Before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jordan spoke with leaders of the Black Jewish Liberation Collective about the power of community for Black Jewish activists, the attention the George Floyd Uprisings brought to Black Jewish Community, and the complexities of discussing Israel Palestine while Black. Check it out here!
The Black Jewish Liberation Collective is a space for Black Jews to access support, culture, community, and political strategy, built up of activists from the frontlines of cities from Ferguson to New York, Detroit to Atlanta. What has creating this space allowed you all to do, as activists and as people?
The very existence of the Black Jewish Liberation Collective is in its own right resistance. It was birthed out of a necessity to be seen and find support. In recognition that Black Jews stand at a particular intersection within social justice movements specifically at the crossroad of antiracism and antisemitism, and when these societal ills are leveraged against one another (as they often are), we are always sacrificed in the crossfire. Prior to the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, we had no organized national voice. We were either being tokenized or invisibilized, and any organizing work one could do would never have the necessary impact nor be sustainable. The only thing to do was to gather ourselves to support for Black Jews around the country in our organizing work towards Black liberation such that we could offer space to develop a shared analysis and offer each other tools, resources, and support in our organizing work.
We have used our community to offer care for each other during personal and communal crises such as coming together to mourn George Floyd and also working collaboratively to norm language and ideas around policing as it relates to the Jewish community’s investment in policing. The breadth of our work spans beyond quantifiable data and digs deep into the healing necessary for many Black Jews to exist as so many of us find ourselves in communities that are predominantly white Jews.
Some of your more prominent events are Kwanzakkah, Juneteenth, and Angry Black Shabbat (love the name btw!). What do you do for each of these gatherings, and what makes them special?
We have been gathering virtually since our inception, reimagining ways to build community and family across borders and boundaries. Since we have always navigated a virtual world, we have become skilled at generating culture and care amongst members who might have never met in real life by centering and grounding our time in restorative justice practices and integrating the political with the personal to generate dialogue and deepen relationships. Often, we find ourselves staying on meetings and events long past the agenda and scheduled time because the dialogue is so juicy and we love spending precious time with each other. Can you imagine in a COVID world wanting to stay on a zoom call longer than scheduled?
Last summer, during the George Floyd uprisings, it felt like Black Jews received a sudden surge in publicity within the Jewish community. For those of you already doing organizing work, how did you receive that moment? How were you able to channel the energy?
During the spring/summer of 2020, a lot of attention was turned specifically in the Jewish community to Jews of Color and more directly to Black Jews. As the only space in the field explicitly organizing Black Jews, we received a lot of outreach and inquiries. We were flooded by white Jewish organizations looking to uplift our work and in turn spread the word to their networks whereby other disconnected Black Jews have been able to find community as well. We also received a flood of financial and in-kind support in various ways that have helped us develop our programming and make our work more robust and sustainable. We were able to offer members mutual aid, security and safety,
As Black Jewish activists, you all are uniquely positioned to make connections with both the Black and Jewish communities that are working towards racial and economic justice. How do you manifest your political and cultural desires through these connections, and what's it like navigating both of those waters?
We were founded in the vibrations of the Convening for Black Lives in 2015. Our entire existence has been to develop a political community of Black Jews working in community with Black organizers towards Black liberation. We have been building community through Juneteenth and Kwanzakkah with some of the key organizers of the Black Freedom Project, Drug Policy Alliance, Brooklyn Movement Center, POWER, Color of Change, and more. We have built community with these folks not based on political gain but rather on shared vision for the liberation of our people. It’s been beautiful and generative to be in relationship with our comrades and we are proud to continue to impact and bear witness to the indescribable ways in which these personal and political relationships have shaped the movement landscape.
We also saw you worked on an interesting panel with Jewish Voice for Peace called Black Lens on Palestinian Liberation. What is it like engaging with Israel /Palestine as Black Jews? In these communities, how do you find that conversations about the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the fight against anti-blackness intersect?
For us, as Black Jews, being in dialogue around Palestine/Israel has been an important political mandate. We have members in our collective who have shaped the bulk of their political identity around fighting for Palestinian liberation, others who feel strongly about the importance of a Jewish nation state, and yet others who feel this issue does not and should not define our Judaism. What unites us is a recognition that despite our varied political stances, this dialogue is almost always thrown our way as a political and Jewish litmus test, a brown paper bag test designed specifically for Jews of Color broadly and Black Jews specifically. We are often asked this as a determinant for whether we are “really Jewish” or conversely to determine if our politics are “truly radical”. We understand that this question lands specific and poignantly for us because of the long and important history within the Black liberation movement and Palestinian solidarity. That history is the exact piece that calls us into dialogue, and tasks us with the necessary political education to generate our own perspectives and dialogue. This event arose out of over a year of dialogue and political education where we learned many of us have resisted engaging, learning, or formulating our own opinions because of the dynamics previously listed. Having the Black Jewish Liberation Collective hold space for these dialogues offered our members a safe space to peel back the layers of our assumptions, speak in ways that have felt unsafe outside of our collective, and truly create a safe(r) space for learning. Our learning on this matter is ongoing and the event was but one culmination of our work together. As we continue to engage in rich dialogue we know and look forward to more opportunities to build our collective analysis and partner with comrades across borders.
Do you have any events coming up? And where can a Black, Jewish activist looking to get involved, or anyone else wanting to follow your work, find you?
Black Jewish activists, organizers, and folks across the US can find out more about our work at large at blackjewishliberation.org and follow us on Instagram @blackjewishliberation.