JPR Publications

Published: 2010
Author(s):
There is a clear thirst in the community for more up-to-date information. To help community leaders make decisions that will affect us all, they need reliable data upon which to base their projections and plans. It is time to produce high quality, up-to-date and accessible data about the issues that matter, with one overarching goal in mind: to build the most responsive, supportive and inspiring Jewish community we can.

Published: 2010
Author(s):

During the past 15 months, JPR has been engaged in a conversation involving a small number of the most insightful practitioners and thinkers in the British Jewish community today. The participants in this conversation were drawn from as many sections of the Jewish community as possible and were chosen because of their direct involvement in creating a particularly interesting version of Jewish community, their capacity to think reflectively and their willingness to engage constructively and respectfully in dialogue with others.
 
What has emerged from this initiative, which has been sponsored by the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Clore Duffield Foundation, is a series of thoughts or ideas that can be used to facilitate discussion and debate about our collective future. The views expressed raise some central and often quite challenging questions and ideas which we wish to bring to a wider audience in the interests of promoting a dialogue about how to sustain, renew and invigorate the Jewish community.

Published: 2009
Author(s): Michael Galchinsky

Jewish associations are essentially voluntary and have been since the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Their decision-making is neither top-down nor a result of a participatory bottom-up process. On the political level each brings its own constituency and mission to the table. So, when it comes to global Jewish politics there is an alphabet soup of organizations and individuals participating in the decision-making process.

Their kaleidoscopic interrelations can resemble independent action, coordination, competition, or conflict, and have prevented a unified Jewish response to most political questions. Instead, we find a dynamic system of responses based on ever-changing relationships among multiple power centres.

How this fragile and fluid coalition politics evolved can be seen by reflecting on three human rights challenges where Jews have been particularly active. Building international human rights institutions: Organizations cooperated informally and each national organization contributed significantly to the process, but at times they opposed each other. Defending vulnerable Jewish communities: Internal cooperation and conflict were especially evident in the campaigns for Soviet Jewry and Ethiopian Jewry. Many organizations were active and some pursued distinctly different agendas. Their success could not be credited to the network’s internal cohesion. Working for the relief of victims of Israeli human rights violations: Israel’s 20-year old human rights network is characterized by informality, collaboration and conflict—and no permanent alliances. Differences have led to failures, but also have contributed to successes.

Being aware of the fluid pattern by which global Jewish politics typically operates prompts the question: How will global Jewish politics be managed in the future? This can be divided into three parts: Who sets the global agenda? Does the decision-making process still work? What issues need collective action?

The busy, buzzing hive of associations should be seen as a sign of the robust health of global Jewish civil society. Those of us who hope to influence Jewish public policy need first of all to understand how the Jewish people works.

Published: 2008
Author(s): Ben Cohen and Antony Lerman
Read articles arguing for and against written by Ben Cohen, Associate Director, Department of Anti-Semitism and Extremism, American Jewish Committee and Antony Lerman, JPR Director. The articles were first published in CQ Global Researcher in June 2008.

(2008)

Profesor Zygmunt Bauman (2008)

Dr Steven Beller (2008)

Dr Eric Kaufmann (2007)

David Graham, Marlena Schmool, Stanley Waterman (2007)

Paul Iganski, Vicky Kielinger, Susan Paterson (2005)

Dr David Graham (2004)

A Kovacs (2004)

Ernest Schlesinger (2003)

JPR (2003)

S Waterman (2003)

Dr David Graham (2003)

O Valins and B Kosmin (2003)

Oliver Valins, Barry Kosmin and Jacqueline Goldberg (2002)

Dr Oliver Valins (2002)

Paul Iganski (2002)

H Becher, S Waterman, B Kosmin and K Thomson (2002)

R Schischa and D Berenstein (2002)

G Short (2002)

M Harris and C Rochester (2001)

P Halfpenny and M Reid (2000)

Commission on Representation of the Interests of the British Jewish Community (2000)

B Kosmin (1999)

B Kosmin, J Goldberg, M Shain and S Bruk (1999)

S Waterman (1999)

J Goldberg and B Kosmin (1998)

R Silverstone (1998)

B Kosmin, A Lerman and J Goldberg (1997)

J Goldberg and B Kosmin (1997)

M Harris (1997)

SM Miller, M Schmool and A Lerman (1996)

D Pinto (1996)

F Halliday (1996)