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December 2000 Issue

Reestablishing a Jewish Voice in the Progressive Community: Jews For Racial And Economic Justice

By Jennifer Bleyer

A pensive look comes across Sarah Eisenstein's face when she remembers her first experience with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). It was at the organization's annual picnic, the summer after Eisenstein graduated from Stanford in 1998 and moved to New York.

"I had never been in contact with radical Jewish politics before, and this was the first time my politics and my Jewishness came together," she remembers. "I knew a lot of Jewish activists, but I never knew anyone who was acting radically as a Jew."

For ten years, JFREJ has offered a base in New York for Jews like Eisenstein whose idea of activism goes well beyond the type of tepid soup kitchen volunteering that characterizes many an organization's idea of social action. Their first meeting was called in 1990 to formulate a Jewish response to the escalating racial tension and economic disparity in the city, and forty people packed host Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer's living room to attend.

Brainstorming for an event to inaugurate their fledgling organization, participants were dismayed to realize that the newly-freed Nelson Mandela would soon be making an historic visit to the United States and there was no Jewish contingent to welcome him. So they planned a welcoming event at Rabbi Meyer's synagogue, B'nai Jeshurun, and they were blown away by the outcome.

"There were a thousand people in the room who raised $30,000 for the African National Congress," recalls executive director Andy Stettner. "JFREJ really took off from there."

Since then, JFREJ has often been the only Jewish voice speaking out and acting on issues that may not be explicitly Jewish, but are crucial to the balance of justice in the city. Suggesting ideological descendency from the Jewish Labor Bund and the turn of the century Jewish anarchists and socialists of the Lower East Side, JFREJ has joined picket lines, protests, marches and vigils.

Their actions have ranged from the practical, like the 1998 civil disobedience arrests of scores of Jews, including twelve rabbis, in response to the police shooting of unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo, to the spiritual and symbolic, like a Rosh Hashanah taschlich ceremony in which participants toss crumbs into the Hudson River to "cast off" the sins of New York City, such as homelessness and poverty.

JFREJ now boasts around 900 members, including a growing number of young adults like Eisenstein, now 23. At Stanford she was active in the Coalition for Labor, Dignity and Justice and organized around local issues of farmworker and migrant labor rights.

When she got involved with JFREJ, one of her first moves was to join JFREJ's Young Readers' Group, which gathered monthly to discuss thematic readings ranging from 'Race and Jewish Identity' to 'Yiddishkeit.' Eisenstein's eyes were opened. "The reading group was incredible," she says. "It built on that epiphany that I had at the picnic. I didn't know about radical secular politics, even though my grandparents were part of the Workmen's Circle."

Daniel Lang, 24, has also found a home in JFREJ. Calling himself a "second generation Red Diaper baby" from a strongly Jewish-identified secular family, Lang has long been an activist on multifarious fronts. At Yale University, he participated in a hotly contested fight for worker contracts, and at the protests against the WTO in Seattle last year, he was swept up in a mass arrest and spent five days in jail. In New York, he has been active in the Direct Action Network's Labor Working Group, as well as with JFREJ.

"It was a Jewish community that felt comfortable, like something I'd want to be included in, which is a first," says Lang. He has been particularly ingratiated to JFREJ for offering him an appropriate entry into the city's wide, multiracial anti-police brutality coalition.

"I feel like JFREJ really helped me, someone who's white and Jewish, to find a place in that movement," says Lang.

As part of a growing network of groups around the country seeking to reestablish a Jewish voice in the progressive community and vice versa, JFREJ works around specific campaigns that are key to its local community.

Currently, for example, they are spearheading a multifaceted public schools campaign to push for reinvestment in the city's failing schools, fight efforts to privatize and introduce vouchers into the system, and force a threatening police presence out of the schools. JFREJ will soon return to Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, where it expressed its welcome to Nelson Mandela in 1990, to celebrate its first ten years and to hear from esteemed writers and supporters such as Grace Paley, Tony Kushner and Ntozake Shange.

Looking back at the group's sometimes bumpy but always exuberant history, director Stettner think that after sometimes being dismissed as a fringe group by New York's larger Jewish community, they are finally receiving wider acceptance.

"We've gained a lot of credibility recently," says Stettner. "In the last couple of years, people have realized that we are an important progressive voice in the Jewish community."

And so they hope to be, for years to come.

JFREJ's 10th anniversary celebration, "Mensches in the Trenches," will be held on December 10, 2000 at 5:30 PM For more information on that event or on JFREJ, call 212-647-8966, or go to www.jfrej.org.

Jennifer Bleyer is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Salon, Bust, Alternet, and she recently traveled around the country covering Ralph Nader's presidential campaign for News for Change (it's not her fault, she swears.)

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