We’re so proud of our Board Member and Seminary Leadership Project Co-Founder Rabbi Stephanie Kolin for being selected as a member of the Inaugural Class of the Auburn Seminary’s Senior Fellows. Stephanie joins an inspiring and powerful cohort of faith leaders working to build a multi-faith movement for social justice.
The goal of the Auburn Senior Fellows program is to equip, platform, and network faith leaders who have great potential to catalyze and advance multifaith movements for justice.
Senior Fellows remain in their particular leadership contexts, continuing to serve in nonprofit organizations, congregations, educational institutions, or other leadership positions. Senior Fellows gather for two retreats a year and receive executive coaching and consulting support from Auburn throughout the year. Once elected, Senior Fellows are invited to remain in the program for as long as they are actively engaged in faith-rooted justice work and committed to participating in the program.
Rabbi Stephanie Kolin is the new Associate Rabbi at Central Synagogue in NYC. Stephanie will be working with the congregation on issues of social justice, organizing in partnership across lines of faith, race, and economic differences in order to heal suffering in our world. From 2011–2015 she co-directed Just Congregations, a community-organizing program of the Union for Reform Judaism, supporting 250 Reform Jewish congregations that participate in community organizing. Stephanie was the lead organizer for and a founder of Reform CA, a statewide campaign for political change.
Today we are thrilled to feature an interview with Abby Levine, Director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable. The Jewish Social Justice Roundtable is a sponsoring partner of our national online course, Don’t Kvetch, Organize! Read below to learn about Abby’s journey to organizing why she’s excited about our online course that is launching in the fall.
Is there a moment in your life that you could tell us about, when you realized the power of community organizing and knew that you wanted it to be a big part of your life’s work?
AL: I think that one example pretty early on was when I was doing organizing with the homeless population in New Haven, Connecticut where I went to college. We talked to a number of homeless folks and they raised the issue of what time the shelter closes at night. It was winter in Connecticut and the shelters were closing at 11:00 at night, so if the people didn’t get there by 11 they couldn’t get in. I remember we did some organizing, and after all these conversations and actions that we had about it, somehow I was a freshman in college and I was the one who called up the woman who was the head of the shelter and said to her this: should change.
I don’t know how I ended up being the person doing that–it probably wasn’t the best decision. I remember really clearly her saying to me: Well if you haven’t gotten your act together to get to the shelter by 11:00 at night, then, I’m sorry, no, that’s just the way it is.
And I just remember being shocked at that attitude and realizing that it was really going to take the power of organizing and, frankly, bad publicity and public action to change it. Up until then, I thought I could convince people in power just by my strong argument to do the right thing, but it was really clear that that was not going to work with this conversation. We had to organize and we did. We eventually changed the policy so that they let people in after 11:00.
We’re thrilled that the Jewish Social Justice Round is a sponsoring partner of Don’t Kvetch, Organize! Can you tell us why you’re excited about this course?
AL: I really believe that the skills of organizing can be applied to many different contexts. I’m an organizer at heart but my title is not “Organizing”. I’ve done fundraising work and organizational development work and I think what’s really exciting about this class is it provides the building blocks of community organizing in really concrete, accessible ways. I’m excited for people to learn more about what organizing is and to understand that they can apply the tools to all kinds of work in the world, because I’ve certainly done that and it’s been really useful.
I think about the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable as a very diverse network of now almost 50 organizations and I think if more of us better employed the skills of organizing around building relationships, having good one-to-one conversations, really listening to each other, and taking action based on common concerns, we would be more powerful.
So I’m excited for the course to educate folks about what community organizing is and give people an accessible, tangible way to learn about it with such great content.
What do you hope the cohort of Roundtable participants gain from this course?
AL: A basic understanding of what organizing is. I think this is a great way for us to broaden our reach and train and support more people from our network, particularly lay leaders and other staff who will be drawn in to this course.
I also think that online courses in general are an area that have a lot of potential and so I’m excited to take any lessons learned out of this course and apply it more broadly to the peer learning efforts that we do on a more consistent basis.
Is there anything else you would share with people considering Don’t Kvetch, Organize?
AL: I think the only other thing I would say is I’m excited for the deliberate, solution-based aspects of the course and the fact that even though it is an online course I feel like there’s thoughtful intention around making sure relationships are being built. There are more and more people in our world that are engaging in Jewish justice that want to be part of this network and this community. It’s an exciting opportunity, particularly for folks who don’t live in the big cities to get to know people in the field and the opportunities that are out there to take action from Jewish values and from a Jewish perspective.
On June 22, over 150 people gathered to celebrate with the 14 Fellows at JOIN for Justice’s Siyyum (Graduation). The evening was an incredible gathering to support our graduating 2015 Jewish Organizing Fellows. Below are JOIN’s Executive Director Karla Van Praag’s words of welcome at the Siyyum.
When I was 22, after becoming the first in my family to graduate college, I moved to Washington, DC. Years of sociology class and a fair bit of volunteer work had taught me how messed up the world was, and I was going to be part of the solution. I was offered a job with a service corps, where I was assigned as the team leader for the anti-hunger community service team. We would serve meals at soup kitchens, help people fill out food stamp applications, educate elementary school students about nutrition, and glean excess produce from the fields. I was excited to begin changing the world, alongside my peers who also wanted to do good work.
