New ambassadors confused by alphabet soup of Jewish organizations

“The Global Jewish Association, the Jewish Council of Federative Conferences, the Israel Association of Jewish Jerusalem Rabbis, the Association for Jewish Activism, the Jewish Leadership United Council, the United Council for Jewish Leadership, the Universal Jewish Israeli Experience,” and those are just a few of them, says a newly appointed ambassador from a south Asian state. He wasn’t the only one confused by a recent spate of conferences and meetings held in Jerusalem.

“I can’t keep them all straight,” a European diplomat from central Europe confided.

“We had the President’s Conference, the General Assembly, there’s a conference at the IDC and another security conference and then we had something else, I can’t even recall them all, and that’s just in January. Why are there so many organizations?”

An emissary from the Vatican complained that he had recently received requests for meetings from 45 different organizations all claiming to represent American Jews.

“I know there are six million Jews in America and we deeply respect the Jewish people, but why are there so many organizations that seem to overlap and represent them? One of them comes and says the Vatican should do more to recognize the Holocaust and then another one comes and congratulates for what we’ve done and gives us an award, one of them says a certain historical pope is an antisemite and another says he deserves accolades. We don’t understand.”

“I’ve been to seven conferences in the last week and heard the same former army generals speak at all of them,” says a new ambassador from a Scandinavian country. “How many former generals are there?” he wonders.

“How many times can they give the same speech about Gaza and Iran and Syria? I mean we get it, right. Hezbollah, Hamas, bad. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi are all part of the Israeli anti-Iran alliance. Okay. So why do we have to keep going to the same meetings on the same topics, where nothing gets done?”