Hi, I’m Jewish Currents associate editor Mari Cohen, and today on On the Nose, we’re diving into a new effort to transform what Jewish communal safety looks like in the United States. As a reporter on Jewish politics from the left, I found there are usually two major lines of left critique of the dominant American Jewish approach to fighting antisemitism and protecting Jews from threats. One, of course, as will likely be familiar to readers of Jewish Currents and listeners to On the Nose, is the fact that the project of anti-antisemitism has often been warped into an instrument for suppressing critique of the Israeli state and for targeting leftists, Muslims, Arabs, and immigrants. The other is that in most synagogues and community centers, focusing on safety and security usually means enhancing ties to the police, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and private security companies, even as the past decades’ Black Lives Matter uprisings have brought attention to how such forces are responsible for violence against Black folks on the left, and specifically threatening to Jews of color. The 2020 uprising, in particular, brought attention to the critiques from prison and police abolitionists who argue that America’s carceral institutions can’t be reformed and must be divested from entirely.

Of course, the Zionist approach to anti-antisemitism and the carceral approach are deeply linked to one another. Think, for example, of the formerly Anti-Defamation League-organized training exchanges between US Police and Israeli police that Jewish Voice for Peace long campaigned against. Or the spectacle of cops brutally arresting student protesters on campus in the name of Jewish safety. Or, of course, how federal suppression and surveillance of Muslim communities has, in part, relied on framing them as extremists due to an association with the Palestinian cause. Now, a group of organizers called the Community Safety Campaign has put together an ambitious plan to push Jewish communities to shift away from police and FBI collaboration for protecting their members and to embrace an abolitionist community safety approach. Their vision also involves disavowing the politics of ethnonationalism and embracing relationships with other marginalized communities. As a result of an extensive research process, they released a more than 100-page guide last month for organizers and organizations looking to embrace this work. Their guide describes an existing paradigm used by Jewish communities called “safety through surveillance,” which includes collaboration with the police and the FBI, the employment of private security, consultations with the mainstream Jewish group called Secure Communities Network, and more. As an alternative, the Community Safety Campaign posits a vision of “safety through solidarity,” which involves the mobilization of trained community teams to provide safety and envisions these teams forming alliances with other religious and ethnic groups to share resources and support.

MC 2:53

Today, I’m going to talk to two community safety campaign organizers about the contours of their vision and its complexities and challenges. I’m very happy to have with me here Nadav David. Hi, Nadav.

Nadav David 3:05

Hi, Mari. It’s great to be here. It feels like full circle from when you first interviewed me in 2021 about the nonprofit security grants program we’ll be talking about today. So, thanks so much for having me.

MC 3:17

And today, we also have Erica Riddick. Thanks for being here, Erica.

Erica Riddick 3:20

Thanks so much for having us, Mari, and for the opportunity to look more at this project.

MC 3:25

Let’s get started. I want to just help us frame this conversation with a little bit of context, history, political background on this community safety campaign work that you’re doing. I wonder if you can talk a bit about some of the major developments in recent years that prompted you to embark on this work.

ND 3:43

Absolutely. So I want to take us back a few years to 2017, with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. At that time, there was local Jewish organizing in Charlottesville, anti-fascist organizing, that was ready to step up to respond to the threats of the white nationalist movement that was emerging with the Trump presidency. And at that time, we heard from organizers on the ground who were fighting to protect people in Charlottesville that there wasn’t a coordinated, clear response from Jewish organizations, and how they were going to respond to the violence (and eventually the deadly violence) that was carried out by the right on that day. So one of our colleagues and comrades at that time really pushed many of us to be thinking differently about the role of Jewish organizing, in both stopping the white and Christian nationalist right, as well as protecting Jewish communities. So from there, we saw a major arc of development in community safety organizing within Jewish communities. Fast forward to 2018 and the Tree of Life shootings in Pittsburgh that killed 11 congregants; that moment was another flashpoint that led many of us on this project to start organizing locally, start building durable networks of community safety and defense that don’t rely on policing and law enforcement.

