What the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish community has built and why more communities should follow

In recent years, Jewish students in California public schools have faced well-documented antisemitism.

A Berkeley ninth-grader’s art teacher displayed a Star of David with a fist punching through it. After the boy’s mother complained, the school moved him to sit alone in the library.

A third-grader was called “a racist” by a school employee and told she could perform in the talent show only if she removed the Israeli flag from her poster.

An honors student’s chemistry teacher, on the second anniversary of October 7, wrote “Oy vey, it’s free” on the whiteboard beside a “free Palestine” sign. After the family complained, the school moved the student into a non-honors online class.

These incidents exemplify the difficult moment we are in. Not surprisingly, Jewish leaders do not agree on what to do about the current challenge. Some have asserted that we are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars per year fighting antisemitism, that the organizations leading the fight should be dismantled, and that we should instead redirect resources into the infrastructure of Jewish identity, such as Jewish day schools.

While I agree with their diagnosis that the tools we have relied on are insufficient, their apparent prescription – to leave the field to our adversaries while we tend to our own gardens – gets the moment backwards.

Dismantle or disengage is not a strategy. Day schools do not pass laws. Antisemitism is landing on real people. In response, community members have mobilized and seek to engage in effective action. That surge of engagement is among our most valuable assets, and the “turn inward” counsel would squander it.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, our Jewish community has taken the opposite approach. Working in close concert with our statewide partners, we have built a highly integrated Jewish political infrastructure combining traditional and new forms of advocacy. And that infrastructure has delivered remarkable results.

Our existing organizations serve as a foundation:

The Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area (JCRC Bay Area), formed after World War II, develops communal consensus and leads the community through public policy debates and crises. Partially Federation-funded but independent, it is unusually large and influential among the country’s JCRCs.

The Jewish Federation Bay Area, over 100 years old, helps fund much of this architecture, manages community security for Northern California, and helps secure state and federal nonprofit security grants for partner organizations.

Jewish California, formerly the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of........

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