Cambodia, North Korea, Eritrea, Iran, Myanmar, Russia. All renew annually. The Israel mandate alone stands exempt. Agenda Item 7, the human-rights situation in the Palestinian territories, is the only standing country item on the Human Rights Council’s permanent agenda. There is no Item 7 for China, for Syria, for Iran, for North Korea. Even Ban Ki-moon, while Secretary-General, said the singling-out troubled him. The item is still there.
Strip the legalese and it is simple. In 1975 the UN built a permanent office whose job is to produce one findings about one country. They gave it a budget [out of money from your pocket] and a calendar, and never built the equivalent for anyone else. The finding was settled before the office opened. Everything since has been the office doing its work as designed.
The holders rotate and the output holds. Dugard, Falk, Lynk, Albanese, different people and the same conclusions, decade after decade. Albanese, in the slot now, filed a 2024 report calling Israel’s Gaza campaign genocide. And the system absorbs correction the way it absorbs everything else. When Richard Goldstone retracted the central finding of his own Gaza report in 2011, the Council never withdrew it. The reasonable assumption would be that engagement and evidence move these bodies. The record says they do not. They take in retraction, counter-evidence, and every possible set of facts on the ground, and they produce the same finding. That is a standing interpretive machine, and the network runs on it.
Here is the part the framework people miss. The settler-colonial vocabulary that now organizes elite talk on Israel arrived to interpret machinery that was already running. Patrick Wolfe standardized the chassis in 2006 — “invasion is a structure, not an event,” “settlers come to stay,” “elimination of the native” — in a paper now cited some five thousand times. The journal Settler Colonial Studies launched in 2010. Khalidi’s Hundred Years’ War came in 2020. The 1975 committee, the 1977 unit, and the 1993 mandate all predate Wolfe by decades and the journal by a generation. The framing arrived to give a system that had already run for thirty years a respectable vocabulary. Edward Said got there first while the unit was still being stood up, which makes him the origin layer, Wolfe the chassis, and Khalidi the exemplar.
And because the vocabulary is only the shell, it swaps without the network missing a step. Tarrow’s own account of these networks has them changing frames the way they change clothes, through diffusion and internalization, the coalition underneath untouched. The record bears it out. The anti-apartheid coalition that BDS openly copies ran a settler-colonial framing in the 1960s, a human-rights-and-sanctions framing through the 1980s, and the boycott template from the 1990s on, three vocabularies and one machine. The anti-globalization networks made the same march into climate justice, same organizers, same backbones, new frame. So whether the settler-colonial story about Israel is true is almost beside the point for the people running on it. We have argued at book length, and will again when Rooted in Judea comes out shortly, that it is false on the documentary record, the Mishnah compiled in Tzippori and the Jerusalem Talmud in Tiberias and four centuries of Ottoman census underneath it. The network does not need the story to be true. It needs it to be available, and a frame is always available.
It says so in print
Omar Barghouti’s 2011 book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, names no diaspora institution, no Hillel, no Federation, no AIPAC. The weight sits in the PACBI guidelines Barghouti co-wrote, which are posted on the movement’s own site and quotable verbatim.
The academic guidelines declare “all Israeli academic institutions, unless proven otherwise” boycottable, then widen the target to “Israel, its lobby groups or complicit institutions” and to non-Israeli bodies that “serve Israeli propaganda purposes.”
The cultural guidelines go further and say it plainly: the boycott “must target not only the complicit institutions but also the inherent and organic links between them,” and they sweep in “international ‘brand Israel’ organizations.” That is the single-target picture in the movement’s own words. Diverse Jewish institutions named as one network of complicity, with the diaspora bodies pulled in by function.
It reaches the diaspora in practice. A CUNY Law student government passed a boycott resolution naming groups “like Hillel.” A Massachusetts activist site published a literal network diagram tying synagogues, a Jewish high school, a center for disabled people, Jewish charities, and newspapers to “the colonization of Palestine,” dots and lines, the one-body target drawn at neighborhood scale.
The ADL’s own post-October-7 tracking watched the same targeting move onto Israeli and Jewish-owned businesses on the street. The 2023-24 academic year ran 86 BDS resolutions across student and faculty bodies. The BDS National Committee coordinates the whole thing from a secretariat across five countries — the network Keck and Sikkink diagrammed, with the four tools deployed together.
The most expensive part of this is the academic terrain, and it runs on public-record money. Rashid Khalidi held the Edward Said Chair at Columbia from 2003 until his retirement in October 2024, came back as a special lecturer, then withdrew his course when Columbia adopted the IHRA definition in its settlement with the federal government, calling the definition a deliberate conflation of Jewishness with Israel. The chair he held was endowed at several million dollars, some of it Gulf money.
The chair sits inside a funded landscape. As we documented in The Fifty-Year Front, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies was founded in the same 1975, has drawn more than two-thirds of its money from Arab governments, and sits inside a university that has taken close to a billion [yes, with a “B”] Qatari dollars. Set that against the diaspora side, where an endowed Israel-studies chair runs one to five million in private money that keeps its exit rights — the University of Washington handed a chair back in 2022 over the holder’s positioning. One side runs on sovereign-state capital that does not walk. The other runs on diaspora capital that can.
The terrain is asymmetric by design. The adversary owns the ground, and Israel keeps funding the reaction.
What reading like the adversary would mean
If the people targeting the body operate as one, the answer is to defend it as one, and the pieces already exist, built unevenly, scattered across borders, coordinated only as far as whatever protocols each national organization happened to sign.
