Don’t Dismantle. Build.
What the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish community has built and why more communities should follow
By Michael A. Jacobs
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.
What We Built
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 California (JPAC), is the community’s 50-year-old statewide advocacy arm, uniting more than forty organizations in Sacramento. It recently brought a record 700 people to the capitol for its annual lobbying day, and its service work on issues like hunger builds trust with lawmakers we later ask to back our anti-hate agenda.
The Bay Area Network of Jewish Officials (BANJO), launched in 2022, connects local Jewish elected officials – often the best educators of their non-Jewish colleagues – so they can lead with a common voice.
The California Legislative Jewish Caucus is the body of Jewish legislators we partner with on the inside.
In the wake of the rising hostility our community encountered after October 7, 2023, we recognized gaps in our advocacy infrastructure and our ability to support the surge of newly engaged community members. Our community launched the following initiatives:
Bay Area Jewish Action (BAJA), a new 501(c)(4) created by JCRC Bay Area, can engage in politics, helping to elect our champions and or defeat our adversaries. JCRC Bay Area’s consensus positions guide its work.
The Bay Area Center to Counter Antisemitism (BACCA), a partially Federation-supported 501(c)(3) launched in late 2024, coordinates community members who organized after October 7. It supports eight grassroots groups working with school and city officials on antisemitic incidents. (A separate group, Bay Area Jewish Coalition (BAJC) Action, mobilizes voters around local elections.)
Together, these existing and new organizations constitute something close to a complete advocacy and political circuit. They function as a hub for the wider Jewish communal ecosystem, including Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS), which plays a major role in Holocaust education; our day school and synagogues; and national organizations like JFNA, JCPA, ADL, StandWithUs, and AJC, as well as national activist networks.
What It Delivered
Return to those students. Last October, Governor Newsom signed Assembly Bill 715, the most far-reaching K-12 antisemitism statute in the country. It creates a statewide Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator and strengthens how schools must handle antisemitism complaints. CAIR-California and the California Teachers Association, one of the state’s most powerful unions, fought it. It passed both chambers without a single “no” vote – 71-0 in the Assembly and 35-0 in the Senate.
That outcome was the product of two years of coordinated work. Bay Area communal institutions worked in close partnership with Jewish California and the Legislative Jewish Caucus, alongside JFCS, ADL, AJC, StandWithUs, BAJC Action, and JCRCs and Federation partners across the state. The community spoke with a unified voice and refused to be intimidated by the vociferous and powerful opposition.
Critically, the coalition extended beyond the Jewish community. The bill’s principal co-authors included the chairs of the Black Caucus, the Latino Caucus, and the AAPI Caucus, as well as the co-chairs of the Legislative Jewish Caucus – a Diversity Caucus coalition that, in a joint statement, declared it would “not stand idly by while any community is targeted by hate.”
Another example: This spring, an antisemitic candidate statement promoting the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the September 11 attacks appeared in California’s official voter guide, mailed to some 23 million voters. Within weeks, Jewish California and the Legislative Jewish Caucus had met with the Secretary of State and advanced AB 1853, legislation barring hateful attacks in official candidate statements. That is what standing infrastructure buys – not a guarantee against antisemitism but the capacity to answer it quickly, credibly, and with political weight.
How To Build It Where You Are
If other communities want to follow this model, here are some lessons from our experience:
First, build sustained professional infrastructure. These organizations have staff, funders, budgets, strategy, and continuity.
Second, create 501(c)(4) capacity. Our communities now need vehicles to support candidates and elected officials who align with our values and to defeat those who wish us ill.
Third, instill a culture of arriving at communal positions through consensus-building processes. Without consensus, the community speaks in multiple voices and loses persuasiveness. No single faction can be allowed a veto. Picking up one’s marbles when one loses is not a permitted move.
Fourth, model integrity and patience. The Jewish community’s most durable political asset is its reputation. We have built influence by making careful, factual arguments; cultivating durable alliances with non-Jewish partners; and by making it easy for people of good will across the political spectrum to stand with us.
Fifth – and this is a hard one – maintain non-partisanship. In a deep-blue state, the adversaries we faced in passing AB 715 were not Republicans. In other states, the most potent challenges may come from the Right. We find ourselves as a community in the political center, defending long-standing principles that are under attack from the fringes. We are most successful when we work across partisan divides and operate from principles that most Americans endorse.
Sixth, treat your architecture as a hub. The institutions described above draw much of their clout from active partnership with other organizations and coordinated communal infrastructure gives partners a place to plug in.
Seventh, when community energy surges, treat it as an asset to channel. Community members have become remarkably effective at identifying, interrupting, and remedying antisemitism in their own schools and cities. Established institutions should welcome that energy. Partnership with newly activated community members, on terms that respect their agency, is among the most valuable investments an established infrastructure can make.
Why So Few Have Done It
The Bay Area often serves as a testing ground so we may be ahead in seeing both challenges and opportunities. But the model is not a secret, and pieces of it are being built in many places. What remains rare is the integration of these pieces. Most JCRCs sit inside their federations, which can blunt their independence and complicate their ability to innovate. A 501(c)(4) operating alongside an independent JCRC is highly unusual. Few states have a statewide Jewish coalition with the staffing and lobbying capacity of Jewish California. And the disciplined coordination – institutions speaking from a shared communal consensus, deploying their distinct capabilities in concert – is another part most communities have not yet built.
The scaffolding to support the surge in community activism also appears rare. Most of these groups run on WhatsApp threads and volunteer hours, with no staff and no fundraising arm. Burnout is a constant risk.
It helps that in the Bay Area we have an unusually deep bench of professional and lay leadership, and a donor culture that rewards consensus building and civic engagement. Whatever combination of factors got us here, the architecture is not proprietary, and the lessons are there for any community to apply.
To My Fellow Lay Leaders
If you are disappointed in our institutional response around the country to the current crisis, you are not alone. But the answer is not dismantlement. It is to think expansively about what exists, build what is missing, and make the most of our powerful new asset – the surge of engagement since October 7. Meeting this moment means reaching beyond our existing structures to more effectively engage in politics and to include the many motivated community members who want to be part of the solution.
We are taking that work in the Bay Area to a new level. We have much more to do: we need to look at areas of weakness and gaps and develop an overall strategy for combatting antisemitism in our region; we need better coordination across our organizations. But we’ve made important progress.
Other communities can do the same. The question is no longer whether the old playbook is sufficient – we know it is not. The question is whether American Jewish leadership has the energy and flexibility this moment requires.