ND 5:13

That really marked a turning point in the Jewish community and specifically on the Jewish left as it relates to community safety and responding to antisemitism. So, we saw new resources like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) releasing their Understanding Antisemitism report. We saw Eric Ward’s piece on the connection between antisemitism and white nationalism. And we saw, also, the beginning of the use of this frame of “safety through solidarity,” which is common in our movements today. So we see that frame, and we also see a growth in local community safety organizing. What we notice time and time again is that these antisemitic incidents happen, and the institutions, the Jewish institutions that control how we think and talk about safety and security, continue to grow in their power and their ability to reach Jewish communities. And we see a real need, collectively, to contest for that power; to come together, to collectively organize, to deepen our practice, and, most importantly, to get serious about challenging these institutions and providing a different way forward for Jewish communities. So that’s the context in which we came together. And in the last three years of research and writing and strategy that we’ve been doing, this work has become, unfortunately, more and more relevant because we see more antisemitic attacks, but we also see the weaponization of antisemitism being a critical force in dividing our movements for justice, and criminalizing immigrants, and shaping the ways that the Trump administration is carrying out attacks at this time.

MC 7:00

That was super helpful, Nadav. Thank you. I want to dive a little bit into what this dominant safety paradigm that you’re combating or contesting with for power, as you put it, actually looks like. And in the guide, you’re labeling this the “safety through surveillance” paradigm. And I think it’ll just be helpful to talk a little bit about what that actually looks like and some of the problems that we’ve identified with how this works.

ER 7:24

We’ve been moving toward militarizing security and the idea of safety for a while now, and we know that it doesn’t work. Yet we understand what motivates any community, including the Jewish community, to reach for solutions that are offered to create safety for our communities. They feed into fears that we already hold around keeping ourselves and our families safe, and reinforce the idea that there is no alternative except for this militarized status quo. And it also taps into this idea that antisemitism is often presented as this unique oppression that is different from other systems and will just never be eradicated, which we don’t believe. We believe that we can create real change and real safety within our communities. And so these narratives, they only get us so far, and also, they create an opportunity for us to explore what the narrative actually is saying and what it’s not saying—and whose safety we’re talking about and whose safety we’re not talking about—which we believe leads us to the opportunity to invest in broader alternatives, which are happening on the ground but need more comprehensive support.

ND 8:40

The trends that Erica just talked about was something that we saw over and over again every time there was either an antisemitic attack or an institution described something as antisemitic: these same trends kept coming up. The status quo would feed into more resources for policing and security. These fears would then lead to repressing or criminalizing movements, and there was interest among especially progressive Jewish organizations for alternatives but not the necessary infrastructure and resources to meet those needs.

MC 9:14

So one node in the “safety through surveillance” status quo that our listeners might not be familiar with is the Secure Communities Network, or SCN. Can you talk a bit about what SCN is and how they fit into the “safety through surveillance” paradigm?

ND 9:27

So the Secure Communities Network is an organization, a national Jewish organization, that works very closely with the Jewish Federations of North America. Some of their key functions are to train Jewish communities, synagogues, and organizations to monitor threats of violence, to secure buildings. The two that we think are most insidious are advocating for Jewish security needs and coordinating with law enforcement. So they have a lot of power, both in terms of their ability to affect resource allocation at the state and federal level, but they also have deep and long-standing partnerships with law enforcement, and many of the people who work for that institution come out of law enforcement or have a long history and career in law enforcement. What’s really interesting about the Secure Communities Network is that, if you look at their materials, they actually acknowledge some of the risks that we name in our work of private security. So they talk about the ways that private security sometimes comes with racist ideologies that affect Jews of color, that having private security isn’t necessarily the answer to your security and safety needs. So they themselves, that organization that is most influential in the “safety through surveillance” industry and framework, they themselves identify the gaps.

One thing that really stood out to me in this last year is that in January of this year, when the Trump administration was coming into power, they sent a letter to the Trump administration calling for action against noncitizens who may have been involved in the Palestine protests and encampments last year. So they have made a very clear choice about which of these two paths they are taking. And the path they are taking is one of fear and isolation and of creating fortresses for Jewish communities to remain safe and secure. So I think that letter from earlier this year tells us a lot, and it also shows us the potential of organizing Jewish communities more broadly, because several hundred Jewish leaders and clergy responded to that letter speaking out against the Secure Communities Network, even though many of them are ones that are also receiving funds from the Department of Homeland Security’s nonprofit security grants program. So we see really interesting contradictions and really interesting openings for the organizing that we’re doing.

