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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?

(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.

The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.

“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.

“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”

The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.

Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.

“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”

Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)

We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?

Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.

I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.

Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.

What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.

I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?

I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.

If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.

But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.

So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?

First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.

There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.

It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.

One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.

What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?

I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.

It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.

There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?

Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.

But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.

So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.

The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.

There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.

I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?

Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.

I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.

And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.

But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.

And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.

Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.

The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?

Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.

So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.

—
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He was president of his synagogue. Now he wants to be LA’s next mayor.

LOS ANGELES — Adam Miller volunteered with a Reform social justice movement as a teenager, lived in Israel as a young adult and was and became a leader of one of the country’s most successful synagogues.

But Miller, a businessman who is running for mayor of Los Angeles, hasn’t said much about his Jewish background on the campaign trail. Instead, he has been talking about his entrepreneurial credentials — he sold his software company for $5.2 billion in 2021 — and touting the accomplishments of the nonprofits he started. His campaign site doesn’t mention his Jewish connections at all.

Seated at a cafe in his tony West LA neighborhood of Brentwood, Miller explained why. In today’s political environment, he said, he felt he’d had to downplay his Jewish, pro-Israel identity early in the campaign. But with California’s nonpartisan June 2 primary approaching — with the top two winners going on to the general election — he was ready to open up.

“It pains me a little bit when other candidates are acting like they’re going to position for the Jewish vote,” said Miller, who is running as a Democrat. “They’re acting like all of a sudden they’re very aligned with the Jewish community, when I know as a Jew that’s not necessarily true.”

Miller, who is self-funding his campaign, is currently running third or fourth, depending on the poll, in a race to unseat incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. More than 40% of voters remain undecided. He’s pitching himself as a get-things-done moderate — and a course correction from the growing influence in City Hall of democratic socialists, members of the same left-wing movement that helped make Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City. Four Democratic Socialists of America members sit on LA’s City Council. One, Councilmember Nithya Raman, is Bass’ most formidable opponent in the primary.

At debates and in interviews, Miller has focused on the city’s most pressing issues: homelessness, housing, immigration and budget. Yet Miller’s Jewish bona fides may also hold his clearest arguments for leadership of the city. He leaned forward when talking about Ikar, the nondenominational synagogue where he once served as president, and about his identity as a Zionist — “even though it’s a dirty word now,” he said.

And a series of high-profile incidents affecting LA’s Jewish community during Bass’ term had helped clarify for Miller the problems facing the city.

“Look, to the vast majority of Angelenos, antisemitism is certainly not a top issue,” said Miller. “But as a Jew, antisemitism, freedom of speech, protection of religious freedom, is extremely important. And we can do better.”

A year in Israel

Miller’s Jewish story intersects with his journey into politics. As a teenager growing up in New Jersey, he was active in the National Federation for Temple Youth, a Reform youth movement, and was eventually elected social action chair of his region. The position involved traveling to Washington to lobby Congress on key issues — which in the 1980s included fighting apartheid in South Africa.

Miller recounts that he was always primed to be a supporter of Israel, raised with a grandfather who dreamed of living there, and in NFTY as a Zionist organization. After he finished graduate school, he visited the country for the first time, staying in Herzliya.

“I decided, after being there for almost a month, that I was going to give myself 10 days to see if I could get a job in Israel,” he recalled. He got hired at an investment bank in Jerusalem and lived there for a year, attending ulpan in the evenings.

The experience was formative. His company, Cornerstone OnDemand — a human resources enterprise software — later opened an office in Tel Aviv. “We were the No. 1 workplace in Israel for olim chadashim,” Miller beamed, using the Hebrew for new immigrants.

Miller’s involvement with Ikar began when the congregation was meeting in a JCC gym. Enchanted, he asked the rabbi to coffee. That was Rabbi Sharon Brous, then a mostly unknown Jewish Theological Seminary graduate, who invited him to that night’s board meeting. He served as Ikar’s president for a term in the mid-2000s.

In that time, he helped transform the congregation from an experiment in non-movement Judaism into a dynamic religious community that today has 1,200 member families — a directory that includes Steven Spielberg and former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti — and a multimillion-dollar budget.

When Miller stepped down from the board in February after entering the mayor’s race, Brous — now one of the most sought-out rabbinic voices in America — gave him a blessing in front of the congregation. (Brous did not respond to an inquiry.)

