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After 20 years of heading Boston's Jewish Community Relations Council, Nancy Kaufman is resigning her position. Will this mark the beginning of a new vision for the JCRC?
Kaufman was for these two decades a dedicated and passionate activist for her causes. She made significant contributions to enhancing the welfare of the needy in the Jewish community as well as those in the larger Boston community. But politically, as is well known, she stubbornly clung to left side of the house, even as much of the left turned cold - or worse - on Israel, and even though Boston's Jews have become politically more diverse.
Over these last 20 years, while the situation for Jews here and around the world deteriorated in significant ways, the JCRC, like most of the mainstream Jewish organizations guided by outdated paradigms, failed to adapt.
Times have changed. Anti-Semitism has morphed. In the West, Jews are hated today not because of our religion or our race, but because of the Jewish state. Religion-based Muslim anti-Semitism, which chased almost all Jews from the Islamic world, is increasingly metastasizing into the West. Among the opinion elites of academia and media, Israel is opposed, defamed, despised and organized against.
On the other hand, conservatives rally in droves to Israel and support efforts against Islamic terrorism, which - from the Jewish Federation in Seattle to the Chabad House in Mumbai - frequently targets...