I think, just to clarify—you talked a little bit about SCN acknowledging some of the risks of private security work, but obviously not necessarily disavowing it. What exactly is their relationship to private security forces? Is it that they tend to recommend the use of private security forces for local synagogues? Are they encouraging Jewish communities to go that route of working with private security?

Yeah, from our understanding, they have relationships with private security companies and are encouraging institutions to hire those companies. They’re also, through their advocacy work, supporting organizations to access financial resources, to do building improvements that support security. The private security industry as a whole—the largest company, Allied Universal, which is a conglomerate, is by some measure now North America’s third-largest private employer, behind Walmart and Amazon. In New York City alone, there are now three times as many private security guards as there are police officers, and the New York Police Department is the size of many militaries. So we’re talking about a huge, huge industry that has an immense amount of influence, and I think a lot of Jewish communities and organizations might be hiring them, not recognizing the ways in which they’re so tied up in cultures and practices of surveillance and criminalization.

And for those of us who have attended a synagogue in the past 10 years, there is a good chance that you have encountered private security. I remember this turning point very clearly. There was a relatively progressive, non-denominational synagogue that I used to go to in Chicago, and I believe it was after the Pittsburgh shootings, it was suddenly bag checks, metal detectors, security officers. I remember feeling quite, in many ways, saddened by it, in that I grew up going to a synagogue in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where it was very much like things always felt very friendly, and you’re just walking into the building, and things feel very open, and then suddenly, you’re having to put your bag through a metal detector on the way into the High Holidays. I just remember feeling unnerved by it. And obviously, discourse in the community was starting at the time about how that might make certain members of the community feel less welcome.

Absolutely. I think in some cases it creates what we describe as security theater, or a facade of safety. When actually, what we’re saying is not only do we think these private security companies are ineffective for the most part, we also think that they create an environment in which communities are not actually taking collective responsibility for their safety needs and for the holistic ways in which safety needs to be addressed in our communities.

And I think the other thing I’ll just say is, in general, it’s important to know that statistically, most of our communities are not usually experiencing violent attacks. Not like, you are at imminent threat of a shooting every time you go to a Jewish organization. I also do recognize why communities have decided to turn to that in that moment. We have seen these really scary incidents of violence, but obviously, having this be private security creates these other avenues of problems that you’re talking about.

The Nonprofit Security Grants Program has come up a little bit already. I reported on it early in my time at Jewish Currents and talked to Nadav. But maybe we can just give a little bit of an overview of how that works and what that means, where the funds are coming from, and the critique.

So the Nonprofit Security Grants Program has been around for several decades. It provides funds, specifically, to faith institutions, though nonprofits more broadly can access it as well. And what Mari’s reporting shows is that it has disproportionately provided funds to Jewish communities (though some Muslim and Christian and other communities receive funds, too). Our critique of the Nonprofit Security Grants Program is largely around the fact that it functions through the Federal Department of Homeland Security, and the funds are primarily used to fund surveillance equipment and other security infrastructure. When an attack happens, we see calls to significantly increase funding to these programs, and that happens over and over again. So, what we’ve done thus far is we organized the letter in 2024 of nine Jewish organizations across the US, representing thousands of members, to reject further increases because we know that communities are using these funds—often for good reason, as you mentioned—but we don’t believe that increasing the funding in the program is going to lead us to the types of shifts that we need to make the world we’re trying to build.

So we’re calling on Jewish organizations who are receiving this funding to reflect on taking this money, and what it means, and how it affects their ability to do other social justice work that they care about—and to think about what it would look like collectively to take responsibility for new funding mechanisms that are outside of Department of Homeland Security, whether that be other departments advocating for the resources to move out of Department of Homeland Security and into other departments or to create private avenues, for the time being, for community safety needs that are not just about security improvements but are actually about preparing communities. And this is really a question of complicity, right? So we’re all complicit in different systems at different times. But what we see with the Nonprofit Security Grants Program is a disproportionate Jewish involvement and complicity. And therefore, we see great opportunity to move people—for organizations to believe that other options are possible, and to eventually build the infrastructure and resources to replace the funding that they’re receiving from the Nonprofit Security Grants Program.

