Selah alumni already have a shared baseline for resilient and effective leadership practices and are leading in many capacities across Jewish and non-Jewish social justice spaces. However, the ask of Jewish leaders is constantly evolving and leaders are tasked with navigating a multitude of new tensions through the last decade. While there is a growing consciousness and recognition of white supremacy in the United States as both persistent and systemic, there is also a growing backlash in our government and resistance in our communities towards building pro-Black spaces and praxes. There are tensions or outright disagreements about how to understand and respond to antisemitism, questions of Jewish safety and relationship to Israel and Palestine, new access needs in changing pandemic times, inflation, rising fascist policies, and other constant new challenges.
Furthermore, we perceive a significant gap in the field around multi-racial leadership development. While there are excellent curriculums and learning spaces for both white Jews and Jews of Color around racial equity praxis, there hasn’t been a space where these learnings are coming together for us to ask: what do we actually need from each other to meet the demands of leadership in this time? The need for this toolkit is apparent across the field as we encounter challenges in sustaining our communities and our work. We will build upon Selah’s core shared foundation of leadership praxis to build a transformative cohort that can sharpen and practice the tools to sustain multiracial leadership across the ecosystem and broader field.