Jewish Council for Public Affairs

The latest breach between some leaders of the U.S. Jewish community and a major sector of American Christianity remains open, two months after liberal Protestant participants in the Christian-Jewish Roundtable dialogue group urged Congress to reconsider aid to Israel because of the Jewish state’s “widespread human rights violations committed against Palestinians.”

Jewish groups pulled out of an upcoming meeting with Protestant colleagues over a letter from Christian leaders to congressmen calling for a possible suspension of U.S. aid to Israel.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs announced its qualified support for "fracking," a technique used to extract underground deposits of natural gas.

The JCPA statement issued Tuesday noted that last week's annual plenum of the consensus-driven public policy umbrella approved a resolution highlighting the potential benefits and drawbacks of the process known as “hydrofracking,” which extracts “vast amounts of natural gas from previously inaccessible underground deposits.”

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Jewish groups expressed concerns about proposed Obama administration cuts in poverty assistance, but praised the U.S. budget for preserving aid to Israel.

The White House's proposed budget, released Monday, projects cuts in programs such as heating for the poor and in blocs of money funneled to the states for social programs, and increases funding for education and for "clean energy" development.

When five young Jews disrupted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at last month’s Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly — yelling “the settlements delegitimize Israel,” “the occupation delegitimizes Israel” and “the loyalty oath delegitimizes Israel” — they were greeted with anger and quickly whisked out of the room.

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The framers of an interfaith effort with the grand goal of halving American poverty in the next decade had a small but focused message this week: Keep those school lunches coming.

At a meeting Monday on Capitol Hill at an event attended by congressional staffers, the framers of the effort spoke of a pending vote to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act, the program which brings school breakfasts and lunches to needy children.

(JTA) -- A coalition of Jewish organizations in California is waging a campaign against a ballot proposition they say would hurt efforts to wean the United States off foreign oil.

Proposition 23 effectively would repeal the Global Warming Solutions Act, a California law that established a timetable to bring the state in line with environmental standards set in the Kyoto Protocol. While the United States is not party to that treaty, California has sought to go beyond U.S. requirements and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020.

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Two weeks before their launch, the promised renewal of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks has already engendered a first: a joint statement of welcome by mainstream U.S. Jewish and Palestinian groups.