UJA Wall Street Investment Management Event
Two Black Swan events changed my life.
If not for the FIRST, there's a good chance I’d still be in this room—BUT sitting in the audience with you, not standing here talking about counterterrorism and Jewish communal security.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was nine years out of Penn, deep into my finance career. I was a partner at The Carson Group running our biotech advisory practice and also one of twoprincipals in our investment bank, Evolution Capital.
That morning, we were set to meet with the management of Aviron—a publicly traded biotech firm working on an inhalable flu vaccine—to discuss their secondary offering. While we waited in our Midtown office, the first plane hit the North Tower. Like many, we assumed it was a small plane accident and continued the meeting. At 9:03, our sell-side analyst burst in: a second plane had hit the South Tower.
Meeting over.
I told my team to evacuate. Walking north on Sixth Avenue, I turned back and watched the South Tower collapse. In that instant, the paradigm shifted. New York City was under attack.
A Black Swan had arrived.
What followed over the next few days and weeks was a deep internal reckoning.
The notion that the United States would be at war for some time became apparent.
As an espionage buff, I knew that during World War II, many lawyers and bankers gave up their careers in those fields to contribute to the war effort, with many joining the Office of Special Services (OSS). I’d previously considered a career in public service—West Point, the CIA, but now, as a New Yorker, whose city had been attacked and as a patriotic American, I felt an obligation and duty to find a way to get into the fight against Al Qaeda.
Five months after 9/11, I left finance. By January, I was enrolled at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs to gain the knowledge, expertise, and credibility I’d need to fight Al Qaeda.
Soon after graduation, I joined the NYPD. Not long after that, I received a battlefield promotion to Director of Intelligence Analysis for Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. When I accepted the job I was told what the job was:
“Prevent another terrorist attack in New York.”
That’s it.
Full stop.
In essence, my job was to stop the next Black Swan.
Now let me pause and share a counterintuitive truth: the discipline of counterterrorism shares more with portfolio management than you'd think.
Both are shaped by low-probability, high-impact events. For us, it's a terrorist slipping through the net. For you, it's a market crash, a geopolitical rupture, a pandemic. Events that live in the fat tails—beyond the limits of VaR models or standard deviation curves.
You don’t need a Bloomberg terminal to know Black Swans break models and assumptions. They test systems in real time. But the answer isn’t paralysis. It’s preparation.
We rely on early warning systems: HUMINT networks, OSINT monitoring, foreign partnerships. You do the same—tracking volatility indices, parsing Fed language, watching for data anomalies. In both domains, speed and signal clarity are everything.
Diversification? It’s not just a financial principle—it’s a security strategy. At NYPD, we built a layered defense: specialized undercover teams, intelligence analysts from CIA and top grad schools, heavy weapons units, international liaisons. Redundancy wasn’t waste—it was resilience.
In investing, you diversify across sectors, geographies, instruments. You don’t bet it all on one class. The logic is the same.
We both work within constraints. We don’t have infinite officers or unlimited capital. We prioritize, allocate, hedge risk. And when we succeed, there’s often no celebration. A stopped attack? A hedge that works? These wins are silent—but vital.
Perfection isn’t the goal. Resilience is. You can’t stop every attack or avoid every loss. But you can absorb shocks, adapt under pressure, and bounce back stronger.
These lessons would shape how I responded when the second Black Swan struck that changed my life.
In October 2018, I was in Kyiv, Ukraine of all places, working with former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly on a Ronald Lauder project. We were studying deadly antisemitic attacks in Europe—in France, Belgium, Denmark—assessing how Jewish communities were protecting themselves all across Europe given the heightened threat environment from ISIS, neo-Nazis, Iranians and Hezbollah, among others.
That Saturday morning, during Shabbat services, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered eleven Jews. They were targeted simply for showing up to pray. It was, in my view, the 9/11 moment for American Jews. Nothing would be the same.
By late 2019, after three more deadly attacks—in Poway (California), Jersey City, and Monsey, which left 15 Jewish Americans dead in 14 months —UJA Federation and JCRC-NY had decided to create the Community Security Initiative (CSI). I stepped down from the Lauder project to lead this start-up.