My team consisted of fifteen African American young adults aged 17-23 who were, unlike me, born and bred in DC. Everyone else, while working hard for the corps, was either raising young children, supporting other members of their family financially, meeting with parole officers, getting their GEDs, taking night courses at college, getting harassed by their landlords, or coming late to work when their bus never came to their neighborhood in Southeast, one of the poorest neighborhoods in DC. Meanwhile, once at work, the agency staff made obnoxious comments to me about how lazy “they” were, not always out of earshot.
It soon became painfully clear how the deck was stacked against my corps members. A history of slavery, and hundreds of years of racism, held a tight grip on my new friends’ lives. I realized though I had the degree, there was no clear way to fix these problems they were facing. No longer hopeful, now angry, I felt ill-equipped, out of place, and fully alone. I wasn’t sure what my role was as a white person with a different life experience, but didn’t want that to be an excuse to walk away, either – so I muddled along.
Now, multiply that confusion by all of today’s dedicated white people who seek to be allies but don’t know how. Not because anything new has happened, but because what has happened for generations happened again in Ferguson, Staten Island, Charleston and other places, and was finally more visible. This confusion particularly challenged American Jewish communities. Many of the American Jews who are white ached at the pain and injustice but weren’t sure how to get involved. Many American Jews of Color heard their fellow Jews grappling with how to relate to “other” communities and felt even more invisible.
When we see the horrors of police brutality and systemic racism on a daily basis, who do we turn to? What can we do?
I don’t have the answer for you. But I can suggest where to start.
As you’ll hear shortly in many of the stories, many of our fellows struggled with these same questions. Not surprisingly, being community organizers, many learned that their best hope was to lean into relationships, with leaders and members of non-Jewish communities as well as with each other.
Relationships can be scary. It comes with vulnerability, compromises, missteps, and unmet expectations. Choosing, in spite of that fear and confusion, to enter into relationships, since social change has never been achieved without it, requires – as the theme of tonight proclaims – boldly taking a step into the sea.
Jews have always known to draw upon each other and our collective wisdom when we’ve waded in, hoping the waters would part. Our traditions teach us to look at the stories of the past. They urge us to listen, to question, to challenge, to engage. Our own history as an oppressed people gives us insight what can happen. Our insider/outsider status has always given us a unique perspective in struggles for a just society. If we are part of a community larger than ourselves, we have a place to start. If we can relate to each other – white Jews and Jews of color alike – we can draw on our collective wisdom and relate well to non-Jewish communities and truly be allies in the struggle for justice.
Our Fellows rediscover this ancient and living community as a source of strength through the fellowship year. Young Jews come to our program out of frustration – about the injustices of the world, about the unsatisfactory efforts to address these problems, and often about the Jewish community itself. They see a gap in our world between what is and what should be. Where does their Jewish identity fit into their image of themselves as change agents? What skills and experiences can bridge the gap between their alienation and the ability to lead?
The Jewish Organizing Fellowship captures this familiar moment in generations of young people who are hungry to define their values and identity, and to confront the ills of our society. The Fellowship connects them to each other, to the Jewish community, and to experienced organizers wanting to invest in developing them. JOIN turns frustration, intention and raw talent into concrete skills and effective action. JOIN fills a niche where the interests of the Jewish community and our broader society meet.
These fellows carry the weight of our proud yet complicated history with race and privilege, the current insufficient action of a largely privileged Jewish community, all of it. They know that the Jewish community can do better and must do better, and they are angry about it, but they didn’t walk away, or freeze. This class, and those that came before them, stepped into the complexity and asked themselves how to organize to improve it.
Last Chanukah, responding to requests from African American leaders, hundreds of Jews marched on Brookline under the banner of “Jews Say Black Lives Matter.” That march was largely organized and led by our alumni and our fellows in partnership with Jews of color in our community. And our fellows have shown since then that that march was one moment in a long-term movement, not a one-shot to make a quickly forgotten statement, as you will hear in the stories they will share tonight. They organize not despite their Judaism, but because of it. And by taking responsibility to confront and challenge racism in this country, they will become the next generation of Jewish leaders.
Because of their training, their community, and their wisdom, I have more faith in these young people than I had in myself when I was 22, to know the right thing to do about all this. They have used this year to hold each other accountable, to stay committed to figure it out, to find the mentors to teach them, to determine who they need to be in relationship with and what risks they need to take. They are walking together until the sea parts. As they share their stories this evening, listen for the rushing sound of water. That will be the sea parting. When you hear that sound, let’s follow them through to the other side.
On June 22, over 150 people gathered to celebrate with the 14 Fellows at JOIN for Justice’s Siyyum (Graduation). The evening was an incredible gathering to support our graduating 2015 Jewish Organizing Fellows.
As the crowd listened to the stories, cheered, laughed, applauded and expressed their well wishes, they demonstrated that there is a community standing behind these powerful young leaders as they work for justice in Boston and beyond.
If you weren’t able to join us at Siyyum, you can watch their stories below. Prepare to be moved, inspired, fired up, hopeful…and most of all ready to join them and transforming the world as it is into the world as it should be.
