Mike Leven knows the answer. He published it in eJewish Philanthropy on June 3rd, calm and confident and almost entirely without alarm. Tamim Academy schools work. The data is unambiguous. The economics are scalable. Eighty schools for fifty million dollars. All we need is alignment and the will to act.

He is right. Every word of it. So why is it so hard to raise the money?

Because too many of us still consider funding options, without realising that the options themselves helped bring this crisis into being.

In the past two years, every Jewish leader worth his title has spent hours in a situation room, debating the same urgent questions: the surge in antisemitism, the collapse in support for Israel among the young, the visible vulnerability of Jewish communities across the Western world.

The debate is serious. The will to do good is real. And the money is about to go to the wrong places.

The responses to the surge in antisemitism are divided. Some are doubling down, fighting with even more desperation. New organisations have arrived with real passion and new faces, but the playbook is the same: more funding, louder voices, bigger campaigns, familiar tools, simply wielded with greater force.

Others, having spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars watching the tide rise anyway, are beginning to sound like men who have lost faith in the fight. Ronald Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress, said recently that the Jewish community had spent six hundred million dollars fighting antisemitism since October 7 and asked the room: has any of it helped? His answer was no.

I have written about another path for that fight, one that involves spending much less money fighting antisemites and that has proven far more effective, but that is not what this piece is about.

This piece is about the more urgent crisis: the dwindling support for Israel, the disconnection, the collapse of Jewish identity among the young, the Jews walking away. That crisis is being discussed extensively, seriously, and with real money behind the conversation. And yet every answer on the table is wrong.

Leven puts it plainly:........

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