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Jewish Council for Public Affairs names Amy Spitalnick, who sued Charlottesville rally organizers, as its CEO
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Jewish Council for Public Affairs has tapped Amy Spitalnick, who spearheaded a successful multimillion-dollar lawsuit against neo-Nazis, as its next CEO.
The decision is a sign that the group, called the JCPA, is pursuing a more assertively liberal approach. For nearly 80 years, it was an umbrella for local Jewish community relations groups, and was affiliated with the Jewish Federations of North America, which has historically been driven by consensus across local Jewish communities. But in December, it split from the federation system and rebranded as a more explicitly progressive group.
The statement Monday announcing Spitalnick’s hire highlighted her work at the helm of Integrity First for America, the nonprofit that underwrote a successful lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. The statement emphasized fighting for democracy against hate as priorities, and called Spitalnick “a powerful national voice on issues of democracy, antisemitism, extremism, and hate.”
Spitalnick, 37, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she would focus on building relationships with other communities that are vulnerable to hatred and erosions in democracy.
“There needs to be an organization that wholeheartedly recognizes how deeply intertwined Jewish safety is with other communities’ safety and how bound up that all is in a broader fight for democracy at this moment, and builds the sorts of coalitions within and across communities that are essential to moving the needle,” she said.
The organization will remain nonpartisan, Spitalnick said, but she made no secret that she especially opposed many of the tropes peddled by Republicans including former President Donald Trump, who is a leading contender for the 2024 Republican nomination.
“We are grappling with a wave of anti democratic extremism that is deeply tied to rising bigotry and hate,” Spitalnick said. “And we see this in many forms — we see this with the attacks on immigrants and how so many of the conspiracy theories that underpin, for example, election lies, happen to utilize anti-immigrant and antisemitic conspiracy theories. We see this with the attacks on the trans community and on drag shows, where for example, neo-Nazis are using those attacks and those flashpoints to actively recruit for their violent antisemitic hate.”
Spitalnick was a communications official at J Street, the liberal Israel lobby, before transitioning into the rough-and-tumble of New York politics as the communications director for Mayor Bill DeBlasio and then in the state attorney general’s office. Last year, she was named director of another progressive Jewish group, Bend the Arc, but ultimately declined the position.
She earned a reputation for giving as good as she would get from her bosses’ critics and rivals. An email exchange she had with Tucker Carlson in 2015 made headlines when Carlson and his colleagues lambasted her with misogynist and vulgar language.
She was characteristically blunt last week after Carlson’s firing from Fox News after a history of using racially charged language. “When reporters write the story of Tucker Carlson, do not gloss over who he is,” she wrote on Twitter . “He is a raging white supremacist, misogynist, and bigot who has done more to normalize violent extremism and hate over the last few years than nearly anyone else.”
Spitalnick’s style is a sharp departure from the tone that the 79-year old organization had taken until December, when it announced an amicable divorce from the Jewish federations structure and its emphasis on consensus. It also means the group will be led by a millennial woman, a rarity among large national Jewish organizations.
“This now makes two millennial women at the helm of legacy Jewish organizations,” said Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women. “I’m looking forward to getting in good trouble together as we push Jewish organizations and leaders toward justice.”
Founded in 1944 as the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council — it changed its name in 1997 — the storied group was at the forefront of Jewish community advocacy for decades, from rescuing Europe’s Jews and opening up immigration to allow refugees to enter the United States to the Black-Jewish civil rights coalition, pro-Israel advocacy and advocacy for Jews in the Soviet Union. It received funding from dues paid by scores of local Jewish Community Relations Councils and from 16 national Jewish groups.
In recent years, as the American — and American Jewish — populations became more politically polarized, JCPA’s consensus-driven structure made it increasingly difficult for the group to take noteworthy stands on the issues of the day.
A turning point was the group’s decision in 2020 to sign a statement recognizing Black Lives Matter as a leading civil rights body. Officials in the Jewish federations system, which underwrote much of JCPA’s funding at the time, thought it was reckless to endorse a movement despised by most Republicans, and which has been accused of vehement opposition to Israel.
