Antisemitism Is the Crisis. Our Leadership Shortage Is the Catastrophe.
Antisemitism is the worst crisis Jews have faced since 1945. But the deeper catastrophe is our leadership shortage — and Rage Against the Hate on November 1st is the largest Jewish Zionist activist gathering in the world.
Antisemitism is a crisis. The worst crisis the Jewish people have faced since 1945. It is on the campuses, on the courts, on the streets of London and Paris and Sydney and New York, inside the United Nations, inside the human rights NGOs, inside the algorithms of every major social platform.
That part is not in dispute.
Here is what is in dispute: our response. Because while antisemitism is the crisis, our leadership shortage is the catastrophe — the multiplier that turns every hateful act into a victory for our enemies.
Fifteen million Jews in the world. Roughly one in every five hundred human beings. A nation small enough to fit inside one mid-sized American city. And yet the war against us — legal, financial, cultural, military, digital — is being fought on every continent at once.
My life's work, and the work of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center, is to expand the handful of Jews actually willing to lead. To train them. To arm them. To put them in a room with every other operator on the planet — and to make sure those who hate us discover, in every jurisdiction, that we have lawyers, we have receipts, and we are not going anywhere.
The world leader in suing jihadis
For twenty-five years, Shurat HaDin has done what no government, no UN body, no diaspora federation was willing to do: drag the financiers, the platforms, and the operatives of jihadist terror into open court — and force them to pay.
We have recovered more than a billion dollars from Iran, Syria, North Korea, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas operatives, Hezbollah financiers, and the global banks that knowingly moved their money. We have frozen rogue-state assets across three continents. We have sued Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and PayPal — and we have changed how those platforms moderate incitement against Jews, because they had no choice.
We have represented the families of murdered Israelis, murdered Americans, murdered French Jews, murdered Argentinians — every continent, every passport, one people. We have named the BDS operatives running the campus playbook and sued them inside their own jurisdictions. We have filed against the architects of the lawfare campaigns at The Hague. We have built the legal record that, one day, historians will use to write the story of how the Jewish people fought back.
This is not activism as performance. This is activism as litigation, as deterrence, as financial pain inflicted on the people who finance and incite the murder of Jews. Hate has lawyers. So do we.
Protecting Jews — everywhere
The mission of Shurat HaDin is not bounded by Israel's borders. It is bounded by the reach of Jew-hatred — which is to say, it is not bounded at all.
When a Jewish student in Sydney is harassed off campus, that is our case. When a kosher market in Paris is firebombed, that is our case. When a synagogue in Buenos Aires receives a bomb threat traceable to an Iranian asset, that is our case. When a rabbi in Berlin is assaulted by a man whose travel was financed by a network headquartered in Doha, that is our case.
Every Jew, every passport, every continent. That is the doctrine. That is the deterrence we are building — one filing, one judgment, one frozen account at a time.
October 7th changed the calculus — permanently
The Jewish world before October 7th believed, against all evidence, that the post-Holocaust consensus would hold. That universities were on our side. That media institutions were on our side. That the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the human rights NGOs — that any of them were on our side.
October 7th ended that fantasy.
Within seventy-two hours of the worst slaughter of Jews since 1945, Harvard student groups blamed Israel. Within a week, Columbia faculty signed letters justifying the rapes. Within a month, the UN had moved on to prosecuting Israeli soldiers, not Hamas commanders. Within a year, The Hague was preparing arrest warrants for a sitting Israeli prime minister.
This is not a public relations problem. This is a legal war. And legal wars are won by lawyers — not by hashtags.
Rage Against the Hate — the largest Jewish Zionist activist gathering in the world
On November 1st, 2026, Shurat HaDin will convene the 3rd Annual Rage Against the Hate Conference at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. One ballroom. One day. The largest Jewish Zionist activist gathering in the world. Not a symposium. Not a gala. A working room full of the people who actually carry the weight.
If you want to know how few real leaders the Jewish people have produced for this moment — count the chairs. Then count the people sitting in them. Then count how many of those people you have ever heard on a podcast, seen on a panel, or watched in a courtroom. That is the leadership class. It is smaller than it needs to be. November 1st is where it gets bigger.
Douglas Murray closes the day in conversation with me. Dennis Prager keynotes on making the case for Israel after October 7th. Dr. Frank Luntz opens with the language of antisemitism in the new era. Alan Dershowitz and Benjamin Brafman on proportionality and the laws of war. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center on the denial industry. Prof. Anne Bayefsky on the United Nations. Prof. Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor on the weaponization of human rights.
