Avodah Justice Fellow Mackey Landy grew up going to Hebrew school, preparing for his bar mitzvah, and celebrating the High Holidays with his family. Judaism was always present in his life, but mostly as something he felt obligated to do rather than something he felt motivated to embrace. “I was Jewish,” he says, “but I wasn’t really being Jewish.” After his bar mitzvah, he stopped going to Hebrew school, and over the next decade, Jewish life gradually drifted to the margins of his world.
Making sense of the moment
Working at Columbia University in the months after October 7th felt especially disorienting for Mackey. He found himself fielding calls from worried family members who had seen national headlines about rising tensions and antisemitism, while his own day-to-day life on campus felt different from what they were describing. With no real space to process these complexities, he started to feel the need for Jewish community more acutely than ever before.
Looking for a place to sit in the discomfort
“The Jews I’ve been around in my life, my family, my friends,” he says, “have been more or less raised similarly and view the world similarly.” They are mostly secular, not particularly observant, and not very tied to Jewish institutions. In Mackey’s experience, they rarely grappled with big questions together.
October 7th was the catalyst that pushed Mackey to actively seek out Jewish community. For someone who has spent his adult life trying to make a difference, it felt urgent. “If you want to be an authentic, effective, proud change maker,” he says, “you need to fully explore and engage with your full self.” He wanted history, context, and as he puts it, “a progressive space for Jews who can critically think about this moment.” He found that in Avodah’s Justice Fellowship.
“I have some tools now,” he says. “And a built-in network to explore these things.”
Reaching across difference
The Justice Fellowship brings together Jewish adults in their 20s and 30s navigating today’s complex social and communal challenges. What surprised Mackey the most wasn’t the content, but rather the people. For the first time, he found himself alongside Jews raised in Orthodox and Conservative communities, people who came from very different worlds. They became peers, friends, people he could sit with and have real conversations about identity, history, and what it means to be Jewish in this moment.
“I expected more of a divide,” he says. “It doesn’t feel like there’s this huge wedge between us.” But finding common ground, he’s learned, doesn’t mean the conversations are easy.
This is a challenge all community groups face. He’s been in left-leaning organizing spaces since high school, and he’s watched coalitions fall apart because people couldn’t move past disagreements. One of the greatest lessons he’s learned is that you don’t need to have full consensus to move forward; you just need enough common ground to keep going together.
A practice ground to learn and grow
Mackey describes the Justice Fellowship as a practice ground, with a session on Israel and Gaza pushing them to engage everything they’ve learned. For many Fellows, the topic carries personal weight with family in Israel or a particular way of understanding what Israel means for Jewish safety and identity. Real differences surfaced, people were emotional, and some struggled to engage at all. Mackey, who acknowledges he doesn’t carry that same personal history, mostly listened. “I was really grateful to have that experience,” he says, “just to sit there and observe and take everything in.”
He’s thought a lot about why it’s so hard to stay in that discomfort. Nuance, he says, is gone. Social media has made everything binary, and binary thinking, he believes, is genuinely dangerous. “[People] need to make sense of things. So it’s either this or that. And I just don’t think that’s what our world is,” he says. “We all live in the gray area.” The Fellowship, for Mackey, is a place to actually sit in that complexity. “I was looking for a place where we could sit in that discomfort and really get into things.”
A legacy worth honoring
The Fellowship has been challenging his assumptions in unexpected ways, not just about people but about institutions and history he hadn’t thought much about before. Ruth Messinger, a longtime force in NYC politics, led a discussion on how the Jewish diaspora has built lasting institutions in America. Immigrants who arrived with nothing and did the slow, hard work of organizing, building community, and creating infrastructure that has lasted generations. Mackey found it genuinely moving, even for institutions he politically disagrees with. “We started from nothing,” he says, “and built all of these amazing organizations…because of hard work. It’s a cool legacy.”
A start, not an ending
For Mackey, that legacy feels personal. He’s spent his career moving between art and politics, building power in a local and specific way. In his 20s, he lived in China as a graduate student and, through filmmaking, focused on intercultural dialogue. Back in New York, that interest translated into organizing. He runs social media for Indivisible Western Queens, does content work for City Council Member Julie Won’s office, and is currently the video producer on a congressional campaign ahead of the June 23rd primary. The Fellowship has helped him see that work as part of a longer story.
The primary on June 23rd also happens to coincide with the end of the Fellowship, and he’s not sure what’s on the other side of either. For his Fellowship JLO (Jewish Learning Opportunity), their capstone project at the end of the program year, he’s planning a Shabbat dinner focused on economic power, a space where people can think collectively about how to reclaim some agency from corporations that feel too big and too misaligned with their values. He’s mused on whether or not it’ll be a single event or if it could lead to something more.The Shabbat dinner is just the tip of the iceberg of a bigger idea, that the Jewish diaspora, divided across geography, generation, and politics, can find its way back to shared values and history. He grapples with this vision, aware that he’s still figuring out what his role in it looks like.
“It’s a start,” he says of the fellowship. “It’s not the ending, but it’s a really good place to begin.”
