Tagged Jewish Council for Public Affairs

Jewish community stands up for racial justice

Tony Zinman, co-founder of Tucson Jews for Justice, attends a candlelight vigil in Tucson June 1, one week after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapoolis. (Courtesy Zinman)
June 12, 2020 / Phyllis Braun, AJP Executive Editor

The Southern Arizona Jewish community has joined communities across the globe in expressing outrage at the murder of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25. And it is grappling with how best to support the struggle for racial justice. On June… Read more »

Tucson migrants benefit from generous donations by Wisconsin congregations

(L-R) Shelter coordinators Diego Piña Lopez and Francis Wheeler, Jim Rich, Jill Rich, and volunteer driver Seth Ruskin unload coats and goods donated by Milwaukee’s Congregation Shalom at the Casa Alitas migrant shelter in Tucson. (Photo: Debe Campbell/AJP)
October 25, 2019 / Debe Campbell, AJP Assistant Editor

A sermon at Congregation Shalom in Milwaukee translated into generosity from that community to Tucson. It all began when Rabbi Ronald Shapiro joined a group of rabbis visiting a migrant detention center in San Diego in the spring. Returning to Milwaukee to share what he witnessed, he relayed how… Read more »

Border justice tops Jewish History Museum agenda

Jewish History Museum/Holocaust History Center staff Bryan Davis, left, and Josie Shapiro, center, unfurl a new banner on the fence in front of the museum Aug. 12 while Rabbi Stephanie Aaron, right, looks on. (Debe Campbell/AJP)
September 27, 2019 / Debe Campbell, AJP Editorial Assistant

Tucson’s Jewish History Museum and Holocaust History Center will launch a migrant justice initiative in conjunction with its new annual exhibition, “Asylum Seeking at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” which opens in the Allen and Marianne Langer Contemporary Human Rights Gallery on Oct. 24. As with past annual exhibits, programming, and… Read more »

National delegation bears witness to border immigration issues

Ricardo Santana Velázquez, the Mexican consul in Nogales, Arizona (back row, center), with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs delegation at the consular office on Sept. 9. (Courtesy Melanie Roth Gorelick)
September 27, 2019 / Debe Campbell, AJP Assistant Editor

A 23-member delegation from 12 states recently completed a fact-finding mission trip to the Arizona-Mexico border, conducted by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which is the national network hub of 125 Jewish Community Relations Councils around the country and 17 national Jewish agencies. The Jewish History Museum hosted… Read more »

Jewish groups attack Trump’s call to end DACA immigration program

“Dreamers” originally from Ecuador at a rally in Manhattan watch Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ speak on ending the DACA program, Sept. 5, 2017. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
September 5, 2017 / Ron Kampeas, JTA

  WASHINGTON (JTA) — An array of Jewish groups and lawmakers attacked as immoral President Donald Trump’s decision to end an Obama-era program granting protections to illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. The Trump administration said Monday that it would end the Deferred Action for… Read more »

In the age of Trump, a quandary for Jewish leaders: Access or resistance

J Street activists deliver a petition to the Senate opposing the nomination of David Friedman as ambassador to Israel, Feb. 28, 2017. (J Street)
March 1, 2017 / Ron Kampeas, JTA

WASHINGTON (JTA) – The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for the community’s policy groups, and J Street, the liberal Middle East peace lobby, held conferences this weekend about seven blocks apart. Downtown D.C. is pleasantly people-free on weekends, and the weather, weirdly unseasonable, was mild, so… Read more »

OP-ED Don’t believe their hype: BDS is a marginal phenomenon

Demonstrators outside the offices of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo protesting his executive order calling for New York companies to divest from organizations that support the BDS movement, June 9, 2016. (Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images)
July 14, 2016 / David Bernstein, JTA

NEW YORK (JTA) — Ever since the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel began picking up steam three years ago, its proponents have brazenly declared the movement’s inevitable triumph. In April, for example, a pro-divestment group at the University of Chicago issued a statement proclaiming that by the school’s… Read more »

The anti-Israel trend you’ve never heard of — and how to limit the damage

Muslim students at an anti-Israel protest at the University of California, Irvine in 2006. (Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
January 7, 2016 / DAVID BERNSTEIN, JTA

NEW YORK – If you want to understand why the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS, has gained so much ground in the past two years, look no further than intersectionality, the study of related systems of oppression. Intersectionality holds that various forms of oppression — racism, sexism,… Read more »

For Jewish groups, Syrian refugees are a reminder — not a threat

Migrants wait to be processed at the increasingly overwhelmed Moria camp on the island of Lesbos in Greece, Oct. 21, 2015. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
December 3, 2015 / Ron Kampeas, JTA

WASHINGTON (JTA) – American Jewish organizations don’t see the Syrian refugees as a threat; they see them as a reminder. With rare unanimity on an issue that has stirred partisan passion, a cross-section of the community has defended the Obama administration’s refugee policy in terms recalling the plight of Jews fleeing… Read more »