Voice Your Values in '08!

This pasThis past May, Moishe House Boston helped organize the Righteous Indignation conference. At the conference, 150 young activists from 13 states around the US joined together to explore how Jewish activists can collaborate with faith organizations and grassroots groups to voice social justice and environmental issues as religious community priorities in the ’08 election.

Building on the momentum of an anthology I co-edited, Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, the Righteous Indignation conference emerged out of a growing sense that I and others shared that the national debate on religion and politics had skewed too far to the right in the past two elections. Responding to this trend, our anthology attempted to articulate a compelling and text-based Jewish language to talk about the pressing social justice and environmental issues of our day. Though our book was Jewish, our project is part of a larger effort of activists, scholars and clergy from several faiths to find religious guidance and inspiration for our social justice work.

We knew our book was an important step, but words can be empty when they do not lead to action. We asked ourselves how we could use the anthology to empower Jewish activists with the Jewish and activist tools they needed to help reframe the religious debate around this election, and strengthen Jewish social justice efforts in the future. To this end, thanks to the help of several Moisheniks, we decided to organize our conference around issue tracks and skills workshops that integrated Jewish learning, practical campaign information, skills training, and campaign planning in order to prepare participants to carry out meaningful follow up work after the conference.

While I knew that I cared about the election, what was most inspiring to me at the conference was the energy of young people to build a wider Jewish social justice movement. As one participant put it, “I can't describe how inspiring and energizing it was to meet so many amazing progressive Jews and feel a part of that community.” Another participant said, “I am so excited to see what we can do together around this election, but also what we can do together for years to come.”

Moving forward, alumni are planning voter registration days over the summer and early fall, organizing creative media events around the Interfaith Week of Action on Poverty and Politics, working with the AVODAH/AJWS alumni partnership to plan large debate watch parties in October, and working to create opportunities for voter turnout work in early November. If you are interested in helping folks in your Moishe House community to voice your values this election season, please don’t hesitate to contact me at margieklein1@gmail.com or check out www.righteousindignation.info for more information. We will have our conference workshop materials up soon, so stay tuned!