In the weeks after October 7, 2023, American Jews who had never attended a rally showed up at one. Families who had drifted from communal life called synagogues and federations to ask how they could help. Donors who had never given to Israel-related causes wrote their first checks. The awakening was real, and it was enormous. In Hadassah Magazine, Adam Milstein argued that it was also fragile. A surge of feeling, he warned, does not automatically become a durable movement. Someone has to build the channels that carry it.
His essay, “From Apathy to Action: The Revival of Jewish Determination,” is one of the clearest statements of a concern that runs through his work. The question is no longer whether American Jews care. October 7 settled that. The question is whether the energy unleashed that day will be organized into something lasting or allowed to dissipate.
Measuring the Awakening
Adam Milstein grounds the argument in numbers. In the essay, he cited survey findings that 85 percent of American Jewish adults said U.S. support for Israel was crucial after the attack and that 57 percent reported feeling a stronger connection to Israel than before. Those figures describe a community whose priorities shifted almost overnight.
For Adam Milstein, the data carries a message that runs against a popular media narrative. Anti-Zionist groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace received heavy coverage in the months after the attack, and he notes that the attention far exceeded their actual standing. In his account, they represent “a tiny fraction of the Jewish community.” The mainstream of American Jewish opinion moved in the opposite direction, toward Israel and toward engagement. The challenge was that the mainstream was far less organized than the fringe.
The Problem With Passion Alone
The most pointed part of Milstein’s essay concerns young Jews. He describes a generation that is passionate but lacks strategic direction, too many of its members “glued to their phones, doomsurfing” rather than channeling their concern into effective action. The criticism is not dismissive. Adam Milstein treats the generation’s anger as an asset. His point is that anger without structure tends to burn out, and that a generation which experiences October 7 only as a feed of distressing images will eventually look away.
That diagnosis reflects an instinct shaped long before he became a philanthropist. Milstein graduated from the Technion with a degree in business and economics, earned an MBA from USC after immigrating to the United States in 1981, and built a career in commercial real estate, a field where enthusiasm without a plan is a reliable way to lose money. He brings the same discipline to communal life. Energy is the raw material. What matters is what gets built from it.
Where the Energy Should Go
Adam Milstein’s prescription is notably unglamorous. He does not call on the newly engaged to start new organizations or invent new movements. He urges them to align with “proven efforts and established organizations” that already know how to turn commitment into results.
The reasoning is the same one a disciplined investor applies to a startup pitch. Most new ventures fail, and the ones that survive usually take years to become effective. A community facing an urgent threat cannot afford to wait for a hundred new organizations to learn what existing groups already know. It is far more efficient to strengthen the organizations that already have legal expertise, media relationships, research capacity, and political networks, and to direct new volunteers and donors toward them.
He identifies the areas where philanthropists in particular are seeking “effective, scalable ways to combat Jew-hatred,” including legal action against discrimination, influence in the media, and alliance-building with communities outside the Jewish world. Each requires specialized skills and sustained investment. None can be accomplished by enthusiasm alone.
A Role for Every Level of Commitment
What makes the essay practical is that Milstein sees a place for people at every level of involvement. A student who feels isolated on campus can connect with an established campus organization rather than facing hostility alone. A young professional can join a leadership program. A donor can fund vetted organizations instead of reacting to whatever appeal arrives in the inbox that week. Even modest contributions of time and money, directed through effective channels, add up.
This is where Adam Milstein’s own experience becomes relevant. He has spent nearly two decades in leadership at the Israeli-American Council, and he has watched up close how organizations absorb new volunteers and donors after moments of crisis. He has seen how a structured program can hold someone’s commitment for years, and how an unstructured one can lose them in weeks. The difference is rarely the depth of a person’s concern. It is whether anyone gave that concern a place to go.
The Funding Side of the Equation
Milstein’s argument has a specific message for donors. Through the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation, the foundation he co-founded with Gila in 2000, he has spent more than two decades funding organizations on the basis of their capacity to deliver results. He urges newly motivated donors to apply the same standard. The question to ask is not which cause feels most urgent today. It is which organization has demonstrated that it can turn a dollar into measurable impact, and whether it has the structure to keep doing so after the headlines fade.
He also points to models designed to make that process easier, including the Impact Forum, which he and Gila co-founded in Los Angeles in 2017, where donors hear from vetted nonprofits and fund them directly. The underlying principle is the same one that runs through his essay. Commitment is most powerful when it flows through structures built to use it well.
The Window Is Not Permanent
The urgency in Milstein’s argument comes from his reading of history. Moments of communal awakening are rare, and they do not last indefinitely. If the energy that followed October 7 is not organized, he warns, the community risks drifting back toward the complacency that preceded it, with the difference that the threats it faces will not have receded.
Adam Milstein’s case is ultimately about conversion: turning outrage into membership, concern into funding, and a generation’s shock into a lifetime of engagement. The awakening happened on its own. The movement, he argues, will only exist if people choose to build it.
