The Jewish Leadership Project Will Educate, Recruit & Organize Activists & Donors
Edited by: TJVNews.com
Last week, activists across the United States launched The Jewish Leadership Project (JLP), a grassroots non-profit initiative that will demand that major Jewish organizations—including Federations, the ADL, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs—cease subordinating the safety and welfare of the Jewish-American community to partisan ideology.
Jewish Americans are under siege. Recently, services were cancelled in San Antonio synagogues because the FBI reported a credible threat of a violent attack. Earlier this year, worshippers were held hostage just outside Dallas. Visibly Jewish pedestrians are beaten regularly in the streets of American cities and towns. Jewish students are bullied on college campuses. Celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg and congresspeople like Ilhan Omar have made antisemitic remarks, repeatedly.
This has been building under the watch of establishment Jewish organizations like the ADL, AJC and Jewish Federations. But the leaders of these organizations have been hesitant to do much because they have been serving their personal partisan woke ideologies instead of prioritizing the needs of the people they were meant to serve.
Among these leaders are Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), David Harris, the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, Eric Goldstein, the CEO of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA-Federation), Jack Rosen, the president of the American Jewish Congress and others.
A new grassroots movement has just launched to educate and activate members of the Jewish community to hold their leaders accountable to the missions they are supposed to promote. The Jewish Leadership Project (www.jewishleadershipproject.org) is organizing concerned Jews and others to tell the so-called leaders of the legacy Jewish institutions to “Do your job!” or move over and let someone else fight the rising tide of Jew-hatred.
Much of JLP’s analysis of failed Jewish leadership was recently featured in essays published in a dedicated issue of White Rose magazine.
JLP was co-founded by longtime activists Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, whose influential non-profit projects have ranged from highlighting the hostility faced by Jews on college campuses to exposing the threats Islamists pose in the United States. For his work in helping to liberate thousands of black slaves from jihadist raiders in Sudan, Coretta Scott King presented Charles Jacobs with Boston’s Freedom Award. In 2007 he was named by The Forward as one of America’s top 50 Jewish leaders. Today, Jacobs and Goldwasser realize that efforts to combat external foes cannot prevail given the feckless leadership within Jewish organizations.
“Jewish Americans are under siege,” said JLP co-founder Avi Goldwasser. “Campuses are rife with Jew-hatred. Jews have been attacked on the streets of Boston, Brooklyn and Los Angeles, and murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego, Monsey, and Jersey City. They have been defamed by media outlets such as The New York Times and CNN, and even maligned by members of Congress.” Goldwasser continued, “Many once-venerable Jewish organizations have primarily become front groups for progressive political interests. The significant danger the Jewish community faces today is an indictment of these institutions and their leadership.”
“White supremacists are an immediate, lethal threat to the Jewish-American community, but the growing animus against Jews among black radicals, anti-Zionist leftists, and Islamic extremists constitutes the longer- term peril,” added JLP co-founder Charles Jacobs. “Unfortunately, establishment Jewish organizations are now led by individuals who refuse to recognize the nature of 21st-century Jew-hatred, let alone combat it, and so have abdicated their responsibility to the people they are meant to serve. They have abandoned their missions, are losing credibility, and must radically change course or step aside before the Jewish-American community suffers additional harm.”
In a July 18, 2022 article entitled “American Jewish Leaders Should Lead or Get Out of the Way” that appeared on the Jewish News Syndicate web site (JNS.org), Jacobs and Goldwasser wrote:
“The Jewish establishment is failing to protect the community. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish Federations and the networks of Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs) seem both ideologically conflicted and conflict-averse. Most importantly, Jewish leaders and their major donors are not being held accountable for major strategic failures:
Failure to stop the demonization of Jews in the media.
Failure to stop disparagement, harassment, intimidation and exclusion of Jewish students and faculty on campus.
Failure to stop anti-Israel education in high schools, now exploding across the nation via ethnic studies curricula and critical race theory.
Failure to recognize the long-term threat of the radicalization of the historically moderate American Muslim community.
Today, most Jewish leaders suppress dissenting voices. They and the major donors who support them seem too preoccupied with their social standing to break with fashionable Woke ideologies. Comfortable with the status quo, they are unwilling to allocate precious Jewish resources to the well-being of the community. We have yet to find any who are willing to consider a serious rethink.”
“We need strong, proud, and courageous leaders willing to confront those who would do us harm,” Jacobs continued. “JLP is the first Jewish organization in America that not only recognizes the state of emergency, but also is mobilizing to carry out substantive change to counter the threats we face.”
JLP is already attracting supporters, having established over a dozen activist teams throughout the United States.”
More information about the organization can be found at its website, TheJewishLeadershipProject.org.