Our mission: stop the next Tree of Life. Prevent the next Black Swan.
CSI is the security shield for greater New York metro’s 1.8 million Jews—the largest Jewish population outside Israel. Our territory runs from Albany to Montauk and now includes Stamford and Greenwich in Southwest Connecticut. Our mandate: ensure that Jewish life is safe and secure in synagogues, schools, JCCs, camps, and in our communities.
We work hand-in-hand with the NYPD, FBI, and other agencies. We deliver threat assessments, security consultations, intelligence analysis, and rapid response coordination. We’ve built a communications and training network to protect our community against antisemitic hate and violence.
In just five plus years, we’ve grown from six people to 21. We have assembled an organization that includes ten regional security directors, four intelligence analysts, a cyber security specialist and a campus security director.
Our dream team of savvy veteran law enforcement officials hail from the NYPD, the New York State Police, Israel’s Shin Bet, the CIA, the NY State Homeland Security Department, the Westchester Intelligence Center, the Stamford Police Department, and more. They’re partnered with brilliant intelligence analysts recruited from Columbia’s SIPA, Georgetown, the ADL Center on Extremism, and the ATF.
CSI is run like a start-up which was incubated at and by UJA. We treat our donors like investors. Our approach is unapologetically data driven. We have KPIs. We report metrics. And the ROI on a contribution to CSI is enviable. We have a $4 million-dollar operating budget and that enabled us to bring in $53 million in federal and state grant funds to synagogues, schools, JCC’s and summer camps to implement physical security enhancements – so a 13x Return on Investment for our “investors”.
And it’s working.
Friday morning, November 18, 2022: One of our analysts spots an online threat to “shoot up a synagogue.” We alert the NYPD and FBI. A citywide manhunt begins. By midnight, two suspects are arrested at Penn Station—armed with a Glock, ammunition, a hunting knife, and a swastika armband. Twelve hours from detection to disruption. A Tree of Life-style attack averted.
On Friday, February 14th 2025, as Shabbat approached in New York City, the Jewish community stood on a knife’s edge. A drop out from Marine officer training from Utah, Luis Ramirez, posts that he will “pull up to Shabbat at Central Synagogue” and “kill you first.”. We detect it at 1PM and immediately alert the NYPD. By 2PM NYPD confirms that he owns multiple firearms. By 3PM NYPD is tracking him across state lines—potentially armed, moving fast. He was in Ohio that morning. By 3PM he is in Philadelphia. At 4:45 he is in New Jersey on a direct path to Manhattan.
CSI was in direct contact with Central Synagogue’s security team, its senior rabbi, and NYPD leadership. The decision was made — Shabbat services would proceed under a phalanx of heavy NYPD protection. We make the decision to issue an emergency “Be on the Lookout” (BOLO) to every synagogue in Manhattan.
At 5:30 NYPD leadership informed me that they and Port Authority Police were preparing to intercept Ramirez at the Lincoln Tunnel. And then we waited…5:35, 5;40, 5:45, 5:55. White knuckle time. Then word came in — Ramirez had been arrested on the New Jersey side of the tunnel. A collective exhale rippled through the community. Only five hours from detection to disruption. The system had worked. But it had been far too close a call, but black swan averted.
These outcomes weren’t luck. They were built on infrastructure, trained people, and the unwavering support of UJA and supporters like you. By enabling CSI to build the most sophisticated Jewish security program in the United States in a little more than five years, we have created a layered defense to better protect our community.
To close—CSI, like you, lives in a world of uncertainty. We don’t model risk, we manage it. Like portfolio managers, we absorb volatility, spot anomalies, and respond fast when the improbable becomes real.
We both deal in risk. We both ask: “What aren’t we thinking of?” And we both know that no system—no matter how smart—replaces sound judgment and readiness for the unimaginable.
In the end, we are all, in our own ways, watching the edge of the map for black swans.
Thank you
Mitchell D. Silber
Executive Director
Community Security Initiative