Two of Seattle’s top Jewish leaders are sounding the alarm about the costs of ignoring rising antisemitism, offering up their own city as a “canary in the coal mine”  — a warning of how Jewish communal apathy can allow individual acts of discrimination to slowly erode Jewish life. 

“I’ve been stunned by the effort to erase the Jewish community in so many parts of civic life across the country,” Joe Schocken, one of the authors of a new eJewishPhilanthropy op-ed laying out the stark warning, told Jewish Insider in an interview last week. “I’ve been deeply involved in many aspects of the Jewish community, and sadly steeped in Jewish history. That this effort to push the Jewish community out, this effort to scapegoat the Jewish community, has happened so quickly is just stunning to me.”

But even “more stunning to me” he said, “is the comfort and the complacency that I see across the Jewish community. Everyone is busy living their comfortable best life, and I’m just stunned that this subject is absent from almost every conversation I have across the Jewish community.”

Schocken is a retired investment banker and longtime, major Democratic donor and fundraiser who previously served as chair of AIPAC Northwest. Sam Jefferies, his co-author, founded a pro-Jewish political action committee in Washington state and served as board president of the American Jewish Committee’s Seattle region.

They met about a decade ago, and their work together sharpened after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks into something closer to triage. “We feel this is an urgent moment,” Jefferies told JI. “That pressure is mounting by the day. The number of fronts we are fighting on continues to multiply, and we have been making that case privately and directly, over and over — both of us using our own particular brands or gravitas or otherwise to try and force that urgent recognition and action. And it hasn’t been met in the way that we feel is needed. That’s why we felt we needed to put pen to paper.”

In their op-ed, they point to graffiti on the University of Washington campus that read “kill your local colonizer”; to Jews pushed out of a local Asian American history museum’s exhibit on confronting hate together; to the Seattle-native rapper Macklemore declaring “F*ck America, f*ck Israel” from the stage of a Palestine Will Live Forever Festival in the city’s traditional Jewish neighborhood, on Shabbat, long before he made similar comments on Ed Sheeran’s tour that raised so much controversy in recent weeks. 

Speaking to JI, they also raised efforts to push Jewish representatives out of local party organizations and from the state Legislature — where two progressive Jewish legislators and several of their Democratic allies are being challenged from the left in the November elections — in what they called “a multi-year effort to exclude Jews from this part of the civic world.”

In the midst of such an effort, Schocken had a moment of clarity reading his weekly newsletter from the local Jewish federation. “It looks to me almost exactly the same as what I read four or five years ago. And I see this real emergency coming across the country, and I just don’t see the wake-up call. I don’t see the recognition among the successful, well-educated people in our community.”

Asked why he thinks complacency exists among the largely well-educated and financially successful local Jewish community, in a city known for its high-tech and aerospace sectors, Schocken pointed to social media and disinformation campaigns. He recalled being asked to meet with a member of the House Intelligence Committee “who said a great deal of this comes from Russian efforts to destabilize America, and they have recognized that antisemitism is a potent force in doing that.” 

“For a tiny people like us, you know, it’s such a small population,” he said. “To withstand this tsunami of hate and one-sided presentation of the news is dispiriting, is disorganizing. And you’re saying, ‘Why is this happening? How do you fight as such a small people? How do you fight all this antisemitism and anti-Israel hate?’ I think many people kind of choose to turn away and leave it to other people. It just seems like such an impossible task.”

The authors lament in the op-ed that candidates with an “anti-Jewish posture” are “march[ing] into power functionally unchallenged” while “Jewish community efforts to oppose them are too little and too late.”

Asked where the legacy organizations are getting it wrong, given both their backgrounds in leadership in these organizations at the local level, Jefferies said, “They each have a cadence of dinners and fundraisers and are competing for donor dollars, but not presenting a vision to meet the moment. And I think that’s true across the board. It’s not one particular organization. There is a demand for leadership that’s not being met.”

Schocken said he believes AIPAC, where he has held top lay leader roles, “is doing a great job,” but these organizations generally “have resources. It is time to pivot, to recognize, to acknowledge to the community how serious this problem is, and put their resources into identifying, mobilizing the community, and doing something about it.”

Many of these organizations are 501(c)(3)s and therefore legally unable to wade into electoral politics, Jefferies acknowledged, but “in some ways they don’t want to touch it because it doesn’t feel good, and I think the time for feeling good is long past. … You have to be willing to call your political friends that you’re cozy with and lean on them to act, and if they’re not, then to remove them.”

The national organizations, he said, “look to Jewish communities across the country to fund [them], and the money is raised at the local level to go to these national entities, and we don’t then see it come back. If there is any community that is on the front lines and is feeling this — which is why we framed the op-ed the way we did — it is ours. And yet we don’t see that investment.”

Schocken said that, if the situation is not adequately addressed, Seattle Jewish life could soon look like “the U.K. and Canada today,” citing what he called the “very real threat to the safety and future of the community” in those countries.

“I would say Jewish life in Seattle in five years — and then in other parts of the country in seven, eight, nine, 10 years — looks more like Dublin, Ireland,” said Jefferies, who lived in Ireland and studied Irish history and politics, “where a small Jewish population is excluded increasingly from the spaces it needs to be in — whether it’s Herzog Park being renamed, or a need to hide who you are in public, or to hide who you are in professional spaces, arts, certainly political life.”

For Schocken, the broader Democratic Party, where he has spent a lifetime as an activist and donor, is “very lonely” for the Jewish community right now, an issue he said he’s raised with members of Congress many times. 

His ties to the party run to the highest levels: In September 2023, the Schockens hosted a Biden Victory Fund reception at their home on Lake Washington, where Schocken introduced First Lady Jill Biden, and the following March, President Joe Biden appointed Schocken’s wife, Judith, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He was also Northwest chairman of John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and served on the Democratic National Committee national finance committee.

Asked about the Democratic Party’s trajectory, Schocken said: “Obviously, not going in a good direction. I think we’re going to have to wait to see after the midterms.”

He locates part of the failure in Democrats forgoing what has historically been a cornerstone of the party’s support for the Jewish state. “I don’t see the Democrats explaining the importance of Israel to U.S. national security,” he said. “Protecting the national security of the United States requires Israel, as anybody in the military or intelligence community will explain. And I feel like that message has been missed by the Democratic Party.”

The work to address these issues has to begin locally, Schocken and Jefferies argue. “What is being tested in Seattle will not stay in Seattle,” their op-ed concludes. “It is being readied for your city, your school board, your synagogue, and the only question is whether you will have built something to meet it before the air runs thin.”

“Don’t wait for the singing to stop.”