Organizing During Whirlwind Moments
From #GeorgeFloyd to Israel/Palestine, how the environment for political work is getting more tumultuous and treacherous.
Is your organization ready for a moment of the whirlwind? That was organizer Nicholas von Hoffman’s way of describing the overflow crowd he saw at a community meeting in Woodlawn, Chicago that turned out spontaneously to hear Freedom Riders speak about their experiences in Mississippi in the spring of 1961. “I think that we should toss out everything we are doing organizationally and work on the premise that this is the moment of the whirlwind, that we are no longer organizing but guiding a social movement,” he told his boss Saul Alinsky.
Listen to organizer Mirella Ceja-Orozco, the co-director of the Minnesota Freedom Fund, describing to New York magazine writer Angelina Chapin, what it was like in the days after George Floyd’s murder and her tiny bail fund was swamped with attention, raising $30 million in two weeks:
“Soon after the donations piled in, it became scary. We started being doxed and threatened for supposedly helping people who didn’t deserve it or for being anti-American. Someone sent me an email and private message on Facebook saying, ‘Watch your back. We’re coming to get you.’ Our addresses were being published on social media, and one board member had their porch light broken and their screen door busted. I believe they had children, and they left the board within a week or two of that happening. We had to tell our relatives and employers to look out for anything suspicious that arrived in the mail. I told my brother not to accept any random Facebook friends. I told my family that if they got an email from me that looked weird, don’t open it. Along with thousands of emails to notify us of every donation, we were also getting spammed. In five minutes, I could get 10,000 emails, which would cause Gmail to crash. We didn’t know the difference between a virus and a harmless message. We had to hire a security firm to help us with tracking all the malware — that cost $22,000. They put filters on our emails, installed security updates, and told us when the spam was actually malicious. It started to become apparent that we were no longer going to be the same organization and that a tiny nonprofit group couldn’t function at this level.”
Whirlwind moments are still only partly understood by organizers. And one thing that this testimony from Ceja-Orozco illustrates is the massive challenge presented by today’s digital environment. In this one paragraph we see an explosion of harassment along with notification overload. In the days after the whirlwind, the Minnesota Freedom Fund also found itself facing a weird backlash, as many of its new-found supporters asked why it wasn’t spending its windfall faster. “We were a tiny organization dealing with a chaotic situation, which not everyone understood,” Ceja-Orozco says.
Memo to executive directors everywhere: Imagine a scenario where your organization is suddenly swamped with both positive and negative attention. Can you absorb 10,000 volunteers suddenly knocking on your door? Can you protect yourself and your staff from being doxxed? What steps can you take now to address these challenges?
Right now, American Jews are a whirlwind moment. The eleven-day war between Israel and Hamas didn’t just expose big cracks in Israeli society between Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and right-wing Israeli Jews. When the New York Times runs one front-page story titled, “Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict,” and then three days later, today, puts this image of 67 children killed during the war, 65 of them Gaza residents, on its front page, you can be sure a tectonic shift is underway.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and longtime President of J Street, the liberal counterpoint to AIPAC, argues that the spade work his organization has been doing for years to shift the American political conversation is bearing fruit. The old playbook used whenever fighting broke out, which “said there was only one way to be pro-Israel, and that was by showing unquestioning public support to the Israeli government, no matter what,” has been set aside, he argues in an email sent to J Street supporters this morning. “Our new playbook not only grants permission to speak out about the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians, but recognizes that neither people can be truly secure in their right to peace, freedom and self-determination until the other has those same rights too. That with every new Israeli settlement built, or Palestinian family dispossessed, the dream of Israel as a secure, stable and democratic homeland for the Jewish people slips further from view.”
He may be right. I personally hope he is. But as a progressive American Jew who has long been involved as an observer and participant in politics, I’m not sanguine. Earthquakes aren’t good things to try to live through. I know New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman often reflects a very blasé kind of conventional wisdom about politics (remember his love affair with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman back in 2017?), but he’s not wrong when he writes, “Unless we preserve at least the potential of a two-state solution, the one-state reality that would emerge in its place won’t just blow up Israel, the West Bank and Gaza; it could very well blow up the Democratic Party and every Jewish organization and synagogue in America.” (Friedman’s proposal for how restart peace negotiations using The Former Guy’s Kushner plan, which offered the Palestinians just 70% of the West Bank, is kookoonuts, but let’s leave that to the side.)
