#EndJewHatred 3/7/24
Last week, I had coffee with Brooke Goldstein from the Lawfare Project and it was a revelation. She's one of the few people that not only lives up to the hype, but surpasses it. I had a serious fangirl moment while we sat in my friend's garden and contemplated different initiatives our community might tackle. Brooke talked about how we could use the grassroots agenda outlined in her latest book, End Jew Hatred, to drive our counter-offensive against hate. After studying the strategy, language and funding of efforts like BLM, MeToo and StopAsian Hate, EndJewHatred was launched. It is not a time to be timid, but to use the same methodologies to help the Jewish community. Here are the cliff notes from the book and my time with Brooke:
There has never been a Jewish Civil Rights Movement. Crazy, right? Not a legal, strategic or grassroots effort, so that's what #EndJewHatred aims to achieve. Jews have marched with everyone else, and hell, we even started the ACLU, but it's time to look inward and assert ourselves as a minority community.
There's power in words and we must speak the language of civil rights. Don't get mired in complex nuances, or try to defend Israel like a college professor. Talk about the big issue: we experience hate simply because we're Jewish. Instead of pushing back on someone with lengthy explanations about Zionism or Israel, just say "you hate Jews." Make it personal. It's ok to be accusatory. Stop trying to please everyone. Call out the real root of the problem: Jew hatred.
This is not a political movement. It must be non-partisan to succeed. You don't have to take a position on Israel. You don't have to vote a certain way in November. In fact, if you try to counter someone's Jewish racism by defending the IDF, you're mixing issues and giving the racists an easy affirmative-defence. It's clearly racist to hold Chinese-Americans responsible to COVID, or Muslim-American's responsible for Iran's nuclear goals, so why should Jewish-American's be accountable for the IDF? The partisanship dividing the US also splits the Jewish community, so it's time to put this ridiculous political litmus test aside. No one gets to decide our degree of Jewishness - that's deeply personal, not political.
Jewish activism has been organized in a top-down approach, expecting big organizations like AIPAC or the ADL to solve our problems. We need a grassroots, from the bottom-up approach, to meet these organizations in the middle. Particularly since AIPAC stopped working with college campuses, there has been a black hole of attention - and we are feeling the pain.
A successful movement ensures consequences for bad behavior. Whether the consequences are social (people recognize the perpetrators bigotry and shun them) or financial (they're bankrupted trying to defend their racism in court), there must be consequences for Jew Hatred or there is no incentive to change the 2,000 of system racism baked into Western society.
We are not powerless or alone. Follow this three step plan: Pick a Strategic target, Create a Litigation Fund, and Invest in Yourself and Your Community. The issue could be big or small, but it must be something you can document and Brooke's team can ultimately defend. You need a small decision-making team and a lot of foot soldiers. If someone is posting "No Zionists Allowed" posters at school or a business? It's discriminatory and illegal. There's a "Jews Not Welcome" sign outside study halls or school lectures? Nope, that’s discriminatory and illegal. Are your kids being followed around campus, their movements tracked to their dorms/Chabad/Hillel? That's intimidation and it's illegal. The more we document, the more we can push back. Report the incident to the ADL (for tracking) and to the violations tip line at EndJewHatred (for action). You can talk to Brooke's team about the process from inception (picking an issue and organizing) to conclusion (passing the issue and documentation off to them, to fully run the legal battle).
The Jewish community has options, let's use them. Shame on us for forgetting some of the hard lessons learned from the Holocaust. October 7th reminded us that there is no safe place for a complacent Jew. Organize and push back.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Kelly