There is a growing unease in Jewish life today—an ache that defies easy naming but demands honest reckoning. It is the feeling of crying wolf. We sense it in our synagogues and institutions, and even within the Anti-Defamation League—the very organization founded to guard us from defamation. It is the dread of watching antisemitism spread once again, coupled with the fear that our own warnings are beginning to lose their power. We are shouting for the world to listen, yet our voices are starting to echo into exhaustion.
Antisemitism must be taken seriously—deadly seriously—but that is precisely why it cannot become reflexive. The Torah commands, midvar sheker tirchak—“keep far from falsehood.” Truth in Judaism is not mere factual accuracy; it is proportional honesty. To name every offense antisemitism is to dilute the word of its moral gravity. To reserve it only for the most grotesque acts is to ignore the daily corrosion that precedes every eruption of violence. The sacred challenge is to live between vigilance and proportion—to see danger clearly without surrendering to hysteria.
That tension is not theoretical. It lives at the heart of the very institutions meant to protect us. The ADL was founded in 1913 to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment to all.” It has done heroic work toward that end—fighting prejudice, advancing civil rights, and helping generations of Americans recognize and resist bigotry. But in recent years, its moral energy has been scattered. The ADL has become as much a media brand as a moral voice. It issues statements on every political controversy, appears in mayoral races, and comments on issues far afield from antisemitism. There is no shortage of causes in the world, but not every cause requires the ADL’s voice. When the organization inserts itself into every civic squabble, it risks becoming a political actor rather than a moral teacher.
Those who built the Jewish defense network in the postwar decades know this drift did not happen overnight. As one veteran of that era recently reminded me, there was a time when the AJCongress, AJCommittee, and ADL worked in coordinated partnership—a coalition that, however fractious, functioned. Each had its own culture and constituency: the Congress pursued justice through the courts; the Committee represented the polished diplomacy of German-Jewish elites; and the ADL, born of the rougher Polish and Russian immigrant stock, were the street fighters—uncompromising, unapologetic, vigilant. They met monthly, divided tasks, argued fiercely, and when the crisis came, they moved as one body. The Conference of Presidents was no paragon of efficiency, but when the moment demanded it, the machinery of defense worked.
That infrastructure has largely collapsed. The old guard is aging out, coordination has given way to competition, and an archipelago of new self-funded projects has filled the void—each claiming to speak for “the Jewish community,” each competing for attention and donor dollars. The result is not pluralism but noise. Add to that the public confusion over what even constitutes antisemitism—now the subject of endless definitional quarrels—and it’s no wonder that moral clarity has given way to brand positioning. Too many people shouting about antisemitism don’t actually know what they mean by it.
It wasn’t always this way. For much of the twentieth century, Jewish defense organizations pursued not the impossible task of eradicating antisemitism but the pragmatic goal of making its public expression unacceptable in polite society. As my colleague put it, “We worked hard, not to defeat antisemitism—a task beyond human capacity—but to make the public expression of it socially and professionally untenable.” One of the most effective tools was the anti-masking law that forced Klansmen to march unmasked. When the dentist, banker, or grocer had to reveal his face beneath the hood, the hatred retreated underground.
The internet has undone that victory. It has re-masked the mob, giving anonymity to hate and restoring what Jewish activism had so painstakingly dismantled: the ability to hide behind darkness. Combined with the explosion of conspiracy theories that recycle the ancient canard of Jewish control, we now face an antisemitism that is both viral and virtual, hidden and hyper-connected. The mechanisms that once made shame a constraint no longer apply.
In this context, the ADL’s role is more important—and more confused—than ever. It is tempting, and television-friendly, for its leadership to weigh in on every political debate. But is that truly the mission of an organization founded to teach America what hatred looks like? Wouldn’t its energy be better spent in classrooms, implementing “No Place for Hate,” training educators, and helping a new generation distinguish between prejudice, ignorance, and disagreement? The ADL collects data from the FBI and from public reporting. But if those doing the reporting no longer know what antisemitism actually is, the numbers themselves lose meaning. Before the ADL proclaims an epidemic, perhaps it should ask whether Americans—Jews included—can still define the term. If not, that should be its primary mission: to teach. Otherwise, it risks diagnosing a crisis whose symptoms it has failed to explain.
The same confusion surfaced in the ADL’s recent “Campus Antisemitism Report Card.” Universities were graded from A to F, ostensibly to guide Jewish families. But the exercise revealed a lack of nuance. To grade Columbia and Nebraska-Lincoln on the same curve—one convulsed by mobs, the other small but secure—is absurd. When the ADL assigns failing grades to schools that have treated Jews responsibly, it creates problems where none exist, delegitimizing good-faith administrators and inflaming distrust. Outrage becomes a brand, not a strategy.
If we are to take antisemitism seriously, we must learn again to name it precisely. A swastika scrawled on a synagogue, a mob chanting for Israel’s destruction, harassment of Jewish students—these are acts of hate, not ambiguities. But not every critique of Israeli policy is antisemitism. Free speech is not the enemy of the Jewish people. Our tradition has never feared argument; it forbids distortion. Ruth Wisse remains right: antisemitism is not a prejudice but a political project—an organizing principle of resentment. It mutates, taking new ideological forms, but its goal is always the same: to delegitimize Jewish existence. Still, exaggeration backfires. When we label every critic an antisemite, we hand our enemies an easy argument. The moral weapon dulls with overuse.
Holocaust education, once our bulwark against forgetting, has followed a similar arc—from moral clarity to abstraction. It has drifted from testimony to infrastructure, from memory to memorials. We have replaced survivors with plaques. For decades, their presence gave the enterprise its authority; their stories were oxygen. Now, as their voices fade, we build more buildings in their name, as if architecture could substitute for living conscience. It’s easier to raise funds for granite than to teach complexity. In many classrooms, the Shoah has become a generic parable of “tolerance.” Students learn that genocide is evil but rarely learn that antisemitism was the logic that made it possible. They visit Auschwitz and then accuse Israel of genocide on social media. We have taught empathy without history, emotion without intellect. The goal of Holocaust education cannot be niceness. It must be alertness.
The deeper crisis, then, is not only institutional drift but moral exhaustion. The people who once carried the burden of knowledge—the historians, survivors, communal professionals—are aging out, and too few young Jews are being trained to take their place. We are running out of teachers even as the need for teaching grows. And in their absence, the conversation has been reduced to sound bites and pablum—indignation without instruction, branding without ballast.
As rabbis, educators, and leaders, our task is to recover the moral discipline of discernment. Say yes to vigilance, no to inflation. Call out antisemitism when it is real, and refuse to weaponize the accusation when it is not. That is not timidity—it is integrity. The Talmud teaches that rebuke must be delivered with both love and precision. The same must hold for our public voice.
The feeling of crying wolf has returned because the wolf is real—but so is our fatigue. We are frightened, and rightly so. But we are also weary of living in a constant state of alarm. Our task is not to stop warning; it is to make the warning credible again. That demands courage, restraint, and above all, truthfulness. The boy who cried wolf lost his voice because he squandered it. The ADL—and all of us who raise our voices against antisemitism—must guard ours more carefully.
The wolf still circles the village. But our cry must sound not like panic, nor politics, but prophecy. If the ADL can recover that prophetic voice—anchored in humility, education, and moral clarity—it could once again become what America most needs: a teacher, not a pundit; a guardian of truth, not a participant in the outrage economy. The Jewish people do not need more alarms. We need institutions capable of teaching what the alarm means.