This guest post is by Jocelyn Berger, former Bay Area Program Officer for Pursue: Action for a Just World, a project of AJWS and AVODAH, is now a graduate student in International Affairs at The Fletcher School of Tufts University (orgs for identification only). Photo courtesy Dory Dinoto. (This is the first of two Occupy Boston reflections. See the second by attendee Alex Sugerman-Brozan.)
What do Yom Kippur and the Occupy Wall Street movement have in common? Both are about imagination. On Yom Kippur we imagine that a better self is possible. At Occupy Boston, we imagine that a better country, a better world, is possible. And although these are individual imaginings, we come together in community to make them collectively realized. By moving Yom Kippur from a sequestered, individualized experience in a synagogue out into the public square (literally!), we transform the purpose of the holiday from simply imagining a better self to imagining an whole better world.
Undeniably, one of the most exciting things about this movement is how democratic and collective it is. This rang especially true as we recited the Sh’ma together at our Kol Nidre service, proclaiming oneness – of our voices, of our values, of our aspirations, of Hashem, all one and the same, unified. My emotional climax occurred during the Al Chet – we invited folks to call out sins, personal, political, economic, social, all repeated through “the people’s mic,” adding even greater resonance: “Racism. Turning our backs on the old. Turning our backs on the young. Climate change. Defunding women’s health programs. Putting profits before people (aka capitalism). Citizen’s United. Private health care. Eroding the social safety net. Blaming victims. Katrina. Sexism. Homophobia. Anti-Semitism. Islamophobia. High interest rates. Student loans. Unemployment. Not taking responsibility sooner. Not speaking out sooner. Not showing up sooner.”
We concluded with the same reading as our sibling minyan at the Occupy Wall Street, and I felt the deepest sense of truly crying out to God, wailing for forgiveness, supplicating and begging – I burst into tears and saw that many in the crowd were similarly moved. Such immense sins, such huge problems – how can we ever forgive and move on and build something better?
We all said the Mourners’ Kaddish together for the values and virtues we’ve lost, for the American dream that now seems dead, for the lost livelihoods, safety nets, and security. For the victims who have been crushed by this oppressive and unjust system. For all that we’ve lost, individually and as a society. Adding on this additional level to the already solemn prayer further increased the deep meaning and significance. Yet with all the despair, the service left me with a distinct feeling of hope at what is possible. None of this existed before 30 hours prior, when a few of us starting getting in touch to organize the event. In such a short time, we convened a congregation and created a sacred space of prayer, repentance, imagination, passion, emotion, mourning, idealism, and hope. More »
(cross posted to Justice in the City) After a few persistent weeks of peaceful non-violent protests, the “Occupy Wall Street” folks or the “99 percenters” as they are beginning to call themselves, are appearing on the radar of the mainstream media. After a few days of lazy journalistic descriptions of the protests and protesters as disorganized and unfocussed some reporters and columnists are beginning to ask what these protesters want. One of the more interesting answers to the question was given in an interview conducted by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post with David Graeber who was one of the initial organizers of the protests. His answer was that the protesters, rather than making specific demands of the existing institutions (which created the income inequalities and precipitated the financial meltdown and yet were still in their offices controlling vast amounts of wealth) were attempting to “create a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature.” This raises the question: What is the society that we want? What would a just society look like? At this moment, it seems to me, there is no more important question to ask. As it happens, this is precisely the question I seek to answer in my book “Justice in the City” — and since that book is not yet out, I will attempt the short form answer here. More »
Jewschool founder Daniel Sieradski is organizing a Kol Nidrei minyan in at Zuccotti Park, home base of the Occupy Wall Street folks, at 7 p.m. this Friday night.
I don’t believe it’s set in stone yet, but Rabbi Arthur Waskow may be delivering a devar and or leading the service. Sieradski is looking for knowledgeable service leaders. If you can help and you’re interested, get in touch with him on Facebook or twitter.
This will be a service, not to mention a Kol Nidrei, of once-in-a-lifetime coolness. Let me know if you’re coming so I can make sure we say get the chance to wish each other a Gemar Chatimah Tovah.