That spurred an effort to roll the JCPA directly into the Jewish Federations of North America, a shift that JCPA defenders said would place Jewish community relations under the purview of major donors, who tend to be more conservative than the grassroots.
Instead, the current chairman, David Bohm, led a split from the Jewish federations that would guarantee JCPA’s independence. Bohm and one of his predecessors, Lois Frank, joined UJA-Federation of New York in providing a substantial cash influx that would allow JCPA to function for three years.
That led to the divorce from the Jewish federations, and the end of dues that had come into the organization from the local and national groups. A JCPA official said Spitalnick would be expected to diversify the funding base, and did not count out a return to the dues-paying format.
Freed of the fear of alienating a multitude of stakeholders, the announcement in December laid out two prongs that located JCPA robustly in the liberal camp: One would focus on “voting rights, election integrity, disinformation, extremism as a threat to democracy, and civics education.” The other would focus on “racial justice, criminal justice reform and gun violence, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, reproductive rights, and fighting hate violence.”
Bohm, in restructuring JCPA, brought in the heads of two local community relations councils — Jeremy Burton of Boston and Maharat Rori Picker Neiss of St. Louis, who had previously said the old structure — and its inhibitions — made it increasingly irrelevant. The JCPA announcement this week came with quotes from Neiss and Burton lavishing praise on Spitalnick.
“Through her unwavering commitment to social justice and her demonstrated leadership in public policy advocacy, Amy is poised to usher in a new era of progress and impact for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs,” Neiss said.
The release said JCPA would continue “to support a democratic, Jewish, and secure state of Israel” but otherwise did not address the divisions over democracy and the judiciary currently roiling the country and its supporters abroad. It also didn’t address the erosion of support for Israel on the American left in an era when Israel’s governments have trended increasingly to the right.
Asked about differences between the Jewish community and other communities over Israel, Spitalnick said it was important not to cut out other communities. “It means working across those differences where possible, and building those relationships, and sometimes that means staying at the table even if we have fundamental disagreements,” she said.
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The post Jewish Council for Public Affairs names Amy Spitalnick, who sued Charlottesville rally organizers, as its CEO appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Judea Pearl: What Reason I Find for Hope After October 7
Supporters of Israel gather in solidarity with Israel and protest against antisemitism, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terror group Hamas, during a rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Nov. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
Judea Pearl’s new book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002–2025, compiles the author’s writings on topics such as Israel, Zionophobia, antisemitism, the October 7 massacre, and his son, Daniel.
Below is an excerpt from the book, which serves as its epilogue:
Epilogue: The Crater of October 7
Science tells us that the extinction of dinosaurs occurred approximately sixty-six million years ago, when an asteroid struck the Earth, forming a huge crater in the Yucatán Peninsula. An enormous dust cloud blocked the sun, cooled the planet, and disrupted food chains, ultimately leading to the extinction of about 75 percent of all plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs.
Science tells us much about disasters that occurred millions of years ago, but, sadly, it tells us almost nothing about how our lives will be shaped by the giant crater created by the blow of October 7. Looking into its depths, we find ourselves clueless and bewildered about what future might emerge from the dust cloud that still obscures our sun — and what species, movements, or ideas will perish or evolve from the darkness, winter, and confusion it has left behind.
Some say they were surprised by the brutality and hatred of October 7. Others were shocked by the scale of the operation and how close it came to its goal.
As a native Israeli, raised on the stories of the Hebron Massacre (1929) and haunted by the horrific images of the Ramallah lynching (2000), I was not surprised by the brutality and savagery of Israel’s enemies. Nor was I surprised by the depth of their hatred and inhumanity — a reality I painfully experienced in the murder of my son, Danny. Likewise, I already saw the early and deep infiltration of Hamas’ ideology into Western thought. Indeed, this book documents my premonitions about this process and the extent to which Hamas’ ideology mirrors the essential Palestinian mindset: “From the river to the sea.”
What, then, shocked me about the crater of October 7?
I was shocked by how swiftly Zionophobia — the absolute denial of Israel’s right to exist — became normalized, mainstream, and even respectable in Western discourse, precisely at Israel’s moment of greatest vulnerability.
