Jewish Voice for Peace doesn’t just oppose the war in Gaza; it challenges the link between Jewish identity and support for Israel.
In the early-morning hours of October 7, when most Americans were asleep, Elena Stein began to get word of something happening in southern Israel. Scrambling to get a sense of what was going on, a handful of her colleagues in Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish-led pro-Palestinian group, leaped into action and started contacting everyone they knew in the area.
By 5 a.m., the scale of the unfolding massacre by Hamas was becoming unnervingly clear: One staff member was on the phone with contacts in the Gaza and Israel when he learned that two of his own family members had been killed, according to Stein, the group’s director of organizing strategy.
“That is how it began for us,” she said. “There was never a moment where any of this was theoretical.”
Four days later, after Israel ordered more than 1 million people living in the northern half of Gaza to evacuate and was already pounding densely populated neighborhoods with air strikes, Jewish Voice for Peace held its first demonstration. In Brooklyn, nearly 1,000 Jewish New Yorkers gathered at Grand Army Plaza, chanting for hours until they were hoarse, before marching to the home of Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, where dozens sat in the street until police carted them away.
JVP, as it’s known, has been agitating for an end to what it describes as Israel’s “apartheid” regime for the past 30 years. With the outbreak of the current war, though, the group has never been more prominent. It has thrust itself into the white-hot center of discourse around the conflict. Led by Jews, it rebukes arguments from some pro-Israel voices who expand the definition of antisemitism to include virtually all criticism of Israel. For its part, JVP says it is intolerable that Israel is destroying Gaza in the supposed interest of their safety as Jews. “Not in our name,” is its rallying cry; its most pressing demand: “Cease-fire now.”
The group’s demonstrations have broken out among larger protests through its guerrilla tactics: Jewish people and their allies appearing by surprise in a high-security location, clad in identical black T-shirts, and singing in unison. On October 18, hundreds massed inside the U.S. Capitol and were led away in handcuffs. In Philadelphia and Chicago, JVP members shut down the city’s train stations during rush hour. In Oakland, 700 activists staged a sit-in at a federal building. In Los Angeles, more than 1,000 came out in the rain to shut down a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. Similar demonstrations took over slices of Atlanta, Durham, and Seattle.
And in New York, JVP has appeared again and again. On October 27, it staged its biggest action yet with hundreds of protesters flooding into Grand Central Terminal and shutting the station down during the evening rush hour. A little over a week later, hundreds arrived incognito at the Statue of Liberty, sneaking enormous banners through security and unfurling them at the base of the monument to once again demand a cease-fire. In its most recent action on Sunday afternoon, hundreds assembled on the Manhattan Bridge, shutting down traffic for hours.
In sheer scale and size, the protests against the Israel-Hamas war — many of which have dwarfed the comparatively smaller JVP actions — have come as a welcome shock to veteran activists like Kaleem Hawa, an organizer with Palestinian Youth Movement, which coordinates with Jewish Voice for Peace. “The immense showing of popular support for Palestine, in the West, is not emerging spontaneously — it’s a product of years of mobilization and relationship building and the development of infrastructures,” Hawa said. “And so for me, it’s beautiful to understand that the careful, principled work of a movement over the years is helping to mobilize in such a major, disruptive way.”
The most contentious JVP action so far took place two weeks ago outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., a demonstration co-sponsored by the progressive Jewish group IfNotNow and the Democratic Socialists of America. As hundreds of protesters laid 11,000 electric candles on the ground to commemorate the number of Palestinians reportedly killed up to that point, a small group from JVP took positions at several of the building’s entrances and linked arms to block the doors. When Capitol police officers arrived, they immediately began making arrests, kicking over candles and firing jets of mace into the faces of protesters. Online, accusations flew that the protesters had tried to “storm” the building. California representative Brad Sherman went on X to call them “pro-#Hamas demonstrators” and accused them of trying to break into the building. Police meanwhile accused protesters of resisting arrest and pepper-spraying its officers, a claim JVP strenuously denied. The goal, organizers said later, was not to trap lawmakers inside but rather to force them to exit through one remaining open door so they would have no choice but to hear protesters’ voices.
The D.C. dustup notwithstanding, these actions have for the most part proceeded peacefully, and police have been relatively restrained — especially in contrast to police conduct toward Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Rosalind Petchesky, a JVP member who’s been arrested twice at recent protests, including the sit-in at Grand Central, said she and others had been treated with “unusual respect” by police. “I was very aware, both times that I was arrested, that if I were a Black woman, a brown woman, a Palestinian woman, I might not be treated this way,” she said.
