Jewish communal organizations, especially the network of Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs), are long overdue for serious self-examination. For years, these institutions positioned themselves as the moral compass of the Jewish community, promoting expansive immigration policies, including from Muslim countries, as a matter of unquestionable principle.
However, in doing so, they substituted ideological reflex for strategic responsibility. They celebrated their own humanitarianism while failing to assess how the political, cultural and ideological backgrounds of the Muslim immigrant populations they supported might intersect with the specific vulnerabilities of American Jews. This gap between rhetoric and reality is now impossible to ignore.
HIAS, once the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society but now simply “HIAS,” illustrates this drift. Founded in 1881 to rescue Jews fleeing persecution from Russia and Eastern Europe, it played a heroic role throughout the 20th century. But as Jewish immigration waned, the organization reinvented itself, shifting toward a general refugee-assistance model, compensated on a per-capita basis by the federal government.
Today, much of HIAS’s work involves resettling people from Muslim countries where attitudes toward Israel and the Jewish people, not to mention toward American values, have been shaped by centuries of antisemitism. Regardless of whether or not the shift from supporting Jews to supporting Muslims was guided by admirable humanitarian instincts or financial considerations, HIAS has refused to address how its transformed mission endangers Jewish communal security today.
The JCRCs as well not only supported this transformation but turned it into a moral banner. They dismissed internal dissent as narrow-minded, insisting that “Jewish values” required an uncritical stance toward immigration policy and calling those who raised questions “racists.”
They, too, failed to analyze how the antisemitism Muslim immigrants brought with them would enter American civic life through activist networks, university movements, unions, local politics and general society. They ignored how these dynamics would overlap with foreign-funded campaigns seeking to delegitimize Israel and reshape American political culture. In doing so, they neglected their core obligation: safeguarding the well-being of the communities they claim to represent.
And the direct result of this failure has brought us the far-left Muslim-led “Squad” in the U.S. House of Representatives and New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim Democratic Socialist and hater of Israel. And more antisemitic Muslim politicians are on the way.
A deeper failure—arguably, the most damaging—has been the self-congratulatory refusal of JCRCs and allied agencies to address how these immigration patterns have coincided with the rise of Jew-hatred. For years, they treated any discussion of downstream consequences as taboo, as though acknowledging reality were somehow immoral. This avoidance has distorted communal discourse, shutting out critical voices while actively undermining the community’s ability to confront a crisis that now dominates Jewish life in America.
Jewish communities across the country are mobilizing against unprecedented levels of antisemitism. Yet the very organizations leading antisemitism “task forces” refuse to acknowledge how they themselves have contributed to the problem by aiding the importation of political worldviews targeting Jews and Israel. The JCRCs’ insistence on silence has produced a contradictory position: They loudly condemn manifestations of antisemitism while refusing to examine one of its major causes.
By narrowing the conversation to threats that conveniently fit their advocacy frameworks, the JCRCs have fractured communal strategy at the moment unity is most needed. Their analytical blind spots have prevented the Jewish community from forming a coherent, long-term approach to safety. No community can confront a problem when its own institutions insist on filtering out key information and analysis that conflict with outdated ideological commitments.
The time has come for Jewish communal organizations that have contributed to the steady rise in antisemitism to acknowledge their misjudgments, reassess their approach, fire incompetent staff members and rebuild policy frameworks, recognizing that the security and well-being of the Jewish community is the highest of humanitarian concerns.
The JCRCs loudly proclaimed that the white community owed a reckoning to black Americans after the Black Lives Matter movement blamed it for the failure of blacks to thrive in the United States.
The JCRCs now owe the entire Jewish community a reckoning for their failure to protect it.
