the first woman to lead any major Jewish co-ed religious organization in the United States. Rabbi Jonathan Stein, of Temple Shaaray Tefila, served as president of the CCAR in 2011–13. In 2014, the CCAR joined a lawsuit challenging North Carolina's ban on same-sex marriage, which was America's first faith-based challenge to same-sex marriage bans. In 2015, Denise Eger became the first openly gay president of the CCAR. Criticism In the 1980s, CCAR began to examine sexual misconduct among its member rabbis. According to several sources, the initial committee was jokingly referred to [implicitly by rabbis within CCAR] as the "well-oiled zipper committee." In the ensuing decades, a formal Ethics Committee was established, but investigations were slow and rabbis were privately reprimanded and faced little to no consequences for their actions. A 1996 Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) report covered the slow process and lack of serious consequences or standards for holding offending rabbis accountable, with one Reform rabbi stating, "when we deal with the difficult issues of rabbinic sexual misconduct, we have not taken seriously our own tradition.” Since the 1996 JTA investigation, a number of prominent cases have drawn media attention and public criticism for their illustration of these concerns. In 2015, a CCAR member rabbi was expelled for sexual misconduct, but his community was not informed. In 2014, a senior rabbi of a Texas synagogue was reprimanded for sexual misconduct and allowed to move to another senior rabbi position in North Carolina, where he was censured for sexual misconduct within 36 months of his new placement, and neither congregation was alerted to the allegations. In 2021, the CCAR hired a legal firm to investigate its ethics processes and to make recommendations for improvements. However, the recommendations were criticized as not sufficiently addressing survivors' and whistleblowers' concerns, including allowing for the continued use of untrained lay investigators and for allowing fellow rabbis to serve as rehabilitators who could determine whether an offender is fit to return to the pulpit. According to an email from the 2018 Ethics Chair, CCAR rabbis are not expelled unless they fail to cooperate with the ethics process or are unable to perform their duties. As of January 2022, the only rabbi expelled who did not resign during the pendency of their ethics process or suspension was a rabbi who failed to comply with the terms of his suspension. Survivors of sexual misconduct by CCAR member