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After a belated crackdown on campus antisemitism, some were surprised to see the Jewish Council for Public Affairs leading a campaign in support of college Hamas enthusiasts.

Observers of Jewish organizational life remembered the JCPA as a representative of local Jewish ‘federations’, the organization had always been liberal, but it had never taken so blatant a stance in defense of antisemites or so overt a stance.against the American Jewish community.

In reality though the JCPA had not existed since 2022. The organization using the JCPA name is a leftist activist group funded by George Soros and headed by a member of his anti-Israel lobby. The crucial break came when the JCPA endorsed the Black Lives Matter racist hate group whose associated mobs attacked synagogues, assaulted Jews and denounced Israel.

Jewish federations were uncomfortable with the JCPA leadership’s seeming support for antisemitism and racism. JCPA boss David Bernstein initially defended the move along with engagement with far-left antisemitic groups, including the Women’s March, before leaving the organization and founding the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (the group is now known as the North American Values Institute) to fight wokeness and institutional capture of liberal groups.

The JCPA however was ground zero for institutional capture. Instead of the federations taking control of the JCPA which they had funded and lent their name and support to for so long, a plan was developed to make the JCPA independent. The problem was that most people did not realize that an organization that had formerly spoken for sizable portions of the liberal Jewish community was now detached from the community and funded by one of its worst enemies.

In 2023, as the JCPA became “independent”, the group received a $250,000 grant from the Soros Open Society Foundations. While that amount might not have been so impressive for a major organization, the JCPA had lost most of its funding when it left the ‘federations’ and its budget was less than $2 million so that the Soros grant represented a sizable part of its cash.

It also helped pay the salary of its new CEO: Amy Spitalnick. Spitalnick was a veteran of Democratic and leftist organizations, but her only previous role in a Jewish organization had been serving as a spokeswoman for Soros’s anti-Israel lobby: J Street. The JCPA added new board members like Kiyomi Kowalski, the “Afro-Latin queer” founder of ‘Jewbian Princess’ to deliver DEI training to Jewish organizations. Kowalski had come through Soros’s Bend the Arc.

Rori Picker Neiss, the JCPA’s Senior VP for Community Relations, was a leftist activist who had argued that America was systemically racist, claimed to have a transgender 11-year-old girl, was a former board member at HIAS, which specializes in resettling Muslims in America and was the “Rabbi in Residence at the Holy Communion Episcopal Church” in St. Louis.

Other incoming JCPA staffers included Benjamin Suarato, the former spokesman for USAID, and Emily Graham, a Gillibrand staffer.

None of this was normal and the JCPA, which had been a generically liberal group, became a radical leftist one.

The old JCPA had responded to Israel’s elections by describing them as evidence of democracy, the new JCPA however repeatedly attacked Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu, declaring a “fight for democracy” in Israel and America.

Days after the Oct 7 attacks, Amy Spitalnick, who had worked with the anti-Israel lobby J Street, organized a statement against ‘Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate’.

“We unequivocally reject those targeting our Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian American neighbors with bigotry, threats, and violence,” Spitalnick declared. The signatories included multiple Soros anti-Israel and anti-Jewish groups including J Street, Bend the Arc, T’ruah and the New Israel Fund which subsidizes BDS hate groups.

Spitalnick jumped on the Burlington shooting hoax to issue a press release declaring that “we are praying for a swift and full recovery for Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ahmed.”  The shootings had nothing to do with Israel or Islam, but the three Muslim men used their platform to repeatedly denounce Israel with the political aid of the new JCPA.

No one could mistake the new JCPA’s priorities when it issued two statements condemning the Oct 7 attacks, three statements condemning Islamophobia after the attacks and five statements condemning the Trump administration’s crackdowns on campus antisemitism.

While the JCPA assembled a list of signers to its campaign against Islamophobia, it offered no such response to Oct 7. What made the JCPA jump into some kind of action wasn’t the mass murder of Jews, but any report of any violence, no matter how random, as in the case of the Burlington shootings, involving Muslims.

The JCPA claimed that its militant defense of campus antisemitism was motivated by its concern for ‘free speech’ and other democratic values, but the organization had previously demanded the removal of hate speech from Twitter and social media. Its sudden concern for free speech existed only when it came to Hamas supporters targeting Jewish students on college campuses.

The new JCPA defends even the worst campus antisemitism while leveraging a vintage brand of the liberal Jewish establishment. The JCPA had started life as the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council. Many people who encounter its initials still think that it represents some sort of ‘grassroots’ coalition of liberal community groups when all it represents is the Left.

And the Soros political machine.

In announcing its new identity, the JCPA stated that it “traditionally operated on a consensus model among 125 national JCRCs and 16 National Jewish organizations”, but in “today’s political climate, however, consensus is harder to obtain” and so the “JCPA is moving from a consensus and general membership model to the coalition model where policy will be driven and overseen.” The JCPA no longer represents anyone except its bosses and major donors.

That includes at least a quarter-million dollar investment from the billionaire funder of anti-Israel groups who had once urged, “America and Israel must open the door to Hamas.”

And whose former employee runs the JCPA and speaks for it.

The JCPA is certainly not the first liberal Jewish group or personality Soros bought, what is surprising is how cheap the price of one of the crown jewels of the old liberal establishment was.