This week of my summer is made possible by Amherst, Massachusetts, cats, and Netflix. For a while in my queue has been a documentary called Lord, Save Us From Your Followers,directed by Dan Merchant, who wears a jumpsuit covered with bumper-stickers throughout the entire 104 minutes. The focus of the film is America’s “Culture Wars,” and Merchant, himself an Evangelical Christian, travels around the country gently challenging people to respond to his various bumper stickers, as well as asking folks what they think about Christianity. The film’s tagline is : “If you were to meet ten average Americans on the street, nine of them would say they believe in God. So why is the Gospel of Love dividing America?” Without totally ruining things, because you should see the film, Merchant’s theory is that Christians percieve themeselves differently than how they are actually perceived, and proceeds to sniff out why that might be true.
At the end of the film, Merchant profiles a Portland, Oregon project called Operation Nightwatch, which addresses the needs of Portland’s homeless community. In addition to providing food, medical care, and other basic resources to folks, people can also socialize and build important relationships. St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church houses the project, and also offers Bible study and services. Folks involved tell Merchant that they would love for the people they’re helping to find Jesus, but in the meantime, they’re making changes and forming relationships.
Like any direct service project, there are problems with this, but there was a scene in this sequence that hit me particularly hard, and it featured one of the homeless folks having their feet and hair washed by a church volunteer. (No, the biblical significance of feet washing did not escape me.) My instinct was to try to remember if I could recall any Jews or Jewish organizations doing work like this. I’m not talking about direct service, or about helping the homeless, but rather, the level of intimacy that comes with physical contact.
There’s an anecdote in Rabbi Jill Jacobs’ new book in which a religious school teacher asks if there’s a place to just drop off the sandwiches the children have made for the homeless, because their parents don’t want them to have any actual contact with homeless people. Washing someone’s hair and feet is an act that requires confrontation with people we are afraid of, people we’re supposed to avoid. Why aren’t we collectively educating Jews about what it means to really have a relationship with someone?
Have we absorbed and internalized whiteness to such a degree that we think we’re above building relationships in such direct, unflinching ways? In Merchant’s film, it is white Christian men, the ultimate power base, at the helm of these projects. What would it take to change our own paradigm towards one of intimacy, mutual vulnerability, rather than what’s safe for us but keeps others at arm’s length?
Growing up in Israel, I joined a lot of organizations: Youth Against Racism, Hashomer Hatza’ir, Reut Sadaka, and maybe one or two groups even further to the left. I attended Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam and Meretz Youth weekend seminars, a kind of experience I’ve never seen in the US, not even when I was a college student. At these seminars, high school students would listen to Members of Knesset, well known professors and journalists, professional youth educators and others as they dissected Israel’s social issues.
During this entire formative period, regardless of where you stood in the left wing spectrum, certain things were true:
Our side was in favor of dialogue with the Palestinians, while right wing Israelis were racists who denied the Palestinians essential humanity, let along their human and national rights.
Our side addressed a combination of moral elements and enlightened self-interest. The occupation might be wrong, but it is also suicidal.
Our side drew inspiration from Western values that flowed from the enlightenment. Rationality, skepticism, a slight fear of the mob, an emphasis on individual identity over collective identity.
Our side was focused on liberating Israelis (Jews and Arabs alike) from the burden of having to represent anything else other than who we were. In other words, even the hard core Zionists were often in favor of ‘post Zionist’ measures like removing religion from identity cards, affirming the validity of the Palestinian narrative, and de-mythologizing the founding of Israel.
I was part of the lucky minority of Israel Jews that interacted with Israeli Arabs and Palestinians from the Occupied Territories on a regular basis. They represented a fairly diverse range of opinions and backgrounds, though less from among the poor and seriously religious, a bit more from the upper and middle classes, the Christians, and those from larger cities and villages. At a certain point, my identity as an Israeli changed into one that wholeheartedly embraced the reality of Israel: one fifth Palestinian, one fifth Russian, inclusive of countless racial, ethnic and religious minorities, with a tragic mix of conflicting impulses. Together, we were Israeli, and deserved to be truly equal for all our sakes. More »
In the District of Columbia, the highest income tax bracket begins at $40,000. You read that right: a person making $40,000/year and a person making $40,000,000/year are taxed at the same marginal rate.
