Robert Bank is President and CEO of American Jewish World Service (AJWS), which works at the intersection of Jewish values and global issues to build a more equitable world by supporting community-driven change in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and by advocating in the U.S. for foreign policies that prioritize human rights and democratic norms. Prior to his work at AJWS, Robert served as COO at Gay Men’s Health Crisis and as an attorney litigating on behalf of vulnerable populations with the New York City Department of Law.
Robert Bank
By Robert Bank
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Opinion I’m a Jewish gay man who resisted apartheid. LGBTQ rights in the U.S. are slipping away from us.
As we celebrate another Pride Month, our nation is backsliding, and our hard-fought gains are in peril.
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Community Five Ways Harvey Milk Inspires My Work For Social Justice
It is difficult to imagine the contours of my life without the influence of one of my heroes: Harvey Milk, a social justice giant and the first openly gay elected official in California. I immigrated to the United States from South Africa in 1977, one year before Harvey’s assassination. As a young Jew who was…
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Community Our Jewish Responsibility To Help The Rohingya
I have been haunted for weeks by a photo of a Rohingya woman mourning her dead baby on the shores of Bangladesh. This photo appeared in The Huffington Post in late September, and I’ve seen dozens of similarly disturbing images on the Internet every day. This mother and child were among the more than half…
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Community Marching For Pride In New York — And Fighting For Activists Around The World
Two weeks ago, I was in Haiti visiting AJWS’s grantee partner Kouraj, which is the Creole word for “courage.” What an apt name for an organization led by courageous activists who are fighting for a very simple human right that still eludes people in more than 70 countries around the world. That right is the…
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Community Apartheid Bulldozed My Muslim Neighbors Out Of Existence — We Must Not Let That Happen Again.
I grew up on the southern tip of South Africa, not far from where the waters of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. As a child, I spent most of my weekends in my grandparents’ small store, located in a crowded and ethnically diverse marketplace in District Six, a Cape Town neighborhood long ago destroyed….
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