American Jews are under assault, their institutions under siege, and their leaders are failing to
protect them due to conflicting ideological loyalties and a deficit of courage.
This insightful 22-essay collection persuasively demonstrates that American Jewish establishment leadership today consists mostly of politicized bureaucrats operating on the basis of feel-good utopian notions disconnected from the real world. Betrayal loudly rings the alarm for a somnolent American Jewry. The Jewish community can ill afford to ignore the alarm.
This may be the first book about the failure of the Jewish establishment to respond effectively to the rapid rise in anti-Semitism in America.
Charles Jacobs, Avi Goldwasser, and a distinguished group of contributing authors — Alan Dershowitz, Mort Klein, Caroline Glick, Richard Landes, Jonathan Tobin, and Thane Rosenbaum among them — skillfully analyze the ideological onslaughts and physical threats that have become all too common. The authors delve into the pervasive presence of anti-Semitism in numerous spheres of American society, from news media to educational institutions, religious organizations, and, more recently, from political leaders.
The book itself is an expanded version of a collection published in the Spring 2022 issue of Karen Lehrman Bloch’s White Rose Magazine, a publication which promotes classical liberalism in the face of political extremism and is named in honor of the anti-Nazi White Rose resistance movement.
Betrayal launched May 21, 2023, at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem with a panel discussion featuring Charles Jacobs, Richard Landes, and Melanie Phillips.
In his speech, Charles Jacobs explained that Jewish leaders fail to understand the nature and extent of modern-day Jew-hatred, which extends well beyond traditional white supremacists, to “inconvenient” sources: leftists, anti-Zionists, black anti-Semites, and Muslims.
The Jewish establishment “left us practically defenseless” and “is now fully trapped in a corner,” Jacobs said. “Our leaders are flummoxed and confused. They need to be pressured, convinced, humiliated, shamed to do a massive re-think.”
This book is unique and long overdue. It is a thought-provoking work which analyzes and documents the failure of American Jewish leadership to effectively confront the ideological and physical onslaught that many in the Jewish community are experiencing. The contributing writers describe and explain the failure of Jewish leaders to stop the ongoing demonization and defamation of Jews and Israel in the media, on college campuses, in high schools, and even Congress.
The book has been praised by prominent Jewish thinkers and writers, including Dennis Prager, Daniel Pipes, Ken Levin, Liel Leibovitz, and Gil Troy.
The Jewish Leadership Project, which compiled and edited the essays, is planning several webinars with the authors over the next few months. Stay tuned.
The book sheds light on the importance of leadership and the crucial role which Jewish leadership must play to defend and protect American Jewry during a time of growing hostility.
