In June 2024, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hosted a livestream with Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the tension between the speakers and their audience blazed across the screen for the entirety of the 30-minute event.

“Antisemitism, hate and violence against Jews because of their identity is real and it is dangerous,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the beginning of the event. “It is also important to say here in this moment and during that conversation that criticism of the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic and criticism of Zionism is not automatically antisemitic.”

People immediately took to social media to call Spitalnick a traitor for meeting with one of the Democratic movement’s most vocal critics of Israel, and Ocasio-Cortez lost her endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America due to Spitalnick’s condemnation of Zionist bans and the use of the term as a pejorative.  

The fallout from the talk, with some in the Jewish community applauding Spitalnick for the bridgebuilding conversation and others denouncing her, was par for the course since Spitalnick took the helm of the organization two-and-a-half years ago. 

Under her leadership, JCPA has reorganized and grown substantially: Its staff has increased from two to nearly a dozen, with the number of employees working on the Capitol Hill increasing from zero to four; its annual budget has increased from $970,000 to over $2.7 million; and the number of annual donors to the 83-year-old legacy organization has increased from 300 to over 800.

But Spitalnick’s tenure with the organization has also been contentious. Some on the left have criticized her liberal Zionist stances, while critics on the right — including her immediate predecessor in an interview with eJP — feel that Spitalnick’s progressive politics pigeonhole the Jewish community and that her organization is spending resources on cultivating relationships with individuals and groups who are not allies to the Jewish people.   

Spitalnick, 40, rose to national prominence as executive director of Integrity First for America, where she launched a successful multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the neo-Nazi organizers of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville, Va., march. She has become a progressive face for the Jewish community, acting as a go-to resource for CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post. 

Spitalnick’s worldview and advocacy were shaped by the stories shared with her by her maternal grandparents, who grew up in what was then Poland, now Ukraine, and survived the Holocaust — the only members of their families to do so. Her grandmother hid under a porch, listening as her sisters, nieces and nephews were murdered nearby. The sounds of the gunshots that her grandmother recalled were “seared into my brain as a kid,” Spitalnick said.

But after a chance meeting in a displaced persons camp, her grandparents found refuge in America, where they sought a better life. Her grandfather drove a New York City cab, and her grandmother worked as a seamstress, sacrificing so her mother could have “opportunities they couldn’t have dreamed of,” Spitalnick said.

Her grandmother was a member of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and her parents, both teachers, were members of the United Federation of Teachers. It was these unions, along with the higher-education opportunities offered in America, which “in turn, gave me the opportunities that I have,” she said.

She grew up during the so-called “golden age of American Jews,” when Jews were ingrained in popular culture, higher education and the Supreme Court, and experts debated if antisemitism existed outside of the darkest crannies of American culture. “It felt like a very safe time to be an American and an American Jew,” Spitalnick said.

Spitalnick grew up in Long Island and followed the path many American Jews did, attending Jewish summer camp and becoming USY president. While studying political science and Middle Eastern studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts, she spent her junior year in Israel, learning at Hebrew University, and became Hillel president her senior year.

It was during her time at Tufts’ Hillel that Spitalnick first connected with JCPA, attending its annual The Charlotte B. and Jack J. Spitzer Hillel Forum, an event that brought together student leaders to debate policy, Israel advocacy and social justice.

“I never intended to be so institutionally engaged in the Jewish community, but it’s where I found my home in a lot of these moments,” she said.

Before suing Nazis with Integrity First for America and later joining the JCPA, Spitalnick served as press secretary for liberal Israel advocacy group J Street, communications director and senior policy advisor to the New York State attorney general and spokesperson and advisor to the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Today, Spitalnick is one of the youngest leaders in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. 

Even before Spitalnick took over JCPA, the organization was set to make major changes. The nonprofit previously worked within the Jewish federation system, serving as an official umbrella organization for over 125 Jewish Community Relations Councils and 16 Jewish national organizations, which paid dues and voted on policy.

The JCPA and most JCRCs were created during the 1930s and 1940s “at a very different time in our understanding of a Jewish collective voice in America,” Jeremy Burton, the longtime CEO of the JCRC of Greater Boston, told eJP. “One of the things that JCPA was not doing well anymore… was being able to speak [for] and support community relations [councils] across the country in ways that were useful to [the] local dynamic in which we operate.”