 

 

Miller, who said he’s reached out to Garcetti for advice about the office, was eager to connect his experience at Ikar to his qualifications to lead City Hall. Both institutions, Miller said, were full of good people with great ambitions, adding that his unique advantage is practical organizational leadership experience — budgeting, development and operations.

“You have to have the right mission, but you also have to have the ability to execute,” he said. “Ikar is a good example. We had great ideas early on. We had a lot of excitement and hope and compassion, but I put in operational structure to make it a reality.”

Two longtime congregants who asked not to be named for publication agreed, crediting Miller for professionalizing the organization when it was still a fledgling startup.

“That understanding and capability,” Miller said, “is what I’ve been able to do over and over again across a number of different organizations, and what I will bring to City Hall. And none of the other candidates have that.”

Campaigning in counterpoint

Miller is likely right that most Angelenos don’t regard antisemitism as a top issue. But the last four years have offered Jewish residents of the city plenty of opportunities to rate the incumbent.

Bass’ term has seen an antisemitic shooting in Pico-Robertson, the city’s largest Jewish neighborhood; a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA that drew national attention; and dueling protests outside an Israeli real estate seminar at Adas Torah, an Orthodox synagogue, that devolved into a brawl. More recently, pro-Palestinian protesters entered Wilshire Boulevard Temple to protest an Israeli defense contractor speaking there.

Miller said the mayor’s response in each case reflected the same pattern. “I think the city just generally shows no urgency to any problems,” he said. “We see that with the fires and the slow recovery, we see that with the encampments, we see it with trash and public safety, but we also see it clearly with antisemitism — just not a sufficient response. Period.”

Local Jewish leaders have lobbied for buffer zones outside of synagogue entrances where protesting would be prohibited, a measure Miller sees as a no-brainer. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has vetoed a bill that would have mandated a police perimeter outside of schools, citing First Amendment protections. (Mamdani meanwhile signed a bill that created such a space around houses of worship, which passed with a veto-proof majority.)

Like many American Jews, Miller was alarmed by Mamdani’s rise, as he was by the rising influence of DSA on local politics, saying the movement, whose platform includes a boycott of Israel, “has been overall antisemitic.” But he hoped Los Angeles, under a Miller mayoralty, would be a counterweight to Mamdani’s militantly anti-Israel stance.

“It’s an enormous opportunity to do that,” he said. “And conversely, if both coasts are run by DSA mayors, I think we put the Jews at real risk.”

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With Israel Facing PTSD Emergency, New App Seeks to Help IDF Soldiers Heal

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff. Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi salutes fallen soldiers at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem in a picture published on Oct. 27, 2024. Photo: IDF.

When one of Tzur Kurnedz’s cousins woke from a coma after fighting Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, the first person he asked to see was Kurnedz.

The soldier, who had served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)’s Golani Brigade and lost most of his unit in the fighting, wanted to speak with someone who could understand what he had just lived through. For Kurnedz, that need was painfully familiar.

Kurnedz, who served in an elite IDF unit and as a sharpshooter during the 2014 Gaza war, known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge (Tzuk Eitan), had developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) himself. He spent years working through his trauma with the help of family, friends, and body-and-mind therapy. Over time, he came to see how many gaps existed in the support system for former soldiers — and how difficult it was for many to access the tools they needed.

That experience became the foundation for Bishvilenu, a digital platform Kurnedz launched with his wife, Nomi Weiss, a social worker and lawyer, to provide long-term recovery support for soldiers, their families, and their communities.

What began as trauma in Kurnedz’s own life became a resource he could use to help others. “It’s healing. It’s growth,” Kurnedz said. “I wasn’t really willing to share my story before, and now it’s a powerful tool for me to help others.”

In Hebrew, “Bishvilenu” means “for us,” while shvil also means “path” — a fitting name for a platform built around the idea that trauma recovery is not a single intervention, but a long-term process. The app, which is free for soldiers and their families, creates individualized care plans built around three pillars: mind, body, and community. More than 400 IDF soldiers and family members are already using it, and that number continues to grow.

Bishvilenu offers clinically proven practices and tools, including narrative therapy techniques as well as breathing and physical exercises. Weiss serves as vice president and Kurnedz as CEO, but the team behind the platform includes medical and trauma experts from Israel and the United States. Among them are an emotional intelligence coach, a clinical social worker trained in trauma care, and a Brown University professor who previously led PTSD research at the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

As Weiss put it, the couple moved quickly to build a platform that could use technology “as a bridge” to help people receive support and empower themselves in the long process of trauma recovery.