American Jews show up in American politics in numbers far beyond our proportion in the overall population. It’s not just the ten Jewish U.S. Senators or two Jewish Supreme Court Justices. As one digital advocacy director once told me, Jews “overindex” on just about every liberal and left email list in America. This isn’t a new phenomenon either; American Jews have long been deeply engaged in supporting movements for racial, economic and social justice here. A few years ago, Ben Jealous, then the president of the NAACP, told me that half the donors to his organization were Jewish.
So how President Biden navigates the treacherous currents of the Middle East conflict is going to have big ramifications on domestic politics. And while his administration has taken a few useful steps to try to calm the situation (after relying too much on the old playbook of declaring unconditional support for Israel) and ramp up aid and engagement with the Palestinian Authority, he can’t move very quickly. In the meantime, hyper-attentive and hyper-organized American Jews across the political spectrum are on high alert in ways that may lead to more polarization inside the historic coalition that makes up the Democratic base. I’m not optimistic about how this is going to play out.
The recent rise in anti-Semitic attacks on American Jews, especially those wearing kippot or traditional garb, which has been building for the last few years thanks to Trump’s embrace of white nationalism, is a flashpoint. Less visible but of equal concern: 36% of American Jews reported experiencing online harassment last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual survey of hate and harassment on social media. That number rose slightly from 33% the previous year. (One assumes the number is going to be higher this year.) By contrast, LGBTQ+ respondents reported a much higher rate of harassment at 64%, Black respondents at 59%, Muslims at 57% and Asian-Americans at 50%.
You can see the what-aboutism breaking out already, as some American Jewish thought-leaders like Rachel Fish of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism ask why they’re not seeing the same degree of solidarity as was offered to others a year ago, which is an understandable question, though a very hard one to resolve in a satisfactory way. Far more problematic are calls like Liel Liebowitz’s in TabletMag, that it’s time to decide which side are you on, Zionism or anti-Zionism, which to him means telling his Jewish peers to abandon the social justice world and efforts to dismantle racism for the comforts of private property, capitalism, family, nation-states and the West (I kid you not).
The race to spin a coherent narrative out of a miasma of real events and unclear signals is on, and nuance does not survive that process very well. At the every moment when religious and ethnic minorities need to work in concert against the rise of an openly anti-democratic major political party on the right, the liberal-left in America is going to get torn up the more the rhetoric of pain and trauma escalates. Unfortunately, the way the attention economy works now is going to make this situation worse. There’s clicks and money to be made staking out provocative positions and finding small incidents to magnify into moral spectacles. As the poet once said, “Bad lines are being drawn. Nobody’s right when everybody’s wrong.”
Odds and Ends
-If what I wrote above isn’t depressing enough, you can read Ronald Brownstein on how Democratic leaders aren’t taking the threat to American democracy seriously enough, and then top that off with Sean Illing’s conversation in Vox with David Faris, the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty, on how 2020 was a test run for overturning the next election.
-Here’s the best case I’ve seen for treating local news as a pillar of civic infrastructure, written by Steve Waldman of Report for America. He’d do it by giving taxpayers a $250 tax credit to use to buy local news subscriptions or donate to local news nonprofits.
-Related: If you really want to geek out on the topic of what makes a healthy news ecosystem, Impact Architects has posted its full report for the Democracy Fund, Google News Initiative and Knight Foundation. Bonus: An in-depth literature review on the topic.
-If you believe political advertising has a big impact on local elections, then this new study by Way to Win should set off alarm bells. As Greg Sargent reports for The Washington Post, in 2020 House Democrats spent far more money than House Republicans touting bipartisan themes and working across the aisle, while the Republicans spent heavily on ads attacking their opponents as radical extremists.
-End times: Spencer Silver, a research chemist at 3M who accidentally created the not-that-sticky adhesive which led to the invention of Post-it Notes, died earlier this month. I like to imagine that as the news spread, in conference rooms the world over leftover Post-its from meetings that never regrouped after the start of the pandemic came fluttering down en masse in a sign of mourning. Rest in peace.