Israeli group seeks to engage Jewish state's critics through meaningful dialogue
Dawn had not yet broken in Jerusalem on October 7, 2023, when Baruch Apisdorf received a text message from his best friend. David Newman, 25, had borrowed Apisdorf’s car to go to a music festival in southern Israel.
Newman’s text was urgent: he was hiding in a dumpster, from Hamas terrorists.
“Pray for me and pray for your car,” Newman wrote, making a wry joke in the worst of circumstances: He was caught up in Hamas’s attack on the Nova festival, where terrorists killed 378 people, all but a few dozen civilians, and kidnapped 44 more.
Apisdorf and his friends would identify Newman’s body in a photo of a Nova field strewn with corpses a day after the massacre.
“A friend reached out for help and I wasn’t able to help him,” says Apisdorf. That helplessness became the emotional engine of a grassroots initiative he launched with four twenty-something friends, hours after learning Newman had been murdered.
Let’s Do Something grew to become a non-profit rooted in three pillars: defence, healing and advocacy. This month, it launches its first Canadian campus initiative at McGill University in Montreal.
Within days, that late-night group chat evolved into a logistics operation that would send 10 planes of aid from New York to Israel. The first plane came together almost by accident. Friends serving in the IDF reserves needed basics like sleeping bags, so the group emptied their own closets.
Word spread. A friend’s mother in New York agreed to let her home become a makeshift drop-off centre. Within hours, Apisdorf said, 300 cars lined her block. An El Al executive gave them space on a cargo flight, and soon after 20,000 pounds of gear lifted off for Israel.
Let’s Do Something evolved quickly. It now reports mobilizing thousands of young Jews across Israel and the diaspora, most notably via a social-media-driven advocacy operation targeting Gen Z and younger millennials.
In Israel, the group has helped source gear and technology for soldiers and civilians, and is building what it calls a “defence-tech lab” in Tel Aviv to accelerate startups working on new security tools, part of what Apisdorf described as a broader Western struggle against an Iran-Russia-China axis.
“The drones that Iran sent at Israel are the same drones they’re selling to Russia,” he told the National Post.
Let’s Do Something has also opened a fully subsidized PTSD and trauma centre in Thailand aimed at Nova survivors, and others grappling with the psychological fallout of October 7 and the Gaza war. “There are a lot of people that need help and support in many different ways,” Apisdorf said. “You can’t ask people to be advocates for anything if they’re still trying to survive their own brains.”
But it is the advocacy arm – “first ever proudly pro-Semitic movement by the youth, for the youth,” as the organization’s website puts it – that has propelled Let’s Do Something far beyond Israel and the Jewish world. Across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, the group boasts it has engaged more than 100 million people with its campaigns, many of them built around emotionally driven, documentary-style vignettes about young Israelis, campus conversations and what it means to be openly Jewish after October 7.
Apisdorf’s frustration is directed less at anti-Israel activists, than at the institutions that were supposed to answer them. He recalled going online on Oct. 9, just two days after the massacre, and seeing, “for the first time in history, people condemning the victims of a terror attack instead of the perpetrators.” Yet many mainstream pro-Israel responses, he said, seemed to be talking to “a 40-plus generation” and completely missing his peers.
Let’s Do Something’s answer has been to go where those audiences are, and to meet them in a visual language they recognize.
That includes collaborations with major creators like American singer and influencer Montana Tucker, whose platforms reach more than 10 million followers. In one recent undercover campus video shot at UCLA, Tucker and Let’s Do Something on Campus contrasted student reactions to civilians killed by Hamas, with their responses when the perpetrators’ identities were switched, a piece of social experimentation meant, Apisdorf said, to expose “moral inconsistencies and misinformation” about the conflict. Other content features Israeli influencer “Sahar,” and Nova survivors, and Israeli Arab Yosef Hadad, using first-person stories rather than talking points, to explain why October 7 was not an abstract geopolitical event, but a generational trauma.
The group’s most distinctive work happens in the spaces that feed online culture: North American university campuses. Almost a year ago, Apisdorf and his team set out on a U.S. university tour, partly to tell their story, but mostly to listen. They found campuses where pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists, and left- and right-wing students more broadly, were “locked into their camps and just never even talking to one another,” even while admitting that dialogue was important.
Borrowing the energy – if not the combative staging – of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s campus events, Let’s Do Something began designing what amounts to a pop-up dialogue studio. Students with opposing views sit side-by-side, shake hands, are offered coffee and asked their names and a few basic questions before getting to politics. The goal is to humanize before polarizing. “Just by establishing these human things that we all have and share on the front end, you reduce the risk of any sort of conversation degrading into assault and attacks,” Apisdorf told the Post.
Those conversations are filmed, edited and distributed widely on social media. The videos, he argues, show that cross conversations are still possible, and model how to have them. “People know it’s missing,” he said of meaningful dialogue. “People know it’s important, but they’re scared and don’t know how to actually engage in that.”
Apisdorf has Canadian family, and in mid-January, Let’s Do Something will be at McGill University in Montreal. The visit will have two main components: a full-day campus production built around the group’s side-by-side dialogue format, and the introduction of a McGill student the organization has identified as its first Canadian “voice” to be developed into an influencer.
Let’s Do Something seeks to identify articulate young people with a story and a point of view, then help them build a platform that can eventually reach national audiences.
Apisdorf is careful not to frame this as training “pro-Israel influencers” in the narrow sense. “I think those points fall in line with a larger general narrative,” one that embraces liberal democracy, Western values, free speech and open societies.
In practice, that means looking for students – Jewish and otherwise – who can defend those values in a nuanced way, not just generate viral outrage. “Right now, a lot of the people that are built up to have national audiences are people with extreme viewpoints, because frankly, that’s what’s going to go viral,” he said. “I don’t believe that’s the only way to do it.”
The group will sometimes partner with Jewish or debate clubs, but Apisdorf is a bit wary of the usual channels. Those pipelines, he argued, tend to reach the 20 per cent of students who already identify as strongly pro-Israel, or the 30 to 40 per cent firmly in the anti-Israel camp. The real target, in his view, is everyone else: “normal, regular students” focused on their studies, whose opinions are still malleable, and whose feeds are nonetheless filled with content about Israel, Gaza and antisemitism.
For Apisdorf, who grew up in Baltimore and lives in Tel Aviv, the work is as much about safeguarding free societies as it is about Israel. In his telling, what started with a murdered friend at a desert rave, has turned into a generational test: of whether liberal democracies can still defend their own values to their own children.
“Don’t go through your life with blinders on, you know,” he concluded.
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