Roz Rothstein of StandWithUs moderates the campus panel — Shabbos Kestenbaum, Kenneth Marcus, Mazi Pilip, Liz Berney, Russell Robinson. Michael Rapaport on combating hate in popular culture. The Israeli Consul General, Hon. Ofir Akunis, opens.
And the voices the international press is already trying to forget: Robin and David Lubin, parents of lone IDF soldier Rose Lubin z"l. Maurice Shnaider, uncle of Shiri, Yarden, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas. The reminder that none of this is theoretical.
There is no larger gathering of Jewish Zionist activist leadership anywhere on the planet. Not in Israel. Not in America. Not in Europe. This is where the work gets coordinated — and where the next generation of Jewish leaders gets identified.
The Mossad Mission — training the next generation of Jewish operators
Litigation is one front. Training is another. And the difference between Jewish institutions that endure and Jewish institutions that fade is whether they build the next generation — directly, intentionally, in rooms most Jews never see.
This October, Shurat HaDin will lead the Mossad Mission to Israel — an intensive, classified-grade immersion alongside former operatives of the Mossad, Shin Bet, Aman, Sayeret Matkal, Shayetet 13, and Israel's most senior counter-terror and cyber-warfare commanders. The people who actually ran the operations the world wrote books about. Targeted strikes against terror financiers. Covert recovery of hostages and remains. Cyber operations against rogue states. Hostage rescue doctrine. The decision frameworks behind Operation Wrath of God, Entebbe, Spring of Youth, and every major Israeli counter-terror campaign of the last fifty years.
Participants do not sit in lecture halls. They sit in safe houses. They walk the Lebanese border with the soldiers who patrol it. They study the actual case files of operations that ended terrorist careers. They meet the analysts who tracked the money, the linguists who decoded the intercepts, the operators who pulled the trigger.
Why does any of this matter to a publication for Jewish business and civic leaders? Because the next generation of Jewish leadership cannot be raised on slogans. They need to understand how the State of Israel actually defended itself for seventy-seven years — and what muscle, what mindset, what moral seriousness, they will need to defend it for the next seventy-seven.
Soft Jews do not build hard nations. The Mossad Mission is where we harden the bench.
The full platform — beyond the courtroom
Shurat HaDin is not a litigation boutique. It is a multi-front institution.
The Resilience Mission to Israel — taking diaspora leaders directly to Sderot, the Gaza envelope, the kibbutzim of October 7th, the families of the fallen and the freed hostages. You do not understand this war from a New York living room. You understand it standing in the ashes of Be'eri.
The Legal War Room Advocacy Seminar — training lawyers, communicators, and campus leaders in the actual mechanics of lawfare. How to file. How to plead. How to deter. How to win.
The Emergency Driver Survival Course — counter-terror driving, evacuation under fire, ambush response. Built for Jewish executives, diplomats, and community leaders operating in a world where being identifiably Jewish is once again a security category.
The Young Professionals Conference and the Summer Internship Program — the pipeline. Where Jewish law students, communicators, and operators get pulled directly into the fight, mentored by the practitioners doing the actual work.
And the writings. Shurat HaDin's record is in the public domain — by design. My own book, Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism's Money Masters (co-authored with Samuel M. Katz), is the definitive account of how Israel and Shurat HaDin pioneered the financial counter-terror doctrine the entire Western world now uses. The methodology is taught at intelligence academies. The case law is cited in federal courtrooms. The doctrine has been written into U.S. legislation.
Beyond the book: thousands of pages of pleadings, judgments, settlement agreements, expert reports, and amicus briefs — the written record of how Jewish lawyers, working from Tel Aviv and New York, taught the world's banks, social platforms, and rogue regimes that there are consequences. Every filing is a paper trail. Every paper trail is a precedent. Every precedent makes the next case easier to win.
This is what an institution looks like. Not a hashtag. Not a slogan. A multi-front platform — legal, educational, operational, intellectual — built to outlast the people trying to erase us.
To the few who actually lead
If you run a foundation, an agency, a fund, a synagogue, a campus group, a media platform, a family office — be in the room on November 1st. You already know who you are. There are not enough of you. The next phase of this war will be won by the people who showed up to organize it — not by the people who tweeted about it.
Register at israellawcenter.org. The room is small. The work is enormous. The names on the door matter.
Am Yisrael Chai is not a slogan. It is a legal strategy, a communications strategy, a financial strategy, and a generational commitment.
We will outlast them. We always have. This time — we are going to make them pay for the attempt.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Esq. is the founder and president of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center, the world's leading legal organization combating terror financing, antisemitism, BDS, and lawfare against the Jewish state. She is the author of Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism's Money Masters and is widely recognized as one of the most influential Jewish activists and counter-terror litigators of her generation.