That’s a very helpful overview, and we’ll link my reporting on the program a few years ago and that letter for people looking to learn more. There have been some proposals to move the Nonprofit Security Grants Program out of DHS and into a different part of the government and get it out of this homeland security environment. But obviously, it has been hard to secure the political will to do that, especially since you have October 7th, 2023, and this renewed investment in this “safety through surveillance” paradigm. And particularly, again, the Nonprofit Security Grants Program becomes a way for politicians to show off their supposed investment in fighting antisemitism.

I’d love to jump in there, because I think the lack of support to move these funds out of the Department of Homeland Security into a place that does more closely align with the work that we do, I think, really reinforces the idea that there’s a political will behind it, to mass support for something else under the guise of safety.

Right. So the fact that it’s in DHS in the first place signifies the fact that this program is aligned with those other missions.

Yeah. I think it also speaks to the need to counter the influence of these Jewish institutions, who have the agency to call for shifts outside of DHS and are not doing so. So I think it’s trying to get communities out of thinking just about their own context and thinking about: How am I part of something much bigger?

So let’s talk a little bit about these alternate visions that the Community Safety Campaign is proposing, or a little bit more about what that vision looks like. So we’ve talked about this “safety through surveillance” program that maybe utilizes a lot of trainings, about security from the Secure Communities Network, and the ADL, and the FBI, and it takes money from the DHS Nonprofit Security Grants Program, and they’re hiring private security that have ties to all sorts of other shady surveillance and policing practices, and they’re working really closely with the local police to exchange information all the time. That’s this paradigm that we’re spelling out here. What does “safety through solidarity” look like, in contrast to that?

We often frame the idea of safety around this protection from an armed invasion. And you acknowledge that those moments do happen, but they’re not the majority of the instances of how we can create safety for our communities. And because of the armed theater, or the police theater, out front that incites the idea that we, as our own communities, don’t have to think about how we keep each other safe, it can inhibit some of that thinking. And so our thought is, instead of outsourcing the idea of safety, that if we actually had conversations within our community of how to keep ourselves safe: What are the day-to-day things that we have been doing, and can lean into doing, in order to do that? One example that I think of is most public buildings, there are things that are built in, like a first aid kit, but how many of us know where that’s stored? How many of us know what things are in that? How many of us make sure that it’s restocked before a big event? These are the kinds of things that we can build into the everyday development and planning for events that we have, knowing the members of our own communities, to ensure safety. And then things like knowing the layout of our buildings, and making sure that we have agreed-upon practices of when doors are open, or when doors aren’t open, or exit strategies, and where we gather. Often, we’re not talking about that in our communities. That’s been my experience.

Yeah, I want to add to that list: mental health crises, verbal disruptions, helping communities (both our own and others) develop safety plans, having de-escalation skills being trained up, and knowing who to turn to and how to collectively respond. Both specifically for events, but also in a broader way. Is there a plan for if there’s sexual violence in our communities and in our spaces? Are there plans for someone showing up who we don’t know? There are so many possibilities that are beyond just the most extreme example, which, as Erica said, is the way that we’re often thinking about safety and security in Jewish communities. A piece of our work, in general, is also helping folks to understand that there is precarity wherever we are. There is no plan, there is no alternative safety vision that doesn’t account for the fact that we live in a very violent world. We live in a world where our systems allow and further violence against people and against communities. For us, it’s really about recognizing the precarity and making a choice about how we’re going to live with the precarity.

So, having safety teams of Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers at five synagogues across Boston and growing that network over the course of many years—that, to us, is a much more durable solution than having one private security guard outside of each synagogue. This work is happening all across the US in small towns and in big cities. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York has done a ton of this work, providing safety and security support outside of mosques, outside of actions and events that they’re doing. So there are models that we have currently, from other parts of our movements, that can help to shape what it looks like to scale these “safety through solidarity” solutions and to make them material, because so much of the “safety through solidarity” frame the Jewish left has been building over recent years has been narrative (which is super important), but our guide is trying to provide a material basis for growing “safety through solidarity” and actualizing it.

