When Julia Caplan, Julie Iny and Rachel Eisner founded Jewish Voice for Peace in 1996, it was out of a sense of necessity. Yitzchak Rabin had been assassinated the year before, and a spate of bombings by Hamas had led to Benjamin Netanyahu’s first election as prime minister of Israel. According to Caplan, she and her friends were driven to action when Netanyahu opened an archaeological tunnel in Jerusalem, violating the Oslo Accords commitment to maintaining status quo until final-status talks. The opening resulted in protests and many deaths, as well as threatened the peace process overall. “We knew something was wrong and we wanted to protest. President Clinton had co-signed the Oslo Accords and we wanted him to hold Netanyahu accountable,” remembers Caplan. “Naively, I thought there’d be other Jews protesting. I was 22 years old, and my first step was to call other Jewish organizations to find the ‘grown ups’ who were protesting and who we could join.”
Caplan and her friends—who were living in the San Francisco Bay Area—didn’t find any such ‘grown-ups’ in their community—although there had been Jews speaking out against the occupation since it began. So they took it upon themselves to organize a rally. “When we first started, we didn’t set out to start an organization,” says Caplan, who is still a member of JVP though no longer a core organizer. She was 22 at the time, and “organized around the clock during the first few years of JVP’s existence.”
Today, JVP has 35 chapters across the United States and more than 32,000 “active dues paying members,” according to its spokesperson. Since October 7, Jewish Voice for Peace has gained notoriety as one of the moving forces behind protests of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and the campus encampments that swept the United States this past spring calling for an end to U.S. military support for Israel. The group is controversial: They work closely with Palestinian leadership, and their political use of Jewish symbols and rituals has led to criticisms by mainstream American Jews—the overwhelming majority of whom still support the State of Israel—that the group tokenizes Jewish identity in its activism and allies with antisemites. Others point to JVP’s willingness to center Palestinian narratives as an indication that they are not serious about building peace in the region.
“To the best of my understanding, their strategy is to endorse and advocate exclusively on the terms of Palestinians and Palestinian activists,” Aharon Dardik, cofounder of Jews for Ceasefire at Columbia University told Moment‘s Dan Freedman back in May. JVP was banned from that campus earlier this year for employing “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” in an unauthorized protest. “While I have a lot of respect for their organizing, there are significant ways in which many student activists are either closely aligned with violent or militant groups that I cannot support, or just tone deaf to the Jewish-Israeli experience.”
Is JVP an authentically Jewish voice for peace? Or does its alienation of so many mainstream American Jews—not to mention Israelis—make them primarily a voice of dissension and conflict? What can JVP show us about the dynamics in the Jewish world today, in the past, and into the future?
Reclaiming Jewishness
Caplan said that after those first JVP events back in the 1990s, some attendees told her that “it was the first time they participated in anything Jewish because they felt they couldn’t be themselves in Jewish spaces. We really brought together a Jewish community. It was a place for a lot of Jews to reclaim their Jewishness, actually.” This theme has continued today.
Photo of Estee Chandler, Founding Organizer of Jewish Voice for Peace-Los Angeles, at an event to shut down Hollywood Blvd. in support of a ceasefire in Gaza.
Caplan remembers early discussions about JVP’s vision and mission. “One of the major decisions we had to make in JVP was whether we were Zionists or not. And in those early days we decided it was more important to follow principles than to have a label, so we didn’t take a stand,” she says, noting that the fact that today’s JVP is so explicitly anti-Zionist is a “reflection of change in political times.”
As JVP’s profile grew, so did the pushback. Caplan reports she “was burnt out and targeted by death threats.” She points to the pro-Israel, Boston-based Committee of Accuracy of Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) referring to her as an apologist for terrorism as one instance of the rhetoric being turned up. Eventually, Caplan stepped away.
JVP began supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), a Palestinian-led movement to pressure Israel to comply with international law modeled off of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, in 2015. Four years later, JVP officially embraced anti-Zionism. In an interview with Jewish Currents, former JVP Executive Director Rebecca Vilkomerson shared that this decision was made in collaboration with Palestinian activists: “We orient ourselves to being good partners to our partners rather than [having] good standing in the Jewish community.” This sentiment has parallels to the mid-20th century, when leftist Jews who felt a greater loyalty to the “global proletariat” than to the Jewish nation feared that a militaristic Jewish state would undermine class consciousness among working class Jews.
Caplan still attends JVP events, for instance visiting the Shabbat encampment at UC Berkeley in April. “My core beliefs have never changed. Every human being is precious, and some of that comes from Jewish tradition,” she says. “I believe we all have a responsibility to work toward justice. I believe deeply in the work that JVP does. I have put my time and effort into other efforts, but I will always support JVP.”
Fierce Pushback
The pushback against Jewish Voice for Peace has certainly been fierce from many in the Jewish world. JIMENA—a Zionist Mizrachi and Sephardic organization—asserts that JVP’s mission “tokenizes, appropriates, revises and explicitly lies…to promote a hostile, anti-Israel agenda.” UCLA student Rachel Burnett told Freedman that “the JVP approach of BDS and isolating Israel is an intellectually bad approach. They oscillate between tokenizing themselves and self-flagellation.” Jonathan Sarna, a prominent Jewish historian, went so far as to say that “some of them are Jews who have deep roots in the progressive left or are intermarried Jews who still feel the sting of opposition to their choice of spouse, and then this is the way of getting back—by being part of a mainstream movement.”
Ironically, many of the “tokenization” criticisms come from efforts by JVP members to bring more Judaism into their organization. In 2011, a group of rabbis founded the JVP Rabbinical Council to create a sense of community and camaraderie for rabbinic leaders passionate about supporting Palestine. The group evolved into an advisory board that helps organize events and set up rituals during protests.
