BCJAC gets involved
Emma Horowitz discusses how the group advocates for local Jews
Emma Horowitz of Teaneck got involved in local politics a few years ago, when she heard about the possibility of a space on Cedar Lane being leased to proprietors of a cannabis dispensary. “I was very upset about it,” she said. “My children often walk around that area. I realized that I had not paid any attention to local politics. I was always pretty well informed about state level and federal politics, but I was really uninformed about local politics, and I realized that the decisions that are made on the local level have a real impact on your day-to-day life. That was not really something I had ever given much thought to before.
“So I made it my business to learn how local government works and to start going to town council meetings.”
She spoke during the public comment sessions at meetings and organized a group of like-minded residents who did not want to see cannabis dispensaries in town. “This is obviously not a Jewish issue, but to me it’s a values issue, and my values inform everything that I do,” she said. So she felt it was important to advocate against the dispensaries, particularly in areas that draw many pedestrians, including children. “I believe it normalizes the use of cannabis, which is not something that I think is responsible,” she said. “That was my entry into local politics.”
In 2023, shortly after October 7, the township council introduced a resolution denouncing the attack. Ms. Horowitz spoke in support of the resolution, because “it seemed like a really important statement for our local government to make.”
As the council debated the resolution, which it ultimately adopted, a group gathered outside the township’s municipal building to protest the proposal. Another group gathered to counterprotest and support the resolution. Ms. Horowitz’s husband had gone to the counterprotest and described “the anger and hatred that he observed on protesters’ faces.
“That was a big wake-up call,” she said. “Teaneck had never been a place like that. Before that night I can’t recall a time when there were so many anti-Israel, anti-Jewish people protesting in Teaneck.” She found it shocking. And she found the following night’s board of education meeting “even more shocking.”
After October 7, Dr. Andre Spencer, Teaneck’s superintendent of schools, sent a letter to the public-school community that eventually reached the broader community. “It was very neutral,” Ms. Horowitz said. “It referred to October 7 as just ‘the latest event in the cycle of violence in the Middle East.’” She found the letter upsetting. “That someone could trivialize what Israelis, and indeed world Jewry, had been through and was then going through.” A petition asking that Dr. Spencer reconsider his words garnered more than 3,000 signatures.
At the next board of education meeting. “I spoke and asked him to reconsider,” she said. “And I remember saying that these events were not just another moment in the cycle of violence. This was a pogrom. These are atrocities that occurred.”
During the rest of the meeting, she noticed how members of the board treated the people who spoke about the letter. “Jewish people who tried to reference the events of October 7 with any specificity were told to stop,” Ms. Horowitz said. “They were censored. They were told there were children in the audience. There were no children — there were older teenagers certainly, but there were no children in the audience — but they wouldn’t let us speak about what had happened. But people on the other side were saying things that were also upsetting, and in many cases factually incorrect, and they were not being told to stop. So that was a big wake-up call, seeing the way that the board of education treated our community, our local Jewish community, which was not represented in such great numbers at this meeting.”
Ms. Horowitz had gone to the meeting with a small group of women. “We went together because we didn’t feel comfortable going alone,” she said. “But we went to make ourselves heard, to make our position clear.” Afterward, the group agreed that “there should be a greater communal response.”
That’s how “the Bergen County Jewish Action Committee was born.”
BCJAC’s goal is to “support the Jewish community of Bergen County,” Ms. Horowitz, who serves on the organization’s executive board, said. “Unfortunately, antisemitism is not something that we can cancel. As students of history, we know that antisemitism, and how it presents in society, is cyclical. Sometimes it’s at greater levels and sometimes it’s more subdued. What we witnessed in America following October 7 is a rise in that antisemitic sentiment. While we obviously cannot reach out and change people’s minds and cure the oldest hatred, we want to be able to provide tools for people to get through this difficult time and come out stronger and more confident and proud of their Judaism. We deserve the same rights as anybody else to live peacefully and comfortably in the community.”
Over the last 18 months, BCJAC has become “an address for people who are experiencing antisemitism in various contexts, whether it’s in schools or in the broader community, and we have offered logistical support,” she continued. Teaneck, and the Northern New Jersey area in general, have seen a significant number of anti-Israel protests since October 7. “People will often reach out to us and say, ‘I heard there’s a protest coming to town. What can we do about it?’ In specific cases we’ll help mobilize and organize counterprotests.
“We have a very limited set of circumstances in which we believe that’s appropriate,” she added. “But when it is appropriate, we will help mobilize.”
BCJAC is also involved in advocacy. “We meet with elected officials and relevant agencies” to let them know “what our experience is and how we can use their support,” Ms. Horowitz said.
For months after October 7, car rallies drove through Teaneck almost every Sunday. “It really felt like they were in our space and violating our right to have a peaceful weekend,” she continued. “You shouldn’t have to have people honking at you, behaving in a threatening manner, yelling out the window and cursing. It was scary. Nobody wanted to do their shopping or walk around with their kids.
“We helped facilitate a meeting that brought together law enforcement on a few different levels. We met with representatives from the attorney general’s office, from the county prosecutor’s office, and from our local police department, and we spoke about the need for stepped-up enforcement. If I were to drive down Cedar Lane honking my horn and blowing through red lights and disobeying traffic laws, I would probably get a ticket, but there was no evidence that people who were part of the car parades were being ticketed. My understanding is that the police understood the need for enforcement but were afraid that if they were to ticket some of these people, most of whom don’t live in Teaneck — if they were to engage with them on Cedar Lane, or in other places where there’s more population density — it could turn into a flashpoint, and I understand that concern. So it just in many ways felt easier and safer, because of course their first priority is community safety, and like they would be doing their job better, if they just got these people through town and just made sure that there was no violence.
