Welcoming our ’15-’16 Jewish Organizing Fellows!

Posted on September 9, 2015 by Sarah Resnick

DSCF1486

This past Labor Day weekend we welcomed our newest class of Jewish Organizing Fellows to their opening retreat. Our 11 Fellows met for four days in Stoughton, Massachusetts to begin building relationships with each other and kick off the year.

The retreat started out with Fellows exploring the cycle of community organizing, and then moved into a River of Life exercise where they shared personal stories with each other. Highlights included an anti-oppression workshop led by Jo Kent Katz, and the group’s first opportunity to share Shabbat together.

DSCF1501

We are especially excited this year to welcome Fellows who are stretching the term “Boston-area” to new heights! In addition placement organizations in Boston, Brookline, Wellesley and Worcester, we are also proud to have Fellows working with the Naugatuck Valley Project in Connecticut, the Environmental Health Strategy Center in Maine, and Next-Gen Climate in New Hampshire. Many of our JOIN Fellows started their organizing jobs this week, and we are looking forward to sharing their stories as they spread out across New England to organize for environmental justice, economic equality, worker rights and so much more.

IMG_1008

Read more about each of our Fellows here.

Posted in Fellowship, General, Our News | Comments Off on Welcoming our ’15-’16 Jewish Organizing Fellows!

Fasting for a Moral Budget in Pennsylvania

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Sarah Resnick

JOIN’s Rabbinic Fellowship launched in April and we’ve had a powerful first few months. 43 rabbis representing 75,000 congregants in Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia have joined the Clergy Fellowship and begun engaging deeply in community organizing, and starting the process of activating their congregations for justice work.

Our Rabbinic Fellows are already getting to work. In Philadelphia, members of the fellowship joined the broad-based interfaith organizing organization POWER for an escalating series of actions putting pressure on the Pennsylvania legislature to approve a full and fair funding formula for public education in Pennsylvania.

Join For Justice-19

 

From the Faith in PA coalition website:

“PA has the most unequally funded public schools in the United States, including a racial bias towards districts with more white students.  Across the state, in rural, suburban, urban, black, brown and white communities alike, our school districts have been underfunded for decades and our kids can’t wait any longer for a 21st century education. 

Governor Wolf has proposed an increase to public education funding that is still a fraction – 15% – of what would fully fund schools. The House of Representatives has proposed a budget with no new money for schools at all. Meanwhile, both want cuts in taxes for corporations. Clearly, we don’t have a financial crisis in Pennsylvania – we have a moral one. 

If our lawmakers won’t do the right thing and listen to Pennsylvanians’ real pain and experiences, we have no other choice but to go right to their doorstep and bring our values to them.”

As part of an escalating series of actions, religious leaders and their congregants from many faiths gathered at the State House in Harrisburg, PA to show that Pennsylvania has a moral problem, not a budget problem.  In the pictures below, Rabbi Annie Lewis joins her congregants and leaders from other faiths in this day of action.

Join For Justice-34

Join For Justice-41

Posted in Alumni At Large, Clergy Fellowship, From the Field, General | Comments Off on Fasting for a Moral Budget in Pennsylvania

Grappling With the Intersections Between Racism and Anti-Semitism

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Sarah Resnick

Two weeks ago, 35 young Jewish leaders came together for a powerful workshop exploring the Intersections of Racism and Anti-Semitism. Organized by JOIN’s Alumni Steering Committee, and co-led by Cherie Brown of the National Coalition Building Institute and Dove Kent of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice , the workshop dug into how Jews experience and internalize antisemitism and how it effects our lives.

photo 4

Participants (many of whom were JOIN Fellowship alumni) gathered for a full and eye-opening weekend. Perhaps most powerful was how the facilitators led with hope rather than despair.  Participants were able to deeply share and connect thanks to that leadership. The workshop brought to the surface how Jews might fight racism by revealing that we must also be fighting for ourselves and our own liberation, to be able to deeply ally with other oppressed groups and fight for justice for all.

