UNDERSTANDING AND DISMANTLING ANTISEMITISM

Every person — no matter our religion, where we come from, how much money we have, or what we look like — deserves to live with freedom, safety, and belonging. JUFJ has worked for more than a quarter century to ensure that all of us can walk down the streets of our neighborhoods or through the doors of our holy spaces freely and safely.

Some politicians and community leaders try to hold onto power and wealth by fueling antisemitism to exploit divisions within our communities. They want Jews to feel isolated and alone, but we aren’t buying their manufactured fear. To dismantle this machinery of division, we must work together in deep relationships with Jewish and non-Jewish community members and organizations.

When an elected leader uses antisemitism as a tool to push their xenophobic and racist agenda, when our community faces antisemitic violence or when one of our coalition partners accidentally fuels antisemitism by repeating stereotypes about Jews, JUFJ places the humanity and safety of all people at the center of our response. We act in ways that sustain relationships and shut down the fear factory.

Antisemitism is one mechanism of oppression, and just like racism, homophobia, and all of the others, its function is to tear communities apart. We must come together and resist the urge to isolate — despite fear, disagreement, and harm we have done to each other. When we do, our communities and our movements grow stronger.

There are many different ways that JUFJ works to dismantle antisemitism, depending on what we are responding to, how we are connected to the specific people fueling antisemitism, or what our community needs when being targeted by antisemitic speech or violence.

We help non-Jewish partners and elected leaders understand antisemitism, whether through private conversation, public communication, or formal training.

Our staff have spent hundreds of hours privately helping partners understand who Jews are, how antisemitism operates, and how they can help. More publicly, when a Maryland Delegate used a committee hearing about immigration to spout antisemitic conspiracy theories in 2022, JUFJ wrote a letter to the committee and House leadership to explain the dangers of this speech for both the Jewish and the immigrant communities. JUFJ submitted comments to the White House’s Inter-Agency Group to Counter Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Related Forms of Bias And Discrimination in 2023, summarizing some of our thoughts, strategies, and actions.

We mobilize the Jewish community to speak out publicly.

After an incident of antisemitic graffiti and the destruction of a Black Lives Matter sign in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Baltimore in 2021, JUFJ organized a community menorah lighting to bring people together across their differences and stand against hate. Sometimes, antisemitism is used as a smokescreen, with public figures claiming that Jews are in immediate danger, and that this danger justifies their own antidemocratic actions. That is why we helped to bring together over 100 Jewish clergy in our region to call for the release of Dr. Badar Khan Suri after the Trump administration attempted to deport him without reason or due process, while using antisemitism as an excuse.

We work with Jews to make sense of the moment and develop a solidarity-based approach to antisemitism.

Since 2019, JUFJ has been a member of the Collaborative for Jewish Organizing. The Collaborative is a network of nine organizations working within Jewish communities across the country to advance social, racial, and economic justice — including Carolina Jews for Justice, Detroit Jews for Justice, Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action (Massachusetts), Jewish Community Action (Minnesota), Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (Illinois), Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (New York), Bend the Arc (national), and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (national). Through this network, we helped to produce dismantlingantisemitism.org, a guide for how to speak productively about antisemitism, and we have collectively raised millions of dollars to support this work. The solidarity-based approach that the Collaborative works to share is at the heart of how we speak to our own Jewish community about antisemitism.

In 2024, our Executive Director Jacob Feinspan wrote a piece for eJewish Philanthropy about how our close relationships with non-Jewish partners have helped us feel less alone when we are afraid, and how those relationships have helped us learn when we have been the source of others’ fear and hurt. When the Jewish community was rocked by antisemitic murders outside the Capital Jewish Museum in DC in 2025, JUFJ staff brought our own volunteer leaders together to process the emotions that can be triggered by violence in our own community.

We offer trainings on understanding and dismantling antisemitism.

JUFJ has facilitated workshops and trainings on antisemitism and white supremacy across our region for many years. We’ve connected elected officials and candidates, as well as Jewish and non-Jewish community members, to training from the Collaborative on how to talk about antisemitism. In 2025, we launched our Understanding and Dismantling Antisemitism program, and have trained Jewish clergy in our region, as well as many of our own community leaders, and piloted offering the training to non-Jewish partners.

If you are interested in participating in the Understanding and Dismantling Antisemitism program or would like to bring it to your synagogue or Jewish organization, please contact Rabbi Miriam Liebman at rabbi.miriam.liebman@jufj.org.

Resources on Dismantling Antisemitism