Meet JLF’s New Co-Executive Director: Keren Soffer-Roth 

My name is Keren, and I'm thrilled to be writing to you as the new co-executive director of the Jewish Liberation Fund!

In case you missed it, JLF announced in January that we're planning to merge this summer with Rise Up Initiative, an organization which funds spiritually-rooted Jewish justice work that I have proudly led for the last four years. It's an honor to be stewarding this transition alongside JLF's founding director / co-executive director Joanna Ware. As Jo prepares to begin her five-month parental leave at the end of March, I've jumped right in and joined the talented ranks of JLF staff ahead of our merge date.

I am over the moon to be in this new role, where I get to more meaningfully fund my beloved Jewish left. I owe it so much — and I imagine many of you do, too.

I found the Jewish left when I joined Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), one of JLF's grantees, as a dues-paying member in 2013. After growing up in a right-wing Jewish community in Queens, New York, where I was taught to believe that my safety as a Jew came before all else, JFREJ became the spiritual and political home I didn't know I needed until I was lucky enough to find it. To this day, JFREJ models an unwavering commitment to the dignity, safety, and belonging of all of us — Jews and our neighbors — wherever we live.

I return to the words of Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, z"l, JFREJ's founding executive director, again and again. She writes:

"What do I mean by home? Not the nation state; not religious worship; not the deepest grief of a people marked by hatred. I mean a commitment to what is and is not mine; to the strangeness of others, to my strangeness to others; to common threads twisted with surprise. Diasporism takes root in the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund's principle of doikayt — hereness — the right to be, and to fight for justice, wherever we are…."

At JFREJ, I learned to take building power — and the belief that we can and will win — very seriously. I learned that each person making phone calls, painting banners, cooking dinner, or holding down childcare is just as much a leader as the one holding the megaphone. I learned that we are only as powerful as the numbers in our ranks, and all of us have a responsibility to give what we can to the organizations we want and need to exist. And I learned that organizing Jews means understanding our people’s deepest fears and profound yearning to really, truly belong.  

My time leading Rise Up has been about making this same experience possible for more Jews who are adrift, in the way I used to be. I believe, with every fiber of my being, that we need more values-aligned spiritual and political homes for those of us who are desperate for a relationship to Judaism on our own terms. We shouldn't have to make moral compromises about the fact that all human beings are made b'tzelem elohim, in the image of the divine, in order to access these spaces. At Rise Up, that's what I've focused on funding, and I know that everyone at JLF has deeply cared about and led in this arena, too.

All of us have a critical role to play. Whether we're phonebanking, making a monthly gift, creating art, leading an organizing training, looking after our kiddos, or moving resources to the field. I am so grateful to have found my role, here at JLF, where I get to re-invest in the Jewish left that has already given me so much.

I'm looking forward to getting to know each and every one of you.

Onward,

Keren Soffer-Roth

JLF Co-Executive Director