‘Clear violation of our policies’: Jewish nonprofit workers face pushback calling for Gaza cease-fire
Rabbis for Ceasefire held a morning prayer service near the U.S. Capitol in November. After hundreds of workers at Jewish nonprofits and synagogues signed a December letter calling for a cease-fire in Israel and Gaza, some employers pushed back and forced them to remove their names or affiliations from the document. Photo by Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld February 2, 2024
When Brenda Nelson came to work at San Francisco’s Jewish federation two days after Oct. 7, she expected that the staff would come together to comfort each other. Many had family and close friends in Israel. “It was awful and scary,” she recalled. “I cried, I reached out to people.”
But Nelson — who now acknowledges she was naive — said she did not anticipate how quickly the federation’s leadership would start emphasizing the need to defend Israel from political criticism.
One of the first resources shared with staff was a brochure about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Nelson felt was filled with offensive arguments. “If only the Middle East resembled the Middle West!” one section of the pamphlet read.
Nelson, who managed fundraising databases, started speaking out at staff meetings and pressing executives on why they would not support a cease-fire. A week after Oct. 7, she met with a leader at the organization to ask why there wasn’t a fund for Gaza, pointing to previous federation campaigns for Ukraine and survivors of the Maui wildfires.
“I said, ‘If this was anyone else, we would have done something by now,” she recalled. “And the executive told me, ‘But it’s not somebody else.’”
The San Francisco federation did not respond to a request for comment.
Nelson, 31, said she was given an audience with top leaders at the federation but ultimately told to resign if she was unhappy with the organization’s positions on Israel, and left in December. While she was not raised Jewish, Nelson learned as an adult that her grandfather was Jewish and began reconnecting with her Jewish roots, touring old Jewish quarters in Europe and taking the federation job.
She became one of 900 employees of Jewish organizations who signed a letter last month calling for a cease-fire in Israel and Gaza, and organizers say that many other signatories have faced similar pressures. Those behind the letter say they do not believe anyone has been fired as a result of signing the document, which avoids strident rhetoric about the conflict, but it is unknown whether other signatories have left their jobs over political disagreements related to it.
These tensions underscore how raw emotions are within many corners of the Jewish community. Many top rabbis and Jewish leaders expressed unwavering solidarity with Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and argued that a cease-fire would leave Hamas in power and allow it to continue attacking Israelis. These views seem to resonate with many American Jews, including tens of thousands who turned out for a pro-Israel march in Washington, D.C., in November. But younger Jews — including some of those working at Jewish nonprofits and synagogues — are more likely to be openly critical of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack.
For example, 70% of Jewish voters over the age of 35 supported the Biden administration’s decision to block a United Nations resolution calling for a cease-fire, according to the Jewish Electorate Institutewhile 55% of younger Jews opposed the veto.
Establishment leaders have also denounced activists from groups like IfNotNow, a left-wing Jewish group opposed to Israeli policies toward the Palestinians that has organized thousands of young Jews to call for a cease-fire, including many who signed the open letter. Critics say that by aligning themselves with anti-Zionist organizations, these Jews risk removing themselves from the mainstream.
“The Jewish left will have no seats at any tables besides the ones they set for themselves,” Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, wrote in an Nov. 30 op-ed for the Forward.
Names, employers removed
The open letter was partly intended to push back against these claims, by showing that some Jewish supporters of a cease-fire were within the ranks of mainstream Jewish institutions.
“There was a message being put out that they were not in any way representative of American Jews,” said Dove Kent, the former strategic director of Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish group, who helped organize the letter. “We wanted to bring attention to the fact that so many of those people are working at Jewish day schools, teaching Sunday school classes, and are working at Jewish charity organizations.”
Signatures were gathered over the course of several weeks by a group that included Kent and Yonah Liberman, who previously led communications for IfNotNow.
The letter calls on President Joe Biden and Congress to work toward “a ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and a commitment towards a long-term political solution that ensures the freedom and collective safety of Israelis and Palestinians” and referenced Genesis and Psalms.
Activists who organized the letter said that several Jewish groups threatened to fire employees who signed it. Others, the activists said, demanded that their staff remove organizational affiliations from the document.
“Some employees named Repair the World as their employer, which is in clear violation of our policy,” Julia Malaga, the group’s chief operating officer, wrote in a Slack message to staff obtained by the Forward. “We expect that they remove Repair’s name immediately.”
