It is time to reconsider American Jewry’s political strategy

Last summer, I wrote about a Tuesday — primary day in New York City — when a founder of the organization Jewish Voters Unite and self-described “champion of Jewish voting” spent the hours before Zohran Mamdani’s landslide win telling his followers that Jewish turnout could bend an election of more than a million voters. (It couldn’t, and it didn’t.) 

I argued then that the lesson of that Tuesday — and of a series of other Jewish electoral debacles — was that the American Jewish community is not the “sleeping giant” JVU described it as being, but a small community that cannot on its own carry a race of any real size. That believing otherwise is not only wrong, but dangerous.  It leads the American Jewish community to be reckless and uncompromising, and thereby facilitates its political isolation.

A year later, the American Jewish community’s political position has dramatically worsened.  In retrospect, if anything, my prior piece did not go far enough.

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In a piece I wrote more recently, “American Jewry’s Goshen Moment,” I made a different but related argument: that the deeper failure of the American Jewish community has not been tactical but postural. We built ourselves beautiful, comfortable enclaves — modern Goshens in places like Teaneck and the Five Towns — and we let our prosperity convince us we could stop paying attention to the world outside our gates. 

October 7 and the antisemitism that followed did not create the resentment that greeted us. It exposed a resentment that had been building for years, among neighbors we had stopped bothering to know. Insularity, I argued, was never a strategy for safety. It was a mirage that blinded and endangered us.

Put those two pieces together and a single, uncomfortable diagnosis emerges: American Jews have spent a decade or more misjudging both our power and our posture. We came to believe we were more powerful than we are, and we came to believe we didn’t need anyone else to safeguard that power. JVU’s “sleeping giant” and our own gilded Goshens are, in the end, the same mistake wearing different clothes. Both assume that Jewish success can be self-generated and self-sustained — that if we just turn out, or just wall ourselves off in comfort, we can secure our interests without the trouble of persuading anyone of anything.

We can’t. We never could. And it is time responsible members of the Jewish community say so plainly.

Here is the sober assessment we have avoided: American Jews make up roughly two percent of the population. We are not a bloc that decides elections, and we are not a fortress that can ignore tempests stirring up the world outside. What power we have ever had in this country has never come from our numbers, our money, or our voting discipline alone. It has come from the strength of our ideas, and from our willingness, at our best moments, to make the case for them to people who did not start out agreeing with us.

Think about where American Jews actually moved the needle across the last century. It wasn’t by outvoting anyone. It was by helping architect the case for civil rights alongside Black Americans who were doing the harder work themselves. It was by building coalitions for labor protections, for religious liberty, for refugee resettlement — coalitions we didn’t dominate, but joined, and in joining, helped shape. Our influence was real. But it was borrowed against trust we built with people who were not Jewish, not because we had the votes to compel them, but because we had made arguments they came to believe.

That is what power actually looks like for a community of our size. Not a giant, sleeping or otherwise. Not a Goshen, gilded or otherwise. An idea, carried by people willing to leave their own enclaves and their own certainties to win others over (and, just as importantly, willing to be won over when the case made by others has merit).

Both JVU’s turnout gospel and our community’s Goshen instinct fail for the same underlying reason: They treat influence as something you seize rather than something you earn. JVU’s mistake was thinking we could seize it at the ballot box, all by ourselves, without partners. Our Goshen mistake was thinking we could seize safety by opting out of the argument altogether, retreating into comfort and hoping the world’s problems stayed outside. 

None of this means abandoning political engagement or self-reliance. On the contrary.  It means abandoning the fantasy that any of those things are substitutes for the harder, slower work of persuasion, and of that harder work’s necessity. It means showing up in rooms where Jews are a small minority of the people in them, and staying in those rooms even when it’s uncomfortable, and treating the people in them as potential partners rather than adversaries or means to our own ends. It means being willing to compromise because we recognize that a community of our size does not get to dictate terms — it gets to make its case and see who it convinces. It means caring about problems that have nothing to do with us, because credibility on other people’s issues is the only currency that buys us a hearing on our own.

This is not a case for embracing Jewish powerlessness.  It is a call to identify, and leverage, the Jewish community’s true power — its ideas — and to use them to shape a world in desperate need of healing.

Yigal Gross of Teaneck is an attorney and community organizer. All his opinions here are expressed in his personal capacity.