Njcrac’s Future on the Minds of Community Relations Experts

This year’s annual conference of the Jewish communal world’s national public affairs body was marked mostly by what did not happen.

There was precious little of the contentious debate over substantive policy issues that has characterized and enlivened previous plenums of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council.

Also, scant attention was paid in the formal agenda to a newly released, controversial plan to reform NJCRAC to increase services to the 117 local community relations councils. Proponents say not making the changes risks rendering NJCRAC irrelevant.

But a vote on the plan originally stated for the plenum was postponed in the wake of intense protest by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee – three of NJCRAC’s 13 national member agencies.

Instead, only two hours of discussion in small groups were devoted to the plan, with a vote tentatively scheduled to take place by June.

Nonetheless, the overarching theme of the plenum, which drew about 400 delegates here from Feb. 11 to 14, remained NJCRAC’s efforts to recast itself and its direction in a changing communal landscape.

“Have we stood still?” Lawrence Rubin, NJCRAC executive vice chairman and an ardent advocate of internal reform, said in his address to the plenum.

“Have we allowed ourselves to grasp the comforting cliches and bromides of past positions and policies, ignoring changes in our country and their consequences for our field?”

Despite “monumental changes in the world,” Rubin said, NJCRAC’s annual policy- making process has “appeared bland and sanitized” in recent years.

“The instrument needs refining” for NJCRAC to make a difference and help shape “a communal vision of a just society,” Rubin said.

For Rabbi Douglas Kahn, executive director of the JCRC of San Francisco, the mandate for change in the community relations field is evident in the “diminished urgency in the issues typically associated with the CRCs: the Middle East, Soviet Jewry and anti-Semitism,” he said.

“CRCs have been viewed as the insurance policy for the Jewish community, there to address crises and external threats,” Kahn said. Now that some of the longtime crises have eased and the community is turning inward, the CRCs must reposition themselves, he added.

“In fact, CRCs have always, as part of their mandate, fulfilled a number of additional functions that have taken on increasing importance, including Jewish outreach, serving as a common table in an era of increased concern about intracommunal civility and respect, and providing expertise in the area of public advocacy,” Kahn said.

Nancy Kaufman, director of the JCRC of Greater Boston, said, “NJCRAC and CRCs across the country are in transition. The strategic plan is an attempt to begin to address where do we go from here and what do we want to be.”

Plenum sessions were devoted to federal budget cuts, race relations, the environment, the peace process, the religious right, law and cyberspace, and grass-roots political organizing in an election year.

Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak gave a warmly received speech, though his scheduled counterpart, Likud Party head Benjamin Netanyahu, did not attend and was replaced by Zalman Shoval, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, whose telephone address drew only a sparse crowd.

U.S. Health Secretary Donna Shalala, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt also appeared.

But “compared to several past plenaries, there were no burning issues, none that divided the community,” said Leonard Cole, a NJCRAC vice chairman from Bargen County in New Jersey and member of the committee that issued the strategic plan.

“Because of strategic planning, we were focused more on the internal structure and function of the agency and where it’s going,” he said. “If the plan had been brought to a vote, it would have been a major issue, but we’ve postponed the day of reckoning.”

Instead, five largely boilerplate resolutions were passed. One expressed support for the peace process and another condemned Jewish extremist rhetoric and violence and pledged to work for civility in public discourse.

To the consternation of some delegates who privately called the discussion “vacuous,” the most heated debate was generated by a resolution calling for environmental protection. The dispute was over whether the subject was a “Jewish issue.”

But some delegates said something fundamental was at stake in what seemed like a frivolous debate about “salamanders.”

The question “reflects a much larger debate over the Jewish public affairs agenda,” said one delegate. “The agenda is clearly expanding and there is growing debate over the contours of the agenda,” he said.

“Both the agenda and the entity itself are in a transitional phase,” he said.

For some, the paucity of burning issues reflects the success of NJCRAC and its members.

“Look at the Jewish communal agenda,” said Maynard Wishner, past chairman of NJCRAC and current president of the Council of Jewish Federations. “We’ve won it, both overseas and domestically.”