“But of course, that was not really enough, because it wasn’t providing any kind of disincentive for them to come back, and they just kept coming every Sunday. So we discussed the need for deterrence and enforcement and not just the safety piece. Having county and state law enforcement in the room made a big difference, because everyone was able to coordinate and get on the same page about how they could do this type of enforcement without it turning into a flashpoint, and talk about the need for mutual aid and support, and they were able to develop a strategy” — to stop cars after they had driven off the main streets into more secluded areas where there weren’t many observers. Once the police started ticketing — “and in some cases even made arrests because some of the drivers had open warrants — we saw that the car rallies really started to die down.”
More recently, BCJAC leadership met with Teaneck’s police chief and the township manager to discuss “a general sense of things feeling riskier for us,” Ms. Horowitz said. “We talked about how to some extent we’ve had to go into hiding, and that we really resist the idea that we need to hide our events. We advocated very strongly — publicly at council meetings and in private meetings — for the town to enact an ordinance regulating protests. We made our leadership and our law enforcement officials aware that enforcement is a big deal for us, that we want to know that we’ll be protected if we’re not hiding.” On April 22, Teaneck’s town council passed an ordinance that sets certain time, place, and manner restrictions on protests.
BCJAC also has advocated for New Jersey to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition helps to define what constitutes a hate crime and can help ensure that antisemitic ideas are not included in public school curricula, Ms. Horowitz said. She and other members of BCJAC’s leadership spoke in favor of the bill last spring at a virtual state Senate committee meeting.
Ms. Horowitz stressed that adopting the IHRA definition would not curtail First Amendment rights. “You can still say whatever you want,” she said. “It just helps give law enforcement and state agencies clear guidance on what antisemitic speech sounds like, on when a crime can be elevated to a hate crime. It helps with enforcement, it helps everyone to get onto the same page about what antisemitism looks like. It helps educators, it helps educate the public. It’s a tool that has been used in 37 states already, but New Jersey is having a really hard time getting it passed.”
BCJAC’s advocacy in this area “has yet to bear fruit,” Ms. Horowitz added. The bill cleared the committee on June 20 but “is stuck in the Legislature. But I think we’ve done a lot in terms of raising awareness.”
Another one of BCJAC’s focuses is community relations. “Trust is not built overnight,” Ms. Horowitz said. The organization is working to “build bridges between the Jewish community and the broader community.
“We encourage people to join town committees and go to town events” — Thanksgiving, a town clean-up, to mark Martin Luther King Day — “and meet our neighbors. To get to know other people, to sit with other people, to show other people you care about their issues.
“Our community wants people to care about our issues, we want other people to be appalled by antisemitism and by antisemitic protests on our streets. We are a community that has showed up for other people. I remember going to Cedar Lane during the Black Lives Matter march. There were many Jewish people engaged in that kind of thing. I think that that’s not a one-time thing — going to one march — it’s an ongoing effort.” BCJAC organized two Jewish heritage events last year for the broader community — a Jewish book story time at the library and a cheesecake tasting that was an introduction to Shavuot.
BCJAC also is engaged politically. “Creating a favorable political climate for our community is one way to weather this storm,” Ms. Horowitz said. “Having leaders who understand our issues and care about our issues and are willing to work for our community while, of course, keeping all residents safe and prosperous.
She stressed that the goal is not for elected officials to take the community’s issues into account at the expense of other constituencies. “We don’t believe the interests of the Jewish community are adverse to any other communities’ interests,” she said. “If we’re able to help create an environment where people can live peacefully, that helps absolutely everyone. It’s not an us versus them thing at all.” The organization has run “get out the vote” campaigns and endorsed candidates.
Now BCJAC is primarily a Teaneck organization, Ms. Horowitz said. Most of its leaders live in the township and most of its efforts have so far been concentrated there. “We named it the Bergen County Jewish Action Committee because we do want to expand into other areas in Bergen County and be a resource for other communities,” she said. So far, BCJAC has consulted with people in Fair Lawn and Fort Lee when they faced similar issues. “We hope to be able to reach more communities who have need of our advice and expertise as we grow.” The goal is to help nearby communities develop similar infrastructure within their own towns.
“One thing that we’ve noticed is that the Jewish people across the country have been behind the eight ball when it comes to local governance. The broader Jewish community has generally not gotten involved on a very local level, but people who seek to undermine our position in America have. If you look at school board videos and town council videos from across the country, pro-Hamas people are coming out and saying things, and influencing curricula, and getting involved locally, in ways that are really prejudicial to the Jewish community nationwide.”
Ms. Horowitz also stressed that BCJAC is nondenominational. Although the founders and current leadership are members of the Orthodox community, the organization is working to liaise with synagogues from other denominations in Teaneck and welcomes more involvement from other Jewish communities. “We may believe differently on certain matters of religious law, we may observe differently here and there, but we have so much in common,” Ms. Horowitz said. “We care about the future of the Jewish people, we care about the rights of Jewish students to exist peacefully on campus, in public schools, in any setting, about our rights to live peacefully without harassment. That crosses denominations. When it comes to this type of communal work, I really think we have more in common than what divides us.
“If we can’t find unity in this difficult time I don’t know when we’ll be able to,” she added. “One thing that really struck me about the movie ‘October 8’” — a recently released documentary about the emergence of antisemitism on college campuses after October 7 — “is that so many of the featured college students, who have chosen to make advocacy for the Jewish people and for other Jewish students a priority — at great risk to themselves — are not wearing kippot. They took this on because they feel the same way about Judaism that I do — that it is an essential part of who I am. I admire them — they didn’t have to do this, but spiritually, emotionally, they were compelled to do it.”
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