Jonathan Woocher was a scholar of Jewish education and communal life. In a 1992 article, he wrote: Portraying Israel as beleaguered and vulnerable and issuing dire warnings about continued or growing anti-Semitism helps maintain a high level of concern among potential supporters and thus helps ensure these organizations continued existence. Woocher was analyzing how Jewish communal organizations in the United States use narratives of vulnerability. He argued that these narratives serve an organizational purpose. They keep donors engaged. They keep political support high. And they ensure the organizations themselves survive. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an academic observation from a scholar inside the Jewish communal world.

Source: Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Indiana University Press, 1986), and Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 13 (1992).