Jews For Racial & Economic Justice is the home for Jewish New Yorkers to organize alongside our neighbors and allies to fight for a New York where every community has the freedom, opportunity, and resources to thrive. Drawing from our Jewish values, our diverse histories, our skills, and with a lot of hard work, we’ll halt our city’s transformation into a playground for the wealthy and build a real democracy that works for all of us. Together we will dismantle the systems and institutions that perpetuate racism, inequity, and injustice, and grow something new and beautiful in their place.
New Yorkers are facing multiple crises: enormous inequality, sky-high rents, failing mass transit, unaffordable healthcare, an ugly and discriminatory policing and incarceration system, disappearing small businesses, segregated schools, and the looming threat of climate change. While the poor and working class, older and disabled New Yorkers, and communities of color are most impacted, all of us call this city home, and we all deserve more.
JFREJ is rooted in our home, New York City, because we believe that cities like New York can be centers of radical progress. But we’ll never live in a city that meets our needs and reflects our values as long as everyday people have to compete with the massive corporations, powerful real estate tycoons, and corrupt political machines that are shaping the future of our city. So we’ll work to elect progressive candidates that share our bold vision and are committed to supporting the leadership of the diverse communities that call New York home. JFREJ exists to fight tooth and nail to demolish this status quo, and work side by side with other communities to contest for the power to govern ourselves and end the injustices and violence that serve the interests of the 1% and hurt everyone else.
We come together as Jews out of a deep commitment to a more just society. In every borough, we are your congregants, your friends, your neighbors, your bubbes and habibis. We are Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi, Black, Brown, white and Arab, Latinx and Asian, immigrant and US-born. We are old and young, rich and poor; teachers and students; parents and children; righteous rabbis and secular socialists.
Our diverse, multiracial, multi-ethnic, intergenerational community builds solidarity and trust by listening to each other and to our partners and allies, and by showing up, doing the work, taking risks and making mistakes together. We know that capitalism, antisemitism, xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia are interconnected and that we can’t address one of them without addressing all of them.
Our collective experience has taught us that retreating behind walls has not led to Jewish safety anywhere in the world, and that organizing with others is the only way to confront the broken world as we find it and bring about the world we imagine. We organize in New York City as inheritors of the Bundist philosophy of “doykait” (hereness) that reminds us that where we live is our home — and our home is where we seek kinship and fight for justice.
We are the New York Jewish left. Wherever you are from and whatever being Jewish means to you, if you share our values, you are welcome here.