During the Super Bowl, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft took heat on two fronts: one, for owning the team that lost, and two, for airing an ad that quietly infuriated a large portion of the Jewish community. The commercial depicted a scrawny Jewish teen being bullied at school and finding a “Dirty Jew” sticker on his knapsack, before a tall, black classmate steps in to save him.
The backlash from Jews was sharp and immediate. We don’t need to be cast as victims waiting for a savior, many critics offered. We need to project strength.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Yet the instinct behind Kraft’s commercial—to seek protection through solidarity politics rather than demanding equal treatment under the law—is the underlying mission of a new organization called Project Shema. The group, which has made a splash on college campuses, is trying to make Jews palatable again to the intersectional Left. But much like some of the organizations that preceded it, Project Shema will inevitably end in failure.
Project Shema is positioning itself as a DEI organization for Jews. On its website, it invokes standard DEI tropes—claiming, for example, that “we are all socialized into anti-Jewish ideas and must do the work to unpack these bigotries and act as allies.” The group “focuses on depolarizing difficult conversations around anti-Jewish harm to strengthen allyship for and within the Jewish community” by offering sensitivity trainings and seminars in schools, communities, and workplaces.
Project Shema is trying to fill the space on the progressive Left that groups like the Anti-Defamation League once occupied. The ADL has lost the progressive mantle, now branded right-wing by the Left for objecting to anti-Zionist hatred from progressives.
Into this vacuum steps Project Shema, led by founder Oren Jacobson. Jacobson previously ran Men4Choice, an advocacy group devoted to “mobilizing male allies in the fight for reproductive rights.” The word “Shema” means “to listen” in Hebrew. And “listening” seems to be a major focus, as does educating and facilitating dialogue.
Take the group’s non-stance on Israel. According to its website, “We do not offer education or advocacy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, we do help upstanders understand Jewish identity and nurture empathy for Jewish traumas and lived experiences.” This noncommittal position tries to keep Shema palatable to a progressive movement moving rapidly toward anti-Zionism.
For a new and relatively unknown organization, Project Shema has made substantial inroads on campuses. Major universities like Harvard, Columbia, and Tufts have employed its services. Working with Project Shema, Harvard even developed a seven-session DEI training on “practical strategies to combat Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian, and anti-Israeli biases on campus.”
Such programming illustrates the flaws of Project Shema’s approach. Yes, Jews face discrimination, and universities should take anti-Semitism seriously. But groups like Project Shema see the answer to anti-Semitism as more DEI—when DEI itself is part of the problem.
The DEI framework seeks to determine oppressors and oppressed. This will never be a comfortable exercise for Jews, because the activist Left puts Jews on the wrong side of that ledger. Trying to place Jews into the oppressed side of the binary doesn’t disrupt DEI but further validates it.
Besides, Jews don’t need a seat at the DEI table. They need civil-rights law applied consistently and enforced vigorously. If someone harasses or assaults a Jewish student, prosecute them. No sensitivity seminar needed, no “allyship” workshop required—just equal protection under the law.
Jacobson himself understands the deeper problem. In a 2019 op-ed responding to the progressive Sunrise Movement’s unwillingness to march alongside Jewish groups at a voting rights rally, he wrote with real force about the nature of anti-Semitism:
[A]ntisemitism is not anti-Judaism in its modern form. It’s anti-Jew. It’s not about how Jews pray, but rather about who they are and what they are accused of doing. . . .
By attacking “Zionist organizations” in a voting rights coalition Sunrise DC basically said it won’t work alongside Jewish organizations (or Jews) that believe the state of Israel has the right to exist. . . . It seeks to deny Jewish people the right to self-determination by erasing our peoplehood and connection to the land. . . . It says that Jews must be a perpetual minority on this earth subject to the whims and bigotries of the societies they live in . . . I believe “Never Again” isn’t just a slogan to hope for, but rather a mission to fight for.
Here is a precise, unflinching criticism of how the Left wants Jews to behave in order to treat them as equal partners. But Jacobson has founded an organization that doesn’t seem to share this focus and clarity.
Project Shema, instead, speaks the language of allyship and listening. It embraces the DEI framework that, by its own internal logic, will struggle to treat Jewish identity—particularly Jewish peoplehood and any connection to Israel—as legitimate and on equal footing with other group identities.
Forcing sensitivity training on people who don’t want it hasn’t protected Jews on college campuses. Jews don’t need new organizations trying to force them into a progressive movement that doesn’t want them. They just need the law to be applied on their behalf.
Photo: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images