Sapir is pleased to begin including select letters to the editor in the print edition. The letters below respond to our Chosenness issue of Spring 2025. Additional letters can be found on our website at sapirjournal.org/letters. We welcome your responses to the current issue at letters@sapirjournal.org.
To the Editor:
ewish communal talk about fighting toxic anti-Zionism in the United States often mentions resurrecting strategies from our campaign to free Soviet Jewry. Unfortunately, the activists with the most intuitive grasp of these strategies are across the quad in the “globalize the intifada” encampments.
Consider how much Soviet Jewry nostalgia focuses on the December 1987 Freedom Rally on the National Mall — a peak moment one-off near the movement’s end — rather than the decades of sweat that got us there.
Kudos to Ariella Saperstein for highlighting what activists in the fight against Soviet anti-Zionism used to know: Movements succeed by creating a thick culture of replicable practices (“Why Has Palestinian Activism Been So Successful”). This was why they invented Passover freedom seders, bat mitzvah twinnings, Anatoly Shcharansky bracelets, Pepsi boycotts, aid missions to Moscow, and more. It was this rich activist culture — not any single rally — that changed American Jewry and the world.
Encampment leaders understand this principle. Their replicable protest culture of tents, keffiyeh fashion, watermelon memes, boycott demands, and ritual chants may do nothing for Palestinians, but it has changed America. For the first time in this country’s history, a successful mass movement of the political Left has arisen in which Jewish symbols, ideas, and people feature as the villains for crowds to rail against.
Jews are now less safe in America. As anyone nostalgic for the Soviet Jewry movement knows, activist cultures shape identity. Decades from now, today’s campus activists will reminisce about the encampments, washing them in sepia and sunlight. And how will rational argument sway people whose loathing of Zionists is tethered to nostalgia for their lost youth?
Shaul Kelner
Author, A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press, 2024)
Nashville, Tennessee
To the Editor:
write to congratulate Ariella Saperstein on her thoughtful and necessary analysis in “Why Has Palestinian Activism Been So Successful?” It is a piece that does what so much of our own advocacy fails to: It thinks strategically, not just reactively.
[[I drop cap]] write to congratulate Ariella Saperstein on her thoughtful and necessary analysis in “Why Has Palestinian Activism Been So Successful?” It is a piece that does what so much of our own advocacy fails to: It thinks strategically, not just reactively.
Here in the U.K., we’ve seen exactly the dynamics that Saperstein describes. The success of pro-Palestinian activism derives not merely from the content of its arguments, but from its emotional calibration and cultural agility. It feels both cool and warm — morally righteous and socially relevant. By contrast, Jewish and pro-Israel communication often feels either coldly defensive or emotionally out of sync with the moment.
That point is powerfully echoed in Toba Hellerstein’s companion article, “Actually, Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts.” She and I have had many constructive and inspiring conversations — we’ve helped each other sharpen our advocacy (albeit across a vast ocean), and I see deeply complementary themes in her work and Saperstein’s. Both argue, in different ways, that emotional resonance trumps empirical overload when speaking to audiences without shared context.
Coming from the world of advertising, branding, and communications, I know this truth well. Successful campaigns aren’t built on the righteousness of your cause. They’re built on how well you understand your audience — and how you make them feel. About us. About themselves. About our opponents. We obsess over coolness (does this feel modern, relevant?) and warmth (does it feel human, trustworthy?). The result, ideally, is not just noise or reach — but measurable behavioral change.
That requires clarity of purpose. What does success look like? Who are we trying to reach — and crucially, how do we want them to think, feel, and act differently as a result? Too often, we confuse social media performance among echo-chamber influencers with real-world impact. But persuasion begins where agreement ends.
It remains a mystery — and a source of deep frustration — why the global Jewish community, which has helped shape some of the most impactful brands, campaigns, and social movements in the world, so often fails to apply the same clarity and craft to our own cause. What do they say about the shoemaker and his children?
We need to stop creating for one another and start reaching those who don’t yet understand us — or worse, think they already do. That means being audience-centric, not egocentric. And it means designing communications not for applause, but for effect.
Saperstein and Hellerstein have laid out the challenge — and the opportunity. We need to take it!
Malcolm Green
London, U.K.