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By Menachem Wecker
(AUGUST 2, 2023 / JNS) The Workers Circle, a 122-year-old progressive Jewish nonprofit known in earlier days as the Workmen’s Circle, notified the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that it is resigning its membership, as of Aug. 2.
It cited the conference’s “failure to condemn the Israeli parliament’s recent steps to erode democracy in Israel” and its silence “in the face of the many attacks on democracy here in the United States.”
The conference, which has 50 other member organizations, was founded in 1956 and received a mandate from President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his administration to unify the U.S. Jewish community.
“For the past two-plus years, the conference has been drama-free as it relates to ideological and political disputes. We’ve been working together,” William Daroff, CEO of the conference, told JNS. “That’s a record that we’re proud of.”
In a letter to the conference, which was provided to JNS, Zeev Dagan and Ann Toback, Workers Circle president and CEO respectively, wrote that they disagreed with the group’s “reluctance to critique Israel, its equation of such critique as antisemitism, its adoption and promotion of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and its failure to condemn the Israeli parliament’s recent steps to erode democracy in Israel.”
“We are further dismayed at the silence of COP in the face of the many attacks on democracy here in the United States,” they added.
The two cited gerrymandered districts; “voter suppression laws obstructing the voting power of millions of Americans”; “right-wing justices” who “are rolling back critical rights”; and white nationalism.
“We cannot be part of an organization that stands idly by in the face of these existential crises,” they stated.
Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of the anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace, wished Workers Circle yasher koach (“congratulations”) on X, formerly Twitter. Workers Circle shared the post.
Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told JNS that Workers Circle, formerly Workmen’s Circle, is an “extremist socialist group,” which “almost never attended Conference of Presidents meetings” and is now “absconding” from the conference “based on misinformation and falsehoods.”
“They claim the conference didn’t take a position against Israel’s judicial reforms, yet the COP expressed concerns about these reforms and refused to allow the judicial reform’s leaders to even speak to the COP while giving a podium to opposition leaders,” Klein said.
The Conference of Presidents “generally takes left-of-center positions, which the Workers Circle should favor,” Klein said.
The Workers Circle reveals that it doesn’t understand the mission of the Conference of Presidents when it criticizes it for not taking a position on domestic, U.S. policy, which has nothing to do with Jews or Israel, according to Klein.
“We only concern ourselves with Israeli Jewish issues,” he said.
“These erroneous allegations by these extremist socialists make it likely they simply don’t want to continue paying the Conference of Presidents dues.”
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