Two shocks tore at Jewish Americans on and after October 7. The first came in the stream of excruciating reports of violence against our friends and family in Israel. The second shock came at home, when many of the groups we considered our allies and partners turned away from us. Some of our decades-long alliances and friendships crumbled in the moment we needed them most.
This felt like a betrayal and left us reeling and disoriented. Many began to lose confidence in the value of coalition-building and social justice work altogether — understandably so. But this work has been a cornerstone of Jewish-American life and institutions for generations. To abandon that in favor of isolation from our neighbors at a crucial moment in our history would be a disastrous misstep. Securing our Jewish future as a small minority in this country requires interweaving our fate with those who share our hopes and vision for a thriving, pluralistic, inclusive society.
To repair our intercommunal connections, we need to be honest about what it takes for a partnership to work, and why many of the Jewish community’s failed. Durable alliances emerge from shared underlying values and mutual understanding. Where our partnerships ruptured, they did so because our foundational values weren’t shared by those we thought had our back, or because of a fundamental disconnect about who we are as Jews and what we need from our partners.
But if we misjudged the ideals and goals of some of our alliances, that doesn’t mean we should abandon the concept of partnership entirely. We need to reevaluate our partners to be sure they’re foundationally aligned with us and understand the commitments we need — while continuing to be open to new commitments ourselves.
The need for this work will endure. I know it because I’ve seen what aligned coalitions have done for our community after October 7 — and what we’ve done for other communities in crisis.
In early 2020, San Francisco’s Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community was in trouble. When Covid shut down our city, it brought another virus with it: a vicious strain of anti-Asian hate. Incendiary rhetoric, including phrases like “the China virus,” bred a wave of violence against AAPI seniors, most notably in San Francisco’s Chinatown. This violence shook a community to its core.
Weeks into the anti-Asian hate crisis, in April 2020, the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area (JCRC) published a full-page advertisement in Sing Tao Daily, the most widely read Cantonese newspaper in San Francisco. In the ad, which took the form of a public letter, we expressed solidarity with targeted Asian communities and explained that the Jewish community’s visceral reaction to this crisis stemmed from our own experiences with antisemitism and xenophobia. Two dozen local Jewish organizations signed on, including the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund (now the Bay Area Jewish Federation), Jewish Family and Children’s Services, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee.
Following the ad’s publication, calls, texts, and emails of gratitude flooded in from Chinatown. Friendships were born. Our staff spent many hours at banquet halls and restaurants in Chinatown and Japantown, bonding with community leaders and celebrating cultural events. Months later, several AAPI leaders participated on our annual civic-leadership trip to Israel, where they deepened their understanding of Jewish identity.
In 2023, JCRC collaborated with the API Council of San Francisco, an umbrella organization representing 57 social service and advocacy organizations in the AAPI community, to lead a joint delegation of 24 community leaders to New York and Washington, D.C. Over several days, our group discussed our shared immigration stories at the Tenement Museum, learned strategies for public safety with the NYPD, visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II, and pressed for action against antisemitic and anti-Asian hate crimes at the White House. We bonded over what we had in common: values, history, policy — and a love of food. Each night of the trip, after our scheduled dinner program, we would migrate over to our “second dinner” at 10 p.m. into the wee hours of the night, enjoying Filipino and Chinese food until comatose. Upon returning from the trip, our alumni formed the San Francisco AAPI-Jewish roundtable, where to this day we work together to address rising hate, public safety, and education issues.
After October 7, when the Jewish community was in crisis, the script flipped. It was AAPI leaders who called, texted, and sent flowers and chocolate-covered strawberries to support our staff, came to our vigils for the hostages, and more. Our JCRC honored the API Council for their friendship and solidarity in the spring of last year, flanked by diverse community leaders and a spirited troupe of Chinatown Lion Dancers.
This solidarity was not without consequence for our partners in the AAPI community. Organizations in Chinatown and Japantown faced ugly calls from far-left factions within their communities, pressuring them to abandon their friendship with the Jewish community while repeating antisemitic tropes and spreading lies about JCRC’s work and values. But these pressure campaigns did not succeed in dividing us. Our friends in the AAPI community consulted us and drew from our shared experiences in New York and Washington to understand how we were being demonized. While we may not always agree on Middle East policy, San Francisco’s AAPI leadership is clear-eyed about the parallels the Jewish community is experiencing today with the ongoing wave of anti-Asian hate.
I draw several lessons from this story.
First, building relationships based on trust takes time. There is no silver bullet to success. It wasn’t a single program, relationship, issue, or moment in time that sparked a strong relationship with the AAPI community. Rather, it was an ongoing commitment to mutual engagement and a continued curiosity to learn about each other and our communities’ history, hopes, and fears.
Second, friendship is not a one-way street. In each of our communities’ moments of crisis, we were there for each other not out of self-interest but because of the visceral feeling that our friends were under attack.
