Building a New Generation of NIF Supporters

Last month, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a dozen members of NIF’s NewGen community convened for a half-day workshop on how to think, speak and educate about Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. Former Breaking the Silence Education Director Becca Strober and NIF’s Young Leadership & Education Manager Zak Witus facilitated sessions which provided formal (Hebrew school and public school teachers) and informal (camp counselors and activists) educators with practical pedagogical tools to teach about the reality on the ground in the West Bank..

“We know that speaking plainly about what’s really happening in the West Bank elicits strong emotional responses from people in our communities, which can lead to fights, rejection, and strained relationships,” Witus said. “As courageous educators, we don’t shy away from this discomfort. We refine our pedagogy in order to meet people where they are at, presenting the facts honestly but with sensitivity to our audience’s predisposition.”

Towards the end of the day, participants workshopped specific scenarios that they were anticipating in their work. An education director at a local Brooklyn synagogue explored how to implement the day’s learning in his Hebrew school’s curriculum; a public school teacher in South Brooklyn planned an curricular module for an upcoming unit in World History; and a college student activist raised challenges she anticipated would arise within her campus Hillel.

This program comes as NIF NewGen continues to expand the horizons of leadership development for people in their 20s and 30s, aiming to empower rising community leaders with the knowledge and relationships that come from the grassroots in Israel and the West Bank in order to propel a liberal-progressive movement in the United States.

NewGen programs have become wide-ranging. In just the last month, Sam Stein, a former NIF/Shatil Social Justice Fellowship who subsequently worked for Rabbis for Human Rights met with a NewGen group in Boston; NewGen held a national online book club read on Israel’s Black Panthers by Asaf Elia-Shalev and then convened to discuss the book with him on zoom; and NewGen in Chicago had an open and frank conversation about the strategic value of the terms “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” in our current conversations.

“Whatever we’re learning about and discussing, whether it’s protective presence solidarity activism, the history of Mizrahi oppression, Netnayahu’s judicial coup, or the tensions between Zionist and anti-Zionist American Jews, NewGen participants stay rooted in relationships with Israeli and Palestinian social change leaders on the ground,” Witus said. “Ultimately, it’s by staying connected to these folks, who have the most at stake and who are working on the ground, that we build a better solidarity movement in this country, the United States.”