I think that’s a really useful framework to bring in, because I do think that is a common thing that comes up when people are talking about certain types of abolitionist practice, and then also, obviously, talking about it in the Jewish context, that we say things like: We keep ourselves safe, we need to keep our community safe without police, we need to do things this way. But I mean, that’s such a big, vast vision, and actually figuring out how to implement that is really hard. And then, I think sometimes, that makes people feel like there’s not a way to do that, or actually, this is just a vague utopian idea that we can’t actually move toward. And so, I think that thinking about what it looks like materially is a really powerful framework. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what that’s looked like, or what it meant to build up that work.

I would say that what makes this possible is a long arc—multiple years of organizing and building the culture and the buy-in, and a recognition that if we’re serious about changing the political and moral center of Jewish communities around safety, it’s going to require us working with communities who are not fully there yet. So we don’t expect Jewish communities to be like: Okay, yesterday, we were invested in private security and the police, and tomorrow, we’re abolitionist, and we won’t ever call the police ever again. It’s just unrealistic to imagine communities transforming overnight. So it requires patience and a belief that there are small steps that people and organizations can take. So, with some of the synagogues we organized, one year they asked us to support with just one event, and then the next year they asked us to support with both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And then the next year, they were part of our network, and getting people trained up from their own community to support other events that were not Jewish events. So we have to see it as an arc.

And something we have wrestled with constantly in this work is: There’s the political understanding of why we shouldn’t be relying on police and surveillance, and then there’s the embodied experience of what it’s like when you walk into your synagogue and there are non-Jewish folks or Jewish folks from other congregations standing outside welcoming you, who are prepared and have gone through safety planning to be there. Like, the embodied experience of feeling that, and how different it can be than having a private security guard, goes much, much further. But getting organizations and communities to the place where they feel comfortable to take that step does require some amount of political education and investment in them transforming and then doing things differently. So we’ve had to make real choices about how we present our work, how we talk about our work, how we train in ways that are accessible across political difference.

Yeah. I would add: One of the things that is the most exciting part of this report is how much it taps into the research partners that weren’t Jewish. And this highlights, honestly, the historical reality that the policed and militarized safety that we refer to really is talking about only certain people’s safety. There are communities that have long had to—because they’ve been outside of this vision of what community safety looks like—that have had to protect themselves. That’s Black and brown communities. That’s the deaf community. One of my favorite examples is that the creation of the ambulance system that we all know today was born, I think, in Pittsburgh, within the Black community, because they had to go further distances to get to the hospitals that would serve them. And so, they bought some vans, and they trained some people, and they created a hotline so that people could call them. And that was such a great example of community care that it’s become adopted and incorporated into our everyday narrative.

Yeah. I also found that really interesting as part of the guide. Another thing that I noticed and found helpful about the guide: One thing you go into when talking a little bit about how to make this actionable is the idea that this training in community safety is a serious skill that people really need to put time into developing, and it’s not just a tossed-off thing. I think this goes into this idea of actually making this material, rather than just rhetorical, which is that maybe we have this tendency, as people who are busy and doing lots of different things and not super well versed in some of this type of material work to just say: Oh yeah, I can just do one training on Zoom or something and then know how to immediately be a safety person. But I think what you’re proposing is that there’s a lot of time that it takes to learn about de-escalation techniques, and about understanding a safety plan for a building, and all of these different components that you’ve talked about. And that the intention is for this to be a pretty serious space of knowledge that people can learn how to use rather than just a quick, slap-dash or band-aid solution.

Well, I think it’s a yes, and. Yes, these are very specific skills, and they require an investment of time and intention. And I think that we’ve all probably planned an event before. And so, there’s a lot of everyday things that just actually require being on the list of things to consider, and to plan for, and to talk about, and to prepare for. We may have some experiences when—during Yom Kippur, many people fast. If somebody faints, there should be juice somewhere, or sugar to put into their system. But how to do that in ways that respects the cultural sensitivity of the community, but also recognizes that there’s a safety concern there? So sometimes, these are things that we have some experience doing, and anybody can have the skills to tap into—starting to think about this and starting to expand who’s involved in the conversation.

