Imagine a Jewish life in which all synagogues are praying and organizing for peace for all people. Where no Jew of Color is questioned on their lineage. In which Jewish schools and summer camps teach our young people all the Jewish languages, cultures and histories. Where JCCs are in interdependent relationships with their neighbors. Where Jewish leaders do not treat war and violence as inevitable and acceptable. Where you don’t have to worry that where you buy your shabbat candles is using their profits to fund the IDF.
In the history of Zionism there has not been a single day since Jews embraced Zionism as a political project that there weren’t Jews opposed to that project. The very same year, 1897, of the First World Zionist Congress was the first gathering of the anti-Zionist General Jewish Labour Bund in Russia and Poland.
Since then projects big and small have taken root to build Judaism outside of Zionism, most intensely in the past few decades. Some of these projects were explicitly anti- or non- zionist and oriented as Palestine solidarity formations, some were not engaging with Zionism at all, instead building Jewish culture and community using the tools and gifts of Judaism.
In recent years, some have been watching the development of these organizations with enthusiasm, understanding that if we brought these organizations together we could collaborate on resource sharing, strategy, and leveraging our collective power to upend zionist hegemony in our synagogues and community institutions. At times we’ve experimented with different partnerships and collaborations, and experienced how, if we were less siloed, more aligned and articulate about the places of our shared vision, we would be able to collectivize our resources and wisdom to become the defining cultural force of Jewish life. This is the space in which the Jewish Diaspora Movement is being born.
The story of this particular iteration of this vision began in earnest in 2022 when, as part of the JVP rabbinical council, Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg and I participated in JVP’s strategic planning conversations in Fall 2022 into early 2023. Those conversations led the two of us to many long hours of conversations about the Jewish Left as we saw it and as we dreamt what could become of it. Through that process, we got more and more clear that there was room in our organizing for something that brought together spiritual, cultural, educational communal Jewish life. While a lot was seeded inside of the political home of JVP, we saw that there is value in maturing the broader ecosystem that includes and goes beyond JVP.
We articulated what many of us have known for years: that there is overlapping but distinct work between the political project of solidarity with Palestinian liberation, and building a liberatory Jewish community and Judaism.
In Summer 2023 we began conducting one-to-one meetings with Jewish communal leaders who have been building Judaism outside of Zionism, diasporist Jewish communities, liberatory Judaism and Judaism beyond nationalism. We worked to talk to people from a range of identities, experiences, and positions of Jewish left cultural and ritual organizing and leading. After doing dozens of those meetings we were preparing to do focus groups of practitioners in various spheres: education, culture, organizing, clergy/spiritual leaders, etc. our plan was to begin these focus groups after the High Holidays in 2023. That was not to be.
We put down the project to focus on the urgent work of trying to stop the unfolding genocide in Gaza. When we picked it back up in spring 2024, we realized that the political moment had created a sense of urgency and inevitably for this kind of movement building. The need for a liberatory Judaism to rise to upend supremacist Judaism was essential.
In 2024 we convened a small circle of folks, who had expressed the most enthusiasm from our one-to-one’s the previous summer, to draft language trying to articulate a vision. We then circulated it to a wider circle of folks for feedback. At the end of 2024 we decided to gather a group of these practitioners in person for a retreat, understanding we would get much more done in person than hour by hour over zoom. We invited each person to bring one person with them. Rather than trying to create what would be an inevitably incomplete invitation list, we turned to relationships and existing networks of trust and comradery.
In February 2025, 40 individuals from various projects and organizations spent three days together dreaming up what is needed for a liberatory future, and what role Jewish community building plays. We wrestled with strategic questions and ultimately found our way to where we had broad alignment: the political and moral responsibility to connect and amplify the growing constellation of Jewish cultural and spiritual organizations that reject ethnonationalism and proudly value universal freedom and the sanctity of all life.
Moving out of the retreat we established a spokescouncil made up of representatives from the various committees we agreed were needed to move forward building this movement. The spokescouncil has met weekly since February 2024 and the committees (Coalition Building, Education, External Communications, Fundraising & Finance, Infrastructure, Internal Culture, Outreach) have been moving forward the work that led to the launch of the JDM last week.
The JDM launched on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot that commemorates Israelites gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai awaiting revelation, with 47 member organizations. The outreach team has been doing their recruitment from a list of over 220 (!!!) projects and organizations around the globe that are inline with JDM’s purpose and principles.
This first phase of the JDM is a time of consolidation of all that has been building over the past decades, bringing us together to claim our collective power and to provide a compelling counterweight to supremacist Judaism. But we are not organizing ourselves in the form of the legacy Jewish institutions we are seeking to supplant. We prioritize autonomy (minimal hierarchy, self-organizing), participation (democratic decision-making, shared leadership, and shared carrying out the work of our movement), and transparency (clear communication channels and processes). Our organizational structure celebrates the fact that we all have something to contribute and creates ways for our members to participate in the work and direction of our movement. These values and practices repair the disconnect between authority and participation found in most Jewish communal spaces and beyond. We are deliberately organizing ourselves differently to make new and different Judaisms possible.
This project will only succeed if we all roll up our sleeves to make it happen. Follow us on instagram, donate to the JDM so we can bring together our founding minyan of organizations for an in-person gathering to take this project where it needs to go, and spread the good word about us!
My deepest hope is that this new movement will prove to be a scaffold for meaning, community and creativity for those that once held Zionism as the central pillar of their Jewish lives and identities and an affirmation for those who have always embraced diaspora over nationalism. In this time of precarity and transformation, we are choosing to pull the threads of Jewish life that are life-affirming. We are mining our tradition for its liberatory wisdom, and celebrating that Jewish life has historically taken root, adapted and blossomed in many lands throughout the world.