A Jewish child should not have to pass an armed guard before learning the Aleph-Bet. Yet protecting ordinary Jewish life in America now carries a staggering price tag.
The Jewish Federations of North America estimates that more than 4,500 Jewish communal institutions spend approximately $1.015 billion every year on security, 33 percent more than its comparable 2024 estimate.
That covers synagogues, schools, camps, community centers and nonprofits, but not privately owned kosher restaurants, markets and other Jewish businesses.
Before the rabbi teaches, before the campers sing, before a family enters synagogue, thousands of Jewish institutions increasingly must pay to make the space safe enough to use.
When security becomes a billion-dollar prerequisite for ordinary Jewish communal life in one of the freest countries Jews have ever called home, antisemitism is no longer merely an occasional emergency. It has become an operating cost of being Jewish.
We should be precise about what has changed. Antisemitism does not rise every year in every country according to every measurement. Britain's Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, below its extraordinary 2023 peak but more than twice the number recorded in 2022.
Germany's RIAS network documented 8,725 incidents in 2025, almost 24 every day, and reported that the elevated level established after October 7 had persisted.
Different countries measure different things, so these numbers should not be mechanically combined. The important signal is persistence. What initially appeared to be an extraordinary eruption increasingly looks like a changed baseline. The spike is becoming the floor.
We should resist an opposite mistake as well. There is no public evidence that every attack, protest, campus confrontation and antisemitic online campaign is controlled from one global headquarters.
Australian intelligence concluded in August 2025 that Iran directed at least two attacks against Jewish targets in Melbourne and Sydney while using intermediaries to conceal its role.
Separately, the United States and Canada took coordinated action against Samidoun after the U.S. Treasury described it as an international fundraiser for the PFLP operating across Europe and North America. These are specific, documented examples of state direction and transnational organization.
They do not make every Palestinian activist, anti-Israel protester or critic of an Israeli government part of the same network, and legitimate criticism of Israel must not be collapsed into antisemitism.
But the larger phenomenon does not require a headquarters. Narratives can now travel faster than organizations. Holocaust inversion, collective accusations against Jews, conspiracy theories about Jewish money or power, and ancient prejudices repackaged in contemporary political language can cross borders almost instantaneously.
In Britain, 53 percent of antisemitic incidents recorded by CST in 2025 referenced Israel, Palestine, October 7 or the subsequent war while also containing anti-Jewish language, motivation or targeting.
The result is an environment in which states, organizations, ideological movements, influencers and unaffiliated individuals can imitate and reinforce one another without answering to the same commander. There can be documented coordination without one conspiracy, and there can be a networked threat without a single network.
The Jewish problem is that this networked environment is still being confronted through a response organized largely institution by institution.
One synagogue hires another guard. One school strengthens another entrance. One federation raises another security budget.
Much of this is necessary, and democratic governments retain the primary responsibility for enforcing their laws and protecting their Jewish citizens.
But the answer cannot stop at protecting Jewish institutions. We must invest with equal seriousness in the human beings inside them.
Security cannot become Jewish life
Security is supposed to protect Jewish life. It cannot become Jewish life. We can become extraordinarily good at protecting Jewish buildings while forgetting to ask what kind of Jews those buildings are supposed to produce.
This is where Israel enters the argument, and the distinction must be exact. Israel does not cause antisemitism abroad. No decision by an Israeli government turns a synagogue in London, a Jewish school in Toronto or a restaurant in Melbourne into a legitimate proxy for the State of Israel.
Collective responsibility is part of the problem, not an explanation for it. At the same time, Israel itself formally recognizes responsibilities toward Jews beyond its borders. Article 6 of Israel's Nation-State Basic Lawcommits the state to strengthening its affinity with the Jewish people in the Diaspora and preserving Jewish cultural, historical and religious heritage there.
Israel maintains institutions devoted to Diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism. If there is an Israeli failure here, it is not causal. It is strategic.
