This evening the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will host its first-ever Food and Justice Passover Seder with Elissa Barrett of Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) and Simon Greer of Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ). Rabbi Jack Moline, Director of Public Policy at the Rabbinical Assembly, and Rabbi Dara Frimmer of Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles will officiate at the seder, to be held at USDA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
As participants drink the traditional four cups of grape juice, the seder will bring a Jewish perspective to today’s pressing issues of hunger in America, the exploitation of food workers, and the unsustainable food production methods that are destroying our environment. Participants will discuss our individual and communal responsibilities for ensuring that healthy food, ethically produced, is available to all.
This seder was also conceived as a springboard for building relationships between members of the progressive Jewish community and a critical federal agency. The USDA wields enormous influence over how food is produced in the United States and is also responsible for ensuring that Americans in need – including the nearly 40 percent of U.S. children living in low income families – receive help putting food on their tables.
With the first cup dedicated to considering ways to end hunger and food insecurity, seder guests will receive poster illustrations of the “Food Desert Seder Plate” created last year in conjunction with a tour PJA conducted of Los Angeles neighborhoods to highlight communities where supermarkets are scarce and where healthy, nutritious food is hard to come by.
The question of food workers, and the conditions under which they toil so we may eat, will be the focus of the second seder cup, and has special resonance for Jews coming together at Passover to celebrate our freedom. Just last Wednesday, the EEOC filed two federal lawsuits accusing eight some of the world’s largest and most powerful agricultural producers of what amounts to modern day slavery. The allegations include human trafficking of hundreds of men, confiscating their passports, holding them hostage, saddling them with insurmountable debt and forcing them to harvest fruit, right here, on American soil, while also enduring verbal and physical abuse.
While these lawsuits are welcome, we know that our responsibility cannot end here. There are far too many abuses in the food chain – whether that means migrant workers and their families who don’t enjoy basic wage and working condition protections, whether it means contract farmers who can’t afford to stay on land their families have owned for generations, or food processing workers who can’t take a day off to care for a sick child. In one significant effort to address unfair labor practices in the food industry, PJA is currently supporting organizing efforts of Mercado food workers in the San Francisco Bay area who are seeking an end to poverty wages, a dearth of benefits, and substandard working conditions.
With a number of USDA staff members, Judith Belasco of Hazon, Josh Viertal of Slow Food, and dozens of other knowledgeable people at the table, there is sure to be a lively discussion of how unsustainable food production and consumption are damaging our water, soil and air – and what to do about it – as those attending the Food and Justice seder drain the third cup of the evening.
As guests work their way through the Food and Justice Haggadah created by JFSJ and PJA they will wrestle with the fundamental question: What is our responsibility and role – individually and communally – for repairing our broken food system, ensuring that everyone has access to healthy food, produced without exploiting workers, and without destroying the environment that sustains all life on Earth.
JFSJ partner Domestic Workers United (DWU) has taken the lead in making sure that New York State’s historic bill – signed into law last August – is understood and implemented.
After years of organizing, passage of the law, which spells out legal rights and labor protections for domestic workers, was a huge legislative victory.Now DWU is partnering with the Labor Department to make sure it actually helps the workers it was intended to protect.Worker-employee workshops are planned, and DWU organizers are pounding the pavement and seeking out child care providers to educate them about the law, the first in the nation to set time and hour requirements for in-home care-givers and housekeepers, including mandated overtime pay, vacation pay and a 40 hour standard workweek.The law also provides for temporary disability benefits and spells out protections for domestic workers facing discrimination or harassment.
How well and how quickly the domestic workers law is understood and implemented in New York will provide a model for other states and organizing efforts, as similar bills move to the forefront nationwide. On Wednesday, while hundreds of domestic workers and their supporters packed a Sacramento hearing room, a bill modeled on New York’s law passed out of the California Assembly’s Labor Committee by a 5 to 1 vote. Here’s more on DWU’s implementation campaign from today’s New York Times.
Hey you! The Service Learning Department is looking for a few good people to lead our service learning trips that focus on the intersections of Judaism and social justice. The trips could be with families, teens or college students and could land you for a week in the Gulf Coast, LA or Balitmore.
Suzanne Reisman is a trusty jspot contributor and a superhero JFSJ grant writer. Not only does she help keep JFSJ afloat, she does cool stuff outside of work, like win awesome writing contests. Suzanne is a 2010 Blogher Voice of the Year.
Blogher "is the largest community of women who blog: 20+ million unique visitors per month."
Check out Suzanne's piece on her blog, which focuses on an anecdote about her quest to learn about her family's pre-Holocaust history.
Check out this short video we just created of Alice Craft-Kerney, a fellow in the Gulf Coast Fellowship for Community Transformation (a project of Jewish Funds for Justice, 21st Century Foundation, and Gulf Coast Fund for Ecological Health and Community Renewal.
All B’nai Mitzvah would receive a formal invitation to Passport for Service, which would include at least one free service-learning immersion experience on a program of their choosing, either with their families or independently. They would participate in pre- and post-trip programming, and, upon their return, would make a commitment to continuing their social justice work in their local community.
These activities would be reinforced with an electronic “passport,” in which each young activist would accumulate “stamps” indicating their community service experiences and the other seminal events on their Jewish journey. Each passport would represent a path to Jewish adulthood defined by ongoing contributions to the world.