Participant Marisa Turesky (also a 2014 JOIN Fellowship alum) shared this about her experience:

I have been so lost in thought grappling with white guilt that I have actively refused to make my Jewish identity something visible to myself. This workshop gave me a space and a community that I trusted, allowing me to think critically about my lived experiences and my family’s history from a strictly Jewish lens. After all, how am I supposed to make change in others’ communities if I don’t fully understand my own? I was both shocked and frightened as I began to consider how the behaviors and actions of my family, close friends, and myself might manifest from anti-Jewish sentiment over the generations. Our intimate conversations elucidated fears and anxieties that I have with my own secular Judaism.  I might never have been willing to feel so deeply had I not been so lovingly challenged by facilitators in the earnest space created.

We were at maximum capacity for this workshop and had a sizeable waiting list. If you’re interested in attending a workshop like this in the future, please add your name to this list.

This program was supported in part by a Young Adult Innovation Grant from Combined Jewish Philanthropies.  We are grateful to Combined Jewish Philanthropies for this support.

Posted in Alumni At Large, From the Field, General, Our News, Thinking Out Loud | Comments Off on Grappling With the Intersections Between Racism and Anti-Semitism

I Am Jewish and Black Lives Matter

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Sarah Resnick

Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, co-founder of the Seminary Leadership Project and JOIN for Justice Board member, published this powerful call to action in the Huffington Post last week. Read the full post here.  

On a recent cross-country drive, I stood where James Earl Ray stood when he killed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, TN. I put my feet where his feet had been and I cast my gaze across the street, to the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel. I imagined Dr. King standing there – a man who not only embodied a community, but a movement, an insistent dream, and a charge to our country to be better than we were. I felt a shiver run through me as I tried to see through the eyes of James Earl Ray, a man who was willing to kill another person in order to kill a dream. Then I felt overwhelmed with the truth that dreams don’t die that easily.

And yet again and again, we are forced to view our world through the lens of those who hate. We see a young man kill nine beautiful people solely because they were black. We see burning black churches, KKK members who spew racist vitriol as they plan to march in South Carolina just a month after the attack on Emanuel AME Church. And like so many others, I think: what year is this?

In the Jewish tradition, we are taught “Yehi ch’vod chaveirach chaviv alecha k’shelach” — “The dignity of your friend should be as dear to you as your own” (Pirkei Avot 2:10). This text does not direct us simply to acknowledge our friend’s dignity, but to ensure it. To protect it. To act as vigilantly as if it were our own. If my friend’s dignity is my dignity, then the humiliation of my friend causes me personal shame and the pain of my friend breaks my heart.

My heart broke as I listened to my friend, a wise and kind African-American pastor, recall his son’s sadness when he came home and asked why his teacher, who used to be so nice to him, would no longer call on him or talk to him, and now seemed to treat him with suspicion. My heart broke as he told me that he had to explain to his son that his growth spurt had turned him from being a small black boy into a young black man and his now tall and broad black body changed how many people, including his beloved teacher, would relate to him.

Read the rest of Rabbi Stephanie Kolin’s piece in the Huffington Post.  

Posted in Alumni At Large, From the Field, Success Stories, Thinking Out Loud | Comments Off on I Am Jewish and Black Lives Matter

Making Time For Story: Words of Wisdom From Rabbi Dara Frimmer

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Sarah Resnick

Rabbi Dara Frimmer was a member of our Seminary Leadership Project’s very first cohort of rabbinical students to be trained in community organizing.  She is now an inspiring rabbi and community organizer at Temple Isaiah and a member of JOIN’s Clergy Fellowship in Los Angeles.

Watch below to see the powerful story she delivered from the TEDx UCLA stage about inspiring social change through community organizing.

Posted in Alumni At Large, Clergy Fellowship, From the Field, General, Success Stories, Thinking Out Loud | Comments Off on Making Time For Story: Words of Wisdom From Rabbi Dara Frimmer