In an email to the Forward, Cindy Greenberg, Repair the World’s chief executive, said that while the organization “respects its staff’s right to freedom of speech” it requires them to “avoid doing and or saying anything that would lead someone to reasonably attribute their personal positions to Repair the World.”
Other organizations whose employees originally listed them on the letter and later removed them include the Shalom Hartman Institute, a think tank, and Mishkan Chicago, an alternative synagogue.
Jakir Manela, chief of Adamah, which promotes Jewish environmentalism, said he was OK with staff signing the letter as individuals but asked them to take the organization’s name off. “It’s not issue-related, it’s just that staff are not supposed to sign onto something as Adamah without permission,” he said.
Asked if he could recall another instance of asking staff to remove the organization’s name from a letter, Manela said he could not, but added that the policy was relatively new.
The president of SVARA, which describes itself as a “traditionally radical” yeshiva catering to queer Jews, offered a similar explanation. Rabbi Benay Lappe said that she encouraged staff to sign any letters they “felt called to” but asked them not to name SVARA for fear “that the signatories could be understood to represent the policies, positions, or views of the organizations that employ them.”
Organizers of the letter are skeptical of these arguments. They noted that there was a disclaimer at the top saying that signatures did not represent official endorsements by the organizations named.
“People are very able to understand someone’s employment being listed for identification purposes and not meaning that the organization is signing on,” said Kent. “It’s such a common practice.”
Repair the World also tried to convince Kent to remove the organization’s name from anonymous signatories on the letter (those who had signed as “Anonymous, Repair the World”). Kent declined to remove the affiliation.
Some institutions more receptive to worker calls
Not every organization has pressured workers who signed the letter. Some signatories — like the nine from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice — work for organizations that already endorsed the call for a cease-fire.
Several employees of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel organization that has held off on explicit calls for a cease-fire, also signed the letter. One signatory who works at J Street said management asked him to remove the organization’s name beside his signature because the letter does not represent the organization’s policy.
The employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of professional repercussions, said he declined to remove J Street’s name and did not hear anything more from his managers.
“I felt that I was being honest about who I was and the values that I’m working for,” the employee said. “It is disappointing that through my work at J Street — fighting for a future of peace and equality for Israelis and Palestinians — that I can’t fight for an end to this war.”
Nathan Wolfson, a J Street spokesperson, said that the organization had not pressured any employees to remove their affiliation from the letter and noted that Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group’s president, praised the employees who signed during a December appearance on MSNBC.
In a statement to the Forward after this article was published Friday, Ben-Ami said, “I am really sorry to hear that any employee of J Street felt pressured in any way around this letter. That is completely inappropriate and not in keeping with our organizational values.”
Others said that their bosses seemed open to employees both signing the letter and pushing for change within their workplaces. Jules Santiago Anderson, who teaches art to preschoolers at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, said they signed the letter after raising concerns about how the institute was responding to the crisis in Israel and Gaza.
Anderson, who is not Jewish, said the response they got from senior leaders was that they were glad they felt comfortable signing the letter. “More recently, they’ve told me that they’d like to make the workplace more explicitly anti-Zionist friendly,” they said.
Paul Geduldig, chief executive of the San Francisco JCC, updated an open letter that he posted on the center’s website. While the original language included passing mention of Palestinian suffering, the new version included a full paragraph on the “growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
The JCC, which had at least one other employee who signed the letter, also removed a link to a local Israel advocacy website and added prominent links to Standing Together and Combatants for Peace, two organizations focused on Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, and the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a U.S. think tank.
Geduldig said that the community center made a decision shortly after Oct. 7 not to focus on advocacy related to the conflict, instead emphasizing a “big tent” approach, a decision that included prohibiting political speeches at a Shabbat dinner for hundreds of people shortly after the attack.
He has also held meetings for employees every Wednesday since Oct. 7, and learned how diverse staff opinions are when it comes to the conflict. Geduldig said that he would “prefer” that workers did not identify themselves with their employer while engaging in political activity, but said that there was no Israel litmus test for working at the center and that leadership was not trying to “silence anyone.”
“When I think about the younger staff that work here — that choose to work in a Jewish organization, that care about the Jewish future, I want to build a bridge to them,” Geduldig said. “Not close the door.”
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