A Defining Moment For Social Justice

Rabbi Jennie Rosenn director of the Jewish and values program of the Natha Foundation, believes it isprime time for Jewish social justice initiatives.

Rabbi Jennie Rosenn director of the Jewish and values program of the Natha Foundation, believes it isprime time for Jewish social justice initiatives.

by Randi Sherman
Staff Writer

When Rabbi Jennie Rosenn entered Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1991, her goal was for “Jews to make social change as Jews.” There she would meet her husband, David Rosenn, who espoused similar goals. Had they started rabbinical school today, she said, they may never have met.

“There are so many more people in rabbinical school now [focusing on Jewish social justice] that we wouldn’t have found each other,” Rabbi Rosenn told The Jewish Week. “This is really a strategic moment. Jewish social justice has really arrived.”
As the director of the Jewish Life and Values Program of The Nathan Cummings Foundation, an organization that has been funding Jewish social justice work since 1989, Rabbi Rosenn believes this is a great moment for Jewish social justice, and the numbers bear her out. Between 2001 and 2008, the American Jewish World Service more than quintupled its staff, from 14 to 86 workers, and increased its income nearly 500 percent, from $5.5 million to more than $30 million. Avodah, a Jewish anti-poverty service group, also saw significant growth between 2001 and 2006, increasing their staff positions from three to 15 and more than quadrupling their donor network. In that same time period, Hazon, with its focus on Judaism, nature and food, went from a staff of two to nine, increased its donor pool from 464 to 7,932 and increased its budget nearly six-fold.

With so much growth and relatively little attention paid to the field, the Nathan Cummings Foundation commissioned a study, Visioning Justice and the American Jewish Community by Shifra Bronznick and Didi Goldenhar, to highlight the strengths and shortfalls of the field as it comes into its own and recommend strategies for the future. The study, released earlier this summer, was shared with funders, organizations in the field and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

The organizations examined in the study represent big trends in the field, from spiritual communities growing through social justice initiatives to independent Jewish social justice organizations growing both in numbers, visibility and influence. They included national and local organizations, as well as the expanding group of congregation-based community organizations (CBCOs), such as Congregation Beth Elohim/Brooklyn Jews, which uses Rabbi Andy Bachman’s “blog pulpit” to debate issues of just payment for construction workers at the synagogue.

The team employed “action research” in the course of the study, conducting more than 200 interviews with Jewish social justice activists, attending conferences and bringing together leaders in the field to deliberate. They also looked to secular organizations to see how they build networks.

The team found that social justice has become much more popular in the Jewish community. Volunteer service participation has grown more than 20 percent annually for the past five years, evidence of its rising priority. Embracing a multiplicity of issues and approaches also enables Jewish social justice organizations to appeal to a wider range of people, who see themselves not just as Jews, but also as citizens of a global community.

For a long time, the focus was solely on Jewish identity, but that won’t work anymore, Bronznick said. “The old rules of Jewish life no longer apply. Multiple identities are an opportunity, and Jewish social justice is the magnet to bring people together.”
These organizations are also becoming more visible and creating more of an impact throughout the U.S. and worldwide, whether it be on behalf of the victims of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, victims of the genocide in Darfur or more locally, fighting anti-gay legislation in Boston or for workers’ rights in California. Most recently, Jewish social justice organizations gained visibility and credibility for coming together in the wake of the raid on the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, prompting discussions around eco-kashrut and heksher tzedek, issues that jumped from Jewish newspaper to the national-level secular press. It offered an opportunity to define community standards in a Jewish context, and the realization that the questions they asked were Jewish questions, Bronznick said.

The study also found room for improvement in the field. While Jewish social justice has seen considerable growth, the field overall is still small, and the growth has been uneven. Groups compete for limited dollars and the Jewish social justice workforce is lacking in numbers, recruitment and training. One way to combat the workforce issues would be to expand upon the Selah leadership program, a collaboration between the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Jewish Funds for Justice, which has “a network of agents for social change” in Jewish and secular organizations. Organizations also need to address new technologies and the integration of spirituality into the field, and to make themselves known.

“We need to send the message to people in leadership in other fields that [the Jewish social justice field] exists,” Bronznick said. “Right now, the most influential Jewish social justice organizations are run by great leaders, but the field is not really as visible as it could be to the rest of the world.”

A big obstacle to success is the perception that Jewish social justice organizations are an alternative, not a partner, to the organized Jewish community. Offering an alternative to this model is Just Congregations, an initiative of the Union of Reform Judaism, which gets synagogues involved in local community organizing.

Some of the suggested strategies for improvement are already being tested in the field, like professional development through the Selah program, and training not just high-level leaders but those who could potentially fill those positions later on, a suggestion that pleased Just Congregation’s assistant director, Lila Foldes.
“The emphasis on building the next generation is very exciting,” she said. “It’s creating space for people from various organizations to learn from each other. Not just from the top down, but for people on their way up, [people like me.]”

The embrace of multiplicity also resonated with Just Congregations, as they try to connect their synagogues many different kinds of issues, and many social justice groups.
“We live in the multiplicity the study talks about,” she said. “We’re helping congregations connect with what is happening in their backyards.”
Another important suggestion is to build a Jewish social justice table, to create networks of shared values among the broader field, taking advantage of the multiplicity in their midst. The resulting collaborations will lead to more visibility and greater effectiveness. The Nathan Cummings Foundation has developed a pilot program around this idea, bringing together Jewish social justice groups with mainstream institutions, secular groups and interested individuals to boost their effectiveness in public advocacy.
“We’ve entered the 21st century with broken-down 20th century systems,” Bronznick said. “We’d like to see Jews as Jews at the forefront [of social change]. This is an opportunity to focus on the accomplishments and challenges so we can work together more powerfully to build organizations and create wide-ranging networks to impact the world and American Jewish life.”

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