Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Letters

Meet the Jews of Color Organizing in Partnership With JVP

To the Editor:

We are three members of the Jews of Color (JOC) in solidarity with Palestine caucus organizing in partnership with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) responding to Sigal Samuel’s recent article about the JOC Convening (“Jews of Color Get Personal and Political at First-Ever National Gathering”)”).

We agree with Samuel’s summary of the emotional weight of the convening — the joy of seeing others “like” us for the first time, and the recognition we received in centering each other. The convening was a powerful and historic event.

Our concern is with how Samuel’s article portrays our group not only as “youngish” and by extension naive, but also as having dominated the convening, or that the convening somehow catered more to us than to JOC who do not share our political perspectives on Israel and Palestine. This could not be further from the truth.

We are a group of JOC in solidarity with Palestine who are organizing in partnership with JVP. For us, “Jews of Color” includes Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, and other Jewish people, like Romaniote Jews, who are minoritized under white Ashkenazi-dominated Jewishness. We share a commitment to the liberation of Palestine and an end to the occupation. We say “organizing in partnership with JVP,” rather than as JVP, because our work is distinct in that it centers racial justice, challenges Ashkenazi-centrism, and because we are autonomous from JVP even as we receive JVP support.

The organizations that planned the convening, Jews for Economic and Racial Justice (JFREJ), the Jewish Multiracial Network (JMN) and Bend the Arc, all claim policies of neutrality on Israel/Palestine, even as their individual members may have strong opinions about the topic. This meant that some of our members were invited to speak on panels that did not mention Israel/Palestine in the title like “Telling Our Stories: Jews of Color, Migration and Diaspora” or “The Role of Mizrahim in our Racial Justice Movements,” and some of us were invited to speak on the panel titled “US Social Movements, Israel/Palestine, and the Role of Jews of Color” only under the auspices that we stick to stories from the United States, and that the panel have equal representation of “both sides,” including JOC who identify as Zionist.

As the power of JOC grows, as it necessarily will, this will be an issue that we hope to think through differently than white, Ashkenazi-centric Jewish organizations. We feel a strong affinity with the other attendees at the Convening based on a shared commitment to racial justice in and beyond Jewish communities, regardless of their politics on Israel/Palestine. Our JOC caucus may be distinct in that we see racial justice and the liberation of Palestine as dependent on one another and therefore central to our work rather than as avoidable through neutrality. We hope to build with them, and other Jews of Color across the United States, a movement for racial justice in the United States, Israel/Palestine, and beyond.

Signed,

Lina Morales
Tallie Ben Daniel

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version