I’ve witnessed many personal attacks on Israel before, but they always followed her victories and achievements. Those attacks I could understand; people instinctively side with the underdog. But the post-October 7 attacks were different. This time, they were driven by a wholehearted desire for Israel’s demise — with all its genocidal implications. The scent of blood, it seems, triggered a hunger for more. Hordes of predators emerged from their ideological tunnels, rushing to indict, sentence, and lynch Israel in the finest tradition of herd madness.
Can the Jewish people survive this madness? Can Western civilization endure the dangers rising from these tunnels?
Ideologies, once metastasized, are deadlier than the sword. We have heard Western intellectuals brand the Bibas family as “settlers,” thus, legitimate targets. Others went even further, labeling them “Nazi guards of a concentration camp.” A civilization capable of generating such images has lost all moral bearings and may not endure for long.
Yet I refuse to say that we are doomed.
Not because the threats aren’t real, but because alongside the spreading moral decay, I have also found islands of moral clarity, primarily among my fellow Jews, my students, and my academic colleagues. The crater of October 7 has created a deeper appreciation of Israel’s centrality in Jewish life, along with a sharper understanding of the outbreak of Zionophobia in its aftermath. This renewed awareness encompasses not only Israel’s historical, cultural, and spiritual significance to Jewish identity, but also its role as the embodiment of Jewish “normalcy.” In these islands of moral clarity, the existence of Israel is now understood to be essential to ensuring that Jews everywhere are treated as equals — not as a unique, tolerated, respected, or admired minority, but as equals. In short, no Jew can be truly equal in the family of man before Israel stands equal in the family of nations.
I cannot end without evoking the victims. I see them, the children of Western civilization, sons and daughters of Isaac and Prometheus: my son, Danny, Ilan Halimi, the Bibas family, the one thousand two hundred murdered on October 7. I imagine them standing up, waiting for me, for us, to say something meaningful. All I can say is Yitgadal Ve’Yitkadash Shmai Rabah — the Jewish prayer of mourning recited in memory of the dead. A prayer that does not mention death or mourning, but glorifies God and expresses hope for a good life and universal peace. It is a humble confession of our inability to comprehend God’s cruel ways of playing with human lives and world order.
I sang this prayer at Danny’s funeral. I said to Danny: “I’ll sing it to you in the special melody that your great-grandfather chanted on Yom Kippur.” It’s a melody that rattles the gates of Heaven and pleads for mending our broken world order.
Yitgadal Ve’Yitkadash Shmai Rabah
Judea Pearl is Chancellor’s professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation.
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He documented a changing Jewish world, and the Jewish world changed him
“I have to tell you,” Bill Aron told me as he walked around The World In Front of Me, a retrospective of his photography at the American Jewish Historical Society. “My photography allowed me to walk into rooms I might never have otherwise walked into.”
We had just looked at some of his work documenting Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s and 80s: a sofer bent over a Torah scroll, a glowering rabbi with imposing eyebrows, a Hasidic wedding in the Bobover movement. Each photo begat the next; when he showed a reticent subject the results of his film, they would invite him back to take more.
Aron has become known for his work documenting Jewish communities around the world — his first book, From the Corners of the Earth, shows Jewish life in New York, Los Angeles, Cuba and the then-Soviet Union. His next, Shalom Y’all, was the result of a decade spent in the lesser-known Jewish communities of the American South.
His images are joyous and warm, portraits of resilience and invention, not dour investigations of poverty and antisemitism, offering respect to each subject he was able to meet through his work.
But his camera didn’t just change his access to the communities he documented. It changed Aron’s own experience of his Judaism.
A series of photographs shows scenes from the New York Havurah, a lay-led, egalitarian Jewish religious movement: A rabbi stands in reverent contemplation under his tallit in a misty forest, a child smiles from her father’s shoulders during a Shabbaton. Aron was a member in the 70’s, which is how he found himself in the middle of those scenes. But, he said, he didn’t grow up observant, and without his camera, while he might have been a member, he would have been “a much more passive one,” he said.
These photos are anything but passive. People smile or glower directly into the camera, and proudly present their life to the lens — a handful of shrimp from a Jewish man who built a business selling the shellfish to New Orleans restaurants, a woman showing off a bowl full of her famous chopped liver, a woman grinning as she carries a Torah on Simchat Torah. There is a clear symbiosis between Aron and his subjects, in which they each shaped and enlivened each other.
