Jewish Council for Public Affairs

Historically, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs described itself as the representative voice of the organized American Jewish community in the community-relations field. Its dual mandate was to safeguard Jewish rights in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere while promoting a just, democratic, and pluralistic American society.[1] Since its 2022 restructuring, it has operated instead as an independent national convener of opt-in Jewish coalitions.[3]

JCPA continues to work with local Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs), national Jewish organizations, and other partners through professional development, educational resources, crisis consulting, peer networks, and issue-based Action Networks.[5] Daniel J. Elazar described the older JCPA structure as an umbrella body involving organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Congress, Jewish Labor Committee, Jewish War Veterans, and local Jewish community councils.[6]

Under the former structure, member agencies identified issues and developed positions through an open, representative, and consensus-driven process.[1] The post-2022 model uses opt-in coalitions whose policies are overseen by JCPA's board in collaboration with participating organizations.[3] Both models reflect the organization's use of tikkun olam—the repair of the world—to connect Jewish communal security with civic engagement and social justice.[1] Its current framework consists of the Protecting Democracy and Combating Hate and Bigotry Action Networks.[7][4]

The Council of Jewish Federations formally established the National Community Relations Advisory Council (NCRAC) in 1944 to formulate policy and coordinate national and local Jewish community-relations work.[1] Its founding network included the American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, Jewish Labor Committee, and Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, together with 14 local community-relations councils.[8] Organized antisemitic activity and overlapping efforts among Jewish organizations had prompted Jewish welfare funds to press for greater coordination.[1]

Member agencies retained their autonomy and participated voluntarily. Because constituent organizations resisted centralized control, NCRAC initially functioned more as a clearinghouse than a governing body, although it gradually developed staff and influence through its work with local councils.[9]

A 1953 NCRAC statement defined community relations as protecting equal rights and opportunities and creating conditions contributing to "the vitality of Jewish living." It added that those conditions required a society in which people were secure regardless of religion, race, or origin, providing a rationale for positions on social questions beyond direct Jewish communal concerns.[9] A biennial joint action program presented member organizations' positions as a broader community consensus on community relations, defense against antisemitism, and social policy.[6]

In 1950, the Council commissioned a study that produced the R. M. MacIver Report, which proposed expanding its authority and assigning separate spheres of work to member agencies.[1] Verified sources disagree over which organization joined the American Jewish Committee in withdrawing: the Encyclopaedia Judaica identifies B'nai B'rith, while Jack Wertheimer identifies the Anti-Defamation League.[1][9] The accounts agree that resistance centered on organizational autonomy and majority rule, and that the departing organizations later returned after NCRAC adopted a more pluralistic approach.[1][9] By 1968, the Council comprised nine national organizations and 81 state or local councils.[1]

The organization adopted its current name after two earlier changes. The Encyclopaedia Judaica dates the addition of "Jewish," creating the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, to 1968 and says the 1997 change to Jewish Council for Public Affairs more accurately reflected its mission.[1]

Sources differ on the first renaming's exact year. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 1968, while JCPA's own historical timeline gives 1969.[1][8] Wertheimer dates it to 1971.[9] All of these accounts trace the institution to the NCRAC founded in 1944 and agree that it became JCPA in 1997.

Israel gradually became more prominent in the organization's agenda. Its 1953 Joint Program Plan mentioned Israel only in connection with Soviet anti-Israel activity. By 1954, it acknowledged American Jews' cultural and ethnic affinity with the young state, and the 1957–58 plan described concern for Israel as a normal expression of emotional attachment.[9]

For most of its history, JCPA operated as a partnership among national member agencies, local community-relations councils and committees, and affiliated federations.[1] National participants included the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, major Jewish religious denominations, Hadassah, Jewish Labor Committee, Jewish War Veterans, and National Council of Jewish Women. The Jewish Labor Committee helped organize NCRAC and remained an active member.[1][10]

A 2017 amicus brief described JCPA as coordinating 16 national organizations and 125 local Jewish federations and community-relations councils.[11] Its formal policy process involved months of debate among national agencies and constituent councils, followed by voting at an annual conference on subjects including Israel, civil rights, hate crimes, climate change, and stem-cell research.[12]

The network also spread local programs and professional practices. A Washington initiative sending Jewish teenagers into schools to discuss Jewish life was adapted in St. Louis, while a curriculum-review program addressing Israel, Judaism, and the Holocaust was modeled in San Francisco. Former executive director Hannah Rosenthal called JCPA's approach "the most democratic with a small 'd' method" of communal decision-making.[12]

Funding came from member dues, federation allocations, and donations. A 2007 letter by United Jewish Communities president Howard M. Rieger said UJC helped fund JCPA and local councils, whose work he characterized as advocating for pro-Israel American policies.[12][13]

By 2021, JCPA's consensus system faced financial and political pressure. Donations had declined from nearly $4 million in 2015 to $2.4 million in 2019, and many local JCRC directors said the national organization had not influenced their agendas for years.[12]

Its 2020 decision to sign a full-page advertisement declaring "Black Lives Matter" intensified tensions with parts of the federation system. Some federation officials and donors objected because of concerns about Israel-related positions associated with parts of the movement and the appearance of partisanship; supporters emphasized the movement's decentralized character and JCPA's civil-rights history.[12][2]

On December 19, 2022, JCPA announced that it was loosening its financial and organizational ties to the Jewish Federations of North America. It ceased formally speaking for JCRCs and stopped collecting dues from the councils and 16 national organizations that had funded it. Its new board was limited to 30 members, and participating JCRC leaders would represent the community-relations field rather than individual communities.[2]

