Activities
The JCPA works on shaping consensus on public issues, developing strategic responses, and working with the media, elected officials, coalition partners, and others through public relations, advocacy, and lobbying. International issues that the JCPA is concerned with include Israel-United States relations, global antisemitism, the United Nations, the well-being of Jews in endangered areas, and human rights. Domestic issues that the JCPA is concerned with include include anti-Semitism, social justice, poverty, education, public health, and individual rights, and religious liberties including the preservation of the separation of church and state. The JCPA is also actively involved in environmentalism and climate change issues though its program the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), an affiliate of the National Religious Partnership on the Environment.
Each year the JCPA has an annual conference known as the Plenum, the highest policy-developing body of the organization. At the Plenum the JCPA hosts speakers and debates and adopts resolutions expressing the consensus policies of member organizations and the organized American Jewish community. These policies become part of the "JCPA Policy Compendium," which includes positions on a range of issues.
The JCPA has three main task forces:
- Israel, World Jewry, and International Human Rights
- Jewish Security and The Bill of Rights
- Equal Opportunity and Social Justice
In September 2007, the JCPA launched an anti-poverty program "There shall be no needy among you." The effort seeks to raise awareness and action to combat hunger, homelessness and other vestiges of poverty in America. JCPA director Gutow led a national 'food stamp challenge' in which he and others consumed for a week no more food than could be purchased with $21, the total amount received by the average food stamp recipient.
The JCPA also jointly manages, in partnership with The Jewish Federations of North America the Israel Action Network.
The JCPA is a partner in the Campaign for Children's Health Care, a campaign to raise awareness about the problem of uninsured children in America.
JCPA shares its acronym with the Jerusalem-based think tank, Jerusalem Center for Public AffairsRead more about this topic: Jewish Council For Public Affairs
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Love and work are viewed and experienced as totally separate activities motivated by separate needs. Yet, when we think about it, our common sense tells us that our most inspired, creative acts are deeply tied to our need to love and that, when we lack love, we find it difficult to work creatively; that work without love is dead, mechanical, sheer competence without vitality, that love without work grows boring, monotonous, lacks depth and passion.”
—Marta Zahaykevich, Ucranian born-U.S. psychitrist. “Critical Perspectives on Adult Women’s Development,” (1980)