Like many states across the country, DC is in a budget crunch this year because the recession leads to both lower tax revenues and higher demand for safety-net services. As a result, DC’s social safety net is at risk. Mayor Vincent Gray’s proposed budget makes the tax brackets ever so slightly more progressive, with an additional 0.4% tax on income above $200,000. This is a trivial increase for high-income earners (millionaires would owe another $3200 per year), and still would not prevent cuts to the safety set, but it is a step in the right direction. Yet some Councilmembers are opposing even this minor tax increase.
Enter the Jewish community. As the Washington Jewish Week reports this week, DC’s Jewish community, led by Jews United For Justice, has been at the forefront of efforts to tell the Council that the people of DC really wouldn’t mind paying higher taxes in exchange for a better city to live in. (91% of people in the affluent Wards 2 and 3 support a tax increase.)
The article also includes an obligatory quote from a (probably Jewish) libertarian representing midat Sedom (“What’s mine is mine”), riddled with factual errors (in addition to what ZT points out in the comments, I don’t think the DC Treasury actually accepts donations — this would run afoul of corruption laws).
Still, most of the Jewish community understands that we all have obligations to our society and to our neighbors. If you live in DC and want to make sure that this perspective wins out, get involved with JUFJ’s efforts.
This is a guest post by Lawrence MacDonald and Geri Maskell, co-chairs of the Green Team at Temple Rodef Shalom, the largest Jewish congregation in Virginia. The authors can be contacted at lawrencemacdonald at gmail.
We are two members of Temple Rodef Shalom, a Reform synagogue in northern Virginia, who are exploring with fellow congregants what it means to be a “green” congregation as the world teeters on the brink of rapid, catastrophic climate change. This is our unfinished story.
For the past four years, we have been working with our clergy and lay leaders to increase attention to the climate change threat. We invited speakers and organized events, helped to reduce energy use within the synagogue, promoted home energy conservation, organized temple members to write letters and make phone calls in an effort to block construction of a new coal-fired power plant in southwestern Virginia, and visited Richmond as participants in a Jewish Advocacy day to lobby for clean energy.
Meanwhile, nearly every year has set a new record high average global temperature. The Arctic ice is shrinking much faster than experts predicted. Extreme weather events are claiming lives and dislocating millions of people: fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan and Australia, and just this month drought-fueled wildfires in Texas and an unprecedented spate of killer tornadoes across the southeastern U.S.
Scientists are alarmed but much of the American public, confused by coal and oil industry propaganda, is complacent. Climate legislation stalled in the Senate, then died after the mid-term elections. President Obama, who had spoken passionately about the climate threat, has stopped saying “climate,” preferring to talk about “clean energy.” The U.S. failure to act has torpedoed international negotiations.
The technology exists to substantially cut the emission of heat-trapping gasses, slowing climate change. But there is a failure of political will. Could our tiny efforts in Temple Rodef Shalom make a difference in the face of this impending catastrophe? Is there something more that we and other Jews could do to help sound the alarm? More »
Coming of age in Israel, I encountered quite a few reminders of how strange politics can be. In the mid-80s, I went with members of the scouts (Tzofim) to protest Meir Kahane outside a venue in Petah Tikva. An elderly man came to argue with us. He didn’t yell and wore a forgiving smile. And a kippa. He said that Arabs are dogs, they only look human. Looking back, I can finally appreciate how bizarre he was. Only… he was one of the more normal Kahane supporters. And he didn’t try and assault anyone (that I saw). Not like the other guys spitting and throwing punches at us.
A few short years later, Kahane came to my little hometown. I only found out because the bus passed the town square he was using. A couple hundred folks had gathered – more than I’d ever seen assembled (outside of the soccer games). I got off the bus, put away my schoolbag, put on my keffiyah, and marched over there to protest. By myself. While I didn’t have a sign, I did have bright yellow stickers reading ‘say no to racism’. I held one up and stood not four meters away from him.
Again, looking back, I have to say that was stupid. Even if thugs hadn’t followed me in a car and given me a stomping outside my apartment building in front of all the neighbors.
Later still, when I was a soldier, I was forced to attend a lecture by the commander of our corps. Which is to say, he was above the head of our training base and in charge of all sorts of things related to our specialty, though he would never again lead troops into battle. In this lecture, he gave a military-political survey of the situation with Lebanon and the Occupied Territories. When he opened up the Q and A, I said: “Officer sir, since the conflict with the Palestinian people can only have a political solution, not a military one, aren’t you deceiving us by talking about ‘winning’?”
