This activist class of Jews have proven incapable of defending Jews under siege, because doing so would mean breaking with ideological allies.
David Reaboi
(JNS)
As Israel engages in a life-and-death campaign of historic strategic precision—neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program and striking the heart of its military infrastructure—the silence from many progressive Jewish institutions in America has been conspicuous and shameful. Among those at the forefront of this void is Amy Spitalnick, head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who has offered nothing resembling leadership at a time when it is most desperately needed.
Israel is engaged in a generational act of self-preservation, not only for the one Jewish state, but for the majority of the world’s Jews. It is the active enforcement of the Begin doctrine—a red line drawn decades ago that no regime committed to Israel’s extermination will be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. That line is now being defended, in real time, by some of the most elite and courageous Jewish heroes in history: fighter pilots, special forces operators and intelligence agents executing precision strikes to degrade and dismantle the Islamic Republic’s genocidal infrastructure.
And while these brave, young Israelis take existential risks to prevent a second Holocaust, Spitalnick only this as the war began: “Just heartbroken and terrified watching the news out of Israel tonight.”
The JCPA’s official statement after Israel began to attack Iran was an anemic and evasive prayer for “Israeli people as they await potential strikes, and with all civilians caught in the crossfire,” devoid of moral clarity, historical context or even a mention of Iran. In the week that followed, there was no elaboration, just more silence. While Iranian missiles continued to fall, Spitalnick’s JCPA commemorated Juneteenth, condemned the Supreme Court’s decision upholding a ban on child gender transitions, saying that “trans safety is Jewish safety.”
She did, however, post on social media after America struck the Iranian nuclear facilities, saying: “Putting everything else aside, I am just terrified about efforts to exploit the escalation with Iran to further undermine Jewish safety and security and our democracy at an already-frightening moment for both.”
But there was no mention of the world of the Islamic Republic’s repeated promises to destroy the “cancerous tumor” of Zionism.
This is not mere omission; it is a kind of ideological confession. Spitalnick and the far-left activist class she represents have constructed an entire political worldview in which the actual lives of Jews are, at best, incidental, and, at worst, a hindrance to the pursuit of progressive absolution. When Jewish lives are on the line, they default to abstraction. When the Jewish state acts with strength and moral seriousness, they vanish.
Israelis, for their part, understand what is at stake. According to polling by the Israel Democracy Institute, 80% of Jewish Israelis supported the strike on Iran. The response was not partisan or controversial; it was unified, sober and necessary. In Israel, questions of sovereignty, deterrence and national security are not theoretical. The threat is known, and so is the obligation to act, even in the face of uncertainty and great sacrifice.
Spitalnick’s career, by contrast, is built on a kind of weaponized irrelevance. She began as J Street’s first press secretary, helping to shape a platform of moral equivocation and public relations warfare against Israel and its security. Founded in 2008 as a counterweight to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, J Street styled itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” but was widely regarded as a Trojan horse for anti-Israel sentiment within the American Jewish community. Its donors, many of whom now fund the JCPA, have also bankrolled organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Oxfam, which churn out anti-Israel propaganda under the guise of human rights reporting.
Since Spitalnick moved to head the JCPA in 2023, Israel is the last thing a left-wing organization wants to discuss. Nearly every press release or statement from Spitalnick’s JCPA repeats the same refrain: “Only by ensuring that all communities are protected from discrimination and violence can we ensure that Jews are safe.” What does this mean? While the group never explains why that causal relationship holds, the implication is clear: Jewish safety is synonymous with the march of social justice, and, because the social justice policy wish-list progresses forever leftward, the fate of the Jews is along for the ride. Under this framework, those who insist on a more centrist, rational politics or forthright solidarity with Israel are branded as enemies.
The organization’s 2025 legislative and policy agenda from last month is illustrative as it’s a dense catalogue of progressive domestic priorities, including abortion, “climate equity,” DEI mandates, housing policy and voting access—every agenda item imaginable, except the one now threatening the lives of most of the world’s Jews. When antisemitism is acknowledged, it is only through the filter of the threat of white supremacy. There is no mention of the dominant forms of antisemitism now raging through academia, elite media and leftist organizing, anti-Zionist activism.
This was her posture after Oct. 7, when Hamas committed the most brutal mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Rather than confront the ideologies and movements that had enabled it, or to help Americans understand the stakes for Israel’s security, Spitalnick and her allies worked to frame the Israel Defense Forces’ response as an overreach. And when Jewish students were harassed, threatened and assaulted on elite college campuses, JCPA did not stand with them. Instead, it criticized Republicans for daring to notice.
The group’s partner organizations, from Bend the Arc to Jews for Racial and Economic Justice to The Shalom Center, allow themselves to be more explicit and radical. They refer to Israel as a white-supremacist or colonialist project, and they do so without consequence or Spitalnick’s rebuke. The JCPA’s alignment with anti-Zionist groups is not a fringe position within this coalition, but its moral center.
Participants at the JCPA’s most recent summit, included Rabbi Rachel Timoner, who presided over a Pride Shabbat the weekend Iranian missiles began falling and mentioned not a word about Israel, not a prayer for soldiers; Aviva Meyer, whose “New Jewish Narrative,” born from the collapse of Americans for Peace Now, has effectively abandoned any pretense of Zionism; and Jill Jacobs of T’ruah, who spent the week accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing.
What all of this makes clear is that the JCPA advances a left-wing political agenda using American Jews as human shields. It is a lobbying arm for left-wing priorities, branded with a Jewish aesthetic for credibility and rhetorical utility. While it retains access to elite forums, press coverage and donor pipelines, it does not speak for the majority of Jews in America. It speaks for a credentialed activist class that has proven incapable of defending Jews under siege, because doing so would mean breaking with ideological allies.
October 7 was a moment of moral reckoning, and the current campaign against Iran is another. Because Spitalnick and the JCPA do not believe in the survival of Jews outside the context of progressive utopianism, they are unwilling to defend living and breathing Jews when it matters.
They may continue to post on social media, host panels, attend summits and issue irrelevant press releases and infographics, but they must not be regarded as representatives of Jewish communal life. They speak for an ideology that cannot see Jews except as props in someone else’s revolution.
Image: Israeli security and rescue forces at the scene where a ballistic missile fired from Iran hit and caused damage in Tel Aviv on June 22, 2025. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.