Yeah, I also just want to quickly talk about one of the other aspects of the guide and one of the other aspects of this vision that you’re proposing, which is: In addition to actualizing community safety teams and work on the ground for Jewish communities as an alternative to carceral solutions, there’s also an idea about having a kind of clearinghouse or central organization for data, and rhetoric, and communications around antisemitism, in a way that’s very different than the most prominent organization that we have right now for that, which is the ADL, which is in charge of narrativizing the experience of antisemitism for the Jewish community, and which, of course (I know well from my reporting), does that in a very specific way that long has involved the prioritization of Israel advocacy politics and, more recently, has involved a very right-wing politics, and aligned with the Trump administration and with the deportation of immigrants, and creating panic about Muslims, and Arabs, and pro-Palestine activists as terrorists and all of that. So this is really interesting to me, because this comes up a lot in my work. When I talk about the ADL, people say: Well, are you proposing an alternative? Is there another organization that could take on this role? And usually I say: Yes. Some people are thinking about that, but we don’t necessarily have that yet, or we don’t know what that would look like. And so, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what your vision is for that.

Yeah, this was such a critical point that we heard over and over again, both with our Jewish and non-Jewish research partners. The three core needs that people identified in those conversations were around data collection, dissemination, as well as comms advocacy and press work. So the reason why we focus in the guide on data so much is because it is an important tool in the advocacy toolbox that these Jewish institutions are using to further this “safety through surveillance” framework. So if we’re serious about contesting those institutions, we also have to be serious about providing the case to a much wider audience for why we need these “safety through solidarity” alternatives. And we’ve already heard from several of our partners that there is work happening to build new data collection practices that we’re excited about. Some of the key principles that I think are necessary in building that out are for the data collection to be deeply intertwined with work to challenge the white and Christian nationalist forces at a local and regional level. If we’re serious about building a data tool, we also need to understand the threats through a lens of fighting fascism and fighting white and Christian nationalism, rather than what I think the FBI and other law enforcement agencies do, which is they look at the incidents as one-by-one incidents rather than as a structural set of conditions that are leading to this type of violence. I think that’s true, also, of some of the ways that hate, in particular, is used as a framework for understanding these incidents. Because the hate frame comes from this idea that an incident is just the incident on its own. It’s not part of a structural context. It’s not part of a system that enables and furthers this type of violence from happening. So I think what we see the need for is a data hub that will include several partners. It will not just be one organization. We need a constellation of organizations with different orientations, with different positionalities and roles that take seriously these incidents as part of a systemic issue and connects the dots between the rising forces of white and Christian nationalism and the ways that the Trump administration and other administrations globally are furthering those forces and supporting those forces, as well as take seriously the critiques that have come up that you’ve reported on around the ADL’s reporting.

And I would just add that, around data dissemination, sometimes it’s a little murky and unclear that there were some instances that are presented as trends that aren’t necessarily that. I think that with more expansive data collection, analytical approach, and dissemination system, that could really tap into the “safety through solidarity” framework by inviting in folks that are seeing things within their communities in ways that another community might not notice so much, and see the relationship between data and what that might be saying about what’s happening in our communities.

Yeah, I think this is really interesting because, at least what I found in my reporting, is that figuring out how to report on trends and bias incidents, or violence, or racism/antisemitism—it’s quite difficult because a lot of what you’re reporting on is reporting of incidents, right? You’re like reporting on whether somebody told an organization or told the police, and there are a lot of factors that can influence when someone decides to speak up and report something that happens versus when they don’t (and also, whether they’re comfortable with the agency that’s collecting the information). Also, whether you’re only getting the same points of contact for people’s reports every year so that you can accurately measure the year-over-year change, or are you adding new sources of data, and then that changes the methodology. So I think it’s a real challenge, and it’ll be interesting to see if a more concerted and studied effort could provide alternate, more thorough ways of understanding this data.