Boy was he mad. I never got punished though. Just ostracized.
These incidents surely paint a picture of the young man as a foolish dissident. But grant me that I had heart – lots of heart. Whatever my politics, however wrong headed my political analysis or ideology, it was sincere and flowed from a sense that my reference group, my peers in Israeli society, included both Palestinian and Jewish comrades. Whenever some right winger or patriot made a bloviating reference to ‘we’ meaning Israeli Jews, I always thought to myself – yes, ‘you’, because my ‘we’ is made up of Arabs AND Jews. Of all Israelis, exactly in the way that in America, ‘we’ includes whites AND blacks.
How odd then, to find myself dismissed as a ‘Zionist’ here and there in the Palestinian solidarity movement. Not like so many people actually know me or anything. But… there was that JATO woman at the UFPJ gathering, the trainer at the Student PSC conference, the outright verbal assualts on the activist listserve, and a picture comes to mind.
The Palestinian solidarity movement, especially as it has coalesced around the strategy of BDS, has two faces. One face is warm, friendly and intelligent. It says that BDS is a tactic not a preferred political solution. It doesn’t require B, D and S, and it can be directed at the occupation or at Israel in general – no coercion. It makes Gush Shalom feel right at home.
The other face is quite clear that the one state solution is preferred and the two state solution is dead – and good riddance. Anyone in support of an Israeli identity is a Zionist. Anyone seeking compromise with Zionists is a Zionist. Anti- or non-Zionists who refrain from calling for an end to Israel are ‘soft-Zionists.’ Israelis are ‘butchers’ who commit ‘massacres’, their peace camp isn’t really for peace except for a handful, the Palestinian Authority is not only corrupt, it is ‘only corrupt’, lacking in any other attributes or identity. It’s everything awful about the 90s campus culture wars/identity politics madness, with the eager pleasure in despising whatever isn’t politically correct.
Everything I used to hate and fear about the Israeli right wing: the extremist language, the eagerness to demonize the other, the closing of ranks around a narrow set of ideas, the very harshness of the voice and tone. It’s the flattening of every nuance into a slogan or holy truth. It’s the utter impossibility of dialogue with people who feel differently.
I used to be part of that first group. Some days, I still am. But… I keep running into that second group and it turns my stomach. Sometimes it’s the same person displaying one face or the other, depending the audience. It’s as if all the experiences I have growing up in Israel and ‘putting myself out there’ as a refusenik, participant in militant demonstrations, getting arrested, working inside of majority Palestinian political organizations – count for nothing. Because I’m insisting on the slogans of my youth (Arab/Jewish unity, two states for two peoples, down with the occupation, negotiations yes/war no) somehow I’m excluded from the cool kids lunch table at the Palestinian solidarity middle school. Back in Israel, that’s who I sat with. Now they sneer at me.
But I can’t sit with the Zionist kids anymore! Not after all that stuff I said about not being a Zionist…. sniff.
I guess I’ll go sit by myself. And I am NOT a Zionist! I’m just another Israeli yored in New York waiting for the occupation to be over. So I can go home.
Before a lot of other things could happen to me, I needed to live on the first floor of a large Victorian house in Jamaica Plain, MA, with three other Jews. There were four more Jews upstairs, and two cats, and some plants and books and for a while, cable. We moved into the house in August 2001, and I remember watching the news in the weeks after September 11th, but eventually, the cable disappeared, but not before I, like the rest of the world, had become completely saturated with the images.
I came to Boston after graduating college to spend the year as a Jewish Organizing Initiative Fellow, a program that empowers young Jewish leadership with organizing skills in order to build strong communities predicated on social and economic justice. There were twelve of us that year, some of us living in that Victorian house, some in other parts of the city, all working in community organizations and meeting once a week to meet and talk with members of the Boston Jewish community and as a fellowship, talk about justice, identity, privilege, power and what it meant to create and live in a pluralistic Jewish space.