Third, finding common ground in shared values and objectives is a sturdy foundation for any relationship. Today, both the Jewish and AAPI communities are deeply committed to strengthening public safety (including calling for boosts for the California nonprofit security-grants program) and education. Both communities are fighting attempts to minimize the voices and needs of groups like ours in K–12 public schools, local government, and universities.
While our local Jewish-AAPI work continues to thrive, our relationships with some other groups have become more strained. Several months ago, I sat down for a challenging conversation with a longtime black community partner who did not reach out after October 7. For years, JCRC had been standing in solidarity with black leaders and organizations like his. Following the murder of George Floyd, JCRC prioritized an agenda for criminal-justice reform, engaging with black reparations efforts and working tirelessly to create common ground between our communities. His silence in our moment of crisis was painful.
Though difficult, this conversation proved illuminating — it mended fences and provided guidance for the future.
First and foremost, this partner quickly expressed his remorse to me. He told me that he hadn’t realized the depths of the Jewish community’s pain after October 7. He had not connected the dots between the terror attack in Israel and the indelible impact on Diaspora Jews, nor did he understand or recognize the antisemitic rhetoric of our detractors. Then he asked whether we had clearly and effectively spelled out for our civic community partners on an ongoing basis what ideal allyship looked like for the Jewish community. I reflected on what he said, and I told him no. We were not being explicit on what we needed from our partners.
In the past, we had not been up-front about our needs. We had been uncomfortable centering them. After October 7, we saw that we need to be clear about what we expect from our partners — and that we have to do a better job of asking them for help.
We also can’t assume that our partners have baseline knowledge about our experiences. While the Jewish community is inundated with news coming out of Israel and is keenly aware of public-safety matters at home, this experience is far from universal. For a prominent black leader navigating hyperlocal challenges in San Francisco, among them the homelessness epidemic and the fentanyl crisis, issues in the Middle East feel far away. While it may be true that the onus should not fall on us to explain to non-Jews why they should tackle antisemitism, any more than it should be on black or LGBTQ+ people to explain why society should tackle racism or homophobia, this is not a moral high ground we can afford today. Silence from our friends can mean many things. The only way to disrupt it is to stand up for ourselves, even when it is uncomfortable.
There are other lessons to take from our relationships since October 7. For starters, no community is monolithic. Here in San Francisco, the city’s recently departed black mayor, London Breed, and current black and Latina district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, have stood with the Jewish community and prioritized our safety. At the same time, local chapters of Black Lives Matter have posted images of the Hamas paraglider on social media.
Similarly, our statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, Equality California, has been a close partner and collaborator. Rick Zbur, the organization’s past executive director, is now a state legislator who has joined the California Legislative Jewish Caucus as an ally. He has written and sponsored key bills in the legislature to combat antisemitism and improve ethnic-studies curricula. Yet antisemitic organizations such as Gay Shame still unapologetically harass our community. Manny’s, a Mission District gathering place owned by a gay Jewish man, was vandalized last fall on the eve of the first anniversary of October 7.
We have allies and detractors in every community. But we shouldn’t listen only to the outspoken voices from some quarters — much less take them as cause to write off an entire community.
Second, too many Jewish organizations in the social justice arena have dismissed the needs of the Jewish community from their work in progressive spaces, or view combating antisemitism as beyond the scope of their mission. Yet these are the groups best positioned to have challenging conversations about far-left antisemitism and anti-Zionism and the harm they cause our people. In this moment, we need Jewish social justice organizations to end their compartmentalization and help lead on combating the antisemitism that has become endemic in many far-left circles.
Too often in our social justice work, Rabbi Hillel’s reminder to ask ourselves “If I am only for myself, what am I?” comes at the expense of his preceding question: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” We must learn to hold these sage ideas together. After all, combating antisemitism is also a form of social justice work, just like combating racism or sexism. We should not be afraid to frame it that way for our would-be partners.
Finally, abandoning coalition-building would be a huge gift to those who mean us harm. Right now, anti-Israel and antisemitic groups on both extremes of the political spectrum are building coalitions of their own, spreading vitriol and fueling hate in our communities. Ceding ground for them to do so will not serve us. As these bad actors try to demonize Jews and Zionists, imagine the arrow in their quiver that our abandonment would provide: “The Jews never cared about you. They were only out for themselves all along.” We can’t allow that to happen.
Building relationships and coalitions with other communities is messy and not always successful. When it fails, it’s in our human nature to allow ourselves to turn away and become isolated. But our democracy is made up of many small groups like our own. Like them, we can’t afford to desist from this work. By being clear about who we are and what we need while keeping ourselves open to other communities, Jewish Americans will be stronger, more connected, and safer. We must find the courage to keep our hearts open and continue doing the work.