This, Aron said, was not the style of street photography at the time he came up. People were not supposed to document their own communities, nor were they supposed to engage with their subjects.
“It was frowned upon to study your own community — you were supposed to go out,” he said. “Street photography was supposed to be dispassionate.”
But of course people saw the camera and reacted to it, so he embraced that fact, spending hours talking to his subjects and learning their stories. Now that he has bequested his work to the AJHS, those stories are now preserved not only in images but also in a podcast accompanying the exhibit, in which Aron is able to preserve the memories behind each photograph.
The stories come through in the images alone, too; each shot is redolent of Aron’s affection for his subjects. An Israeli soldier in Jerusalem’s Old City makes flirtatious eye contact with a woman as his companions smirk. An elderly man on a bench dives in to kiss his wife on the cheek. Holocaust survivors beam out from full color photos, not reduced to the numbers on their arms but presented as “people who lived lives, lived beyond their nightmares, had families where they could, given back to their communities,” Aron said.
Not every image, on its surface, seems Jewish — there isn’t always a yarmulke or a lulav or a Torah scroll in frame. Nevertheless, Aron manages to find the sense of Jewishness that knits these images into the tapestry of Jewish life.
In a photo of a couple embracing at the liquor store they ran in Arkansas as part of the Shalom, Y’all series, Aron told me that only the husband was planning to be photographed, because his wife wasn’t Jewish. The photographer invited her anyway, and the couple ended up explaining that an Orthodox rabbi had performed their marriage ceremony. This seemed wrong to Aron — Orthodox rabbis don’t perform intermarriages — so they produced their marriage certificate to show him. As they pulled it out of the envelope, he recounted, another slip of paper fell out in which the rabbi had written that the wife had consented to become a member of the people of Israel and was now a Jew, a fact she was unaware of but delighted, Aron recalled, to discover.
“I loved interacting with people while I was photographing,” he said, “and the people became part of the portrait.” Aron did too.
The World in Front of Me is showing now through June 4 at the American Jewish Historical society. More information is available here.
The post He documented a changing Jewish world, and the Jewish world changed him appeared first on The Forward.
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Prosecutors charge Capital Jewish Museum shooter with terrorism
Federal prosecutors added two terrorism charges to the indictment against Elias Rodriguez, the Chicago man accused of killing two Israeli embassy employees outside a networking event held at the Capital Jewish Museum last May.
The new indictment, filed on Wednesday, claims that Rodriguez murdered Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, with the intent to both influence government policy through “intimidation” and that he sought to “coerce a significant portion of the civilian population” of the United States.
“These additional terrorism-related charges carry a mandatory life sentence under D.C. Code, while also reflecting the reality that this act was in fact an act of terror,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a statement.
Rodriguez, 31, who prosecutors say flew from Chicago to carry out the attack, allegedly shot Lischinsky and Milgrim repeatedly after they left a Jewish young professionals reception at the museum, hosted by the American Jewish Committee.
He then entered the museum and shouted, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
While prosecutors previously charged Rodriguez with national origin-based hate crimes, they have focused on the political dimension of the attack and the indictment quotes at length from social media posts and a manifesto that law enforcement sources attribute to Rodriguez.
“I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do,” the manifesto stated. “Free Palestine.”
Lischinsky, a German-born Israeli, worked as a research assistant at the Israeli embassy while Milgrim, who was American, worked in its department of public diplomacy.
It remains unclear whether Rodriguez, who has pleaded not guilty, intentionally targeted the young couple, who were planning to get engaged on an upcoming trip to Israel. Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter initially said that Rodriguez had identified Milgrim and Lischinsky as embassy employees while mingling with attendees at the event and then waited outside for them to leave.
But other accounts say Rodriguez never made it inside the event prior to the shooting, and the Israeli Embassy later said that Leiter was merely floating “a theory that law enforcement officials are investigating.”
Prosecutors said at a September hearing that they had more than 1.5 million pages of evidence against Rodriguez, while one of his defense attorneys described receiving “trillions of gigabytes” of data from the government.
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