“It’s a place to try to create a shared knowledge from all these trauma experts who have been working in the field,” Weiss said. “We’re the digital infrastructure. We’re not trying to be the trauma experts. We let the NGOs be the trauma experts, with the final say of what exactly their soldiers need, and we build the infrastructure as people who understand trauma. It’s more about having a place for all the expertise to be gathered than for us to try to be another voice in this oversaturated field of trauma experts.”

The need has only grown since Oct. 7.


Tzur Kurnedz, right, during his IDF service. Photo: Provided

A Mounting Crisis

Israel is facing a mounting mental health crisis, with post-traumatic stress disorder rising sharply among soldiers and the broader mental health system under extraordinary strain with no end in sight.

A report released in February 2025 by Israel’s State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman, following an audit of mental health care, revealed that in the aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent Iron Swords War, approximately 3 million adults in Israel have experienced anxiety, depression, and symptoms of PTSD.

These numbers are astronomical, underscoring the scale of the psychological fallout Israel has faced since Oct. 7. They also point to a mental health system under extraordinary strain, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis expected to seek care in the years ahead.

The scale of the need has overwhelmed existing systems. According to Bishvilenu, more than 70,000 IDF soldiers are on the waiting list for the IDF Rehabilitation Department, including at least 9,539 diagnosed with PTSD. Reuters recently reported that Israel’s Defense Ministry has recorded nearly 40 percent more PTSD cases among Israeli soldiers since September 2023 and expects that number to rise by 180 percent by 2028. Of the 22,300 troops and security personnel currently being treated for war wounds, 60 percent suffer from post-trauma.

The crisis has also brought a rise in suicide attempts. Reuters cited findings from an Israeli parliamentary committee showing that 279 IDF soldiers attempted suicide between January 2024 and July 2025, and that combat soldiers accounted for 78 percent of soldier suicide cases in 2024.

The backlog positions Bishvilenu as part of a familiar Israeli pattern, in which civil society organizations step in to provide support when public systems are overwhelmed.

Weiss said the trauma of the current war has been compounded by public distrust in the government and by the exhaustion of a long conflict.

“People don’t really believe in the government. People don’t trust the people sending them to war,” she said. “Everyone is tired.”

Using Technology for Togetherness

Weiss said that while she and Kurnedz started Bishvilenu for deeply personal reasons, it quickly grew into something much larger than they had expected.

“Each person’s individual journey can also become a resource for others, and we’re trying to create togetherness where trauma creates isolation,” Weiss said.

Bishvilenu is designed not to be a replacement for trauma professionals but rather as a piece of critical digital infrastructure connecting soldiers, families, and the NGOs already working with them.

Since Oct. 7, NGOs and other organizations have offered soldiers short-term trauma support, often using their own specialized methods and rarely sharing data or insights with one another. Bishvilenu is designed to fill that gap.

The platform is distributed through NGOs working with IDF soldiers and gives soldiers and their families access to clinically validated tools focused on mental, physical, and community-based healing.

For the NGOs, the app extends the relationship with soldiers and their families beyond initial intervention. It helps organizations stay in contact, monitor needs, and measure outcomes. Soldiers, meanwhile, receive tools for self-assessment and self-regulation.

Bishvilenu now works with 10 NGOs, including the Jerusalem-based organization OneFamily, and is in talks to partner with about 10 more.

“We’re at a point now where NGOs are calling us,” she said, “and we see that we have a service we can offer that is really meaningful.”

The platform, she said, can identify red flags during treatment or signal when soldiers need specific aftercare. “For soldiers and families, it gives them tools to assess themselves, help themselves, and regain a sense of agency over their own process.”

The Bishvilenu team and its volunteers working in a bomb shelter. Photo: Provided

Behind the platform’s technology is a simpler idea that Kurnedz learned through his own recovery: trauma isolates, but healing often begins when people feel heard.

One of the most important steps in his recovery, he said, was finally opening up about his trauma to his family, beginning with his wife.