JCPA described the change as a move from consensus-based general membership to an opt-in coalition model, with policy overseen by its board in collaboration with coalition participants.[3] Its announced priorities included voting rights, election integrity, disinformation, civics education, racial justice, criminal-justice reform, gun violence, LGBTQ rights, immigration, reproductive rights, and opposition to hate violence.[2]

Amy Spitalnick subsequently became JCPA's CEO and is identified in that role by the organization's current website.[4] Before joining JCPA, she led Integrity First for America, which successfully sued organizers of the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville.[14]

JCPA's audited financial statements for the year ending June 30, 2025, describe two Action Networks—Protecting Democracy and Combating Hate and Bigotry—alongside strategic services for JCRC professionals. Those services include professional development, advocacy resources, best-practice sharing, convenings, and efforts to identify and scale successful local programs.[7]

JCPA's historical significance rests partly on campaigns connecting Jewish security with broader civil and human rights. In 1950, it joined the NAACP and the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters in founding the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. JCPA housed and staffed the conference in its early years and credits the coalition with helping win the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Fair Housing Act of 1968.[8]

Beginning in 1946, JCPA opposed national-origins immigration quotas. By 1955 it had helped organize civic, labor, and Christian organizations into a coalition that lobbied, distributed literature, and published articles until the quotas were repealed in 1965.[8] Since 1990, it has also supported an open-admissions policy, opposed national preferences, and rejected rigid immigration caps.[11]

JCPA assumed leadership of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry in 1966; the coordinating body later became the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Its campaign used government advocacy, rallies, and international conferences before the Soviet Union permitted Jewish emigration in 1989. In 1992, JCPA mobilized its network on behalf of 4,500 Jews in Syria.[8]

The organization also conducted leadership missions concerning Ethiopian Jewry and created a National Committee on Ethiopian Jewry. Its history links that work to Israeli airlifts of Ethiopian Jews in the early 1990s, although different passages in the same document give conflicting totals and therefore do not support a single precise figure.[8]

With American Jewish World Service, JCPA helped organize the Save Darfur Coalition, which operated from 2004 to 2016 and included more than 190 religious, political, and human-rights groups. Its Million Voices for Darfur campaign sent more than one million handwritten and electronic postcards to the White House.[8]

JCPA has also participated in constitutional litigation. In Konikov v. Orange County, it joined an amicus brief defending the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act and describing church-state separation as an "essential bulwark for religious freedom in the United States."[15]

Support for Israel became increasingly prominent in JCPA's agenda after the 1950s and especially after the Six-Day War of 1967.[9][12] In a 2010 interview, historian Jack Wertheimer said JCPA was more involved in Israel-related issues than it had been 15 to 20 years earlier and identified its efforts to discourage mainline Protestant churches from supporting divestment as perhaps its greatest recent accomplishment at that time.[16]

JCPA states that it supports Israel as the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people's right to self-determination. It favors a diplomatic resolution involving independent, democratic, and economically viable Israeli and Palestinian states coexisting in peace and security, together with civil-society and economic projects supporting coexistence.[17] The organization says years of its advocacy contributed to the 2020 passage of the Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act, which provided $250 million over five years for peacebuilding, coexistence, and Palestinian economic projects.[17]

In 2019, JCPA's David Bernstein joined representatives of 136 Jewish organizations in condemning academic, cultural, and commercial boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns against Israel as counterproductive to peace and antithetical to free speech.[18]

JCPA representatives have also participated in government engagement. Chair Andrea Weinstein attended a July 2009 meeting with President Barack Obama concerning Middle East peace, Iran, health-care reform, and global hunger.[19] In 2011, the White House Director of Jewish Outreach listed JCPA among the organizations he met during his first week in office.[20]

Combating antisemitism has been central to JCPA since its creation amid organized antisemitic activity in the United States.[1] Its current Combating Hate and Bigotry Action Network lists countering antisemitism alongside LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, racial justice, and related work.[4]

In May 2023, the White House included JCPA among organizations announcing commitments under the first U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.[21] In a 2024 interview, Amy Spitalnick said JCPA was helping 125 local JCRCs and other partners mobilize for democracy, combat antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, and explain the relationship between Jewish safety, democratic institutions, and the safety of other communities.[22]

JCPA has also joined broader Jewish coalitions. A February 2026 letter listed it among organizations supporting voting representation for the Association of Jewish Psychologists on the American Psychological Association's Council of Representatives.[23] In 2025, JCPA brought together ten Jewish organizations for a statement arguing that universities must protect Jewish students while rejecting what the signatories described as federal policies undermining due process, academic freedom, and democratic rights.[24]

JCPA's domestic-policy positions and institutional changes have generated debate within American Jewish organizations. Its support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter advertisement drew objections from federation officials and donors concerned about anti-Israel positions associated with parts of the movement and the appearance of partisanship. Others defended engagement as consistent with JCPA's civil-rights history and noted that the movement was decentralized.[12] The dispute intensified tensions that contributed to later discussions over JCPA's relationship with the federation system.[2]

The 2022 restructuring ended JCPA's formal role speaking for 125 JCRCs and 16 national organizations and replaced mandatory consensus with opt-in coalitions.[2][3] Supporters said this would make the organization more independent and effective in a polarized environment. Critics and some news coverage characterized its announced priorities as a liberal advocacy agenda rather than a broadly representative communal consensus.[25][2]

A separate dispute concerned the Combat Antisemitism Movement. JCRCs contacted JCPA on June 16, 2023, after its logo appeared on a website carrying a video whose message they had not approved. The video was removed on June 18, and JCPA and the Jewish Federations of North America later said they had no immediate plans to rejoin the coalition.[14]

Wertheimer has described continuing tension between donors who wanted JCPA to avoid divisive domestic-policy positions and advocates who favored a broader community-relations agenda. His comments represent his assessment of the organization's role rather than an institutional finding.[16]