American businessman Ronald S. Lauder stood at The Jerusalem Post conference in New York earlier this month and said what many have been saying for years. Since Oct. 7, Jewish organizations in the United States have spent more than $600 million fighting antisemitism through advertising, media campaigns and public messaging.
“Has it helped?” he asked the room. “Has all that money stopped or even slowed down the hatred against us? The answer is no.”
He’s right. And he’s not the first person to say it.
In the mid-1990s, marketing consultant Gary Wexler sat in a meeting in Israel and watched the infrastructure of what became the global campus movement against Israel get mapped out in front of him. He came back and tried to warn the people with the power to respond. Nothing happened. In 2003, Frank Luntz was commissioned by major Jewish philanthropists to find out why American Jewish college students weren’t pushing back against campus attacks on Israel.
His conclusion was blunt: The community was talking to itself. He built a detailed language guide showing that persuadable audiences were reachable, but only if someone actually tried. The organizations took the report, thanked him and went back to their gala dinners.
Now, Lauder, who has served as president of the World Jewish Congress since 2007, is calling for a $1 billion dedicated government agency—an “Iron Dome for public relations”—led by someone who actually knows public relations and news, not a political appointee. He wants Israel to respond to disinformation twice as hard and without hesitation, and he’s proposing that intelligence resources, including Mossad and the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet), be used to track where the lies originate. He’s saying Diaspora Jews need to fund this and fight alongside Israel, because what happens to Israel’s image in Western media markets lands on our doorsteps, too.
Thirty years after Wexler’s warning. Twenty-two years after Luntz’s research. The question worth asking isn’t whether the need is real. It’s why it took this long, and what that delay has actually cost.
Some will argue the community has been responding—that $600 million in spending proves the institutions weren’t asleep. That argument disintegrates the moment you look at what the money bought: Awareness campaigns aimed at people who already agreed. Reports distributed to people already convinced. The 2025 Nation Brands Index ranked Israel last among 50 nations for the second consecutive year, the steepest single-year drop in its nearly 20-year history, below Russia, below Kenya, below Namibia. If $600 million moved the needle in any direction, it moved it the wrong way.
Writing in The Algemeiner, the same week as Lauder’s speech, organizational psychologist Dr. Jonathan Myers identified the “why.” The problem isn’t that Jewish organizations have been lazy. It’s that they’ve been solving the wrong one.
Monitoring antisemitism, counting incidents, publishing analyses, flagging content to platforms … all of it treats Jew-hatred as a problem of misinformation. The thinking goes: Correct the facts, and the hatred recedes. But antisemitism isn’t primarily rational. It’s emotional. It spreads through feeling, not argument, and it survives because it offers simple explanations for complicated problems. Conspiracy narratives drawing on works like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion don’t keep resurfacing during moments of international crisis because people find them logically persuasive, but because they’re emotionally satisfying to people already primed to receive them.
You can’t counter that with a fact sheet. The behavioral science on this is very clear.
Myers goes further. The actual target audience—the people whose minds can still be changed—isn’t the committed ideologue. It’s what he calls the movable middle: People who haven’t formed hard views yet and are still susceptible to whichever narrative reaches them first and most often. That audience is large. It’s reachable. And for decades, the organizations with the resources to reach it have been spending their money talking to themselves instead.
Meanwhile, the other side has been systematically shaping that same audience’s perceptions using AI-driven tools designed for exactly this kind of influence at scale. Jewish organizations haven’t built anything comparable. They’ve barely acknowledged that the gap exists.
The suppression isn’t only coming from outside the community. Western media has played its own role in ensuring that the full picture of what happened on Oct. 7 never fully reached the public. When the Times published a detailed, sourced account of the sexual violence Hamas committed during the attack, a faction inside the newsroom worked to undermine it, leaking internal documents to outside media rather than letting the reporting stand. The atrocities were documented. They were real. And portions of the press corps decided the story was inconvenient enough to bury.
That’s not a failure of the information war. That’s the information war. You can read a full account of that pattern here. When the institutions responsible for informing the public are selectively deciding which atrocities count, the argument that Jewish organizations just need better messaging misses half the problem.
The numbers on the ground reflect the cumulative cost of that failure. In 2025, 21 Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks across the Jewish Diaspora, the highest death toll in 30 years. The Diaspora Affairs Ministry documented 815 severe antisemitic incidents, including roughly 124 million antisemitic posts on X alone. In Toronto, Jews are 3.6% of the population and were the target of 35% of the city’s hate crimes. Jewish students are hiding their identities on campuses in cities their families have called home for generations.
The ideology driving those numbers was seeded deliberately, over decades, while the institutions meant to respond held fundraising dinners.
Someone was paying attention, even when the institutions weren’t. After Oct. 7, ordinary Diaspora Jews, most of them without platforms or organizational backing, decided that they weren’t waiting anymore.
Writers, researchers and educators who had never thought of themselves as advocates became ones because the gap was there and nobody was filling it. They tracked how narratives shifted in real time. They built audiences on platforms working against them and showed up in comment sections where coordinated disinformation went unanswered because leaving the field wasn’t acceptable. They work at midnight. They take the threats, the suspended accounts, the accusations that they’re paid Israeli operatives, a smear designed to discredit them before their arguments can land. They are exhausted. They haven’t stopped.
And they are doing, without resources, what $600 million in institutional spending failed to do with them.
Lauder is right that the global Jewish Diaspora needs to be a partner in this fight. What he didn’t say—and what the institutions still haven’t seemed to recognize—is that part of the Diaspora has already been fighting it alone for two and a half years. Myers has laid out the strategic framework for what comes next. The research exists. The behavioral science is documented. The tools exist. The people doing the work are already doing it online and in the streets.
What’s been missing isn’t a plan. It’s the decision to act on one.
