Appalled by Haas Fund
I am appalled by the Walter and Elise Haas Fund’s decision to support a known anti-Zionist organization. (“Anti-Zionist org gets $100K grant as Walter and Elise Haas Fund changes direction,” Dec. 16) Are there no other ecumenical organizations in the community that would meet its desire to reach out beyond the Jewish community?
In one word: shameful.
Maureen Rittenberg
San Francisco
Haas Fund supports avowed enemy
As family foundations’ leadership moves through subsequent generations of family members, there is no guarantee that the founders’ passions and interests will continue to be shared. There are so many societal issues that require addressing and priorities shift.
But there should be limits — not necessarily legal ones, but moral ones — to how far a foundation board can stray from the core values of its founders. They may move in new directions, but to support an organization dedicated to undermining or destroying what the founders believed in and helped build is unfathomable. Yet this is what has happened with the recent Walter and Elise Haas Fund grant to the Arab Resource Organizing Center.
AROC is an avowed enemy of Israel and Zionism. After leading the 2014 “Block the Boat” campaign against a Zim Line ship at the Oakland Port, it followed up with a fundraiser entitled “Help us kick Zionism out of the Bay Area.”
AROC then utilized the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack to mount virulent anti-Israel campaigns in schools, including a school walkout, that led many Jewish students to feel isolated and intimidated.
Inspired by its founders, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund supported Jewish and civic causes, including Israel, for decades. Not only have its current leaders suspended the fund’s Jewish life portfolio, they have now rewarded an organization that represents the antithesis of what its founders stood for.
The board’s decision to award a substantial grant to AROC has done great harm to Jewish students and our community and simultaneously shown the middle finger to the founders. The only way to repair the damage is for the current board and staff to engage in deep conversation with leaders in the Jewish community and to reflect on their duty to honor the memory, values and remarkable legacy of the founders, even as they carve new paths.
Rabbi Doug Kahn
San Francisco
Disappointed in Haas Fund coverage
I was disappointed in the article “Anti-Zionist org gets $100K grant as Walter and Elise Haas Fund changes direction.” The organization in question is the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, or AROC. The fund prioritizes what they call “bridge-building” — engaging in solidarity between our diverse communities. In the present political moment, we need all of us to be able to work together; we need those bridges to be built.
The article complains that the grant to AROC runs counter to a widely held tenet in the Jewish community of support for Israel — though that support is neither universal nor unqualified. This insistence on what one group of Jews wants is the opposite of bridge-building.
The only quote in the article about AROC is from someone who makes the false accusation that it has participated in violence against the Jewish community. The plain fact is that AROC has worked in coalitions with a diverse group of organizations, including Jewish organizations. That is exactly the bridge-building that we need.
Let us take off our blinders and work together with everyone to make a better future for our children.
Helen Finkelstein
Berkeley
Kudos to Haas Fund
I am writing in response to the article on the Haas Fund’s grant to the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC). I am pleased to see a prominent Jewish foundation funding a variety of organizations doing critical work to support immigrants and people of color here in the Bay Area, and I commend the Haas Fund for allowing youth to select causes that matter to them.
Many Jews here in the Bay Area, including myself, have worked side by side with the AROC team to oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. To describe AROC’s efforts organizing for cease-fire resolutions, leading protests and advocating for economic pressure against Israel as “burning down” the Jewish future, as the CEO of the JCRC did in the article, is deeply offensive. I see the Haas Fund’s grant as a step toward building a shared future of peace and safety.
Alice Robinson
Redwood City
Thank you for supporting Haaretz
I want to thank Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, the CEO of J., for raising and analyzing the issue of the Israeli government’s sanctioning the newspaper Haaretz. (“Israel’s sanctions on Haaretz offer a warning and a lesson,” Nov. 27) As she wrote, although the government has the right to pull its ads, it should not limit any means for the public to learn the truth via reporters who do their jobs. I applaud her strong call to her journalism peers to speak out against the Israeli government’s sanctions of Haaretz.
As an Israeli who strongly believes in democracy, I joined many thousands of my fellow citizens in protesting this government’s anti-democratic efforts for 10 months preceding Oct. 7, 2023 — and I continue to demonstrate and contribute what I can as a translator and editor. Since the war started, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lied to Israelis and vilified the hostage families and delayed agreements or outright thwarted proposals to return large numbers of hostages at a minimal cost to Israel. Some hostages have died; all have suffered horrible conditions and torture.
Now, the only solution we can see to end the war, bring the hostages home and recall the present government is pressure from other governments and international institutions. Any of us who have the opportunity to speak out beyond our borders has the moral responsibility to do so.
May we have good news in 2025.
Marsha Brown
Displaced from Kiryat Shmona, Israel
Former liaison with the S.F. Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund’s Project Renewal
Ageism is all too real
I read Dr. Adrienne Green’s ageism column with interest and concern. (“Redefining normal: We all need to challenge our ageist beliefs,” Jan. 2)
Ageism among older people is real. However, as an octogenarian living in a retirement community, more often I see them helping and comforting others. When we choose to not participate, it may be because we cannot hear in a noisy room, fear falling or are bored with the same repetitive conversations. Every day, I see older people, even those very compromised, teaching others, making do and finding meaning.
