Student Leader Tells Bibi: The Jewish Establishment Has Failed Us
Jewish student hero Shabbos Kestenbaum tells Bibi that establishment leaders failed him
At a recent meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, Shabbos Kestenbaum, hero of the battle against anti-Semitism at Harvard, made it clear that he was deeply “disappointed” in the “Jewish non-profit” world and “establishment” organizations.
“Young American Jews,” he said, held the key to safeguarding the Jewish future in this country, while so many of the organizations tasked with protecting it — on campuses in particular — had failed.
It makes young American Jews like Shabbos all the more heroic given that this failure is not new, as we have documented for more than two decades, going back to our film Columbia Unbecoming in 2004. At that time, non-profits like the ADL, AJC, and especially the Federations refused to tackle the problem of campus anti-Semitism — then much more manageable — and abandoned future students like Shabbos to their fate — or, in his case, to become their rightful replacements.
As shown in our 2023 book, Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, community leadership has long embraced the wrong priorities and doesn’t know how to fight in the war against American Jews which is already underway. There certainly has been marked improvement since October 7, but the emergence of new, young leaders, who can speak directly and eloquently to Israelis and their government, is especially heartening.
