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 interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Both at-home and working mothers can overmeet their mothering responsibilities. In order to justify their jobs, working mothers can overnurture, overconnect with, and overschedule their children into activities and classes. Similarly, some at-home mothers,... can make at- home mothering into a bigger deal than it is, over stimulating, overeducating, and overwhelming their children with purposeful attention.”
—Jean Marzollo (20th century)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)