“It was hard for me to share. It took a few years,” he said. “Last Hanukkah we had a family meeting, and it was the first time my family heard my story from Tzuk Eitan. It was very meaningful to feel heard. With trauma, you feel very isolated, like nobody can understand you. For me, it started with the small community I had — my family, my friends, even my military team. I did a lot of body and mind therapy, but the sense of community was the strongest part of the work for me.”

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Israel just quadrupled its PR budget to $730M. Experts say it won’t work.

(JTA) — Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis.

Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget last month that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy — the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara — more than four times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about 20 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war in Gaza broke out in 2023.

The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey show declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important ally. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably.

Most striking for a country long accustomed to bipartisan American support: 57% of Republicans under 50 hold negative views of Israel. Support has cratered among the religiously unaffiliated, Black Protestants and Catholics. Among American Jews, support has slipped below two-thirds.

On social media, the Hebrew word “hasbara” has become a dismissive shorthand for pro-Israel advocacy, indicating how widely known Israel’s uphill efforts to shape its image have become.

Congress is increasingly reflecting this drop in public support. Earlier this month, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel, and 36 voted to block a sale of 1,000-pound bombs, representing the strongest congressional rebuke of U.S. military aid to Israel on record.

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, says the country is engaged in a global war for hearts and minds and it must spend accordingly.

“We had a major breakthrough this year, but we must as a country invest much much more,” Sa’ar said in December as the government entered budget deliberations. “It should be like investing in jets, bombs and missile interceptors. In the face of what’s arrayed against us and what’s invested against us, it’s far from enough. This is an existential issue.”

Alongside the budget, Sa’ar won approval for a dedicated public diplomacy unit inside the Foreign Ministry, headed by a director equivalent in rank to the ministry’s top political official — a structural consolidation meant to end years of scattered hasbara work across rival ministries.

Public filings, Knesset testimony and Israeli business reporting show where a portion of the 2025 allocation went.

A $50 million international social-media ad buy was split across Google, YouTube, X and Outbrain. Roughly $40 million went to hosting 400 foreign delegations — lawmakers, pastors, influencers, university presidents. A “media war room” was erected to monitor 250 outlets and 10,000 daily Israel-related items.

The Foreign Ministry also signed a $1.5-million-a-month contract with former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale’s firm to deploy AI tools against antisemitism online, a $4.1 million campaign aimed at evangelical churches, and the “Esther Project,” a paid influencer network running up to $900,000 through a PR firm called Bridges Partners.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for interviews and comment.

Defending the approach, Consul General Israel Bachar, Jerusalem’s top diplomat in Los Angeles since 2023, said in an interview that most of the money so far had gone into social media and delegations. His post oversees seven Western states and one of the largest Israeli expatriate populations in the world.

“We flew a lot of delegations to the country — whether it’s pastors, whether it’s politicians, universities,” Bachar said. “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you have to fly out a lot of people.”

A veteran Israeli political strategist before his consular appointment, Bachar argued the anti-Israel shift in the United States is not primarily a messaging failure. He pointed instead to “sociological changes in America that have nothing to do with us” that are “being used against us.”

He called the situation a complex problem with “no silver bullet,” and said he favors additional spending on what he called “productions” in the United States — sitcoms, documentaries, feature films that touch on Israeli themes — alongside the ad buys and influencer work.

Ask the people who study public diplomacy for a living whether any of this will work, and the answer is, overwhelmingly, skeptical.

Their central objection is that no amount of messaging can outrun entrenched rejection by its target audiences of Israel’s armed response to conflicts with its neighbors.

“My position is that history shows all the money in the world won’t help if the policy is wrong,” said Nicholas Cull, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California and one of the founders of the study of public diplomacy. “The U.S. discovered that in Vietnam when its own Cold War public diplomacy budget peaked.”

Cull coined the term “reputational security” to describe the argument Sa’ar is implicitly making — that a country’s standing is itself a strategic asset worth serious investment.

“It means protecting the country both by accentuating positive images and by eliminating negative realities,” Cull said. “I suspect that the government of Israel will be unable to sell its solutions to the world when so many of its own people dispute the validity of those solutions, and where the domestic consensus is wide of the international understanding of realities on the ground.”

The polling tells a similar story, according to a scholar who has been tracking it longer than almost anyone else.

“There has been a paradigmatic shift that has taken place in America about Israel,” said Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, who has surveyed American and Arab attitudes toward Israel for decades. “I have been tracing shifts, particularly among Democrats, for a decade and a half. I have never seen a shift like the one we’ve seen.”