So we’ve talked a little bit about how getting Jewish communities to be open to this “safety through solidarity” paradigm as opposed to surveillance is a challenging effort and is going to take a lot of organizing work. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the challenges there, and also. of course, the fact that people immediately jump to thinking about active shooters as the main threat, or the idea that there’s going to be an imminent killing if we don’t do certain types of security. But also, there’s many other ways of thinking about safety, and there’s a lot of other daily safety practices. And so, we’ve talked about this, but I think I just want to drill down on it a little bit, because I think people’s fears around what it would look like to give up the existing paradigm and institutions are going to be a big challenge for organizing on this front. And I just wonder if we can talk a little bit about that and about the ways in which some of these “safety through surveillance” structures have been responsible for disrupting certain types of anti-Jewish violence in recent years. Like during the 2022 Colleyville hostage crisis, where the synagogue in Texas was held up by a man with a gun, and the rabbi used techniques from a Secure Communities Network, and FBI, and ADL trainings to figure out how to help people safely flee. And also, the FBI has been involved in some infiltration and disruption of white supremacist groups in recent years (although, obviously, having the Trump administration back in office, I think, is likely going to change what that looks like). And so, what does it look like for community safety to replace these types of functions, and how do you respond to people who are concerned that this stuff needs to be happening in that way that it’s happening now in order to protect people?

Yeah, I just want to highlight that we’re not proposing that we don’t have safety conversations. If we don’t leave it to the theater of the police officer up front, we can have these conversations within our own communities and find ways to keep safe—if we are resourcing the efforts to continue to practice and develop these resources so that we can create viable alternatives.

Yeah, several of our team members have been to these types of trainings before—like, FBI or ADL or the Federation—just to get a sense for what’s happening. And what we find is that actually some of the content is parallel to what we’re talking about. So it’s not that we are presenting an entirely different set of tactics. The question is: The tactics that they’re presenting require a certain investment in violent state systems—is that worthwhile in the long term? Is continuing to rely on the FBI when we know that the FBI has targeted and repressed our movements, when it has been part of assassinating major movement leaders, when the ADL continues to be a force for tearing apart our communities? It’s not that the content is so entirely different, it’s that the result of the content that they provide is: Build closer relationships with law enforcement because they will keep you safe. When the reality—whether it’s the Uvalde school shooting, where police officers explicitly allowed more people to be killed in that scenario, or studies that show that the presence of armed guards doesn’t lead to fewer fatalities in school shootings—there’s data that shows that police presence does not actually lead to better outcomes in these scenarios. So it raises a lot of questions and holes in the “safety through surveillance” logic, which—that logic is so based on the belief that there is no alternative. But until our communities start to unravel that, start to see: Yes, there might be some things in this training that are useful, but the more and more we invest in these trainings, the more we build these relationships, the more the bridge to a different society, a different way of being, a different relationship to safety, becomes harder and harder. There’s a re-entrenchment that happens after these antisemitic incidents. So the specific things that they did in the Colleyville synagogue were critical. And our vision is that some of those tactics that they learned, they could actually be learned through a community safety network once we’ve built at the scale that we need to. So to us, the gap is really building at the scale and the reach that we need, and once we are able to do that, we think that people and communities will be even less willing—and will not see the benefit as clearly—to going to the ADL or the FBI for their safety and training.

I want to get into a little bit more that idea—of the vision for scaling it—but I just quickly want to first get into this other challenge that I think can come up here, which is about thinking about this line between community-organized safety work and vigilantism. I think there’s a really interesting example that you bring up in the guide, which is the idea of the Shomrim, or private or local community security forces that exist in some American Hasidic or Orthodox communities. I know there are several in Brooklyn neighborhoods near where I live. In certain ways, these Shomrim forces, which can be responsible for trying to respond to crimes in these Orthodox neighborhoods (and injuries and other emergencies and local needs), can sometimes feel like they’re more effective for community members than the regular police and are an example of people organizing to protect themselves. But then also, in this context, there’s been a lot of issues and challenges with these forces being responsible for violence toward people not in the community—often, particularly, in a racialized way, often with Black and brown groups that are living nearby. And then, also, there’s no public accountability because they’re a private group or a private force. And so, that model brings up a lot of interesting questions in terms of: How do you take the positive elements of the model without creating another type of exclusionary force?

