{"id":175421,"date":"2026-03-13T06:39:41","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T14:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=175421"},"modified":"2026-03-13T06:40:39","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T14:40:39","slug":"everything-is-incentives-antisemitism-and-the-organizations-that-fight-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=175421","title":{"rendered":"Everything Is Incentives: Antisemitism and the Organizations That Fight It"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Alliance Theory<\/a> and his other papers, David Pinsof’s core claim<\/a> is that behavior follows incentives. Not intentions. Not moral convictions. Incentives. He calls this incentive determinism, and he sets it against what he names likability determinism, the far more popular belief that good things happen when good people prevail and bad things happen when bad people do. Most of public life runs on likability determinism. Political speeches run on it. Cable news runs on it. So do most organizations that describe themselves as fighting hate.
\nTo understand antisemitism in America right now, and to understand the Anti-Defamation League’s response to it, Pinsof’s framework cuts through a great deal of noise.
\nStart with the antisemitism itself. The standard account says it rises because bad people have bad ideas, and those ideas spread when weak or corrupt institutions fail to check them. The incentive account asks a different question: what do people gain by expressing hostility toward Jews or Jewish institutions? The answer has changed, and changed recently, and that change explains more than any catalog of individual bigots.
\nFor several decades, the incentive structure around antisemitism in American public life was sharply punishing. The Holocaust sat near enough in cultural memory to make overt antisemitism radioactive. Jews had strong alliances with the civil rights movement. Both major political parties competed for Jewish support. The ADL and similar organizations maintained enough institutional reach that being labeled antisemitic carried genuine professional and reputational cost. In that environment, crossing certain rhetorical lines was expensive. Few people did it openly.
\nThat structure has weakened on multiple fronts at once. The Israel question fractured the progressive coalition in ways that matter enormously here. Once a significant portion of activist culture began treating Israel as a colonial project, criticism of Jewish institutions became a way to signal membership in the pro-Palestinian coalition. The signal has value. It generates approval inside certain spaces. The cost of making it, in those same spaces, dropped toward zero. Pinsof would recognize this pattern immediately: the incentive shifted, and behavior followed.
\nOn the populist right, a different shift produced a similar result through entirely different logic. Figures who built audiences by attacking elite gatekeepers discovered that the ADL, along with other major Jewish advocacy organizations, fit neatly into the category of institutions their audiences resented. Criticizing them became a way to perform independence from the liberal establishment, to show that you would say things others would not. The audience rewards that performance. The incentive is attention and loyalty, not theology or ideology.
\nAnd then the internet collapsed the old enforcement mechanism. In the legacy media world, accusations of antisemitism could move quickly and stick. Editors and producers acted as filters. Today those filters are gone. Online communities build their own interpretive frames. The cost of being labeled antisemitic dropped for anyone operating outside mainstream institutional life, and once the cost drops, more people test the boundary, and more people follow those who test it without consequences.
\nThese three forces, progressive coalition signaling, populist anti-elite performance, and the collapse of reputational enforcement, do not share an ideology. They share an incentive structure that, in different ways, rewards attacking Jewish institutions. The result looks like a wave of antisemitism. Some of it is. Some of it is coalition positioning wearing the clothes of moral argument. Pinsof would say the two are nearly impossible to disentangle from the outside, and that the effort to disentangle them is often itself a form of coalition positioning.
\nNow apply the same lens to the ADL.
\nThe organization’s stated mission is to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish civil rights. It does this through incident monitoring, policy advocacy, institutional partnerships, and law enforcement training. None of that is controversial to describe. What Pinsof’s framework adds is the observation that any organization that survives a century does so by aligning its moral language with its institutional incentives. The ADL is no exception, and recognizing that is not the same as calling it cynical.
\nIts annual audit of antisemitic incidents does several things at once. It documents a real problem. It also validates donor urgency, signals indispensability to policymakers, and reinforces the ADL’s authority as the definitive interpreter of the threat. An organization that publishes the most widely cited data on a problem does not have a neutral relationship to that data. The incentive favors finding that the problem is serious and growing. That does not mean the data is wrong. It means the data is produced inside an incentive structure, like all data.
\nThe push for broad definitions of antisemitism, including the contested claim that certain forms of anti-Zionism constitute antisemitism, follows the same logic. Pinsof predicts that coalitions define norms in ways that protect their allies and disadvantage rivals. A definition that expands the boundary of antisemitism expands the rhetorical and legal territory the ADL’s coalition controls. Critics who see this as motivated reasoning are not entirely wrong. Defenders who see it as a sincere response to genuine blurring at the boundary are not entirely wrong either. The point is that sincerity and institutional interest tend to converge, which is precisely what Pinsof argues.
\nThe coalition architecture the ADL built over decades, inside law firms, universities, tech platforms, and police departments, is exactly what Pinsof means when he says influence flows through alliances. Embedding an organization inside powerful institutions is not merely advocacy. It creates a structure in which the organization’s definitions and priorities become defaults across a wide range of institutional decisions. That is a form of power, and like all forms of power, it eventually generates resistance.
\nThe backlash the ADL now faces from multiple directions at once is, on Pinsof’s model, entirely predictable. When an institution holds the center of a coalition and enforces norms aggressively enough, it accumulates enemies across the ideological spectrum. Progressives accuse it of conflating Israel criticism with antisemitism. Conservatives accuse it of selectively labeling right-wing speech while ignoring left-wing hostility. Tech companies that once deferred to its content moderation guidance now face counter-pressure from free speech coalitions that treat the ADL as a symbol of the old censorship regime. The organization has not become more extreme. The incentive landscape around it shifted, and new coalitions formed to challenge its authority.
\nPinsof is careful to note that none of this means the beliefs people express are false or that the causes they advocate are wrong. The ADL does fight real antisemitism. Antisemitism is a real and persistent problem. The current wave of hostility toward Jewish institutions contains genuine prejudice alongside strategic coalition signaling. His point is structural, not cynical. Moral language is the medium people use. Incentives are what move them.
\nWhat this framework offers, and why it cuts deeper than most analysis of antisemitism and the institutions that fight it, is that it forces the question of who benefits from a given framing, not as an accusation but as a method. When criticism of the ADL surges, the useful question is not whether the critics have a point, though they may, but what incentive structure rewards the timing and intensity of that criticism. When the ADL pushes a broader definition of antisemitism, the useful question is not whether the definition is defensible, though it may be, but what coalition is strengthened by the expansion.
\nPinsof ends his essay with something close to optimism. If awareness of incentive structures can itself change behavior, then thinking this way might matter. The catch is that awareness is also an incentive, and the feeling of having seen through the machinery is one of the most reliable pleasures available to anyone who writes or reads about how the world works. The framework is not exempt from its own analysis. Neither is this essay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With Alliance Theory and his other papers, David Pinsof’s core claim is that behavior follows incentives. Not intentions. Not moral convictions. Incentives. He calls this incentive determinism, and he sets it against what he names likability determinism, the far more … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[605],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-semitism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=175421"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175423,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175421\/revisions\/175423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=175421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=175421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=175421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}