The deeper question is whether the Israel-Diaspora relationship is sufficiently reciprocal for the era now emerging. Israel will always remain the home available to every Jew, and aliyah will remain central to Zionism.
But Diaspora Jews cannot be regarded merely as donors, advocates, potential immigrants or audiences for Israeli public diplomacy. Israel also has an interest in strong, educated and confident Jewish communities abroad. How does a people divided across continents remain one people?
The distance runs in both directions. In a 2021 AJC survey, 32 percent of Israeli Jewish respondents said they had received no education about Diaspora Jewry.
In AJC's parallel survey of American Jews that year, 42 percent said they could neither read nor speak Hebrew. Yet AJC's 2025 survey found that 77 percent of American Jews considered caring about Israel important to their Jewish identity.
These are separate snapshots, but together they raise a serious question: How durable can emotional attachment remain without sufficient educational, linguistic and interpersonal infrastructure underneath it?
This is why Hebrew belongs at the center of the strategic conversation. Hebrew is not simply another school subject, nor should fluency become a test of Jewish authenticity. It is connective infrastructure.
A Jew who understands Hebrew can engage Israeli society without waiting for somebody else to translate it, summarize it or decide which part to show. Not every Jew will become fluent, and not every Jew will live in Israel. That is precisely the point. A worldwide people should not need translators to speak to itself. Hebrew is the operating system of modern Jewish peoplehood.
Physical preparedness belongs in the same conversation. The answer to Jewish vulnerability is not Jewish militarization. Self-defense training cannot replace police, intelligence services or professional security, nor should it.
But first aid, emergency response, situational awareness, institutional preparedness and lawful self-defense can give Jewish individuals something walls alone cannot provide: agency.
The goal is not to create frightened Jews constantly searching every room for threats. It is to create capable Jews who know what to do when something goes wrong. The answer to fortress Judaism cannot simply be a better fortress.
That leads to a doctrine simple enough to remember:
Protect. Prepare. Connect.
Protect the institutions with professional security, policing, intelligence cooperation and sensible safeguards.
Prepare the people through first aid, emergency response, situational awareness, lawful self-defense, leadership and confidence.
Connect the people through Hebrew, Jewish history, religion, culture, Israel engagement and relationships between Jewish communities across borders.
These are not three unrelated programs. They are three dimensions of the same objective: Jewish agency.
Jewish people shouldn't need antisemitism to keep them connected
The goal cannot merely be safer Jews. It must also be capable Jews. Jews capable of participating in their own security, education, identity, and relationship with the rest of their people. A Jew should not need an antisemite to remind him that he is Jewish, a crisis to make her seek Jewish community, or an interpreter to communicate with half of Jewish civilization.
And this is where the argument must turn away from antisemitism altogether. The greatest danger would be allowing the people who hate Jews to become the authors of the Jewish future.
A Judaism organized primarily around locked doors, Holocaust education and explanations of why other people hate us may teach children everything about Jewish danger while teaching too little about Jewish joy, language, faith, history, creativity, humor and belonging. Security protects civilization. It cannot substitute for civilization.
Resilience is not merely the ability to remain Jewish under pressure. It is the ability to expand Jewish life despite the pressure.
So guard the door, but teach what happens inside it.
Teach Jews to defend themselves, but make sure they know what they are defending.
Teach Hebrew, not because every Jew must move to Israel tomorrow, but because a global people should possess the means to speak directly to itself.
Strengthen the bond with Israel, while strengthening Israelis' knowledge of the Jewish communities beyond their borders.
Antisemitism may help determine the environment in which the next Jewish generation grows up. It must never determine what kind of Jews they become.
The response to a networked threat cannot be a fragmented people hiding independently behind stronger doors.
The next Jewish century will not belong to the Jews who learned how to hide better. It will belong to the Jews who learned how to stand taller.
Adam Scott Bellos is the founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund, creator of Wine on the Vine, Herzl AI and Project Maccabee, and the author of What Is Zionism? Why Never Again Is Not Enough.