Rachel Gilmer
Image by Tumblr
The Jewish Heart of #BlackLivesMatter
The Jewish establishment struggled this year to come to terms with Black Lives Matter. Rachel Gilmer, a 28-year-old African American who was raised Jewish, both embodies the #BLM movement and was responsible for some of the Israel-related intersectionality that gave the establishment pause.
The tensions came to a head with the August release of a sprawling “policy platform” associated with the Movement for Black Lives — which branded Israel an “apartheid state” committing “genocide” against the Palestinian people. The Jewish establishment went into crisis mode; it wanted to be on the side of social justice, but was put off by the characterization of Israel
To the surprise of many, the co-author of the platform’s section on Israel had a Jewish background.
Born to an African-American father and a white Jewish mother, Gilmer was raised as a Jew and participated in Young Judaea, the Zionist youth group, when she was a teen. There, she rose to become a leading member of her local group. But Gilmer later distanced herself from organized religion and Jewish identity.
Gilmer has long been involved in black-Palestinian solidarity work. She is currently associated with the activist group Dream Defenders, which has been on the forefront of recent black-Palestinian solidarity efforts, such as bringing high-profile delegations of African-American activists to Israel and the West Bank.
Gilmer told the Forward that she found her calling outside of the Jewish world. “When I got connected to social justice, I found my spirituality in the heart of organizing.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
