SPME and Fundraising:

Dear Colleagues,

I want to wish you all a joyous and Happy Pesach or Easter or simply Spring time greetings.

2010 has begun very well from a fundraising perspective. Thanks to your efforts we have been bringing in just under $20,000 per month in donations. Many of these donations are new money and count toward our matching grant campaign. Even more important is the fact that we have almost tripled the number of donations we have been getting from 2008. So, I want to give a great thank you to all of you who have helped us get to this point. We also are the recipient of a substantive donation from the Jewish National Fund to restart our Faculty Fellows to Israel program this June. Applications are due on April 30. (See the article in the Forum on this or go to our web site ).

Your donations have helped us do many things this year so far:

· You have enable us to cosponsor with the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists the upcoming Conference on the Goldstone Report and Lawfare at Fordham University Law School (See the Faculty Forum for more information)

· You have enabled our Legal Task Force to complete a very crucial document on the Misuses of Universal Jurisdiction such as the case in Great Britain and the threatened prosecution of Israel leaders for war crimes. (See Faculty Forum)

· You have enabled our Chair of the Legal Task Force Ken Marcus to pursue with the ADL, the AJC, ZOA, JCPA and a host of other organizations changes in Title IV regarding protections for Jewish students. (See Faculty Forum)

· You are helping us restart the Faculty Fellows Program to Israel

· You are helping us give support to the faculty at places like UC Irvine to organize more effectively to end Israel bashing and hate speech on campus.

· You are enabling us to start new chapters in Peru, South Florida, Philadelphia, Minnesota and revitalizing our chapter in France and we are in discussions with academics in Norway, Italy and Brazil about starting new chapters.

· You have enabled us to fight boycott and divestiture attempts in Norway and UC Berkeley.

· You have enabled us to move to over 30,000 academics getting our newsletters and updates regularly and to more than 70,000 academics and scholars signing our petitions.

Because of you and your moral and monetary support we are becoming a force to be reckoned with on college campuses all over the world. For this we thank you.

But we cannot rest on our successes. We need your help in getting your colleagues who support the mission and vision of SPME to help as well. We need you to spread the word. We want to get to more academics and scholars to get them to join with us, to contribute to us both money and intellectual capital to grow our organization and expand to more campuses beyond the 2000 plus we are already on.

So this is a call to each and every one of you who get the Faculty Forum, help us help you. To help us, we need your continued contributions of money and we need you to tell others about us and encourage them to join us in this ongoing struggle against the propagandists, the demonizers, and hate mongers who more and more see the campus as their battle ground in the struggle for the hearts and minds of our students.

For instructions on how to donate by PayPal, Credit Card or by check, click here.

All my best,

Sam Edelman, Executive Director