For my daughters, IfNotNow is a place to build community and resistance.
With IfNotNow, I feel as if the future has arrived. And I’m urging you to join me in making a gift to the future today, to help them meet their 25K goal.
About a year ago, I was at a meeting in LA between leaders of IfNotNow and progressive Jewish activists and philanthropists. One of the senior members of our group turned to an IfNotNow representative and said: “I’ve been waiting for you for decades.” It is your turn, he indicated, to assume the mantle of leadership.
Everybody in the room felt a kind of shock, as if we had just witnessed an important act of generational transmission.
It is not just that IfNotNow provides a compelling community and site of resistance for my own daughters. And it is not just that IfNotNow wraps its actions in a meaningful Jewish language, like the moving Tashklikh service that was spontaneously organized in LA between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur a few months ago.
It is that IfNotNow speaks with the urgency and authority of its generation.
Some claim that this cohort of young Jews has been lost. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Members of IfNotNow have a deep sense of commitment and ethical clarity. They understand that the Jewish community has hesitated for too long in calling out the moral and political disaster that is the occupation. Like the sage Hillel, they ask: “If not now, when?” They seek not to bring shame for shame’s sake, but rather to answer Hillel’s question by answering: “Now!”
They are not motivated by hate, but rather by an encompassing love, for fellow Jews, for Palestinians, and for all human beings.
How could one not follow the example of IfNotNow? How could one not heed the call of the young?
Thank you,
David N. Myers, Los Angeles
