Racial Justice Guide

The Jewish community is stronger and more authentically rooted in justice when everyone has an equal seat at the table. This moment calls us to do the best, most authentic, and most effective work for justice that we can. We know that there are many kinds of injustice in our world, including racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy. This guide approaches our drive towards diversity, equity, and inclusion, primarily through a lens of race; it offers ways to understand, and work against, racism in our organizations. However, we also acknowledge the ways in which racism is intertwined with other forms of oppression, and in particular how antisemitism and racism are linked through white supremacy in the United States.

To do our part in dismantling these systems of oppression and building a better, more just world, we need to understand how they affect each other, and we must do true coalition building. This racial justice guide is intended to be a resource for Jewish nonprofit organizations. It has been written for all stages of leadership, as racial justice and inclusion are everyone’s responsibilities. In each section, we share an example of how Avodah worked through this stage of our process, and resources for how your organization might put this into practice. 

Click here for a PDF version of Avodah’s Racial Justice Guide

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Acknowledgements

This guide was compiled with input by Nate Looney, Kira Manso Brown, Sasha Raskin-Yin, Rachel Glicksman, Dani Levine, Chava Shervington, Jared Jackson, Sarra Alpert, Cheryl Cook, Emily Becker, and Leila Bilick. Huge thanks as well to Suzanne Feinspan, who worked with us on our initial racial justice plan, and to the many organizations and leaders who have created tools and learning that have inspired our work and that we have incorporated into this guide. We are especially grateful to the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative and Ilana Kaufman and her team for their support of this guide.