Born in Israel to an Arab family, Telhami was long a two-state advocate operating within the American foreign policy mainstream before moving considerably leftward in recent years.

He described a new “Gaza generation” — a majority of young Americans who, his polling shows, now see Israel as committing genocide and who see the United States as implicated in it.

Telhami said the moment reminded him of a previous episode. He served on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy in 2005, when Washington tried to spend its way out of the reputational damage of the Iraq War with campaigns aimed at Muslim audiences.

“Our conclusion was, it’s the policy, stupid,” he said. “Yes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they’re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.”

Many Israelis believe the country has simply never told its story well enough, and that with enough money and the right platforms, it can. But the conventional wisdom that Israel has not been active on the frontiers of public diplomacy simply isn’t true, according to Ilan Manor, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University who has long studied the Foreign Ministry’s online presence.

Israel was one of the first countries in the world to build a global digital-diplomacy operation, Manor said. Before Oct. 7, he said, its accounts reached roughly a billion people, a scale rivaled only by the United States.

“The problem is not that we lack infrastructure. The problem is not that we lack skill,” Manor said. “The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore. And that’s a much, much deeper problem that no amount of money is going to repair.”

He calls it a credibility gap, borrowing the term American reporters used for Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era statements. “If you’re not a credible spokesperson, if you’re not a credible state, it doesn’t matter how good your message is,” Manor said. “It doesn’t matter how viral it might get. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get.”

The credibility problem is now compounding itself. As disclosures have revealed Israeli contracts with influencers, shell websites, and AI-driven campaigns, pro-Israel posts on American social media routinely draw comments accusing the poster of being a paid foreign agent, whether they are or not.

Similar concerns come from inside the pro-Israel branding world. Joanna Landau, founder of the Tel Aviv–based Israel branding nonprofit Vibe Israel, has spent more than a decade flying international influencers to Israel on lifestyle-focused trips. She said she was not available for an interview but has laid out her views in a recent series of essays on her Substack, “Reputation Nation.”

Landau called the 2026 allocation “a long overdue course correction” but warned that structural failures would swallow the money. “Israel’s narrative has no single strategic owner,” she wrote, noting that messaging responsibility is scattered across the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the Government Press Office and the IDF.

According to the government’s own announcements, she added, most of the new funding is slated for “tactical activity” — “the same tools Israel has relied on for years, only now with many more zeros.” Her conclusion: “A large budget poured into a broken system produces scale, not strategy.”

The spending does vault Israel into the same league as some of the world’s largest public diplomacy operations, according to Landau.

Exact comparisons are hard to make, and there are no widely accepted figures for what different countries spend on public diplomacy — the work is scattered across culture ministries, state broadcasters, foreign affairs budgets, and intelligence agencies, often without a single label.

Germany, for example, funds Deutsche Welle, its international broadcaster, and the Goethe-Institut, its global network of cultural centers, at hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but both operate independently of the government. Britain spends around $450 million on the BBC World Service and millions more on international scholarships, also at arm’s length from direct messaging. The United States allocates an estimated $2.3 billion through State Department programs and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. China’s public diplomacy spending has topped $10 billion. Qatar has built Al Jazeera into a global network through state funding whose full scope is not publicly disclosed.

Israel, a country of roughly 10 million people, is now set to spend on its global image at a scale normally associated with much larger countries.

It may be too late, according to one Israeli scholar who has argued for two decades that Israel chronically underinvests in public diplomacy.

Eytan Gilboa, a professor of international communication at Bar-Ilan University, said he welcomes both the larger sum and its consolidation inside the Foreign Ministry, which he said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had deliberately “dried up” in favor of rival ministries.

But Gilboa agrees the current moment may be beyond repair.

“This is the worst crisis in Israel’s image abroad,” he said. “In the past, we have seen criticism of Israeli policy. Since Oct. 7, we have seen a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.” He argued that Israel has lost a generation of Americans, calling it “highly dangerous, because these people are going to be the next politicians, elites, journalists.”

“Perhaps $730 million is not enough,” Gilboa said. “You have to establish a mechanism, a system that would systematically address all the challenges. I am quite pessimistic.”

The post Israel just quadrupled its PR budget to $730M. Experts say it won’t work. appeared first on The Forward.

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