War & Peace Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

A line like this is designed to make allies squirm. Hertzberg, a rabbi and public intellectual who spent decades inside Jewish institutional politics, isn’t denying anti-Semitism; he’s accusing parts of the anti-anti-Semitism ecosystem of needing it. “Meal ticket” is deliberately blunt, even vulgar: it drags moral urgency down into the realm of budgets, fundraising letters, staff salaries, and organizational survival. The provocation is the point. He’s warning that a permanent state of alarm can harden into a business model.

The subtext is a critique of incentive structures. If an organization’s legitimacy and revenue depend on the persistence of a threat, there’s a quiet pressure to frame events as escalating, to spotlight the worst actors, to treat ambiguous slights as strategic campaigns. That doesn’t require bad faith; it can be an institutional reflex. Hertzberg is also jabbing at a style of leadership that substitutes vigilant branding for political imagination, where “fighting” becomes a performance of toughness rather than a strategy that actually reduces hostility.

Context matters: Hertzberg came of age after the Holocaust, through the founding of Israel and into an American era where Jewish life became more secure yet anxieties remained potent. His career was marked by arguing with establishment groups about power, identity, and what counts as communal responsibility. The line’s intent is corrective, not contrarian: it demands that organizations prove they’re oriented toward outcomes, not just perpetuating fear. It also dares listeners to ask the uncomfortable question: who benefits when a community is kept perpetually on edge?