For nearly three years, many American leaders have perfected a particular kind of cowardice: saying just enough about antisemitism to sound responsible while doing just enough nothing to stay comfortable with their anti-Israel support base.
While some publicly pay lip service against horrible antisemitic acts, in reality, their lack of action delivers permission slips in practice.
Synagogues have been attacked, Jewish students have been beaten on campuses, other Jewish citizens have been beaten in public spaces, and some have been murdered.
Jewish communities across the country, including in Los Angeles, have been targeted, all while the people in charge calculated exactly how little they could get away with doing. There is a word for that kind of response, and it is not leadership.
Spencer Pratt is not someone I expected to be the one to name it so clearly.
The former reality TV star, now running for mayor of Los Angeles, recently blasted the city’s leadership for playing what he called “far too cute” with antisemitism.
He described how current officials have wink-and-nodded their way through years of rising anti-Jewish hatred, offering just enough condemnation to seem responsible while doing just enough nothing to stay comfortable with their base.
He is right. And the fact that a celebrity candidate is the one saying it out loud should embarrass every elected official who has spent the last three years perfecting the art of the non-response.
Los Angeles has been a case study in this.
At the University of California, the Department of Justice found that the university fostered an antisemitic hostile educational environment in the aftermath of October 7, displaying what prosecutors called “deliberate indifference” to discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students.
When masked demonstrators erected an encampment and physically beat Jewish students with sticks, doused them with pepper spray, and blocked them from entering academic buildings, the university watched.
Police arrived hours later. The governor called the response “limited and delayed.” The mayor called the violence “absolutely abhorrent.” Words. Just words. Carefully calibrated, thoroughly meaningless words.
This is what “too cute” looks like in practice. Statements of concern without police presence. Expressions of outrage without consequences. Press releases timed to news cycles, not to protect any actual human being.
I have written about this pattern before.
When Professor Derek Peterson stood at the University of Michigan’s commencement ceremony and cheered on the very students who had spent two years making Jewish life on that campus a misery, urging them to “make good trouble,” the crowd applauded, and the university’s president sat in his regalia and let it happen.
A pattern of institutional evasion
When criticism came, the administration issued a mild rebuke, then retracted it under faculty pressure. That, too, was too cute. That was a university calculating what it could afford to say while keeping the peace with the louder voices in the room.
The pattern runs all the way to Congress. When university presidents were asked, under oath, whether calling for genocide against Jews violated their campus conduct codes, the answer was “It depends on context.”
That answer became, I believe, one of the most-watched congressional clips in recent memory. Not because it was shocking in isolation, but because it crystallized something everyone had already felt.
The people responsible for protecting Jewish students had spent years finding increasingly sophisticated ways to avoid doing so.
Morality has no context clause.
You cannot beat someone with a stick depending on the context. You cannot blockade Jewish students from a library depending on the context.
The moment we accept that framework, we have already lost the moral argument, and we have handed a permission slip to everyone who wants to harm Jews while maintaining plausible deniability.
History is uncomfortable with this kind of analysis, but it demands it. The Wannsee Conference was full of lawyers.
Every step of the Nazi persecution of Jews was technically legal under the laws that had been carefully passed to make it so. Legality and morality are not the same thing. Technically, not being wrong is not the same as being right.
Pratt said he has zero tolerance for antisemitism and that protecting Jews requires “strong and unwavering leadership.”
He pledged to direct the Los Angeles Police Department to increase patrols around synagogues and Chabad centers. Whether or not he wins a mayoral race, he has done something valuable. He has put a name on the disease.
Too cute. The wink. The nod. The carefully worded statement that gestures toward concern while committing to nothing.
The Jewish community does not need more gestures. We need leaders who understand that when they choose comfort over clarity, someone else pays the price.
The writer is the International CEO of Aish, a global Jewish educational movement. He formerly served as Eastern Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where he oversaw the Museum of Tolerance in New York City.