The IDF Spokesperson works in seven languages now, with Turkish added last year, and it is the closest thing to a single-body broadcast layer in Israeli life — and it sits on the army, not on the diaspora, which has no equivalent.
The J7 Global Task Force, stood up in July 2023, links seven national advocacy organizations, among them the UK Board of Deputies, France’s CRIF, the ADL, and the Conference of Presidents, into joint working groups. It runs as voluntary coordination with no central command. The model exists. Scaling it is the open question.
Two security organizations sit at the center, and the gap between them is the diagnosis. The Secure Community Network runs its Chicago operations center, a proprietary threat platform tracking more than 12,400 Jewish facilities across North America, the only faith-based direct line to the FBI’s threat center, and a staff that grew from five to seventy-five. It is dwarfed, though, by Britian’s version — which serves fewer people in a smaller area.
Britain’s Community Security Trust runs four offices, ninety-odd staff, several thousand volunteers, protects roughly 200 schools and 250 synagogues, and recorded 4,103 antisemitic incidents in 2023. Its funding climbed from £14 million in 2022 to a £72 million package for 2024 through 2028. S
CN talks to the FBI. CST talks to the Home Office.
No public document describes a standing coordination protocol between SCN and CST, or between either of them and Israel’s Diaspora Affairs ministry.
The closest thing on the available record is the Penn Station case, where the Community Security Service, CST, and ADL worked a single plot with New York law enforcement. One after-action memo, waiting for the next case.
The people targeting the body produce standing infrastructure. The people defending it produce case files.
What the missing line would do is not exotic.
A threat that CST’s analysts flag in London on a Friday would reach SCN’s Chicago floor before the same play runs in New York on Sunday.
A funding pattern Mosaic can see on a French campus would tell NBN what to expect at a New York aliyah event. The IDF Spokesperson’s Persian desk would feed the diaspora organizations tracking the same Iranian accounts, and the MFA’s diaspora liaison would sit in the room instead of reading about it afterward.
None of that costs anyone a board seat. It costs a shared line and the decision to treat one body’s threats as one body’s problem.
The cost of leaving it like this shows up on the broadcast side too.
As we reported, Israel’s combined public-diplomacy spend was a rounding error as recently as 2023, roughly twenty-fold smaller than the war-time budget across three ministries, and Sa’ar’s twentyfold increase is largely unspent. And the national public-diplomacy directorate’s top job went vacant for over a year.
Meanwhile the post-October-7 emergency money, that $908 million, went substantially into Israel through thousands of grants, while diaspora-side communal security scaled separately and an order of magnitude smaller.
The serious objection is the autonomy one. American Jewish life is voluntary, plural, fragmented by design, nothing like a kehilla, and a single-body operation sounds like it would crush that.
It would, if it meant unified governance. It does not.
Voluntariness is threatened by anyone trying to run the community from one chair, never by shared threat-assessment and shared response.
J7 already proves the point, seven countries’ autonomous organizations coordinating without a central command. Scaling J7 from working-group pace to operational pace, coupling SCN and CST into a standing transatlantic threat-assessment line with the IDF Spokesperson’s languages and the MFA’s diaspora liaison feeding in, closes the asymmetry without touching anyone’s autonomy.
The pieces are not hypothetical, because the de facto version already runs in three places. Mosaic United has been governed jointly by an Israeli ministry and diaspora philanthropy for a decade. The post-October-7 emergency campaign decided its allocations through a joint Israeli-diaspora committee. And the longest-running case is Argentina, where Israeli intelligence drove a host state’s legal system to rule on the AMIA bombing three decades after the attack. The model exists in fragments. What is missing is the standing line that connects them.
The order matters, because doing it backwards produces the worst result on offer. Diagnose first, community by community, on the five indicators. Reallocate second, rebuild the budget lines to match what the diagnosis found, and make the momentum line argue for itself. Coordinate third, couple the security organizations and accept Israeli operational weight on defense in exchange for an Israeli budget commitment. Let the vocabulary go last. The word “partnership” falls away on its own once the money has moved. An institution that takes the language first and the allocation never has only performed the new model on top of the old machinery, which is worse than the honest two-centers version, because it imports the urgency and skips the work.
The single moves are already happening. Hesse’s parliament introduced a bill last month to criminalize denial of Israel’s right to exist, five years’ imprisonment, and sent it to committee — a near-identical version stalled there before, so the outcome is open, but a German state legislature is at least trying procedural defense while the MFA looks elsewhere. Columbia’s IHRA adoption is procedural defense at the university. The Met’s new team is protection sized to one city’s demand. Each is one move at one point. None of them is the standing institution the diagnosis calls for, the body the network can push against and find resistance.
The cost does not arrive as theory. It arrives in next year’s denominational budget, in the next line booked against “American Jewry” as one thing, in the next security incident the funding was sized too small to meet, and the one after that. It arrives until the institutions either read the body they are funding or stop funding the version of it that no longer exists.
The diaspora institutions have not read the body. The people targeting it read it correctly in 1975, and they have not stopped reading it since. Closing that gap is what watching is for, and the adversary is not waiting for the diaspora to catch up.
We mark the morning at Sinai this week, when a crowd of former slaves stood k’ish echad b’lev echad, as one person with one heart, and became a people. The oldest thing we know about ourselves is the thing the adversary relearned and the institutions forgot. One body. We should start funding it like one.
Chag sameach!
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief