The organized Jewish world is burning money to worship at the altar of Instagram vanity — and it must stop. There is a rot eating away at the Jewish cultural sphere, and it wears designer clothes, posts curated reels, and pretends to speak for the Jewish people. We are living through the era of the Jewish influencer — and it is a sickness.
These are not leaders. They are not thinkers. They are not visionaries. They are the children of privilege who believe their wealth, their access, and their social media following give them the right to define what Judaism and Zionism mean. They strut across the Upper West Side and coastal LA with the false crown of influence, imagining they are the face of Jewish destiny. In reality, they embody the very caricature the world has always despised: arrogant, spoiled, superficial. And worse — they are not helping, they are hurting. They export to the world a false image of the Jewish people that feeds every ugly stereotype. In doing so, they are partly responsible for the rise of antisemitism itself. They make even people like me recoil, because they reduce Jewish life to its ugliest clichés — too shallow, too arrogant, and too blind with hubris to understand the damage they cause.
And worse than the influencers themselves are the Jewish organizations that fund them. With donor dollars meant to strengthen Jewish life, they bankroll the sons and daughters of their friends — the “Jewish American princes and princesses” who confuse self-promotion with service. The organized Jewish world has wasted precious resources on people who sell nothing but themselves, building brands instead of building a Jewish future. This is not accidental. It is structural. For decades, our institutions have prioritized the superficial over the substantive, mistaking glitz for substance. They throw millions at campaigns designed to make Jews look “cool” to outsiders, while Hebrew literacy, Jewish education, and absolute security for our communities languish. They empower the worst stereotypes we face — spoiled, wealthy, arrogant Jews broadcasting themselves to the world — and then wonder why antisemitism multiplies.
The funding of influencers is not just misguided. It is an abdication of responsibility. Organizations exist to cultivate leaders, strengthen identity, and transmit values. Instead, they are cutting checks to the very people least capable of representing Jewish values. They are underwriting hubris. They are teaching a generation that the way to serve your people is not to build, not to defend, not to sacrifice — but to pose, post, and self-promote.
Israel was not built on hubris. Zionism was not birthed out of selfies. The sweat of farmers created the Jewish state, the sacrifice of soldiers, and the humility of pioneers who knew that true greatness is measured not in visibility but in responsibility. The values that made these people strong were modesty, hard work, and collective duty — not rooftop parties, not Birkin bags, not TikTok monologues. The influencers sell a lifestyle, not a legacy. They present Jewishness as brand management, Zionism as hashtag activism. And our institutions, instead of challenging this, have elevated it to the center of Jewish life. This is why so much of organized Jewry today feels hollow. Because it is, it is obsessed with optics, allergic to substance, and addicted to the shallow drug of social media validation.
But Jewish survival has never depended on optics. It has never depended on whether we were liked, followed, or shared. It has relied on our willingness to live with humility, to defend ourselves with courage, and to pass on our language, our faith, and our culture with fidelity. When our enemies rose up against us, it was not influencers who stood in the breach. It was ordinary Jews — modest, faithful, unglamorous — who carried the covenant through fire and exile. The tragedy is that by elevating these false gods, we reinforce every stereotype that poisons us. The image of the spoiled, elitist Jew — detached from reality, flashing wealth and arrogance — is exported daily by those who believe likes are legacy. And Jewish institutions, instead of challenging this, have written checks to keep the charade going. They have confused patronage with leadership, and spectacle with strength.
We must say it clearly: this is not Jewish power. This is not Jewish influence. This is Jewish vanity, dressed up as relevance.
A declaration of war on Jewish establishment funding priorities
And so this is not just a critique. It is a declaration of war on the funding priorities of the Jewish establishment. Every dollar given to a self-promoting influencer is a dollar not spent on Hebrew education, on Jewish security, on building resilience in communities under threat. Every sponsorship deal for a rooftop event in Manhattan is money stolen from a child in Phoenix or Toronto who deserves to grow up speaking Hebrew, learning Torah, and knowing how to defend herself as a Jew. Every penny that props up the vanity projects of the privileged is a betrayal of the values Israel was built on and the sacrifices that made our sovereignty possible.
We do not need more influencers. We need more builders. We need Hebrew-speaking teachers, not Instagram celebrities. We need self-defense instructors for our children, not brunches in Malibu. We need serious investment in culture, education, and strength — the kind of investments that ensure continuity, not the ones that inflate egos. The influencers may think they are shaping the narrative. They are not. They are distractions. They are false gods — hollow idols before which the organized Jewish world has bent the knee. But just as we smashed idols before, so too must we smash these because our people’s survival has never depended on performance. It has depended on the purpose.
The Jewish world has a choice: continue to waste its treasure on the vanity of the few, or return to the substance that built a people capable of surviving exile and building a state. If we choose the first, we will be left with nothing but empty feeds and broken institutions. If we choose the second, we will reclaim our dignity, our strength, and our future.
Because the Jewish people were never meant to bow to false gods. Not in the desert. Not in exile. And certainly not to the hollow idols of Instagram.
Adam Scott Bellos is the CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund.