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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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How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020
Muslims grew fastest; Christians lagged behind global population increase
• Christians are the world’s largest religious group, at 28.8% of the global population. They are a majority everywhere except the Asia-Pacific and Middle East-North Africa regions. Sub-Saharan Africa has surpassed Europe in having the largest number of Christians. But Christians are shrinking as a share of the global population, as millions of Christians “switch” out of religion to become religiously unaffiliated.
• Muslims are the world’s second-largest religious group (25.6% of the world’s population) and the fastest-growing major religion, largely due to Muslims’ relatively young age structure and high fertility rate. They make up the vast majority of the population in the Middle East-North Africa region. In all other regions, Muslims are a religious minority, including in the Asia-Pacific region (which is home to the greatest number of Muslims).
• The religiously unaffiliated population is the world’s third-largest religious category (24.2% of the global population), after Christians and Muslims. Between 2010 and 2020, religiously unaffiliated people grew more than any group except Muslims, despite their demographic disadvantages of an older age structure and relatively low fertility. The unaffiliated made up a majority of the population in 10 countries and territories in 2020, up from seven a decade earlier.
• Hindus are the fourth-largest religious category (14.9% of the world’s population), after Christians, Muslims and religiously unaffiliated people. Most (99%) live in the Asia-Pacific region; 95% of all Hindus live in India alone. Between 2010 and 2020, Hindus remained a stable share of the world’s population because their fertility resembles the global average, and surveys indicate that switching out of or into Hinduism is rare.
• Buddhists (4.1% of the world’s population) are the only group in this report whose number declined worldwide between 2010 and 2020. This was due both to religious disaffiliation among Buddhists in East Asia and to a relatively low birth rate among Buddhists, who tend to live in countries with older populations. Most of the world’s Buddhists (98%) reside in the Asia-Pacific region, the birthplace of Buddhism.
• Jews, the smallest religious group analyzed separately in this report (0.2% of the world’s population), lagged behind global population growth between 2010 and 2020 – despite having fertility rates on par with the global average – due to their older age structure. Most Jews live either in North America (primarily in the United States) or in the Middle East-North Africa region (almost exclusively in Israel).
These are among the key findings of a Pew Research Center analysis of more than 2,700 censuses and surveys, including census data releases that were delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. This report is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes global religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Funding for the Global Religious Futures project comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation.
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Antisemitism in some unlikely places in America
By HENRY SREBRNIK Antisemitism flourishes in a place where few might expect to confront it – medical schools and among doctors. It affects Jews, I think, more emotionally than Judeophobia in other fields.
Medicine has long been a Jewish profession with a history going back centuries. We all know the jokes about “my son – now also my daughter – the doctor.” Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath to heal the sick, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. When we are ill doctors often become the people who save us from debilitating illness and even death. So this is all the more shocking.
Yes, in earlier periods there were medical schools with quotas and hospitals who refused or limited the number of Jews they allowed to be affiliated with them. It’s why we built Jewish hospitals and practices. And of course, we all shudder at the history of Nazi doctors and euthanasia in Germany and in the concentration camps of Europe. But all this – so we thought – was a thing of a dark past. Yet now it has made a comeback, along with many other horrors we assume might never reappear.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, there has been a resurgence of antisemitism, also noticeable in the world of healthcare. This is not just a Canadian issue. Two articles on the Jewish website Tablet, published Nov. 21, 2023, and May 18, 2025, spoke to this problem in American medicine as well, referencing a study by Ian Kingsbury and Jay P. Greene of Do No Harm, a health care advocacy group, based on data amassed by the organization Stop Antisemitism. They identified a wave of open Jew-hatred by medical professionals, medical schools, and professional associations, often driven by foreign-trained doctors importing the Jew-hatred of their native countries, suggesting “that a field entrusted with healing is becoming a licensed purveyor of hatred.”
Activists from Doctors Against Genocide, American Palestinian Women’s Association, and CODEPINK held a demonstration calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., Nov. 16, 2023, almost as soon as the war began. A doctor in Tampa took to social media to post a Palestinian flag with the caption “about time!!!” The medical director of a cancer centre in Dearborn, Michigan, posted on social media: “What a beautiful morning. What a beautiful day.” Even in New York, a physician commented on Instagram that “Zionist settlers” got “a taste of their own medicine.” A Boston-based dentist was filmed ripping down posters of Israeli victims and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine did the same. Almost three-quarters of American medical associations felt the need to speak out on the war in Ukraine but almost three-quarters had nothing to say about the war in Israel.
Antisemitism in academic medical centres is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish healthcare professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, according to a study by the Data & Analytics Department of StandWithUs, an international, non-partisan education organization that supports Israel and fights antisemitism.
“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics, and study co-author, Alexandra Fishman, said on May 5 in a press release. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”
The study, “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” included survey data showing that 62.8 per cent of Jewish healthcare professionals employed by campus-based medical centres reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.
“When administrators and colleagues understand what antisemitism looks like, it clearly correlates with less antisemitism in the workplace,” co-author and Yeshiva University professor Dr. Charles Auerbach reported. “Recognition is a powerful tool — institutions that foster awareness create safer, more inclusive environments for everyone.”
Last December, the Data & Analytics Department also published a study which found that nearly 40 per cent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims. The study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left more than one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 per cent, “feeling unsafe or threatened.”
