A letter published in these pages last week made a claim about our organization that requires a direct response [True progressives care about Palestine, Viewpoints, May 6]. Linda Vasquez claimed that AIPAC organized and funded the community opposition to the ballot initiative at the Oak Park Township Annual Meeting. This claim is false. We are stunned that Wednesday Journal would choose to publish disinformation on its opinion pages.
Jewish Community and Friends for Democracy (JC&F4D) is a grassroots organization of Jewish families and their allies in Oak Park, River Forest, and surrounding communities founded in 2025. We have no affiliation with AIPAC. We receive no funding from AIPAC. Our budget is $0.00. AIPAC played no role in organizing our effort. Our organization is made up of volunteers. We are neighbors, parents, and community members who read about this ballot initiative and decided, on our own, to organize a response. The suggestion otherwise is not a difference of opinion — it is a fabrication, and it draws on a familiar and ugly trope: that the action of the Jewish community and its allies must be the work of shadowy outside forces pulling the strings.
We organized because we believed — and still believe — that this referendum was divisive, discriminatory, and a distraction from the issues Oak Park Township actually exists to address. Illinois’ 2015 anti-BDS law governs foreign institutional pension investment decisions by the state’s pension board. It does not restrict any individual’s right to boycott, protest, or speak. Every Illinoisan already has the right to boycott Israel or any other country. Placing a misleading advisory referendum on Oak Park’s local ballot was not a free speech act — it was a pressure campaign aimed at Senate President Don Harmon, using our community as a political tool. We thought Oak Park deserved better, and 70 percent of our neighbors agreed.
A community newspaper has a responsibility to its readers. Publishing opinion pieces that contain disinformation and antisemitic tropes — without so much as a note that the central claim is unverified — does not serve that responsibility. We would ask Wednesday Journal to apply the same scrutiny to claims made about the Jewish community that it would apply to claims made about any other community in Oak Park.
JC&F4D was founded to build a stronger, more engaged Jewish community presence in Oak Park and River Forest — not just to show up when something feels threatening, but to be in relationship with our broader community all the time. We welcome good-faith dialogue about the issues that matter to Oak Park. We will not, however, allow false, claims about who we are and who funds us to go unanswered.
Jewish Community and Friends for Democracy
Oak Park, River Forest, and surrounding communities