JVP’s actions are highly choreographed to maintain the element of surprise. According to several people familiar with the process, would-be participants must provide two references from people familiar to the group, and once they are accepted, they are organized into smaller groups acting in concert with one another. The protests are planned by a small central group of organizers, who typically tell participants the details with less than 24 hours notice .
Discipline around messaging is similarly tight, which includes avoiding chants that have sparked controversy at other rallies and limiting slogans to a handful of preplanned songs and demands for a cease-fire, an end to what the group describes as “genocide” in Gaza, and freedom for Palestinians. (The group does include an allusion to the controversial “From the river to the sea” chant in its mission statement: “We picture Palestinians — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — living with their inalienable rights respected, building schools and hospitals and planting olive groves with the resources they need.”)
JVP has also kept up its work during the long stretches of uneasy calm. Over the years, it has taken part in campaigns against the main U.S. pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC, and against companies like Caterpillar, whose bulldozers Israeli authorities have used to demolish Palestinian houses in the West Bank. In 2015, the board of JVP voted to fully endorse the economic pressure campaign known as “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.”
And it is this dogged organizing, in relatively normal times, that has helped the group seize the moment so decisively amid the urgency of the current war. It can pursue high-risk actions in secrecy by what Jay Saper, a JVP organizer based in New York, likes to say is “moving at the speed of trust.”
“We built such incredible trust through organizing together through the years,” Saper said. “That has prepared us to be able to recognize our role and be able to move together through this crisis.”
For as long as Zionism has existed as a political force in Jewish life, so too have Jewish anti-Zionists. From its birth in the late-19th century, the nationalist movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine has met some resistance from within Jewish communities. One strain of thought, especially common in Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox communities, opposed the creation of a Jewish state on religious grounds,, arguing that the reclamation of the Holy Land can only come with the Messiah. Another camp, which included the socialist Bundist movement, argued that Jewish safety would be better secured by simultaneously strengthening Jewish cultural ties and the power of organized labor in the Diaspora than by emigration to Palestine. After the Holocaust, both strains of anti-Zionism were greatly reduced but never disappeared. Religious anti-Zionism persists to this day in pockets of Haredi communities, most notably with the Neturei Karta, whose members have been ubiquitous at antiwar marches in New York since October 7.
Jewish Voice for Peace partially follows in the footsteps of the Bundists, basing its opposition to Zionism in secular politics of anti-colonialism and anti-racism, rooted in the idea that the millennia of persecution should instill in Jews the importance of solidarity with Palestinians. Founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley undergrads, the group — which welcomes non-Jewish members but is overwhelmingly made up of Jews — has spread nationwide and has long found a home on college campuses like Columbia, which earlier this month banned its chapters of JVP and Students for Justice in Palestine.
While many progressive Jewish groups take issue with Israeli treatment of Palestinians and are sharply critical of the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu, JVP is perhaps the most prominent among them to explicitly call itself anti-Zionist, which the group defines as “criticism of Israeli state policies, and/or moral, ethical, or religious criticism of the idea of a Jewish nation-state.” Still, few in JVP would deny that their position puts them at odds with most Jews in the U.S., including friends and family. “When I grew up, Zionism was in the water,” said Stein. “And I’m in profound pain to see loved ones continue to invest in an answer to the question of Jewish safety that requires Palestinian repression.”
While outright opposition to the idea of the Jewish state is distinctly minority opinion among Jewish Americans, there is a growing generational divide over Israel. According to recent polling, older Jews were significantly more likely to express a deep emotional connection to Israel and to reject criticism of the Jewish state. In a 2019–20 Pew Research Center poll, eight out of ten American Jews surveyed said that caring about Israel was either essential or important to their understanding of what it means to be Jewish. Among those under 30, just one in three consider caring about Israel to be essential to being Jewish, while one in four say it is not important. And a 2021 poll by the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute, younger Jews were far more likely to support sharp criticisms of Israel, including the assertion that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians. A quarter of all respondents, regardless of age, agreed with the description of Israel as an “apartheid state.”
In a conflict so often reduced to Arabs versus Jews, the Jewish identity of JVP comes into play beyond simply guiding the personal politics of its members. As one small part of a broader movement for Palestinian rights, JVP sees great strategic value in turning out large numbers of Jewish dissenters to Israeli policy, according to Saper. “We know that we have such an important role to challenge false accusations of antisemitism,” Saper said, “and also make it so clear that, actually, our Jewish values teach us to take action for justice.”
