Rabbi Deborah Goldberg discusses how her experiences in the Justice Fellowship and HUC propelled her career and commitment to Jewish communal life.
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Get notified when applications open for the 2025-2026 Justice Fellowship. Otherwise, scroll down to continue learning about the Justice Fellowship and the impact our Fellows have on their communities.
Join a cohort of local changemakers passionate about exploring justice, Jewish life, and the powerful intersections between the two. Fellows build a pluralistic, diverse community built on mutual trust and respect through 8 months of evening and weekend sessions, dialogues, retreats, mentoring, and community events. Our systemic analysis and solidarity-based approach will ignite your growth as a Jew acting impactfully in movements for social justice.
If you’re in your 20s or 30s and have been engaging in sustained social and economic justice work in a professional, volunteer, or personal capacity, we’re looking for you. Our Justice Fellows are activists, organizers, educators, social workers, non-profit staffers, movement leaders, artists, lawyers, health care professionals, in-between jobs, and so much more. Our Justice Fellows are visioning, exploring, and building pathways to a better future for all.
We want you to join us.
Find your people and take part in cultivating a powerful, creative, diverse Jewish community oriented in social justice. Learn together how to contribute as Jewish people to the broader justice movement. Build a community where your Judaism flourishes and integrates with your understanding of collective liberation.
Develop a systemic analysis of the root causes and effects of economic, social, racial, environmental, and other injustices. Trace the intersections of different faces of oppression and historical and contemporary intervention strategies.
Through a year-end leadership project, you’ll build a tangible articulation of how you’ve advanced your analysis and work for justice. Past projects have included using the counting of the Omer to live a zero-waste lifestyle, a family book club, leading a panel of Chicago Jewish organizers during Jewish Currents magazine’s fall release party, and facilitating a group dialogue about how we can better align our money usage to our values. They have been featured in the New York Times, The Rachel Ray Show, The Forward, and more.
Engage in deep learning of Jewish texts, history, rituals, and culture. You’ll develop throughlines between your Jewishness and your justice commitments, and locate yourself in an unbroken history of progressive Jews resisting oppression.
This year, Chicago Fellows will learn through a lens of environmental stewardship to trace broader sites of justice and injustice, and deepen their Jewish justice movement relationships.
The Justice Fellowship brings together a pluralistic cohort of social justice leaders working on a diverse set of local issues in a variety of ways. Our Fellows are excited to break out of their personal silos and dig into a more holistic learning approach to making change in their communities. They seek to build power, solidarity, language, and strategy for a Jewishly-rooted movement committed to doing this work effectively, collaboratively, and sustainably.
In short, they:
• Have some experience in either their professional, volunteer or personal life working on domestic social, racial, environmental, and/or economic justice issues;
• Have a demonstrated interest in exploring the intersection of Jewish life and social justice, and developing a deeper relationship between the two;
• Have an active interest in building a values-based community and developing the power of a local Jewish network during and after the Fellowship.
• Have an ability to listen and stay in relationship across with others in a diverse, pluralistic community that reflects a multitude of ways of living and thinking Jewishly.
The Fellowship seeks to build a cohort reflecting many, diverse Jewish practices. We encourage people of all Jewish backgrounds to apply. Prior knowledge of Hebrew or Jewish texts is not required or expected and the program will be stimulating regardless of one’s textual experience.
Our Justice Fellows are typically in their mid-20s or 30s, but we welcome all applicants in their early and mid-career stages. If you’re unsure whether you should apply for the Fellowship–we bet you’d be a great candidate! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Thanks to the generosity of funders, the tuition for participation in the program is subsidized.
Since the Avodah Justice Fellowship is both a professional and personal development program, we encourage employers, when relevant, to cover all or at least part of the tuition. We can provide additional documentation to help secure professional development time or funding from your organization if needed.
As an economic justice organization, we are also committed to offering a sliding scale model, with a scale that is based either on the your employer’s budget or on your own income depending on whether the you or your employer is paying.
We do our best to ensure that no accepted candidates are prevented from attending due to financial reasons, including those who engage with social justice work on a personal rather than professional level.
Rabbi Deborah Goldberg discusses how her experiences in the Justice Fellowship and HUC propelled her career and commitment to Jewish communal life.
Continue reading
Here are stories from just a few of the many Avodahniks organizing to build worker power and a more just United States.
We asked three of this year’s Justice Fellows what brought them to the program and what they will be taking with them.
We’re here to help you through the application process and will be available every step of the way, from start to finish. We know that everyone’s background and needs are different, and can answer any questions you may have.
