Against a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund: Renewing America’s Covenantal Promise

In “The Need for a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund,” Jordan Hirsch offers a serious and stimulating account of the pressures facing American Jewish institutions in an age of technological disruption, political volatility, and cultural fragmentation. His diagnosis is thoughtful; his proposed cure — a communal vehicle modeled on a Persian Gulf–style sovereign wealth fund — is not. The model misunderstands what has made American Jewish life uniquely successful, obscures the centrality of the State of Israel in Jewish political identity, and implicitly concedes ground to those who mischaracterize the U.S.–Israel relationship.

I respond not to dismiss Hirsch but to build on a conversation that he has helpfully begun. As an American Jewish conservative committed to renewing the institutions that have long sustained Jewish flourishing in this country, I share much of his concern. But we part ways on the remedy. The American Jewish community already possesses tools that are more effective, more legitimate, and far more aligned with Jewish and American political traditions than the model Hirsch proposes.

I. The Uniqueness of the American Jewish Experience

To understand why Hirsch’s solution falls short, we must begin with the most important fact about Jews in the United States: American Jewry is not simply another diaspora community. It is the beneficiary of a political order unlike any other in Jewish history.

America is not a place where Jews merely found refuge; it is a place where Jews became full partners in the nation’s civic project. The United States is a covenantal republic, not an ethnic or tribal nation-state. As Jonathan Sacks argued, its political philosophy rests on consent, moral responsibility, and the dignity of the individual. As Meir Soloveichik has shown, the American constitutional order — its structures, its jurisprudence, and its underlying moral vision — created an environment singularly hospitable to a minority faith animated by ethical monotheism.

This is why American shtadlanut — the communal advocacy tradition inherited from Europe and elsewhere  — was always different from its Old World counterparts. In Europe, the shtadlan petitioned princes for protection. In America, Jews became lawmakers, judges, advocates, and public servants shaping the nation’s moral and political trajectory. That Louis Brandeis served as a justice of the Supreme Court and as a leading figure in American Jewish civic affairs says more about America — and about the confidence and civic integration of its Jews — than about anything resembling traditional emissary politics.

By the mid-20th century, American shtadlanut was already declining because the American system rendered it unnecessary. Jews did not need intermediaries. They were citizens.

This is why the American Jewish experience has been the most successful diaspora experience in Jewish history. To suggest that this civic architecture is too fragile to sustain Jewish engagement today is to underestimate American exceptionalism itself.

II. The Missing State: Israel and Jewish Political Life

Hirsch’s argument also overlooks the central role of the modern State of Israel in shaping Jewish political identity. Shtadlanut was already waning in the United States for the reasons outlined above, but 1948 completed its demise. With the founding of Israel, Jewish security ceased to depend on the goodwill of foreign rulers or communal emissaries. It rested on Jewish sovereignty — on the decisions of an elected government responsible for defense, diplomacy, and statecraft.

Any framework for American Jewish strategy that sidelines the State of Israel therefore misunderstands the last 75-plus years of Jewish political life.

But Hirsch’s proposal raises a more troubling issue. It risks reinforcing the antisemitic trope — pushed by both the far Left and the far Right — that U.S. security assistance to Israel results from a sinister, ethnically driven lobby acting against American interests. This is not only false; it is profoundly dangerous.

As scholars such as Daniel Samet and Walter Russell Mead have documented, U.S. support for Israel is grounded firmly in American national interests and has been sustained on a bipartisan basis for decades. Israel enhances U.S. deterrence, provides intelligence advantages, stabilizes a volatile region, and reduces the burden on American servicemembers.

My own view — shaped most recently by the events of 2024 and 2025 — is that the United States has enjoyed an extraordinary return on investment from its security partnership with Israel. Far from undermining U.S. interests, the relationship has strengthened them.

Against this backdrop, the notion that Israel should — or would — trade its U.S. security assistance program for reliance on a communal investment vehicle managed by private investors unaccountable to the government of Israel is not merely impractical. It is unrealistic, conceptually incoherent, and undermines Israel’s sovereignty.

If Israel chooses to restructure its security relationship with the United States in the future, that decision belongs to the government of Israel, negotiated with the government of the United States.

A sovereign Israel makes sovereign decisions. American Jews should support that sovereignty; we should not substitute for it.

III. Tocqueville, Lincoln, and the American Civic Inheritance

The most serious flaw in Hirsch’s proposal is its departure from the Tocquevillian understanding of American civic life. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized that America’s vitality rested not only on its institutions but on its “habits of the heart” — the moral and religious commitments that animated civic association, self-government, and shared responsibility.

A young Abraham Lincoln echoed this insight in his Lyceum Address in 1838. America, he warned, would not be destroyed by foreign foes: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” The Republic’s future hinged on Americans’ fidelity to the principles of liberty, law, and civic virtue.

Ronald Reagan drew from the same civic well in 1983 when he declared that “for America to be great, it must also be good.”

American Jews have long contributed to this moral ecosystem. Through our synagogues, schools, charities, legal advocacy, and civic activism, we helped strengthen the Judeo-Christian framework on which the American project rests. This civic-moral investment — not a pooled financial instrument — has been the true source of American Jewish resilience.

IV. A Recent Test of Jewish Civic Strength

The durability of this civic inheritance was evident in the response to recent controversies. After Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes — and amid the turmoil surrounding the Heritage Foundation — what mattered most was not the presence of a communal fund. It was the responsiveness of American Jews acting as full participants in American civic life.

The Republican Jewish Coalition led the national pushback, rallying major conservative leaders to repudiate Fuentes and those who flirted with his antisemitic rhetoric. In the conservative podcast sphere, Ben Shapiro and Josh Hammer mounted a forceful defense of Jewish dignity. In the tech and entrepreneurial community, leaders such as Joe Lonsdale and Sean McGuire responded decisively and unapologetically.

This was a coalition rooted in civic virtue, not capital allocation. It succeeded not because of a communal fund, but because American Jews acted confidently as American citizens.

V. The Real Work Ahead

The challenges Hirsch identifies — technological disruption, polarization, antisemitism — are serious. But his solution misdiagnoses the problem.

What American Jewry requires is not a sovereign wealth fund but a renewal of the civic, moral, and institutional commitments that have sustained us since the Founding:

• Strengthening American civic institutions — schools, synagogues, associations, local communities;
• Rebuilding moral excellence and public virtue;
• Recommitting to America’s founding principles, as Lincoln urged;
• Affirming Israel’s sovereign prerogatives in all matters of national security;
• Equipping American Jews to act confidently as citizens, not intermediaries;
• Building cross-sector alliances to defend liberal democracy and reject hatred in all its forms.

These tasks require leadership, courage, and civic imagination — not a new financial structure.

VI. Conclusion: The Covenant We Inherited

Jordan Hirsch deserves credit for raising urgent questions. But the path forward for American Jewry lies not in adopting a Gulf state financial model. It lies in renewing the American covenant — a covenant grounded in moral purpose, civic responsibility, and the dignity of every human being.

America has been the most successful diaspora home in Jewish history because its political philosophy aligns deeply with Jewish ethical commitments. We honor that legacy not by mimicking Bahrain but by deepening our engagement with America’s founding principles, by heeding Lincoln’s warnings, by recalling Reagan’s conviction that goodness is the foundation of greatness, and by recognizing Israel as a sovereign partner in Jewish destiny.

American Jews have long embodied what Hirsch seeks: resilience, civic responsibility, and moral courage. Our task is to continue that work — not replace it.