As soon as I learned about JOI, I knew it was the only thing I could see myself doing when I graduated. I needed a Jewish community,a self reflective, imaginative one grounded in progressive values, where, as a Jew and an activist, I could push at my edges. My year with JOI taught me that not only could I be an organizer (a new and terrifying concept to me), but I could use the best parts of myself to do it. I am the person I am now because of how JOI challenged me in my work, my feminism, my allyship and my idea of myself as a Jew. It was long, hard, honest year, of impact and reward and movement.
JOI has changed a lot since I was a fellow (i.e. folks no longer live together), so to learn about its current incarnation, visit www.jewishorganizing.org . If you’re between the ages of 21 and 30, eligible to work in the US, frustrated, hopeful, committed to change-making, and identify as Jewish, apply to JOI. The application deadline for the 2011-2012 Fellowship is March 18th.
First of all, let’s just set aside for a moment the ridiculousness of mentioning Islamic extremists in every other breath – really, I have to say (I never thought I’d defend Beck in any way whatsoever) that really, his comments weren’t about Reform Jews being terrorists. While his comments were completely inane, his point was that Reform Jews are primarily a political organization rather than a religious one. How many ways this is a stupid comment leaves me gasping, but it’s not what most people seem to have taken it as – i.e. a claim that Reform Jews are terrorists.
However, the level of stupidity remains pretty high: More »
This weekend, several of us from Jewschool will join over 2,000 other people in DC for the 2011 J Street conference. The reasons for my continued involvement with and support for J Street are complex. On the one hand, I harbor deep moral reservations concerning the idea of religious or ethnic states. Yet I find the idea of a binational state completely unworkable, in that I don’t think it would materially improve Palestinians’ lives (I tend to think it would worsen them).
So what’s a Jew to do? I realized early on in my activism that J Street was a unique organization. Unique not only in its policy positions, but in its belief of how those positions should be articulated, advanced, and discussed. J Street’s dual function – advancing a liberal view of Israel that treats Palestinians as partners in nation-building rather than obstacles to Jewish self-determination while simultaneously establishing a robust space where Israel-Palestine activism can stem from real, respectful discussion – is often criticized as a weakness, but I view it as a strength. Having spent the last few years getting more and more deeply involved with J Street, and, as a consequence, surrounding myself more and more with like-minded Jews, it’s easy for me to forget the guttural fear and hatred that J Street still inspires in some of its foes. That fear, itself a symptom of close-mindedness, is what convinces me that J Street is doing something right. It’s what keeps me passionate about my activism. And it’s what keeps me excited about the vast amount of work that still remains to be done.
Working with J Street has caused me to question how the traditional pro-Israel narrative is presented, and to reflect on how this narrative permeates so many aspects of Jewish cultural and religious life. This weekend, I’m looking forward to fresh inspiration from people who’ve dedicated their careers and lives to democratizing that narrative and opening it to criticism, revision, and ownership by those of us who for too long were defined out of its constituency.
If you’ll be at the conference, let us know! We’d love to see you there.
So with our eyes wide open, it is important to assert that Israel’s vision of its future cannot be premised upon an eternity of Arab authoritarianism and an eternity of Palestinian statelessness. Such a vision is wrong, and it will not work. It is painful, for someone who admires the Jewish state for its democratic character, to see it emerge as an enemy of democratization. Jews should not rely on Pharaohs.
One interesting side effect of the situation in Egypt has been to force defenders of Israel (I use this to mean anyone who doesn’t solely blame Israel for the perpetuation of the conflict) to decide where their sympathies lie: with people struggling for democracy against their own Pharoah, or with Netanyahu’s initial position of support for the Mubarak regime, which he’s since walked back (like the US). Israel is now coming into the phase of its nationhood where it has to grapple with the real issues that calling yourself a democracy brings – namely, supporting democracy in other places (something that modern democracies have in general been pretty bad at). This is to say nothing of the profoundly undemocratic nature of the occupation, but the situation in Egypt is a lot more visible, and poses more immediate diplomatic questions to the Israeli leadership.
The Knesset is voting next week on whether to investigate Israeli human rights groups for disloyalty to the state, and here’s something you can do alongside Israeli peers to show that Jews outside Israel oppose this dismantling of democracy: tell the Israeli Ministers’ what you think directly on their Facebook pages.
