Statement: the Mitzpe Institute Joins AIC

Why a Volunteer Coalition Took In a Ten-Thousand-Reader Brief

From Cheryl

AIC has no building. Nobody here draws a salary, me included. Rabbi Yitz Tendler and I started it in 2018 because I had a film I couldn’t find a home for, and he gave it one. Eight years on, we run talks, we take aid to Israel ourselves, and we hide rubber ducks. What we never had was analysis of our own. We’d bring in a speaker, people would leave fired up, and the next morning they were back to the evening news and the group chat.

So when Uri told me the Israel Brief had more than ten thousand readers in more than ninety-five countries, and that he wanted it inside a coalition, I didn’t have to think long. I’d been reading it. It told me what happened, what it meant, and how sure they were. I had never seen anyone grade their own calls in public and leave the misses in the table.

That is what I want our members to have before they open their mouths at a Shabbat table or a school board meeting. Now they do.

From Uri

When Modi and I started the Israel Brief, we went looking for pro-Israel analysis that showed its sources and said how sure it was. We didn’t find one, so we built it. It grew faster than we expected. By this autumn it had readers in the Knesset and in Congress, and the subscriptions roughly covered what it cost to run.

I didn’t want to run it as a business, though. Selling subscriptions is a whole job by itself, and I’d rather spend my time on the analysis. Inside a charity, the people who want the Brief around can pay for it with gifts and grants, and I think AIC and the Institute are both stronger for it. For what it’s worth, nobody at Mitzpe has drawn a salary either. Not Modi, not me.

It helped that Cheryl and I had each written one sentence, word for word alike, without knowing it. Pro-Israel is the floor. We start there, and the argument is about everything above it.

So in October the Institute became AIC’s educational program. The Brief doesn’t change. The scorecard stays public, misses included.

From both of us

If you’re an AIC member, the full Brief is yours now, Sunday to Friday, with the dossiers and the rest of the members’ side behind it. If you read the Brief and have never been to Atlanta, this is who publishes it, and the door is open.

Join at atlantaisrael.org/join.