Community Safety Campaign

This document provides our beloved Jewish communities and non-Jewish partners with a guide for addressing one of the core challenges of our time – rising white supremacist and antisemitic violence.

We wrote this guide as an organizing tool, not simply as a text to be consumed. Our aim is to increase safety both within and beyond Jewish communities. We encourage you to engage with it in community rather than on your own.

The guide is a visionary and practical roadmap for our communities to transform their safety practices and participate in the wider movement for abolition. It offers concrete strategies, interventions, and tools; analysis of the conditions, threats, and challenges we face; and inspiring examples from communities already putting the values of “Safety through Solidarity” into practice.

“An urgent and necessary program, not just for Jewish communities but for all of us. The keyword here is solidarity, the recognition that our collective safety and well-being requires building new communities, new publics, new alliances and even new friendships. If we can do this, with open minds and hearts, with a commitment to accountability and care, then we’ll discover the most important lesson of all: an abolitionist guide to safety turns self-defense into a path toward liberation.“- Robin D. G. Kelley, scholar-activist and Distinguished Professor of U.S. History

“Bringing ‘Safety Through Solidarity’ to Life is an incredible gift to communities who are committed to safety and justice, across a wide spectrum of political commitments and religious expressions. Rooted in Jewish tradition and reaching towards the material realization of the world to come in our days, this report is a prophetic call to action and a strategic roadmap for our communities. I am looking forward to studying it and bringing it to life in my community.” – Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, organizer and co-author of For Times Such as These: A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year

“This guide weaves together practical resources, compelling case studies, and visionary calls to action into a powerful resource for movement building. Its expansive framework for ‘community safety’ is an asset for anyone organizing for justice in these times.” – Zein Nakhoda, Training for Change

“Our movements have needed something like this for a long time, a comprehensive vision of a radical approach to community safety in all of its aspects. It gathers so much wisdom from across our movements all in one place, and offers a really wide range of tools and entry points for this work, ranging from political analysis to resources for campaign work, movement history, and much more. We on the Jewish Left talk about ‘community safety’ a lot and I’m so grateful this report does the work to rigorously develop the, concept, expand it to embrace its full scope and implications, and strategize what it would take to put it into practice not only locally but across our communal landscape and the wider society.” – Ben Lorber, co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism

CONTENTS OF THE GUIDE