“This is no thinly veiled attempt to target the Jewish community - it is an explicit one that is keeping lists and naming names.” “As a Jewish community, and one that has made allyship and outreach the cornerstones of our work, we condemn this demonization of the Boston Jewish community and attack on its relationship with others,” CJP, the New England ADL and the Boston JCRC said Wednesday. In a joint statement, Boston’s communal Jewish organizations say that the map and its creators’ stated goal amount to little more than an effort to “dismantle” the city’s organized Jewish community writ large. The map was posted late Friday, shortly before Shabbat, and became a topic of concern among Jewish groups coming back online late Monday after the Shavuot holiday. “Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.”Ī man who claims to have been a member of the Israeli army for 32 years is surrounded by pro-Palestinian supporters who shout at him and eventually steal his flag during a rally in support of Palestinian rights in Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts, following a flare-up of violence in Israel and Gaza, May 15, 2021. “Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them,” the group, which does not list its members, said in a statement on its website. (The Jewish Journal, a Jewish Telegraphic Agency syndication partner based in Salem, is one of the links.) Sometimes they’re simply demonstrating agency partnerships, or what the group says is behavior “normalizing” Israel. Sometimes its links are accompanied by dollar amounts of financial support drawn from tax forms. The project’s map includes the addresses of most of the major Jewish-affiliated organizations and donor funds in the state: political groups spanning the aisle, from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Zionist Organization of America to J Street, along with the nonpartisan Anti-Defamation League charities like the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston (CJP) and the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston private foundations headed up by Jews religious organizations including the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts and academic research centers like the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. “They make no bones about it.”īurton said he was especially concerned that the map was amplified and praised on Twitter by the nonprofit activist group Massachusetts Peace Action, which he said has a lot of sway in progressive circles and often sits down with local politicians. ![]() “They are choosing, in their desire to be intersectional, to essentially point the finger at the Jewish communal infrastructure of Greater Boston as responsible for every evil under the sun that they can think of,” Jeremy Burton, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, told JTA. The group says its goal is to demonstrate that “institutional support for the colonization of Palestine is structurally tied to policing and systemic white supremacy here where we live, and to US imperialist projects in other countries.” The Mapping Project, a Boston-area pro-Palestinian activist collective aligned with the local Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, is using its map (which includes addresses of the organizations and names of their staffers) to draw literal links between dozens of area Jewish groups, universities, foundations, police departments and other organizations. These are a few of the locations on a dense interactive map of “Zionist leaders and powerhouse NGOs” in Massachusetts created by an activist group that says it aims to expose “local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine” and reveal how support for Zionist causes is a nexus point for various “other harms” in society, ranging from gentrification to the prison-industrial complex to ableism. ![]() ![]() A major Jewish philanthropy that directs funds to mental health, homelessness prevention and refugee resettlement initiatives.
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