Burton works in “hyper-blue Massachusetts,” while his colleagues work within very different political communities. Prior to the reorganization, JCPA would release statements that were “frankly, this parve, gray, amorphous, insult nobody, make everybody feel like we said nothing,” Burton said. “The organization would come out with national statements on matters to be used by relations councils that were too conservative for some communities and too liberal for others, and didn’t match the local needs, and they were unusable by everybody.”

Tension over what political positions the organization took bubbled between the agency and the federation system.

After the 2017 Charlottesville march, David Bernstein, past president and CEO of the JCPA, came under fire for telling JCRC leaders to hold back on condemning conservative politicians with alt-right or white nationalist ties because it could upset federation donors. After JCPA signed an open letter published in The New York Times in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, the tensions between the federation system and JCPA reached a boiling point. Either the JCPA was going to be forced to fold into the federation, which would mean following its lead politically — that is, attempting to be-apolitical — or it was going to have to split from the federation system.

In 2022, the change was made official, with JCPA ending its role as the umbrella organization for JCRCs, though the organization continues to work closely with the councils and many federations, providing JCRC and federation professionals and lay leaders with resources, tool kits, webinars, summits, mentorship programs, retreats and affinity groups.

Under the new iteration, JCPA is nimble and clearly knows the values it stands for, Burton said, offering JCRCs “the tools and the frameworks that allow us to step into spaces where certain kinds of actions and voices and coalitions are needed.”

Burton’s JCRC may not repost every statement the JCPA releases or use every resource it offers, but his council relates to it the same way it relates to every national Jewish organization — they take what they can and leave the rest.

Today, Spitalnick said, JCPA serves the majority of American Jews, whom studies show value democracy and civil rights. Pew Research Center polling shows that American Jews lean heavily progressive. In the 2024 presidential election, the Jewish community cited democracy as a key priority. A recent Ipsos study showed that while the majority of American Jews felt antisemitism was an issue, 72% believed that President Donald Trump was using it as an “excuse” to “penalize and tax college campuses.”

“All of the poll data tells us the majority of the Jewish community is holding this complexity, is rejecting the binary approach to fighting antisemitism and protecting democracy that has shaped so much of the public conversation,” Spitalnick said.

In addition to its work with JCRCs, JCPA has staff members advocating on Capitol Hill for democracy and against bigotry in legislation and policies.

Amy Rutkin, a veteran political leader with over 25 years’ experience who served under  Rep.  Jerry Nadler (D-NY), told eJP that she sees Spitalnick’s influence throughout the language and choices being made by members of Congress.

“In a very short period of time, [Spitalnick] has had a huge impact on how the Beltway understands… what a majority Jewish voice really is,” Rutkin said. Although there are loud voices on both the far left and right, Spitalnick captures how the majority of America feels, and she’s an “equal opportunity condemner” when it comes to calling out the explosion of antisemitism on either side of the spectrum.

Rutkin credits Spitalnick’s advocacy, together with other Jewish and civil liberty organizations, with pushing the Department of Homeland Security to drop requirements for nonprofits to cooperate with ICE in order to access nonprofit security grants and with halting a bill that would have allowed the executive branch to strip a nonprofit of its status, without proper due process, if it was deemed to support terrorism.

Additionally, Rutkin said, Spitalnick’s webinar with Ocasio-Cortez led to the congresswoman acknowledging that antisemitism on the left exists and should be condemned; the acknowledgment seemed to open the door to others on the left to follow suit, when such condemnations were rare post-Oct. 7. Soon after, representatives across the left spoke out against antisemitic incidents at the Brooklyn Museum and the Nova Exhibition.

But there are those who feel that Spitalnick is spending resources cultivating bridges with the wrong people. David Bernstein, who headed the JCPA from 2016-2021, has watched as the “JCPA became structurally disconnected from its base of Jewish federations,” he told eJP. “It no longer needed to reflect the broad middle of the Jewish community. That shift created space for Amy to move the organization significantly to the left, so JCPA now sits on the outer left flank of the mainstream Jewish communal world, and Amy has become an articulate spokesman for that position.”

During his time at the agency, Bernstein saw Jewish federations claiming “primacy” over JCRCs. He believed that “JCRCs needed to have an independent voice from the federation movement,” he said. “That federation movement was tied to certain priorities around funding that the JCRCs needed some operational flexibility from… and there was a very valuable plausible deniability in having local JCRCs that had more room to maneuver than their Jewish federations might want to have.”

Having a single spokesperson speak for the entire American Jewish community is not “remotely possible,” Bernstein, who is founder and the CEO of North American Values Institute, said, but the “question is how much should the lion’s share of the Jewish community investment in building partnerships be with her vision emphasizing the progressive advocacy network.”

