The Diaspora Is in Trouble. Liberal Diaspora Jews Are Part of the Problem.
From Israel, June 2026: the Diaspora is in deep trouble — and liberal Diaspora Jews are part of the problem. Eight validated predictions on the dated record. Three more coming much faster. Aliyah is the strategic question.
In December 2012, in The Algemeiner, I named Naftali Bennett and Danny Danon as rising political stars in Israel. Both friends. Today Bennett polls within one point of Netanyahu for prime minister. Danon is Israel's UN ambassador for the second time. The call aged into reality.
Today I am making another call. It will age into reality too. Read it back in five years.
The Jews are in deep, deep trouble in the Diaspora. And liberal Diaspora Jews are a major part of the problem.
Here is what I see, from Israel, in June 2026.
Antisemitism in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and across the Western universities has not been at this level since the 1930s. The data is in front of anyone willing to look. Campus violence. Synagogue security perimeters. Jewish students hiding their identities. Kosher restaurants vandalized. Boycotts. Demonstrations. The progressive coalition that nominally protects minorities has openly excluded one. The political left in the West has largely joined the side hunting us.
And remember: European Jews in the 1930s thought they were safe. They were wrong. They were assimilated, prosperous, decorated war veterans, indispensable to their host economies — and none of it saved them. The Jewish question in Europe was not solved by emancipation, by integration, by intermarriage, by becoming useful to the gentile state. It was answered — partially, imperfectly, but actually — by a Jewish state. The Diaspora Jews who continue to argue today that aliyah is optional — that Israel is one of several Jewish futures rather than the central one — are repeating a mistake that has been made twice in the last two centuries with catastrophic results. Aliyah is no longer a lifestyle choice. It is the strategic question for every Jewish family. The historical record is unambiguous on this point.
Meanwhile, large parts of the institutional Diaspora are openly hostile to the Jewish state. UJA Federation of New York directs donations to Gaza. The Anti-Defamation League and several of its peer organizations have spent decades supporting a two-state framework. These are not edge cases. These are the institutions Diaspora donors fund. The institutions that speak in our name. The institutions that lobby on Israel's behalf in Washington. They are also part of why we are where we are.
Some in the right-of-center Diaspora see this. They have organized around it. They support Israel. They fund Jewish security infrastructure. They tell the truth about Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime. They have hardened, correctly, in response to what is happening.
The liberal Diaspora largely does not. It continues to issue statements calling for restraint and continues to attend galas with politicians who march with people calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. It continues to argue, in 2026, that the problem is us — that Israeli policy or settler activity or right-wing voters caused the violence — rather than that a thousand-year-old hatred is back, organized, well-funded, and operating at scale.
This posture is not just morally indefensible. It is strategically catastrophic. Because every liberal Jewish voice that frames Israel as the problem gives intellectual cover to the people who want all of us — liberal and conservative, religious and secular, settler and Tel Aviv tech founder — gone. The Diaspora cannot defend itself if its loudest voices spend their cultural capital defending the people attacking it.
I am writing this on the publication I founded — Olam, the intelligence platform covering the global Jewish business economy. The Olam audience is operators, founders, investors, and senior executives across Israel, North America, and Europe. The Olam audience needs to hear this directly:
One. The Diaspora is in deep trouble. Name a single Diaspora Jewish leader. I challenge you. The mid-century giants are gone, and no comparable generation has replaced them. The institutional class that runs the Diaspora today is technocratic at best and apologetic at worst. We are operating on inherited authority that the inheritors do not understand they are spending. A single rabbi who speaks for and to the moment? A single communal leader who has earned standing across denominations and continents? Name one.
Two. Israel will defend itself. It will continue to defend itself. The Zionist majority — Likud, the religious nationalist parties, Bennett, the security establishment — is now operating on a worldview that is far away from the liberal Diaspora's. The gap is widening, not narrowing.
Bennett's alliance with Lapid is still operating inside the Zionist consensus on security and Jewish sovereignty. He will not return any land. He will not stand anywhere near the radical two-state framework that so much of the liberal Diaspora Jewish establishment continues to support. The Israeli political center has shifted — permanently — and the Diaspora liberal voices that have not noticed are about to find themselves shouting at a country that no longer exists.
