We are actively foregrounding work for racial equity and against racism and White Supremacy as a core part of our public policy advocacy and educational programs.
JOIN OUR ANTI-RACISM EVENTS
We are exploring and contributing to the ways in which our history enrichs our anti-racist practice through reflection, study, conversation, and activism ourselves and, importantly, with other partners within and beyond the Jewish community.
We are exploring and contributing to the ways in which our history enrichs our anti-racist practice through reflection, study, conversation, and activism ourselves and, importantly, with other partners within and beyond the Jewish community.
Courageous Conversation: Reclaim Our Vote, a conversation with Center for Common Ground founder, Andrea Miller, October 2020
Live from the Frontlines: Our Democracy At Stake, A Conversation with Elizabeth Hira, October 2021
Yiddish, Anti-Racist Practice, and the Transformation of Jewish Communities, presented by the Museum for Jewish Heritage, co-sponsored by the Workers Circle, JFREJ, August 2020
Live from the Frontlines of the Fight for Voting Rights: A Conversation with Journalist Ari Berman, July 2021
ARTICLES
Translating Black Lives Matter into Yiddish, essay by Anthony Russell for Jewish Currents, June 2020
Understanding Racism to Better Fight It, essay by Larry Moskowitz, former Workers Circle Social Justice Director, for LabourPress.org, March 2018
PRESS RELEASES
The Workers Circle’s Response to the Verdict the Derek Chauvin Trial, April 2021
PLEDGES
Pledge of Solidarity in Dismantling Racism, June 2020
Through our programming, we’ve made critical examinations of how Yiddish language and culture of the past and present illuminate or obscure our ability to both understand and stand against anti-Black racism in the US.
Beyond the Almost Promised Land, a two-part series held November 10 and 17, 2021, exploring a seminal work of scholarship, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 with its author, Professor Hasia Diner.
Part One, Beyond the Almost Promised Land: A Conversation with Hasia Diner
Part Two, Beyond the Almost Promised Land: A Conversation with Hasia Diner
In the Midst, a four-part series held in the spring and early summer of 2021 on depictions of systemic racism in Yiddish art, literature and media created, produced and moderated by Anthony Russell:
Part One, Injustice and Interpretation: Leyb Malach's Mississippi, with Eli Rosenblatt and Alisa Quint
Part Two, Familiarity and Distance: Yoysef Kerler’s Ven Kh’volt in Alabama Zayn, with Maia Evrona and Amelia Glaser
Part Three, Report and Reverberation: Faultlines of Race in the Yiddish Press, with Tony Michels and Jonah Boyarin
In the Midst Revisited, with Alisa Quint, Eli Rosenblatt, Maia Evrona, Amelia Glaser, and Jonah Boyarin where these panelists pursued further questions posed by the audience for the first three sessions and took live questions from the audience.
Optional section:As a social justice organization that promotes Yiddish (Eastern European Jewish/Ashkenazi) culture, the Workers Circle has a particular responsibility to understand and work against racism from within that culture which forms such a crucial part of our heritage and values.
We see the fight against racism and the fight against anti-Semitism as different but related. Fear-mongering politicians and media see fit to utilize dehumanization when it suits them, but when we work together to create a society that fundamentally respects all of us—that humanizes all of us— it becomes impossible to target and blame any one of us for social ills.
That said, American society was founded on a basis of fundamental inequality. Since our nation’s inception, our social systems have denied Black and Brown people fundamental rights: decent education, life-saving health care, jobs at a living wage, housing in neighborhoods of their choosing, true public safety, and the vote. For many years, these exclusions also targeted Jews from among the mass of recently-arrived white ethnic immigrants from Europe. Xenophobic policies established 140 years ago against Jewish immigrants like the public charge rule were expanded and weaponized by the Trump administration against new immigrant communities today. And hateful violence is rarely far behind, as we have seen from Charlottesville to the current wave of hate crimes against Asian American Pacific Islander members of our communities.
We believe that working as an anti-racist organization requires us to continually learn; to be open to hearing and seeing the ways we benefit from, contribute to, and can work against racism today. This is an urgent task for our society. We offer these resources as sustenance for the journey.
You are at the heart of our activism to collectively work to make the world a better place for all.
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