“When we occupied the Capitol Rotunda in October,” says JVP’s Media Coordinator Liv Kunins-Berkowitz, “the rabbis were the last people to be arrested, davening Mincha. Political action and prayer were interwoven. There’s a way that our actions make Judaism feel alive.” Rabbi Brant Rosen, a cofounder of JVP’s rabbinic council, dons a yarmulke and tefillin at protests. He explains that although JVP “is not a specifically religious organization,” using religious symbols in protests has “nothing to do with tokenization. It has to do with taking our values seriously and bringing them to bear in a very real way in the world in which we live.”
Gaza Graveyard: Boston rally from Dec 2, 2006. Photo Credit: JVP via Flickr.
Rosen, who leads an explicitly anti-Zionist synagogue in Chicago, understands Judaism as “a spiritual tradition that talks about tikkun olam, that talks about repairing the world.” He places activism—not religious practices—at the center of his Judaism. This notion has roots in the Reform movement, which early on valued bettering the world through social justice over Jewish law.
But how does Rosen understand the strong emphasis in Jewish tradition of the land of Israel, and the longing to return from exile? “I think the relationship to the land is undeniable, you know; you can’t avoid Eretz Israel in Jewish tradition…but generally speaking, I would say it’s more a spiritual sense rather than a literal one. It’s a mentality,” he says. The return to the land is something he understands “in Messianic terms.” But ultimately he believes that, as diasporic Jews, “it’s our job to repair the world wherever we live in the world.” His attachment to Zion is a spiritual ideal: “We emphasize Zion consciousness over Zionism.”
In fact, Rosen believes “Zion consciousness” is in direct contradiction to Zionism—it means that “refugees should be returned, all refugees should be fought for and their rights to return should be recognized, whether it’s Palestinian refugees, or any other people who seek repatriation.” This kind of inversion of traditional interpretations is also reflected in the religious materials JVP creates. Its 2024 Passover Haggadah replaces the traditional items of the seder plate with foods that symbolize peace and Palestinian oppression by the Israeli government and West Bank settlers. “We add this olive to our seder plate as a reminder that we must all be God’s bearers of peace and hope in the world,” reads the Haggadah. “At the same time, we eat this olive in sorrow, mindful that olive trees, the source of livelihood for Palestinian farmers, are regularly chopped down, burned and uprooted by Israeli settlers and the Israeli authorities.”
Yet for many Jews, the physical land of Israel remains at the core of their Jewish expression. In an op-ed for Tablet, Jewish refusenik and former Israeli Minister of the Interior Nathan Sharansky and Zionist scholar Gil Troy referred to Jewish anti-Zionists as “un-Jews,” or Jews who seek to “disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism, the sense of Jewish peoplehood, while undoing decades of identity-building…They believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness.”
For better or worse, the tide may be changing, at least in America—American Jews aged 18-29 have a limited emotional connection to Israel, notes the Pew Research Center. Fifty-one percent of people belonging to that age group feel no attachment to the land.
A New Era
Since October 7, JVP has been launched into much wider prominence than ever before. Yet as more and more young Jews find themselves wanting to advocate on behalf of Palestinians, JVP’s approach to—some would say ignorance of—traditional Judaism is hard for many to swallow.
“People in our observant community who…want to engage in progressive [pro-Palestinian] organizing…don’t feel that these organizations are speaking to the unique challenges that we deal with,” Noam Weinreich, a key Orthodox founder of a new Jewish-Palestinian advocacy group, Halachic Left, says of most progressive Jewish organizations.
Halachic Left protesters demonstrate on the National Mall against Netanyahu’s visit to Washington DC.
For instance, although JVP claims to represent all Jews, and even to have a few Orthodox members, chapters regularly hold protests on Shabbat, precluding many observant Jews from participating. Members of Halachic Left are perhaps more representative of—and hence in a better position to influence—the more mainstream American Jews that form the backbone of Jewish support for Israel’s policies. In contrast to some JVP chapters’ botched attempts to be Jewishly-informed—the backwards Hebrew on a symbolic seder plate at a University of Southern California being one notable example—Halachic Left seems more sophisticated. A sign at one protest read: “We’re machmir on Hillul Hashem,” Hebrew for “we’re stringent on desecrating God’s name.”
Yet although Halachic Left’s founders are thoroughly Modern Orthodox, they report receiving much of the same pushback as JVP within their communities. “There is currently a pervasive culture of silence that prevents honest discussion of Israel and Palestine in many halachic communities. People are often afraid to even say the word ‘Palestinian’ in shul and are scared that criticizing Israel will lead to being marginalized from the community,” Weinreich shares of his own experiences.
Eliana Padwa, the other founder of Halakhic Left, says that some people question her Judaism, telling her that she tokenizes Jewish voices. But Padwa is entrenched in the Orthodox community and in the Jewish faith; protesting with prayer is just one way that she actualizes her Judaism. The “tokenism” discourse is “used to silence or delegitimize left wing Jewish people,” she says. ”We would never claim to represent all Jews, because Jews do not need to have a single voice on this issue.”
Featured Image: Jewish Voice for Peace-Seattle, Palestine Solidarity Committee, Voices of Palestine, Dyke Community Activists and Women in Black joined together to protest the Siege of Gaza in downtown Seattle on December 2nd, 2006. Photo credit: courtesy of JVP.
Top image: A photo of Julia Caplan “from very early JVP days. Our local community supported radio station was under threat of being cut, and JVP joined others in a rally. This was probably 1998.” Photo courtesy of Julia Caplan.