The group’s critics have been largely unmoved by the group’s professions of faith, dismissing JVP and its allies as a fringe minority at best and, at worst, as cynically using Jewish identity to fight against other Jews. For them, Zionism and Judaism go hand in hand, and the response to JVP actions from their fellow Jews who support Israel has at times been vitriolic. After recent JVP actions in New York, some online commentators accused the protesters of self-hatred, calling them “garbage Jews,” “tokens,” and “kapos” — a gravely serious accusation that recalls Jews who collaborated with the Nazis.
Mainstream Jewish and pro-Israel organizations have been less inflammatory but no less critical. As JVP-led protesters occupied the Capitol Rotunda last month, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League excoriated them. “We long have said that these are hate groups, the photo inverse of white supremacists,” Jonathan Greenblatt wrote on X. And in a report published earlier this month, the ADL included a number of actions and rallies organized by JVP and other Jewish antiwar groups in a list mapping antisemitic incidents nationwide.
For Stein, it is precisely because her family faced oppression for being Jewish that she has dedicated years of her life to working in solidarity with Palestinians. Stein’s grandmother was on a trip from her native Lithuania to New York when World War II started, leaving her no choice but to stay in the U.S. while the rest of her family was murdered in the Holocaust. “I spent years agonizing over the question of ‘Where were the neighbors?’ Why did they just stand by?” she said. “The only way that I can honor that fluke and the miracle of getting to be alive is to try to refuse to be a neighbor who just stands by.”
Many who’ve demonstrated with JVP say it has provided a community for Jews who feel alienated by both Israel and the majority of American Jews who support it.
For many years, Petchesky, 81, felt cut off from her Jewish roots. Raised in a religiously observant Jewish family, she began to drift from her faith after witnessing racism against Arabs during a trip to Israel as a teen. Decades later, at the urging of Palestinian friends, she joined JVP and said she found herself reconnecting to Judaism thanks to activists who embraced both anti-Zionism and strong Jewish cultural traditions. “As I got closer with the young generations in JVP, I realized they’re much more identified with Judaism: They speak Hebrew, they translate Yiddish, and they know so much about the history of Yiddish and Eastern European Jews. And that’s where my grandparents came from!” She even joined an anti-Zionist congregation in Brooklyn frequented by members of the group.
Cookie Hagendorf, 40, a self-described “rich Jewish girl from Westchester,” described a similar feeling after taking part in four JVP actions over the past month, starting with the sit-in at the U.S. Capitol. “Sitting in the Rotunda that day with a bunch of Jews and rabbis singing in Hebrew, I was weeping,” she said. “I felt so connected to my Jewishness to a real legacy of generations of Jews.”
Despite the attention they’ve garnered, JVP-led actions have been dwarfed in number and scale by the thousands of protests, marches, and direct actions largely led by Palestinians and Muslims — which the group encourages its followers on social media to attend as part of its central principle of solidarity with Palestinians. “We’ve spent years working on what it means to be accountable to a Palestinian-led movement,” Stein said.
One such group is Palestinian Youth Movement, which has put to use years of organizing experience and decades of personal and family history to meet the current moment. “For a lot of people, this crisis began on October 7,” said Munir Marwan, a PYM organizer who asked to be identified by his first and middle names in light of the doxing campaigns that have been launched against pro-Palestine activists. “For us, this has been going on for 75 years, and it goes back to our grandparents.”
Marwan has worked closely enough with JVP that at one point during our interview, he spoke unprompted of his appreciation for Jay Saper’s maxim about moving “at the speed of trust.”
In recent weeks, PYM has focused much of its attention on the recurring “Shut It Down for Palestine” demonstrations held on the past three Fridays, which JVP has amplified through social media. On November 17, groups participating in the day of action staged demonstrations at the offices of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Schumer as well as the headquarters of JPMorgan, at a bank linked to an Israeli weapons manufacturer, and at Penn Station.
For many Palestinian activists, like Kaleem Hawa, who’s been working with PYM for about five years, the past weeks have been full of conflicting emotions. Hawa’s family were expelled from their homes along with more than 750,000 Palestinians during Israel’s founding, an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Now, he says, many Palestinians fear they are witnessing a second Nakba in Gaza. But mixed with the abject horror, he said, is the exhilaration at the sudden eruption of mass protest in solidarity with people like him. “It’s a complicated dance to hold one’s grief and rage and joy all together,” said Hawa.
For organizers, the question of what comes next is ever present in their minds. In the short term, JVP and its allies in other groups are focused on maintaining that momentum, continuing to pressure lawmakers to support a permanent cease-fire in the wake of the temporary pause that began on Friday.
“Part of bringing those people in for the long term is helping them to develop an understanding that cease-fire is the floor and not the ceiling,” said Saper. “Palestinians deserve to live with freedom and dignity. That starts by getting the bombs to stop that are falling over Gaza — but that is only the beginning.”
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