Joe Roberts Profile picture
Feb 9 10 tweets 2 min read Read on X
I’ve spent much of my career in the Jewish institutional world. I’ve seen billions spent on fighting antisemitism. And yet, young voters are 5x more likely to have an unfavorable view of Jews than their grandparents.

We need to talk about why. 🧵
2/ For decades, our communal institutions raised and spent enormous sums to “fight antisemitism.” Conferences. Reports. Interfaith dialogues. “Education.”

And yet, antisemitism is worse than ever.
3/ The numbers don’t lie. We’re losing young people. Not just on Israel—on Jews, period. And this didn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of systemic failures by institutions who were supposed to defend us.
4/ Our institutions kept reassuring us that their strategies were working. That engagement and education were the answer. That if we just showed people our humanity, they’d stop hating us.

They were wrong.
5/ While we invested in glossy campaigns and polite conversations, our enemies were radicalizing a generation online, in universities, and in activist movements. They were playing offense. We were playing defense.
6/ Worse, we funneled resources into initiatives that enabled the very ideologies fueling antisemitism. We prioritized coalition-building with groups that turned against us. We funded equity programs that erased Jewish identity.
7/ Now, the bill has come due. Young voters are openly hostile to Jews. Our institutions failed to anticipate this, failed to stop it, and failed to adapt.
8/ Jewish institutions have to take their share of the responsibility for this failure. We don’t need more summits and reports. We need accountability—and a total rethink of how we fight this battle.
9/ That means:

🔹Investing in unapologetic Jewish strength, not fragile “bridge-building.”

🔹Fighting propaganda with facts and power, not just op-eds.

🔹Recognizing that some alliances are not worth maintaining.
10/ This moment demands a reckoning. If we don’t change course now, we’ll be having the same conversations in 20 years—except in a world where it’s even more dangerous to be Jewish.

It’s time to radically alter course. More of the same won’t make this better.

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More from @Joe_Roberts01

Jul 12
The @ADL just dropped one of the most terrifying reports on American antisemitism—ever.

Hate is going mainstream.
Hate is being justified.
Hate is being explained away.

We’re not alarmist. And we’re not too late. But we have to act now.

🧵 Image
Let this sink in:

24% of Americans say anti-Jewish violence is “understandable”

13% say it’s “justified”

15% say it’s “necessary”

That’s not the dark web. That’s your neighbor. Your barista. Your HR rep.
These aren’t fringe views anymore.

They’re in classrooms. On TikTok. At protests. In unions. In Congress.

We are watching antisemitism go viral in real time.

And the people cheering it on believe they’re doing justice.
Read 12 tweets
May 18
You’ve been told that Jews poured into the Land of Israel as colonial invaders.

That Zionism was foreign.

That Palestine was peacefully Arab—until the Jews arrived.

But the truth is more complicated.

Arabs came in huge numbers too. And here’s why that matters.

A thread 🧵 Image
In 1882, roughly 24,000 Jews lived in the Land of Israel—then part of the Ottoman Empire.

By 1948, after waves of aliyah, that number reached 650,000.

These weren’t colonists.

They were exiles returning home.
But here’s what’s often left out:

The Arab population of Palestine grew rapidly during the same period—from 432,000 in 1893 to over 1.2 million by 1947.

This wasn’t just natural growth.

It was driven in part by Jewish development.
Read 12 tweets
Apr 25
What happened this week in Kashmir is a horror.

What happened on October 7 in Israel was a horror.

The world needs to start recognizing the pattern.

This isn’t about borders. It’s about terror. And the free world must stand with those who fight it.

A thread🧵
On April 22, terrorists linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked Hindu civilians in Pahalgam, India.

26 civilians—children, women, elders—murdered for the crime of being Indian, of being Hindu.

A massacre, pure and simple.
It echoes what happened on October 7.

When Hamas stormed into Israel, they didn’t just attack soldiers.

They raped women. They burned babies. They slaughtered whole families.

Not for land. Not for “liberation.”

But because they were Jews.
Read 9 tweets
Apr 21
You’ve heard the slogans:
Zionism is racism.
Zionism is colonialism.
Zionism is ethnic cleansing.

Now here’s what you haven’t heard:
Those are lies.

And the people who built Zionism said so—clearly.

A thread 🧵Image
Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

It was born from exile, persecution, and longing—and rooted in one goal: to return home and live in peace as neighbors.

Not to rule. Not to remove. But to rebuild.
Theodor Herzl, father of modern Zionism:

“We shall endeavor to live in peace with the rest of the population. We will not displace anyone.”

From the beginning, the goal was coexistence—not conflict.
Read 13 tweets
Apr 20
Yosef Haim Brenner didn’t come to the Land of Israel as an idealist.

He came because there was nowhere else to live as a Jew.

He built a life surrounded by neighbors that hated him for it.

And in 1921, during the Jaffa Riots, he was butchered for it.

A thread🧵 Image
Brenner was born in 1881 in the Russian Empire.

He saw pogroms, fled the army, and was nearly swallowed by exile.

He was an author and thinker, who practiced his craft in Hebrew.

And he came to Palestine not because it would be easy.

But because he knew: Exile would kill us.
To Brenner, Zionism wasn’t Herzlian utopia—it was a fight.

A Jewish fight for existence, for language, for a home.

He knew the Arab world wouldn’t welcome the Jews. He said so, often.

But his response wasn’t to run.

It was to stay and build anyway, because there was nowhere else to be.
Read 10 tweets
Apr 14
Al Jazeera reports that Hamas has rejected a deal that would have ended the war, freed the hostages, and spared Gaza from further devastation—because it required them to disarm.

Let’s be very clear about what that means.

A 🧵 Image
Hamas is not fighting for freedom. It’s fighting for the permanent ability to wage war.

This isn’t about a blockade. It’s not about borders. It’s not about “resistance.”
It’s about keeping their weapons, their terror tunnels, and their death cult intact.
They could have said yes. Yes to disarmament. Yes to peace. Yes to rebuilding Gaza. Yes to life.

Instead, they said no.

Because peace is not their goal. The destruction of Israel—and the death of Jews—is.
Read 7 tweets

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