Others were more cynical, saying that the common agenda has “collapsed.”

But all agree these times call for NJCRAC and CRCs to carve out new roles and, in some cases, new agendas.

Indeed, at a time when local federations’ budgets are squeezed, CRCs are clearly eager – and in some instances even pressed – to prove their value.

Most CRCs are attached to and receive their funding from their local federations, which in turn contribute some 80 percent of NJCRAC’s funding.

Several CRCs have begun to lend their political advocacy skills to federations at a time when the federal government is shifting responsibility for funding social programs to the states and federation-supported for funding social programs to the states and federation-supported agencies are at risk for cuts.

“We’ve always maintained relations with key local and state officials, so this is an important service we can provide,” said San Francisco’s Kahn.

“Our JCRCs are teeming with public policy junkies and grass-roots activists, which makes us uniquely positioned to play a key role in this critical time of change,” said Lynn Lyss, who completed her two-year term as NJCRAC chair at the plenum.

Fellow St. Louisan Michael Newmark is her successor.

There were calls by some speakers for heightened Jewish content in the pursuit of social action by both CRCs and the national agencies. But warnings were sounded against retreating from a broad-based social-justice agenda and becoming too parochial.

Said Lyss: “There are those who maintain that our work on behalf of our values is a luxury we can no longer afford, that only those issues that directly affect America’s Jews – Israel, prayer in the schools, anti-Semitism, should occupy us.”

But “it is imperative that we assert in every discussion and every public forum the fundamental correctness and importance of a Jewish community that stands for civil rights and civil liberties, for addressing the root causes of poverty and crime, for challenging discrimination wherever it occurs,” Lyss said in a keynote address.

Such an agenda is precisely what will attract the young, unaffiliated or disaffected into the Jewish fold, thus ensuring Jewish continuity, said Lyss and others.

“If we are to convince substantial numbers of young people that being Jewish is a thing worth being, and if we are to make ourselves a community not only of comfort but of conviction, then we must stand for more than just our own interests,” said Lyss.

Boston’s Kaufman agreed. “Social justice and what we do in public affairs is on the cutting edge of what will ignite a whole new generation,” she said, adding that in Boston, “The young people are coming out of the woodwork.”

Meanwhile, the plenum heard provocative calls both to broaden the liberal organization’s tent politically and reach out more aggressively to conservative politicians and policy-makers.

NJCRAC is out of step with “the radical rightward shift in the political center of gravity” after the 1994 Republican ascendancy, said Ted Lapkin, CRC director in West Palm Beach, Fal.

NJCRAC policy statements “all reflect the ethos of an organization where a left-of-center orthodoxy reigns unchallenged,” he said.

If this “partisan orientation” and “inhospitable environment” for conservatives is not changed, NJCRAC’s mission will be jeopardized, Lapkin said.

Lapkin was not alone in expressing that sentiment.

At a forum on grass-roots political education, Simcha Lyons, a St. Louis Republican activist, warned delegates, “It is dangerous not to have Jewish involvement on the Republican side.

He dismissed as groundless Jewish “fears” of cultivating relationships with politicians of the Christian right. He said members of the Christian right are “sympathetic to Israel” and “share certain moral values.”

“Not to be involved with them is a mistake,” he said. “If we don’t have involvement (with Republicans), we don’t sit at the table and we won’t have input.”

Said Emily Fink Bauman, executive director of the JCRC of St. Louis, “We should listen, have respect for and welcome diversity, and at the same time we have to be true to our principles. Judaism is a reference point. We’ve got to keep our eye on the ball.”

As for the proposed plan to reform NJCRAC, discussions with the three big national agencies – the ADL, the AJCongress and the AJCommittee – are slated in the coming weeks in an effort to reach some agreement. The three argue that the plan violates NJCRAC’s mandate as a coordinating body.

The plan calls for NJCRAC to open an office in the nation’s capital, oversee funds now distributed by federations to the national agencies and eliminate veto power now accorded to the “nationals” over public expressions of NJCRAC policy.