Jordan Chandler Hirsch responds to letters about “The Need for a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund”

I am grateful to Roger Zakheim and Greg Borofsky for their engagement. Their counterarguments help refine my argument for a Jewish sovereign wealth fund—and underscore its need.

Zakheim’s portrayal of the American constitutional order, and of the Jewish community’s role in it, is stirring. He rightly celebrates Jewish contributions to American civic life, but the successes he cites as evidence of transcending shtadlanut (American Jews serving as lawmakers, judges, and public servants) were, in fact, the ultimate proof of it: a highly effective, elite-level version of communal advocacy. We can no longer rely on Tocquevillian “habits of the heart” alone in a low trust society where those very institutions are in decline. We must speak and act in a new language: the language of power. My proposal isn’t a retreat from the American promise; it’s doubling down on America, and an investment in a future where we act as a self-assured people pursuing our interests openly.

Borofsky argues that doing so would raise the specter of “dual loyalty” because any discussion of “sovereignty” would call into question our “unambiguously American” national identity. We are, indeed, American through and through—which is precisely why we should stop appealing to decaying institutions like a protected class and instead start acting like confident citizens. In today’s anti-institutional climate, a model of influence mediated through a fading establishment only feeds suspicion. By making Jewish interests sovereign, we trade “shadowy” tropes for an
authentic, unapologetic presence.

Finally, while public-market advocacy has its place, it is institutionalism par excellence. Attempting to influence corporate governance via ETFs is an incremental response to a revolutionary moment. It does not carve out power and respect in the anti-institutional world, nor does it provide a new model for the Jewish self-assertion that Borofsky agrees we need.

The greatest risk to Jewish flourishing today isn’t that we wield our power too boldly, but that we will fail to adapt while the world shifts beneath us. We must act as sovereign partners in the American project, not just its nervous beneficiaries.