A Personal and Professional Update from Executive Director Joanna Ware

I'm writing to share a bit of exciting personal and professional news with you. My spouse, Diana, and I are expecting a baby - b'ezrat Hashem/G-d willing - in April. We are over the moon excited to welcome this new human into our family, community, and movement.

As when our oldest, Samara, was born in 2022, the question of how to balance what is best for my family with the Jewish Liberation Fund's needs has been front of mind over the last few months in planning for the many exciting changes underway. As we shared last month in announcing JLF and Rise Up's planned merger, Rise Up director Keren Soffer-Roth is going to be joining the JLF team as co-executive director. Although we don't expect the formal merger process to be finalized until later in 2026, in anticipation of my leave, Keren is starting in her role at JLF next week, and will be serving as JLF's solo executive director during my parental leave. She will also be continuing in her role as director of Rise Up until our planned merger in July. Our expectation is that I will be on leave from Passover through Labor Day.

With the talents, support, and leadership of the JLF Steering Committee, along with Keren and the wider JLF team, including Jordan Mann, Noa Barash, and Joelle Asaro Berman in her role leading Brick by Brick, I am confident that JLF will continue to thrive in my absence.

In this moment of both personal and collective precarity, vulnerability, uncertainty, and transformation, I am acutely grateful for and aware of the necessity of the communities and movements we are building together. As a queer person, my family’s safety and legal protections are a product of organizing and movement wins, as is their durability within our home state of Massachusetts. My anticipated 5 months of parental leave is only possible for a small organization like JLF because after decades of grassroots organizing, in 2018, Massachusetts adopted one of the strongest paid family and medical leave laws in the country.

As both the parent of a preschooler and, b'ezrat Hashem, soon a newborn, I feel sharply the pain and urgency of our movement's work today for the sake of a better tomorrow: the mass resistance, mobilizing, and organizing to protect immigrant neighbors from inhumane cruelty of xenophobic and racist state violence; the urgent necessity of protecting trans beloveds from ugly and regressive scapegoating, political and legal targeting, and violence; the persistent and fundamental fight for the full dignity, wholeness, safety, healing, and liberation of Black and Indigenous people in a country built on the theft, extraction, and exploitation of their ancestors lives, land, and labor; and the possibility and promise of safety, belonging, and wholeness for Jews alongside our Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim neighbors wherever we live.

None of us can build Olam Ha'Ba - the world to come - alone. As I look toward this next season, my goal is to step back from JLF in a position of strength.

Thank you for being part of the collective "we" that has made this moment of growth and transformation possible for JLF and for my family; and for all you are doing to bring forth that reality for every individual and family.

With gratitude and solidarity,

Joanna Ware
Executive Director