Will Anyone Listen This Time?

I copied a Substack article written by Melissa Brodsky, with her approval, as I believe it should be published in Israel.

Someone with money and a platform stands up and says what the rest of us have been saying from our kitchen tables and our laptops at midnight. The room applauds. The press covers it for a day. Jewish social platforms amplify it. And then the news cycle moves, the ballroom empties, and nothing gets done.

Ronald Lauder did it Sunday. Frank Luntz did it in 2003. Gary Wexler did it in the 1990s, except he wasn’t giving a speech — he was sitting across from the man who was building the machine and watching him describe, in detail, exactly what he was going to do to us.

Nobody built anything then either.

This Has Happened Before

Lauder stood at the Jerusalem Post Conference in New York and said what needed to be said. 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. “Has all that money stopped, or even slowed down, the hatred against us? The answer is no.”

He called for a $1 billion global communications network. He said diaspora Jews need to be partners in the fight. He said Israel is winning on the battlefield and losing the information war.

He’s right. He’s also the latest in a line of people who have been right about this, out loud, in public, for decades, and watched nothing get built in response.

In the mid-1990s, Gary Wexler, a marketing consultant working with major Jewish organizations, sat in a meeting in Israel and watched the blueprint for what became the global campus movement against Israel get laid out in front of him. He came back and tried to warn people. What matters for this conversation is what happened next.

In 2003, Frank Luntz........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)