RPL in the News: "Meet Jews for Liberation, the HDS Student Group Bringing Politics and Spirituality Together"

Harvard Crimson writers Ellie S. Klibaner-Schiff and Mariah M. Norman cover the new HDS student organization Jews for Liberation, featuring S. Lovett-Graff and Francesca Rubinson, two HDS students involved in Religion and Public Life's Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative (RCPI).

Jews for Liberation, a student organization composed primarily of Jewish students at Harvard Divinity School, describes itself in its Instagram bio as a “spiritual and political space for anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews at Harvard.”

Members of the group emphasize that politics and religion are not necessarily separable. “My political activism, for me, feels very rooted in my Jewish identity,” Rubinson says. “No religious space is apolitical,” Lovett-Graff says. “For Jewish spaces to say that they’re devoid of politics in some way is a political stance.”

Within the web of varied Jewish spaces and political spaces on campus, Jews for Liberation fills a specific niche at the intersection of the religious and the political. 

“Our intended goal is to create an expansive space in which we center Jews who are most marginalized by Jewish organizations and communities,” Lovett-Graff says. Many Jews for Liberation members are involved with diverse Jewish groups on and off campus. “I belong to multiple different Jewish communities, and move between different Jewish spaces,” Rubinson says. “But I feel like that’s a part of the work I try to do, to be a little bit of a boundary crosser, an interconnected person.”

Read the full piece on the Harvard Crimson.