Yeah. The Shomrim example, which comes out of Orthodox and Haredi communities, is one that helps guide how we think about the broader framework we’re building and the practices that might emerge in other parts of the Jewish world. So Shomrim raises these questions: How do we balance meeting our own needs with meeting our non-Jewish neighbors’ needs? How do we define who’s within our community and who’s outside of it? And then, how do we monitor those boundaries? Those are questions that we want all Jewish communities and organizations to be wrestling with, because this “safety through solidarity” framework and practice is about doing what we can to protect our own community but doing it in a way that doesn’t lose sight of the ways that our safety is so deeply connected to that of our neighbors, to that of other communities targeted by white and Christian nationalist violence, to others affected by state violence. So, it does require us to think beyond the narrowness of: Is this making our own people feel safe or secure?

Yeah. I will also add that Shomrim is one example, but there’s other examples that we’re familiar with. There’s the Chaverim, the ambulances, there are free loans societies out there. So, the Jewish community has several examples of how we’ve had to protect ourselves and support our communities.

Thank you, Erica, for adding that. I wanted to also recognize the gaps in our research and writing process in engaging Orthodox and Haredi communities directly. Though we did do research and reading much throughout the process, it was important for us to specifically lift up in the guide the particular experiences of Orthodox and Haredi Jews, because of the ways that those communities are disproportionately affected by antisemitic violence, as well as the depth and breadth of organizations they’ve built to support their communities, to care for each other, to access crisis response resources, and to reduce reliance on state institutions. Though this has often been a fraught and complex relationship, especially as it relates to Shomrim or other security companies’ relationship to police and law enforcement. That’s all to say, there’s a lot to learn from the Orthodox and Haredi examples of community safety efforts that we look at in the guide. I think our work within the Community Safety Campaign and Jewish left movements more broadly really need to be building bridges with and alongside Orthodox and Haredi communities. That’s been a major gap, I think, for a long time in our work. And as one of our colleagues shared, we really need to be identifying shared points of interest and shared values amid the real political and identity-based differences that exist among our communities.

Absolutely. There’s so much more to talk about, and I know we’re running out of time, and so hopefully, we’ll continue to have these conversations, because I think there’s a lot of stuff here that we could go on about for hours. But just to think about translating those important conversations into the more material realm, I want to just quickly ask a little bit about, like, what the next steps are for the campaign and the guide. I know you talk a little bit in the guide about how this isn’t necessarily creating an organization but is more about creating a framework for other organizers and organizations to take on. Where are we going next with this?

Yeah, we do want to really just highlight that this is a tool that we created with love. This is a three-year project that we don’t just want to be read and put on a shelf. We want it to be consumed, to be engaged with, to be engaged with in community, and to get people to enter these conversations.

And I think, depending on what type of community or organization is reading this, they will have different next steps to take on. So if this is a funder or foundation, we want you to think about: How we can be supporting community safety work and shifting resources out of the Department of Homeland Security so that Jewish organizations have other options available to them? If you’re a synagogue, you can think about: How do I build a community safety team within my own synagogue, but do that in a way that connects me to other communities and organizations outside of the Jewish community? If you’re an organizer, think about: What are the strategies that you’re seeing in here that you’re already doing, and where are the places that you could be seeding new projects? We really see this as an offering that can meet people wherever they are, at whatever scale they’re ready to take it on, but that we need to be moving collectively. And so much of what’s in the guide is already happening. So much of the strategy we’re proposing for the next 10 years to bring our vision to life is happening. It’s really about coordinating, elevating it, and building a constellation of communities and organizations who are practicing and actualizing “safety through solidarity”. We’ve started running trainings and workshops for different networks of congregations for Jewish left organizations and organizers. And we’re open to hearing from you, so reach out to us if you’re excited to bring this content and this guide into your community.

Well, I think that’s a great place to end, and we’ll definitely continue to have these important conversations. A lot of links to some of the stuff we talked about are in the show notes, including the full Community Safety Campaign guide. So thank you all for listening today. Thanks, Nadav and Erica, for being here. And to our On the Nose listeners, if you liked this conversation, please leave us a review, subscribe to our podcast, subscribe to Jewish Currents at jewishcurrents.org. Thanks so much, and we will see you next time.