In practice, he agrees that democratic values are central to Jewish security and community flourishing, but Spitalnick’s “view is that the Jewish community should double down on the traditional progressive advocacy network, which she sees as essential to protecting democratic norms. But my view is that that progressive network has drifted away from core American civic principles that undergird our democracy, and that we should instead create a coalition of normie Americans and immigrant groups. These are people committed to American civic values like freedom of inquiry, pluralism, equality of opportunity and the rule of law. These are, in my view, the partners who can help defend democratic norms and, at the same time, push back against both the extreme left and the extreme right.”

That, he said, is where Jewish resources should go. 

(This year, JCPA’s annual budget is $2.7 million; Bernstein reported that NAVI has a budget of $3 million; and, for comparison, last year, the Anti-Defamation League reported a budget of $130 million.)

Other leaders in the community feel that Spitalnick is a needed voice in the Jewish world, one of many.

 “Uniformity is not the goal,” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, who serves Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue, told eJP. While he often agrees with Spitalnick on issues, he also disagrees on certain topics.

“What convening space should be, and leadership in this time and every time should be, is not an expectation that everyone agrees on every issue, [but] rather that we come together in the classic model of Jewish dialogue and debate to ask openly and respectfully what’s in the best interest of our people; and to do so in a matter where, when we disagree — which we will inevitably disagree — we do so without being disagreeable,” he said.  

Brandon Rattiner, the senior director of the Colorado JCRC, views the Jewish advocacy world as a “conglomeration” and believes that the more voices advocating for Jews, the better.

“I don’t think anybody is advocating that any one organization or one voice should be the voice [of all Jews],” he said. “We are a diverse community. We’ve learned since Oct. 7, and even more so after that, that the Jewish people are not a monolith. We have a lot of different perspectives, and one of the most important things that we can do is create a Jewish ecosystem that is authentic to the diversity of our perspective.”

Different messengers serve different audiences, he said. “Advocacy is a team sport, and ADL, [Jewish Federations of North America], JCPA, they all make really important contributions. Amy’s voice is distinct, and having that distinct voice is additive to our community advocacy.”

JCPA continues to receive support financially from local federations and JCRCs, but they have seen a surge of funding from private foundations, mostly Jewish, but also foundations focused on pro-democracy and interfaith coalition-building work, Spitalnick said.

“We’ve definitely had a number of new donors over the last year in particular, but before that as well, who have said they felt homeless [in the Jewish world politically] and they’ve appreciated the perspective we’ve brought,” she said.

One of JCPA’s newest board members, Tracey Labgold, came to the organization after splitting ties with the ADL because the organization presented an award to Jared Kushner for his work on the Abraham Accords in 2024. “Breaking up with ADL was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my entire life,” she told The Forward in January, but soon after, she found a home with the JCPA.

“The Jewish community has never been afraid to speak out for our values, no matter the administration in power,” Spitalnick said. “Whether it’s on issues of antisemitism, whether it’s on civil rights and racial justice, whether it’s on immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, our community has always been among those front and center in advocating, not just for our own values and safety, but for the safety of all communities under threat.”

Everything in her family’s history, everything in Jewish history “tells us that not only is there no inclusive democracy without Jewish safety, but there’s no Jewish safety without inclusive democracy,” she said. “These things go hand in hand. The false choices that we’ve been offered between Jewish safety and democracy are intended by the extremists on both ends of the political spectrum to divide us.”

She isn’t worried about being seen as a “bad Jew” or of being judged for her values or her Zionism, she said. There are conferences on the left that won’t invite her because of her advocacy, and conferences on the right that want nothing to do with her. There are times her X account is flooded with people referring to her both as a self-hating Jew or a kapo and a genocidal Zionist. 

“There’s this broader idea that everyone abandoned us after Oct. 7, and I would say that it’s far more complicated than that,” she said. Often, Jews are told not to “sit at the table with folks with whom we might have real disagreements, but that’s the only way we’re going to build the coalitions we need to keep us safe,” she said. “We’re not going to solve antisemitism by talking to people who already agree with us.”

Helping JCPA reshape itself wasn’t the only major change that took place in Spitalnick’s life three years ago. She also gave birth to a daughter, a milestone that only deepened her work.

“Bringing a Jewish kid into the world right now is an inherently optimistic thing to do,” she said. “You have to believe that a better world is possible. I have an obligation to leave things a little bit better than they were when she got here and to work towards the country that her great-grandparents saw as their safe place to land.”