About CSC
Community Safety Campaign (CSC) is a national project led by a multiracial, cross-class, multi-denominational and gender-diverse team of Jewish organizers, political educators, researchers, healers, and spiritual leaders. We launched in 2022 to build a more coordinated and strategic approach to Jewish community safety practices beyond policing and surveillance. We’ve completed an extensive research process that’s resulted in a 130+ page guide, workshops, and trainings.
We are committed to building a Jewish future, and a future for all people, that relies on practices of solidarity to build safer communities, rather than systems of surveillance and criminalization. We understand our safety as Jewish communities as bound up with the safety of all our neighbors, built through relationships and practices of mutual support rather than fear and isolation.
For a list of our team members, research partners, and external reviewers (past and present) please see the acknowledgements section in our CSC guide.
Our Values
- We lead with an abolitionist approach, which means we build safety beyond policing, prisons, surveillance, borders, militarism, and other carceral systems.
- We understand abolition to require both building community-led alternatives as well as blocking and dismantling harmful carceral systems.
- We draw on a rich legacy of ancestors and examples to guide our work. Communities of all kinds, including Jewish ones, have created safety outside of the police and prisons for generations.
- We root deeply in our Jewish lives, traditions, histories, and cultures to inform, inspire and sustain our work.
- We recognize that our Jewish communities contain erev rav (עֵרֶב רַב), or mixed multitudes, and that different Jews experience violence differently based on their religious observance, race, ethnicity, gender, class, disability, immigration status, etc.
- We know that antisemitism is not eternal and that we can dismantle it alongside other systems of oppression.
- We reject ethnonationalism, and understand it as a central source of racial violence.
- We believe antisemitism and white supremacist violence can only be effectively addressed through partnership, collaboration, and a “Safety through Solidarity” approach.
- We understand that healing and transformation at the scale we need takes time, risk, and vulnerability.
- We organize across different communities because we are oriented towards a collective project much bigger than ourselves and our immediate context.
Project History
As Jews living through multiple crises and committed to Jewish and collective liberation, we planted the seeds for this project with broken hearts after witnessing the hostage crisis and attack against the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas in January 2022.
We recognized cyclical trends within contemporary Jewish communities in response to antisemitic attacks, which we describe in the guide. The most common trend we witnessed was an increased commitment on the part of legacy Jewish institutions to practices of what we call “Safety through Surveillance,” which focus on building both physical and emotional walls and fortresses within and around our communities.
We started having important and honest conversations in Tzedek Lab – a multiracial network of Jews and allies, political educators, organizers, spiritual leaders, and cultural workers committed to fighting racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy – about what it would take to challenge the dynamics we were noticing in our communities and leverage more power collectively.
We launched Community Safety Campaign to advocate for a different path, which is often referred to as “Safety through Solidarity,” that we believe will bring us closer to olam haba (עולם הבא – the world to come). This path is about challenging the systems that create and uphold violence and oppression, including antisemitism, while building structures of community safety and mutual solidarity with others targeted by fascism, white supremacist violence, and Christian nationalism.
Community Safety Campaign 