Once again, American Jews were invited to watch themselves portrayed as powerless. This time, it was by our own people, which, in many ways, makes it worse.
This year’s Super Bowl anti-antisemitism advertisement, funded by Robert Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance, was intended as a moral wake-up call. Instead, it revealed the exhaustion – and strategic bankruptcy – of an entire approach.
A Jewish boy is humiliated. He does not respond. He does not resist. He does not stand upright. He waits. His dignity is restored not through Jewish agency, but through the intervention of a kind bystander who covers the insult and offers reassurance. It is a familiar image – and that familiarity is precisely the problem.
For decades, the Jewish establishment has responded to antisemitism with awareness campaigns, slogans, symbols, and increasingly expensive acts of moral theater. The logic has remained consistent: if the world understood Jewish pain, it would stop inflicting it; if Jews were seen as wounded enough, sympathy and protection would follow.
But they never do. Antisemitism is not rising because Jews are misunderstood: It is rising because Jews are once again perceived as weak, fragmented, apologetic, and dependent on the goodwill of others. Nothing reinforces that perception more efficiently than a $15 million Super Bowl ad that trains the viewer – consciously or not – to associate Jews with helplessness.
Today's antisemitism is ideological, institutional
The antisemitism depicted in the ad belongs to another era: a slur in a school hallway, a discrete act of prejudice, a problem solved by kindness. That is not the antisemitism Jews face in 2026. Today’s version is ideological, institutional, and global. It is embedded in universities, NGOs, international bodies, digital networks, and political movements. It cloaks itself in the language of “human rights” and “anti-colonialism.” It is coordinated, normalized, and increasingly violent.
Responding to this reality with symbolism is not merely insufficient – it is delusional. This is the defining failure of the boomer philanthropic class: they are fighting the current war with the last generation’s instincts. They believe antisemitism can be managed through optics, that acceptance is the goal, and that Jews survive by being liked. Zionism was founded on the opposite insight.
Zionism did not emerge because Jews lacked sympathy: it emerged because sympathy did not save them. Max Nordau diagnosed the disease with brutal clarity, arguing that European Jewry had been physically and psychologically deformed by centuries of exile. The remedy was not persuasion, but regeneration.
“We must think of creating a Jewry of muscles,” he wrote – Jews with bodies, confidence, and self-respect equal to their intellect. Ze’ev Jabotinsky went further, rejecting the fantasy that Jews could secure their future by appealing to the conscience of others. Rights, he insisted, are not granted to those who ask nicely: they are secured by those prepared to defend them. Zionism was not a branding exercise – it was a civilizational correction, a refusal to remain small. The concept of the “New Jew” was not an aesthetic preference; it was an existential necessity. And yet, nearly eighty years after Jewish sovereignty was restored, American Jewish leadership keeps resurrecting the image Zionism was meant to bury.
Let us dispense with the fiction that $15 million is symbolic money: It is not. It is civilizational money – if used seriously. Costing a conservative $150 per hour for certified Krav Maga instruction, one weekly group class of twenty participants costs $7.50 per person. Over a full year, even after accounting for space, insurance, administration, equipment, and periodic intensive training, serious year-round self-defense instruction costs approximately $1,000 per Jew. That means $15 million could train 15,000 Jews every year – not for awareness, but for posture, confidence, and deterrence.
The same math applies to Hebrew. Meaningful Hebrew immersion – after-school frameworks, early childhood programs, or caregiver-led models – costs roughly $2,000 to $3,000 per child per year. That same $15 million could place 5,000 to 7,500 Jewish children into real Hebrew identity pipelines. This is not symbolism; it is infrastructure.
With that level of funding, one could also build leadership academies, campus legal and security response units, and a pipeline of Hebrew-speaking, self-defense-capable Jewish educators and counselors. One could begin – not complete, but begin – a genuine civilizational reboot. And at $100 an hour – easily achievable at scale – that same $15 million could train nearly 20,000 Jews a year, exposing this as a failure not of money, but of will and vision.
Instead, the money was spent on a feeling.
This was not an isolated misjudgment. It reflects an ecosystem that has learned how to monetize Jewish fear while avoiding the harder work of rebuilding Jewish strength. Large budgets, polished branding, and minimal deterrent effect have become the norm. Optics come first; capability comes last. The result is a generation of Jews trained to signal virtue rather than project confidence.
Most revealing of all is what the ad omits. There is no Zionism, no Hebrew, no Jewish peoplehood beyond injury, and no acknowledgment that Jews are not merely a religious minority but a nation with a homeland, a language, and the means to defend themselves. Zionism is absent because Zionism disrupts the victim narrative. It replaces pleading with posture and reminds Jews – and the world – that Jewish history did not end in exile.
A necessary reckoning is unavoidable – not because Jewish leaders are immoral or indifferent, but because the Jewish philanthropic industry itself was built for a world that no longer exists. It was designed for an era when antisemitism was episodic, socially embarrassing, and largely outside the centers of cultural and institutional power.
In that environment, awareness campaigns, moral appeals, and symbolic gestures made strategic sense. In today’s world – where antisemitism is ideological, normalized, and embedded in universities, NGOs, media, and political movements – they do not.
This explains the paralysis we are witnessing. The problem is not a lack of money – Jewish philanthropy in North America alone distributes billions of dollars annually, and major organizations like the ADL and JNF-USA operate on budgets approaching $100 million. The problem is design. Institutions optimized for optics and acceptance are now confronting a moment that demands strength, identity, and deterrence.
When an ecosystem with that level of capital responds to the present crisis with branding instead of backbone, the failure is not generosity, but strategic imagination. It is precisely this structural failure that makes the $15 million choice not merely misguided but emblematic.
Fifteen million dollars could have trained Jews to stand, speak, and defend themselves. Instead, it was spent teaching them how to be seen as wounded. That is not a failure of resources: it is a failure of imagination. Zionism was born to end the era of the pleading Jew. Yet here we are, spending a fortune to resurrect him on the world’s biggest stage – not because we lacked alternatives, but because we chose comfort over courage.
This was not an unavoidable mistake. The money existed. The solutions exist. What failed was not awareness, but nerve. And history has never been kind to a people who confuse sympathy with survival. No people who refuse to invest in their own strength, identity, and self-respect can reasonably expect the world to care more about their survival than they do.
The writer is the founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund (TIIF) and the creator of Wine on the Vine. He is the author of the forthcoming book Never Again Is Not Enough: The Hebraization Manifesto.