And before I hear complaints about “interfering in Israeli politics,” I’d like to remind people that America interferes in Israeli affairs in a hundred ways, from sending $3 billion in military aid, to the $1 billion in federation funds propping up 90% of their nonprofit sector, to the 60% of Israeli political party funds raised here also. At the invitation of Shalom Achshav in Israel, I’m participating in an activity in which I would participate if it were any country in the world.
Applications are now online for Selah National Cohort 10!
The Selah Leadership Program is a collaboration between the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Jewish Funds for Justice, in partnership with the Rockwood Leadership Program. Selah trains a cross-section of leaders in Jewish and secular organizations to be effective, sustainable and collaborative agents for change. Selah is the first leadership training designed specifically for Jewish leaders working across the social change field. Since its founding in 2003, we have trained more than 200 leaders from 165 organizations.
The Selah Leadership Program provides unparalleled training for social change leaders, new tools to enhance organizational vision and facilitate change, and the opportunity to learn among some of the Nation’s most innovative and inspiring Jewish social change leaders. This cohort is broadly designed for Jewish leaders across the country who are dedicated to social change and justice and have at least 7 years of experience in their field. We encourage applicants from secular and Jewish organizations that work on social change from multiple approaches including, but not limited, to: community organizing, direct action, social entrepreneurship, advocacy, education, and arts and culture. The application process is highly competitive. Learn more about Selah, get an application, or recommend someone you know.
Applications are due by Tuesday, March 1st, 2011.
Training dates:
Training 1: Sunday, July 24 – Wednesday, July 27, 2011; (East Coast)
Training 2: Sunday, December 4 – Tuesday, December 6, 2011; (West Coast)
As any of us who are at all politically involved can attest to, it’s pretty damn hard to stay optimistic about world politics. We’re surrounded by immense amounts of pain and suffering, and the governmental structures that supposedly exist to improve those conditions usually move far too slowly, often doing too little too late. I observe this dynamic everywhere I look – on Israel-Palestine, US domestic issues, foreign policy, and global financial problems. Particularly for progressives, who by definition are interested in “progress” – that is, substantive change in the way the world works – it’s incredibly frustrating to have to abide by the glacial pace of most policy discussions. More »
On Sunday December 5th, Pursue New York hosted its 3rd annual Inside the Activists’ Studio (IAS) event at the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca. Hip-hop artist and Jewish activist, Y-Love – the event’s emcee – welcomed the crowd and warmed us up for a full evening of dialogue, debate, learning and of course, eating.
I was particularly inspired by the cornerstone of the IAS experience – a panel discussion with four compelling, young, New York area-based change-makers. Tablet’s senior writer, Alison Hoffman, moderated the discussion with thoughtfulness and humor, eliciting “coming of age as an activist” stories from Karin Fleisch, Taylor Krauss, Annie Lewis and Lucas Shapiro, as well as diverse and insightful reflections on how their Jewish backgrounds did – or did not – shape their identities, careers, volunteer choices, and life paths.
Their stories were powerful and accessible – everyone in the audience could likely relate to at least one perspective or experience that the panel shared in the course of their dialogue with Alison and with each other. For example, Karin Fleisch spoke movingly about the successful letter-writing campaign she participated in during college that led to the release of Tibetan nuns from Chinese prison, and how it convinced her that, in some instances, individual actions can make a significant impact .She applies that inspiration now working at the Food Bank for NYC and serving as a compliance officer for Uri L’Tzedek’s Tav HaYosher (ethical seal), ensuring that NYC restaurants follow basic labor laws.
Taylor Krauss educated the audience on his experience documenting national and global issues including healthcare, sexual violence, the war on drugs and genocide. He emphasized the importance of showing people the truth, coming to terms with identifying unjust and inhumane practices, and taking the right steps to work towards necessary change in creating more humane societies in the United States and abroad. He also shared his unique story of growing up Reform and being among the few Jews in his Catholic high school in Phoenix. As a result of being in that environment, he felt compelled to explore his own Jewish identity further. While in high school he traveled to South America which influenced his work both in college and in his professional career as a dedicated video journalist – for instance, filming in Rwanda where he has been building an archive for genocide survivor testimonies. He noted that the survivor community in Rwanda feels a sense of solidarity with Jews because of a shared history of genocide.
