Gideon Taylor, Executive Vice President and CEO of JCRC-NY was interviewed at the Arutz Sheva Jerusalem Conference in New York on May 22.
At a time when antisemitic incidents have been increasing at historic levels in New York City, Taylor explained that the JCRC is fighting the spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes in multiple ways.
“We believe in security and law enforcement. We have a team called the Community Security Initiative that we founded together with the New York UJA Federation. A few years ago the New York Jewish community only had one person who dealt with security. We live in a different world now,” Taylor said.
“One part of what we do is security and working with the NYPD to deal with hate crime. The other side of that is community building and we have a whole program of working with ethnic communities, communities of faith, communities of color, to address issues together about hate crime because at the end of the day hate crime is not just law enforcement, it’s also education.”
They will be starting trips to Israel again to bring leaders outside the community to Israel.
“We’re not trying to get people to go to Israel and come back and wave a flag and say it’s all easy, there’s only one side, because that doesn’t work in today’s world. What we want is people to go and understand the complexity of the Middle East so that when they hear about BDS and the case for BDS they’ve already seen what Israel looks like and what the Palestinian Authority looks like and they see the complexity and that’s what we want people to do is to embrace the complexity and we take people who are elected officials who are today committed on issues.”