I encounter ageism most among many professionals and staff who see all elders as cut from one mold and assume various degrees of dementia. Our abilities, differences, experience and expertise are often ignored. Professionals and staff are the experts, and we are the objects of their expertise.
During the holidays, I saw ageism in families who took vacations without their slower elders, leaving them not alone but lonely. We have all experienced family and friends who disappear as we age.
I see congregations and other Jewish organizations that focus on youth, our future, but often forget the unseen elders who built and continue to finance these congregations and organizations. Many of us want to continue participating.
Ageism, like other “isms” (antisemitism, racism, ableism, anti-feminism) deprives society of history, resources, wisdom and fun. It also perpetuates a myth about the unworthiness of those that are a bit slower. “Inclusion” includes elders. How do you want to be treated? With time and luck, you will become us.
Kate Lorig
Los Altos
A Silicon Valley vision of Hanukkah
Rabbi Adina Allen writes movingly about how her childhood celebration of Christmas deepened her adult appreciation of Hanukkah. (“What my relatives’ Christmas celebrations taught me about observing Hanukkah,” Dec. 24)
I offer a Silicon Valley re-interpretation of Hanukkah to our Christian, Muslim, Hindu and secular colleagues by teasing out further implications of the miracle of the oil. Is not entrepreneurship, the collective act of transmuting an idea or invention, starting with limited and constrained resources, yet giving rise to an efflorescence, the very essence of Hanukkah? From extension of a resource in short supply, oil to light the temple lamp, we may expand the Hanukkah concept to entrepreneurship and the lamp oil to sustainable green photovoltaic solar cells from organic materials, a technology at the cusp of innovation and commercialization.
Henry Etzkowitz
Menlo Park
Defending a definition of antisemitism
Sheree Roth’s letter to the editor mischaracterized the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (“BDS inherently antisemitic,” Dec. 20), writing: “The JDA definition states that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is not inherently antisemitic. The JDA also excludes as antisemitic the denial of Jewish self-determination and comparisons to Nazi Germany.” All three of her assertions are incorrect. Because JDA doesn’t mention speech comparing Israel to Nazi Germany does not mean that it deems such a comparison to be not antisemitic.
The JDA says, “Boycott, divestment, and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic.” This statement deems the protest activities of supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel not antisemitic. It does not mention the BDS movement as such.
JDA’s position on anti-Zionism as antisemitism is nuanced. Section B10 states: “Denying the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish… as Jews” is antisemitic. Section C12 states: “Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” is not antisemitic, nor is supporting “arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants ‘between the river and the sea,’ whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.”
Thus, if you oppose all nationalism, then your opposition to Zionist nationalism is not antisemitic. On the other hand, one can infer from the JDA that if Zionism is the only form of nationalism that you oppose, then your anti-Zionism is in fact antisemitism.
Finally, JDA’s only mention of Nazis is this: “Denying or minimizing the Holocaust by claiming that the deliberate Nazi genocide of the Jews did not take place … is antisemitic.”
J. readers, including Roth, should read the actual JDA definition at jerusalemdeclaration.org before deciding on your support or opposition.
Todd Silverstein
San Rafael
Don’t forget Rabbi Parris
In the Dec. 13 article “San Francisco’s historic Emanu-El refreshes its team of rabbis for a new era,” I celebrated the onboarding of new clergy to San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El. It is exciting that the congregation boasts five rabbis and two cantors who are “focused on the ‘we,’ not the ‘I’” in congregational leadership. The description of how Rabbis Noah Westreich, Madeline Budman and Rena Singer plan to contribute to the community is invigorating.
I was disappointed that the article only mentioned four of the five rabbis employed at Emanu-El and omitted Rabbi Sarah Parris. Rabbi Parris has served Emanu-El for six years and is now the second longest tenured rabbi at the congregation.
Rabbi Parris will resume her role as one of the congregation’s associate rabbis this month after a parental leave. This includes work as the director of clergy strategy and on the congregation’s senior leadership team. She is a dedicated professional, engaged deeply in community education and life. Her commitment to the community extends even into her personal life; her older daughter is enrolled in the congregation’s preschool program.
Like her new colleagues, Rabbi Parris also has a vision for equity, justice, education and engagement in the community. To this end, she was selected in 2024 to participate in Jewish LearningWorks’ two-year Voices for Good Fellowship. The fellows workshop their ideas and hone leadership skills that will support the entire Jewish community as we move into a new and complex era.
We learn in the adaptive leadership literature that leadership is an activity. My blessing for the full clergy team at Emanu-El is that they engage in leadership together and that they embrace a practice of leadership that allows the “we” to share the burdens and amplify the celebrations.
Jenni Mangel
Director, Voices for Good Fellowship
Jewish LearningWorks