The official journal of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine concurs. According to “The Moral Imperative of Countering Antisemitism in US Medicine – A Way Forward,” by Hedy S. Wald and Steven Roth, published in the October 2024 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, increased antisemitism in the United States has created a hostile learning and practice environment in medical settings. This includes instances of antisemitic behaviour and the use of antisemitic symbols at medical school commencements.
Examples of its impact upon medicine include medical students’ social media postings claiming that Jews wield disproportionate power, antisemitic slogans at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, antisemitic graffiti at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Cancer Centre, Jewish medical students’ exposure to demonization of Israel diatribes and rationalizing terrorism; and faculty, including a professor of medicine at UCSF, posting antisemitic tropes and derogatory comments about Jewish health care professionals. Jewish medical students’ fears of retribution, should they speak out, have been reported. “Our recent unpublished survey of Jewish physicians and trainees demonstrated a twofold increase from 40% to 88% for those who experienced antisemitism prior to vs after October 7,” they stated.
In some schools, Jewish faculty are speaking out. In February, the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group at UCLA accused the institution in an open letter of “ignoring” antisemitism at the School of Medicine, charging that its indifference to the matter “continues to encourage more antisemitism.” It added that discrimination at the medical school has caused demonstrable harm to Jewish students and faculty. Student clubs, it said, are denied recognition for arbitrary reasons; Jewish faculty whose ethnic backgrounds were previously unknown are purged from the payrolls upon being identified as Jews; and anyone who refuses to participate in anti-Zionist events is “intimidated” and pressured.
Given these findings, many American physicians are worried not only as Jewish doctors and professionals, but for Jewish patients who are more than ever concerned with whom they’re meeting. Can we really conceive of a future where you’re not sure if “the doctor will hate you now?”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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The 2025 Toronto Walk (and talk ) for Israel
By GERRY POSNER There are walks and then there are walks. The Toronto UJA Walk for Israel on May 25, 2025 was one of a kind, at least as far as Canada and Jews are concerned. The number of people present was estimated to be 56,000 people or 112,000 total shoes. (How they get to that number is bewildering to me, since there is no one counting). This was 6,000 more than last year. Whether it is true or not, take it from me, it was packed. The synagogues in Canada should be so fortunate to get those numbers in total on High Holidays. The picture here gives you a sense of the size of the crowd.
This was my first walk in Toronto for Israel and I was with my granddaughter, Samantha Pyzer (not to forget her two friends whom she managed to meet at the site, no small feat, even with iPhones as aids). The official proceedings began at 9:00 a.m. and the walk at 10:00 a.m. There was entertainment to begin with, also along the way, and at the finish as well. The finish line this year was the Prosserman Centre or the JCC as it often called. The walk itself was perhaps 4 kilometres – not very long, but the walking was slow, especially at the beginning. There were lots of strollers, even baby carriages, though I did not see any wheelchairs. All ages participated on this walk. I figured, based on what I could see on the faces of people all around me that, although I was not the oldest one on the walk, I bet I made the top 100 – more likely the top 20.
What was a highlight for me was the number of Winnipeggers I met, both past and present. Connecting with them seemed to be much like a fluke. No doubt, I missed la lot of them, but I saw, in no particular order (I could not recall the order if my life depended on it): Alta Sigesmund, (who was, a long time ago, my daughter Amira’s teacher), Marni Samphir, Karla Berbrayer and her husband Dr. Allan Kraut and family. Then, when Samantha and I made it to the end and sat down to eat, I struck up a conversation with a woman unknown to me and as we chatted, she confirmed her former Winnipeg status as a sister-in- law to David Devere, as in Betty Shwemer, the sister of Cecile Devere. I also chanced upon Terri Cherniack, only because I paused for a moment and she spotted me. As we closed in near the finish, I met ( hey were on their way back), Earl and Suzanne Golden and son Matthew, as well as Daniel Glazerman. That stop caused me to lose my granddaughter and her pals. Try finding them amid the noise and size of the crowd – but I pulled it off.
As I was in line to get food, I started chatting with a guy in the vicinity of my age. I dropped the Winnipeg link and the floodgates opened with “ Did I know Jack and Joanie Rusen?” So that was an interesting few minutes. And I was not too terribly surprised to come across some of my Pickleball family. All of these meetings, along with spotting some of my sister’s family and other cousins, were carried on with the sound of the shofar as we moved along the way. In short, this was a happening. Merchants selling a variety of products, many of them Israeli based, were in evidence and, of course, the day could not have ended without the laying of tefillin, aided by Chabad, who have perfected the procedure to take less than a minute. See the photo. Chabad had a willing audience.
Aside from the joy of sharing this experience with my granddaughter, the very presence of all these Jews gathered together for a common reason made this day very special to me. However, there was a downside to the day. The downside was that, as we began to walk back to our car there was no other way I could figure out how to return when the rains came and came. While we walked faster, we were impeded by pouring rain and puddles. But Samantha wanted to persevere, as did I. We made it, but were drenched. My runners are still drying out as I write this two days later.
What with being surrounded by 56,000 people, the noise, the slow walking, and the rain, I can still say the day was a real highlight for me – one of the better moments since our arrival in Toronto in 2012. As well as the photos we took along the way, I have the reminder of the day, courtesy of the UJA, as evidenced from the photo. It was not just the walk, but the talk that accompanied the walk that made it so worthwhile for me. I would do it again, minus the rain.