Annie Lewis discussed the unique path that led her to rabbinical school after working at a women’s center in Jerusalem and a citizens’ rights center in Ashkelon. She expressed her enthusiasm for being a part of the first LGBTQ-friendly program as a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary and spoke of the challenge of spending a year in an Israeli yeshiva that had not yet embraced the same policy as part of her rabbinical program. This perspective affirmed that change takes time, and a policy changes does not mean that the culture will automatically shift – it may take awhile.
As an experienced organizer and active voice in a number of causes ranging from political projects to building queer communities, Lucas Shapiro expressed his frustration with society’s current obsession with social networking devices. He shared with the audience his belief that social networking devices such as Facebook and Twitter often prevent individuals from connecting on a personal level, and more face-to-face contact can allow for better communication in working together to move projects forward. Lucas referenced an ambivalence about his Jewish identity, but even as he spoke, he was wearing a JFREJ (Jews for Racial and Economic Justice) t-shirt, on whose board he sits, and was participating in a Jewish event; an inspiring example of how you can constantly question and struggle with your Jewish identity and still consider yourself a proud Jew.
After participants returned from their workshops, they were greeted with a delicious Hanukkah-themed, Tav HaYosher meal provided by Café 76 of the JCC. Emcee Y-Love closed out the evening with a mini-concert, showcasing hip-hop coated with messages of social activism. With a hearty blend of panel discussions, group workshops, and a hip-hop infused social justice concert, the evening had its fill of inspiring stories and positive ideas for change in the Jewish justice world. As an individual who is new to New York and its Jewish community, I found the event to be incredibly inspiring, and am looking forward to becoming more involved in future change-making events.
A few weeks ago, I went to a JStreet event with John Ging, the head of the United Nation’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip since 2006 . He told us about some young Palestinian girls who came into his office concerned about the security situation and the threat to the UN and the work it was trying to do. “You must be brave,” they said. My cynical heart beat quickly in my ears.
Optimism for me is like math: I need to be tutored in it. I have trouble believing that things can get better, in spite of the fact that I also have to believe that it can in order to get up in the morning, often literally. I just keep wondering, how do we make it better? What are the answers? Is it to punch through the wall from the inside, or build a new structure entirely? (Both, perhaps?) How much longer and harder will it take?
Tonight I had a conversation with someone who is amazing and exhausted, like too many smart, dynamic activists I know. Some of us know the potential we hold to make change, and I think that those are the people who are in the most trouble. Potential is perhaps the most excruciating burden to have, it can make us fearful and exhilarated and so tired. It depends on energy and patience and the willingness of others to move and be moved, things we cannot control. It’s also terrifying because it requires confrontation with our priorities and limitations, and ultimately, with our mortality. We are one of a kind, whether we know it or not, and no one can do things quite like we can.
This last part is something I’ve struggled with for a long time, and continue to. Leadership saturation is really powerful, and dangerous. It happened in 2008 with Barack Obama, when people pinned all their hopes for change on him. His campaign slogan invited that hope, but when change proved slower and harder than people would like, there came a backlash. It happens to any activist when they have to admit they’ve had enough, they’re burnt out, they’re not taking care of themselves. Who will do it? Who will take on their role? The answer, I’ve been forced to admit, is no one, at least not the way I would. This doesn’t mean I have to be the one who always does it, but it does mean I have to have some faith, in spite of the petulant child/control freak inside me.
So what’s a Jew to do? I realized early on in my activism that J Street was a unique organization. Unique not only in its policy positions, but in its belief of how those positions should be articulated, advanced, and discussed. J Street’s dual function – advancing a liberal view of Israel that treats Palestinians as partners in nation-building rather than obstacles to Jewish self-determination while simultaneously establishing a robust space where Israel-Palestine activism can stem from real, respectful discussion – is often criticized as a weakness, but I view it as a strength. Having spent the last few years getting more and more deeply involved with J Street, and, as a consequence, surrounding myself more and more with like-minded Jews, it’s easy for me to forget the guttural fear and hatred that J Street still inspires in some of its foes. That fear, itself a symptom of close-mindedness, is what convinces me that J Street is doing something right. It’s what keeps me passionate about my activism. And it’s what keeps me excited about the vast amount of work that still remains to be done.
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