1. JVP – Not a Major Player in Jewish Life

Founded in 1996 by a small group of left-wing San Francisco Bay Area Jews, JVP worked in relative obscurity for years.

Today it looks poised to break into the big leagues of American Jewish organizational life.

According to its website and recent press releases, JVP currently has a youth wing and a Rabbinic Council, over 65 member-led chapters across the country, and 200,000+ online supporters.

But looks can be deceiving. It’s difficult to pin these numbers down.

According to Yitzhak Santis, Chief Programs Officer for the Jerusalem-based watchdog group NGO Monitor, “JVP provides no evidence” for its claim of tens of thousands of Jewish American followers.

It doesn’t actually require that its members be Jewish or American.


Critics say that it’s bogus for JVP to brag about a Jewish national presence.

Law Professor David Bernstein quips that:

JVP clearly has only hundreds of activists, not enough to fill a regional AIPAC meeting. Some of them, according to JVP itself, are non-Jews (‘Jews and allies’), who like the idea of hiding their anti-Israel views behind a ‘Jewish cloak’”.

Prof. Ilan Troen, who heads Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, calls JVP “self-appointed saints with no mass following”.

JVP is definitely exaggerating its appeal.

At most it represents a mere 2% of Jewish Americans.

And it likely plays an even smaller leadership role in American Jewish life.

Most of its two dozen affiliated “rabbis” probably don’t actually lead Jewish congregations. But its website suggests that the distribution of JVP rabbis along Jewish denominational lines is non-representative of American Jewry. The JVP Rabbinic Council appears to be top-heavy with Reconstructionists. Less than 6% of synagogue-affiliated American Jews self-identify as Reconstruction, according to most recent surveys.

So JVP is nowhere near the major force in American Jewish life that it claims to be, by the numbers and actual influence in the Jewish community