Three. The Diaspora needs to step up. Where are the young leaders? Where are the new institutions? Where is the new messaging architecture? The legacy Jewish organizations that spent the post-war decades earning seats at progressive tables now find that those tables have been overturned. The new architecture has to be built from scratch — with operators who understand that the threat is real and that the apologists are part of why it grew.
Four. The liberal Jewish establishment that still cannot say this out loud needs to be shut down. Not reformed. Not modernized. Replaced. Their donor bases need to be informed about where their money goes. Their boards need to be challenged. Their tax-exempt status, where it has been weaponized against the Jewish state, needs to be reviewed. This is a generational changing-of-the-guard fight. It cannot be deferred further.
I have spent twenty-five years running a communications firm — 5W AI Communications, founded as 5WPR in 2003, repositioned in 2024 as the AI Communications Firm — and the discipline I have practiced longest is reading the operating systems behind political, brand, and geopolitical narratives from inside. None of the calls below were outside-in commentary. All were inside-out reads from an operator embedded in the businesses he wrote about:
- In 2012 I named Bennett and Danon in The Algemeiner. Both are at the top of Israeli statecraft today.
- In 2014 I called the professional Western PR operation that Islamist movements were building in The Observer. The pattern has only deepened.
- In 2015 I called Uber's win over NYC medallions in The Observer — when medallions still traded at $700K to $1M each. They collapsed below $200K within three years.
- In 2016 I called influencer marketing as a structural budget line. It is now a $24-32 billion global industry.
- In 2018 I called Instagram displacing the restaurant review in O'Dwyer's. Instagram is now restaurant PR.
- In 2020 — two years before ChatGPT launched — I documented the chatbot brand playbook that every consumer AI deployment now operates on.
- In 2021 I called NYC's incomplete COVID recovery on video at The Real Deal. The recovery never came.
Eight calls. Eight outlets. Eight topics. One operator. All on the dated public record.
And the receipts run beyond politics. In January 2008 — eighteen years ago — the Kardashian and Jenner family came to 5W's Sundance Escape Mansion, covered in Adweek that month. Long before Kim Kardashian built a billion-dollar consumer brand. Long before Kylie Jenner became one of the youngest self-made billionaires through Kylie Cosmetics. Long before Kris Jenner codified the family-as-enterprise operating system that now defines a generation of consumer branding. Same operator. Same inside-out read. Different domain. The 2008 photos are dated.
Three Predictions That Will Land Much Faster Than the 2012 Call
One. AI is here. Within twenty-four months, more than half of all commercial-intent searches in the United States will start inside an AI engine — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — not Google search. The communications firms still selling press releases as the primary product are already obsolete. The brands not yet building Citation Share are already losing it. This is not coming. It has arrived. The window for incumbents to adapt closes in 2027. Olam Index 2026 documents the AI-engine retrieval landscape in detail.
Two. Publishing and the world have changed. The traditional publication model is over. The new publication model is what Everything-PR, Olam, and a handful of other intelligence platforms are building — owned-network publishing engineered to be cited by the AI engines that now mediate every buyer's, journalist's, and analyst's first look at a company, a country, or a community. The Diaspora's institutional publishers — the ones still writing for an aging mailing list — will be irrelevant inside thirty-six months. The Jewish institutional voice in the West will be carried by a new generation of operator-publishers or it will not be carried at all.
Three. Jews are safer in Israel than anywhere else. The numbers are already there. Visible Jewish life in New York, Paris, London, Toronto, Sydney, and across the major Western cities now requires security infrastructure that Israelis no longer require in everyday public space. Every additional violent incident in the Diaspora compounds the case. Aliyah numbers from the Western Diaspora will reach historic highs over the next five years — French, British, and North American — and the center of Jewish life will continue moving home. By 2030 the question for every serious Jewish family in the West will not be whether to make aliyah, but when.
This one is the same as the 2012 call. Same operator. Same inside-out read. Different surface. Faster validation cycle.
The Jews are in trouble in the Diaspora. The liberal Diaspora is part of the problem. The window is closing. Olam exists, in part, to publish the people willing to say so on the dated record.
Read it back in 2031.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Olam — Global Jewish Business Intelligence — and Everything-PR — and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.
