About Us

Coalition of Pro-Israel Advocates (COPIA) & Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art (COPMA) are sister organizations of concerned citizens who believe there is no place in our society or in our Jewish community institutions for anti-Israel propaganda or anti-Semitism. Some Jewish communal organizations hold themselves out as apolitical and as having missions to represent the Jewish Community as a whole. Their use of charitable donations of their members to support activities that attack and denigrate the State of Israel is a breach of the trust that donors place in these communal organizations.  It is unfortunate but all too common to find members of the boards of these organizations subtly seeking to impose their own politics on the organization. Among our previous campaigns we were successful in persuading the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and the DCJCC (District of Columbia Jewish Community Center) that there was no place in the DCJCC for plays, readings and panel discussions hostile to the State of Israel. Under the pretext of the term “art” and using freedom of expression as an excuse, the DCJCC’s prior theater director, Ari Roth, frequently used the JCC’s Theater J to engage in political activism attacking and defaming Israel. When COPMA sounded an alert to this misuse of communal funds there was widespread opposition. Picketing, running display ads in the Jewish press, meeting with the leadership of the DCJCC and the Jewish Federation and participating in media interviews were all employed to bring an end to the politicization of Theater J. Since then we’ve expanded our mission to include successful opposition to widespread anti-Israel and anti-Semitic programming both within and outside of the arts.

 

Leave a Reply