The view from Rabbi Doug Kahn’s office window would make a classic San Francisco picture postcard: bustling Embarcadero, bridge and bay, with the green hills of Berkeley to the east. But something’s wrong with this picture. And whatever it is, Kahn intends to find out.
As executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, Kahn oversees the most visible advocacy organization in the local Jewish universe. Based out of the Jewish Community Federation building in San Francisco, the JCRC is one of the largest agencies of its kind. Many Jewish communities across the country have a JCRC chapter, but the Bay Area’s — encompassing a seven-county region from Sonoma to the Peninsula — remains one of the biggest and most active.
According to its Web site at www.jcrc.org, the JCRC “represents more than 80 synagogues and Jewish organizations in the Bay Area on issues that impact the rights and protection of Jews as individuals and as a community here and abroad.”
That’s especially true when threats to the region’s Jews arise.
And those threats seem to come every day. The Bay Area is a hotbed of anti-Israel activity and some anti-Semitic incidents, both of which tend to provoke the wrath of Kahn and keeps his staff at battle stations.
They need to be. The JCRC serves a diverse community, which is at once exceptionally tolerant and equally divisive, especially when it comes to matters related to Jews and Israel.
On a recent Thursday morning, Kahn gathers his staff together in the cramped windowless office of JCRC Israel programs director Steve Berley for the weekly Middle East staff meeting.
Berley’s walls are covered with Israeli flags and other Israeliana. In the corner stands a box full of protest signs ready for hoisting at the next local pro-Israel demonstration.
This is the JCRC’s version of the war room.
In attendance, JCRC associate director Abby Michelson Porth, Middle East affairs director Yitzhak Santis and assistant director Abby Fleishman. JCRC has regional directors all over the Bay Area, and so education specialist Jackie Berman, Marin/Sonoma regional director Judy Penso, East Bay regional director Deborah Louria and Peninsula regional director Karen Stiller join in on speakerphone.
On today’s agenda, a mix of good and bad news. The bad, however, is pretty bad. Berley hands out a 23-page booklet detailing all current anti-Israel/anti-Zionist/anti-Jewish activities in the Bay Area, every page a stomach-turner for friends of Israel.
Pro-Palestinian groups including Students for Justice in Palestine, the Middle East Children’s Alliance, Wheels of Justice and International ANSWER all have anti-Israel events planned in the days ahead. One group, Jews for a Free Palestine, has launched a campaign urging Jews to renounce their right to make aliyah.
Over take-out salads and sandwiches, staffers kick around the agenda items one by one.
“This has been a bad month,” says Santis. “We’re seeing more linkage between the war in Iraq and the Israel-Palestinian issue.” He notes that at one anti-war rally last week, protestors chanted “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.”
The conversation isn’t 100 percent depressing. A JCRC-planned Israel Cultural Day event in Santa Clara County is coming up, and a new JCRC-supported bill that sticks up for dispossessed Jews from Arab countries is making its way through Congress.
A self-described “refugee from the high-tech industry,” Berley loves his current job but feels deeply the slings and arrows directed at the Jewish community.
“On good days, I go home feeling like I’m really helping,” he says. “On bad days, I want to pull my hair out.”
Kahn adjourns to his office with Porth to plan the agency’s next move in an ongoing struggle with San Francisco Women Against Rape (SFWAR). Last summer, it came to light that the rape crisis center, which receives public funds, inexplicably required volunteers to sign a personal pledge against Zionism. The revelation outraged the local Jewish community.
Since then, when JCRC began pressing the group to change its ways, SFWAR has generally avoided serious negotiation with the JCRC, launching a stall campaign that caused bad blood between the two groups. The issue has yet to be resolved.
Porth, who has served as a JCRC point-person on the case, is also frustrated. “Their board has never repealed the anti-Zionist policy,” she says. “Every time we come close to progress, SFWAR changes course and creates an adversarial potion.”
Soon after a lunch on the run, Porth, Kahn, Fleishman and legislative affairs director Gia Daniller meet to put the finishing touches on a new plan: form a network of volunteers who will stay in touch with state and local elected officials on a regular basis.
This idea is Daniller’s baby, but she has to work fast. The next day she heads for France to attend a friend’s wedding. So she and her colleagues wrack their brains (and their Rolodexes) to come up with leads for volunteers.
While they’re at it, the four also talk about the upcoming Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California legislative reception and lobby day. The Sacramento event brings more than 200 activists from JCRCs across the state for two-day strategy session and pep rally. (The Governator is on tap to address the attendees this year, but no word yet if he can make it.)
Though flare-ups like SFWAR often draw the most attention, planning something like the JPAC lobby day is more typical of JCRC activities. Kahn and company excel behind the scenes, providing the scaffolding for a strong and united Jewish community.
Kahn, who has been with JCRC since 1982, is a fourth-generation San Franciscan who loves his work. “We have a mandate to build consensus in the Jewish community,” he says, “and to be their advocate in the broader community.”
In the downstairs conference room, Julia Ellis and Shirley Feldman take a meeting. They are key players in the Jewish Coalition for Literacy — affiliated with a national organization, the JCRC and the S.F.-based and East Bay Jewish Community federations — that has made a measurable difference in local public schools. More than 450 JCL volunteers work one-on-one with school-age kids, helping them get a leg up on their reading skills.
“The Jewish community is really well suited to take on this kind of work,” says Ellis. “The values we as a people place on literature and education is something we can pass on to the general community.”
As the workday comes to an end for Kahn, he thinks ahead to tomorrow’s agenda. “I enjoy the challenge of being on the front lines,” he says, donning a jacket before heading out into the icy night winds of the city. “This is the best job in the world.”
The day isn’t over for Porth, however. She races across town to the new Jewish Community Center of San Francisco to inaugurate a JCRC-sponsored series of public forums, this one on homelessness. She fights the traffic on California Street to make it on time.
The forum brings together local leaders in the fight against homelessness, including advocate Paul Boden, former San Francisco City Council member Angela Alioto and San Francisco’s director of housing and homeless programs Dariush Kayhan. Radio personality Michael Krasny serves as moderator.
Only about 20 people show up for the program, but they get an earful. The discussion is lively, occasionally confrontational, but always astute.
Porth is pleased.
After 30 minutes of obligatory shmoozing, she finally calls it a day. It’s almost 10 p.m. when she heads home.
On the way, she stops to reflect on her job and the work of the JCRC. She’s one of the lucky ones who believe in their work, and she knows she’s doing something to make the world a better place.
“There’s never a dull day,” says Porth, noshing on a panini that serves as her late dinner. “I spend my time doing things my heart and mind would direct me to anyway: blending my passion for Judaism and Jewish values while working with the community in the broader Bay Area.”