What a gift that we get to fight for and with one another, for our whole lives.
Dottie always reminds me how solidarity transforms us. Our fear in the face of seemingly intractable horrors and violent repression doesn’t disappear, but it can blur into the background when our deep connection to one another propels us forward.
...The fear somehow shrinks, and it gets manageable. You can do things you never thought you were capable of doing...I am an everyday, garden-variety, coward. If I could do it, anybody can do it.”
“Even for a person like me, your identification with your fellows overpowers everything else. Your care for them--the fear is still there--but it's manageable because your overriding promise is to them and to yourself that you will stay faithful to the group..."
Despite the odds, there was no question for Dottie. She was doing it. She was always going to do what she could, despite her fears. She said:
She said there had to be something wrong with you if you weren’t scared; if you went down to Mississippi, you didn’t know if you would come home.
We talked about the Mississippi Freedom summer, where Dottie and others at SNCC recruited hundreds of people to go south and put their bodies on the line for the civil rights movement.
Dottie was on staff with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement, grew up as a red diaper baby during the McCarthy era, worked for the Center for Constitutional Rights, and has been part of movement work for her entire life.
A couple of weeks ago while in New York, I visited with Dottie, a treasured JVP member, beloved movement elder and dear friend.
"We can’t be distracted. Fighting for Palestinian freedom is one of the frontlines of democracy defense at home ... the fight against authoritarianism within the U.S. is inseparable from our fight to end U.S. support for Israeli apartheid and genocide."
— @stefaniefox.bsky.social, @jvp.bsky.social
So grateful to have sat down for a conversation with JVP members in the Twin Cities and LA as they bring rigor and love to struggle for Palestinian freedom and against fascism here at home.
So proud of the way that Jewish anti-Zionist organizers—skilled up and connected through Palestine solidarity organizing—are showing up to this moment with everything they have.
thevoicememo.substack.com/p/right-wher...
... And offers lessons that we can all learn from about rolling back the tide of fascism. From my particular vantage point at JVP, I shared a few lessons gleaned from resistance to authoritarian repression in 2025, lessons we’ll surely need to apply this year.
Organizing for Palestinian freedom has emerged as one of the most highly mobilized grassroots movements in a generation. That energy and organization has provided stumbling blocks for Trump’s authoritarian agenda...
thevoicememo.substack.com/p/trump-came...
We call on @wikipedia.org׳s cofounders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to stop censoring the Gaza Genocide entry.
In a moment rife with censorship and an authoritarian crack-down on press and media, sites like Wikipedia are more crucial than ever. Wikipedia must remain a site of public information, especially about the obvious truth that the Israeli military is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
May it be so. Read the full letter at www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/12/17/h...
"Let us rededicate to doing everything in our power to end the genocide of Palestinians, and build a Judaism rooted in collective liberation and safety for all.”
“Tonight, as I light my menorah I am doing so as an act of defiance – a rejection of supremacy, domination and death. A rejection of both antisemitism and its brutal weaponization against Palestinians.
“It is a vile and predictable pattern that Israel would attempt to distort and use an act of antisemitism to further the impunity with which they continue to starve and kill Palestinians. It is our responsibility to resist this with everything we have.
JVP Executive Director @stefaniefox.bsky.social shared these reflections in an email to our members. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Jews in Sydney, genocide supporters and anti-Muslim bigots rushed to exploit this tragedy to justify further repression and anti-Palestinian racism.
“May our flames be a recommitment: We will put everything on the line to fight for one another.”
I love this as a guiding principle for organizing in this time: that we embody the antithesis of fascism in the relentlessness of our solidarity, play, creativity, and love for one another. Hoping you spend some time with this incredible piece, we all deserve the hope and resolve it offers.
She explains that this means that "we can learn from how the surrealists tried to not only be antifascist, but be the antithesis of fascism."
She writes that the surrealists were “creating communities that did not merely oppose militarism and fascism, with their bodily and political dismemberments, but sought true liberation from their logics. Freedom not only in theory, but in their daily practice.”
I cannot recommend enough this essay from the inimitable Naomi Klein about what the surrealists can teach us about resisting genocide and fascism.
www.equator.org/articles/sur...
To read more about the ADL’s attacks head to jvp.org/voicememo or thevoicememo.substack.com.
I contextualize this response within the ADL’s decades-long history of surveillance against nearly every popular social movement in living memory, surveillance that has particularly harmed Palestinian, Black and brown communities and organizers.
The "Mamdani Monitor" has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism and everything to do with continuing its months of attacks on Mamdani because of his unapologetic support for Palestinian freedom.
In the most recent edition of The Voice Memo — a Substack focused on the evolving landscape of the Palestine solidarity movement from my perspective as Executive Director of JVP, I reflect on the election of Zohran Mamdani and the ADL’s deeply Islamophobic response.