The nuts and bolts of creating such a program could take many forms. We could establish an umbrella organization to coordinate trips conducted by practitioners. We could organize it locally, giving Jewish Community Centers or synagogues a fresh opportunity to engage a core constituency. We could bring together key service organizations to pilot the project in ten cities and then scale it up later for national implementation. Or we could create a funding share, pooling money from foundations, individual funders, JCCs, federations, and synagogues. Similar to Birthright, this fund would ensure that every B’nai Mitzvah has an immersion service-learning experience of their choosing.
Inspired participants, eager to stay connected, would seek out ways to serve and act together. Synagogues and grassroots organizations would connect this transformative experience to their programming and engagement opportunities. Our community, and our local partners in social change, would be poised to engage thousands of young Jews hungry to change the world.
Nice piece marking Si's retirement from Grassroots Leadership, the organization he founded 30 years ago. Si is also a founder of Jewish Fund for Justice, which through a merger became JFSJ a few years ago. I've been lucky enough to get to know him through his continued service on our board. Excerpt below, full article here.
Kahn grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to the Washington area as a teenager. His mother was a pianist, his father, a rabbi and cantor. He learned to sing in the synagogue. Throughout his career, Kahn has touched on Jewish themes and borrowed from Yiddish and Hebrew musical forms. He has also lent a hand to the Jewish Fund for Justice.
Despite obvious differences, Kahn believes the styles he learned as a child are similar to American folk music.
"You think about traditional Jewish singing. It's unaccompanied. It's highly embellished. You have to learn to carry the rhythm, harmony and melody," he says. "It's got a lot to do with that high, lonesome sound."
Kahn is as renowned for his activism as he is for his music. He protested segregation policies in Bethesda as a high school student and ventured to Arkansas in 1965 to pitch in for civil rights. In 1980, he founded the Grassroots Leadership, an organization that helps Southern communities bond to fight social and economic oppression. Grassroots continues to focus on closing down for-profit prisons, an institution Kahn believes is a crippling sideshow of the American justice system.
"There are some things that are not for sale," says Kahn. "There are some things that can only be entrusted to a publicly elected system. The ability to take away somebody's liberty, the ability to imprison somebody, is something that should never be sold to the highest bidder or to the lowest bidder."
Congrats Si! Quite a legacy already...
Thought I'd include at least one song. Early 80s Si Kahn.
Its Sunday morning and I’m on my way down to South Carolina, where I’ll hopefully be watching the Super Bowl tonight at a retreat together with the Gulf Coast Fellows for Community Transformation (GCFCT); a fellowship in support of 17 of the most amazing community organizers from across 4 states (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi & Alabama), working to help their communities create a just and equitable recovery from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. GCFCT is collaboration between JFSJ, the 21st Century Foundation and the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal, who joined forces two years ago to share our expertise and a long-term vision for the recovery.
The truth is that six months ago, when we scheduled the retreat, taking the fellows away for respite (so desperately needed by these tireless leaders) and skills building this week, we – the staff on the ground and at the sponsoring foundations – maybe lacked the imagination to foresee this Super Bowl Sunday and the monumental excitement being felt in New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast today. But, despite the odds and a less than stellar track record over the last 4 decades, the Saints today are a living embodiment of the hopes, dreams and aspirations of a community that has been dealt, and dealt itself at times, a pretty bad hand over the past decades (the disaster wasn’t Katrina, it was the decades of failed leadership, lack of imagination, and poor planning that created the conditions for the storm to leave behind such destruction).
What the Saints have done this season, and what the 17 fellows do every day on the ground, is encourage and empower the people of the Gulf Coast to imagine something bigger and better. These fellows, working with immigrants, low-income communities, youth, the formerly incarcerated; working
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I sort of love that half of the people in my office said they don't really care about New Years Eve, because they celebrate the Jewish New Year...probably making their resolutions and reflections a bit more sincere- since mine are laced with cheap champagne and cheaper beer, ew. Best quote on the subject matter by a co-worker:
"New Years is just an artificial day of celebrating Western suedo-Christian beliefs that sort of collide with the Winter Solstice but ten days off"
Jewish Funds for Justice is happy to announce that Ariana Tobias, an undergraduate at Hunter College, has won the 2009 Service Learning raffle! Ariana was randomly selected to receive a $100 Amazon gift card for completing a survey about her experience participating in a Jewish Funds for Justice service learning program this spring.
JFSJ Jewish service learning combines hands-on service with study and reflection about current social, political, and economic issues, and about the connections among service, justice, and Jewish identity and tradition. With the conclusion of each service trip, we ask participants to evaluate their experiences so we can continue to improve our programming. All participants who complete this survey are entered into a drawing for a gift certificate. This year, Ariana is our lucky winner.
Ariana was a participant on the Bronx Service Learning trip in June, where she helped Habitat for Humanity build a LEED-certified (environmentally friendly) apartment for a first time home-owner, and learned about community organizing in the South Bronx. When asked about the impact that the trip had on her Jewish identity, Ariana explained, "I enjoyed exploring the many reasons behind Jewish values in social justice. It helped put into words some of the feelings I had about why it was important to me to actively work towards social justice."
Thank you to Ariana and the other 400 participants in JFSJ's 2009-2010 service learning programs for helping to make America a more just and compassionate place.
