Judaism is activism
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Yael Krifcher, 25, Potomac, Maryland, American Jewish activist:
“This might be slightly different than being informed by my Judaism. But I don’t feel dogmatic about this - I don’t need to come to my activism as a Jew. Even if at times I sort of relish the idea of being an activist here because I believe it’s right and not because I’m a Jew, my relationship to this place is entirely informed by the fact that I’m a Jew. My activism can be no different.”
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Emily Glick, 28, Boston, Massachusetts, American Jewish activist :
“It’s important to think of things that are bigger than we are, or feel a part of something bigger. To say ‘this is the moral truth that I believe in so I’m going to fight for it’.
“There have been so many Christian groups working in the South Hebron Hills. There has been a question for a long time: why aren’t Jews doing a sustained presence here? We are the ones who should be, if anyone is. It was very deliberate. It wasn’t like a back burner thought. What pulls me to do this work on the ground is that I feel in my body an experience… a phrase that’s used a lot in the American lefty Jewish context is ‘another world is possible’. We are fighting for something because it could actually happen. Being on the ground doing this work, especially in the South Hebron Hills, I feel that in the little moments.
“I remember leading songs during Shabbat services following a direct protest action. It was a very vulnerable experience for me and my eyes were closed the whole time. When I opened my eyes, I saw the whole room was in tears. This is why we are here - to do an action in the West Bank and then return to Jerusalem and be together and celebrate Shabbat.”
Margaret Hughes Robinson, 28, Brooklyn, NY, Rabbi and American Jewish activist:
“I converted to Judaism in high school and it was very much intertwined with the communities I was part of. It very much modeled for me, in my initial encounters, what a rabbi could be in the world. The rabbi I originally studied under, Rabbi Judy Schindler, is extremely involved with justice initiatives in the reform movement. It’s always been kind of baked in. I don’t know how to separate Judaism from activism.
“A lot of what drew me to Judaism initially was not necessarily the emphasis on justice, although that felt like home in a very comfortable way. What initially drew me was the emphasis on text and on the idea of shiv’im panim l’Torah [seventy faces to the Torah], what I might call a post-modern conception of truth. The idea of multiple truths and a tradition of questioning that was an act of piety and not something that was disrespectful was really attractive to me.
“Judaism and social justice work have always, for me, been sort of braided together in my decade and a half of adult Jewish experience. It’s very hard for me to understand [the mainstream Jewish disconnect between the two]... My big dream for the American Jewish community is that we would invest again in justice work, not out of a sense of noblesse oblige… We have a lot of privilege in this country and have achieved certain things as a community and we really should be giving back.”
Oriel Eisner, 31, Denver, Colorado, American-Israeli Jewish activist:
“Part of that Jewish upbringing, the Jewish world of education, is concern for tikkun olam [“repair of the world”] and social justice. And while it teaches you to care about Israel and be a Zionist, it also teaches you to care about social justice. You see injustice as a problem that needs fixing, and you can be a part of fixing and responding to that. So you have these moments of … these things not really being able to make sense with each other.
“The curiosity and desire to question, that was also instilled in me from a Jewish place and from my family, led me to want to learn more, to explore more, to try and make sense of it all. And it led to more reading, and then eventually, to a feeling like I had to come [to Israel/Palestine] and make sense of it with my body and for myself. And I think when I did that, I found a whole community of people, and whole world of ways of being Jewish that brought those things together, that brought together the Jewish upbringing, the connection to Israel, the connection to Jewishness, and also the commitment to fighting against injustice, to resisting against oppression.”
Emily Glick, 28, Boston, Massachusetts, American Jewish activist:
“We were perceived by our hosts more as Americans, because we weren’t being visibly Jewish. But we weren’t having conversations about it. It’s hard to imagine what a discussion about religion - or what religious identity means - would look like. Maybe it’s less important to clearly articulate Jewish identity here [in the South Hebron Hills] for the same reason it’s less necessary to articulate Judaism in Tel Aviv. Doing this work on the ground here creates space for other pieces of identity and politics to come to the forefront. Judaism is just a fact of the matter, but not necessarily the focus. For the secular Israelis living in the South Hebron Hills, they weren’t like ‘These are my Jewish values. I’m going to come here and fight the occupation’. If anything, it was the opposite.”
Jewish activists participate in an Arabic class in a Palestinian community in the South Hebron Hills region of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Sam Stein, 27, Lawrence, New York, American-Israeli Jewish activist:
“There is a prominent paradigm in Israeli society, a much more rigid idea, of what religious Judaism is. The spectrum is just so much narrower here. There is much less room to wear a kippah and not have people immediately assume you have very specific political beliefs; this really depends on your type of kippah and the rest of your attire. I was at a protest the other day about arrests in the South Hebron Hills and I felt like wearing a kippah. A Haredi guy asked me if I was with the protesters, saying ‘But you’re wearing a kippah and they are Arabs’ and saying all these racist things. Part of me didn’t engage but another part of me was like ‘Just the fact that I was there and wearing a kippah had an impact’. He was probably turning that over in his head all day, maybe went home and had Shabbos dinner with his family and told them about the weirdo with the kippah at a lefty protest.”
An American Jewish activist walks into the hills to accompany a Palestinian shepherd in an area of the southern West Bank where Palestinians are often targeted in violent attacks by Israeli settlers.