How Occupy Has Shaped Jewish Social Justice

A decade ago in Zuccotti Park, Getzel Davis’ words echoed through the people’s microphone.

“What is the golden calf?” he asked the crowd, “It is the essence of idol worship. It is the fallacy that gold is God.” 

And the occupiers repeated, amplifying the words with a heavy effect so that all in attendance could hear. 

From September to November of 2011, the park had been inhabited by self-proclaimed members of the 99% who gathered to express their outrage and advocate for justice—against that so-called golden calf—with the Occupy Wall Street movement. These months tend to be of heightened significance to Jewish people who observe the high holidays taking place within this time span. Many Jewish occupiers convened to celebrate right there in the park, raising Jewish teachings into the conversation and shepherding their religion and protest into one arena. Teachings such as those about the golden calf grew to be not just biblical lessons, but part of a movement.

In call-and-response style speeches, Jewish voices reverberated throughout the park, creating a moment in time that was critical for not only Jewish activists, but Jewish activism.

Although Davis entered Zuccotti Park fueled by his religion and values, he believes that this public act of Jewish ritual has started its own tradition, wherein Judaism is then also the medium for activism. It’s a cycle of meaning and action.

“​​I think that really one of the most fundamental things that happened at Occupy Wall Street was that it was one of the very first times that Jews used ritual publicly as a political act in America,” Davis, now a rabbi at Harvard Hillel, said. “The idea of publicly scheduling a Jewish holiday observance as a form of action was really new and hadn't been done before and has been done since over and over again.”

Finely tuned to the situation, Davis deployed Jewish tradition in his Occupy Kol Nidre sermon, condemning the idolization of riches to his crowd of occupiers eager for economic justice. Later in the occupation, during Sukkot, Rabbi Mike Rothbaum followed this same theme. 

“Social justice is to me, an essential element of what it means to be a Jew, the pursuit of justice, and it's why I became a rabbi,” Rothbaum said.

It was his personal values, intrinsically tied to his Jewish identity, that drew him to the movement that day, and Jewish ritual was used to convey his message to everyone. From a Zuccotti Park sukkah, Rothbaum taught about housing insecurity, connecting to the holiday’s symbolism that people’s positions in life are fragile and its theme of appreciating shelter. His message rang loudly from his position under that frail and temporary hut. 

Again, in this instance, Judaism was both the motivator and the mode of articulation in this otherwise secular public sphere. It was a Jewish foundation that led Rothbaum to join this movement, and Jewish public ritual that then fueled the act for social justice.

For many involved, this cycle of Judaism and social activism did not end when the occupation did. 

Ben Murane is one individual who was impacted by attending Occupy Kol Nidre. Now the executive director for the New Israel Fund for Canada, a social justice organization, Murane connected the situation that brought occupiers to the park to a perceived Jewish value of fairness, and was moved by the Yom Kippur ritual evoked to express the need for justice.

“I think in an artful sense, in a sense of symbolism and meaning, if you care about equality and if you care about the 99%, and if you're worried about what motive for profit is doing to guide corporate decision making above all else, about human lives and sustainability and well-being,” he said, “then you can't help but find a bunch of meaning in doing an act of worship as protest.”

For Rabbi Ellen Lippmann, the fight for justice reaches beyond the Sukkot sermon she gave at Zuccotti Park in short snippets echoed by those surrounding. In 1993, long before occupiers gathered, Lippmann founded a congregation devoted to the pursuit of justice, ​​Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn. What began as a congregation of eight people, she fostered into a passionate group of 500 before she retired.

Lippmann saw these Occupy Judaism pop-ups as a chance to bring messages “out of the synagogue and onto the streets.” 

Lippmann suggests that Occupy Wall Street was a critical moment for a younger generation of activists, inspiring participants in movements that have come since from women’s marches to Black Lives Matter. This may have been especially important, she said, for non-Orthodox Jews to see “very visibly Jewish” public action in the spirit of protest.

And so the cycle continues.

One young Jewish activist that wishes to stay anonymous described Occupy Wall Street as a turning point in his life for his understanding of what social activism could mean. He sees this movement as playing a role in paving the way for his current ambitions for justice.

“When Occupy Wall Street happened, I was immediately totally absorbed by it and intoxicated by it, and just started doing it all the time, and being there, and writing about it and meeting people,” he said. “But before Occupy Wall Street, it wasn't at all clear to me on a practical level how that could be, because there were practically no revolutionary movements.”

Now fueled by this example, he described Judaism as a tool that he mobilizes, giving him a “vocabulary” for expressing his beliefs in a way that resonates with others so that their spirituality may then become both the motivator and means of activism, too. And he’s not the only one. Since 2011, Judaism has been a catalyst for numerous organizations aimed at social justice, and Jewish public ritual has been used in further protest movements.

A prime example is the 2019 protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention camp mistreatment. During these demonstrations, Jewish participants in New York City recited the mourner’s kaddish, a prayer normally vocalized to show faith during times of loss, but in this instance, was also adopted to highlight the deaths taking place in these centers that have been likened to Holocaust-era concentration camps.

However, for all the impact that the Occupy movement has had on Jewish social activism, many Jewish Wall Street insiders hardly remember the event. 

“​​I feel like it wasn't a major part of my professional memory,” said a Jewish saleswoman for a large New York financial firm. “I wasn't necessarily that influenced by this movement.” 

Several other upper-level Wall Street employees share her sentiment. 

Despite Lippmann’s emphasis on the impact of this movement for future activism, she agrees that the Occupy movement, in some ways, missed an opportunity to create more political and social change.

“It's not like Occupy Wall Street came together with one agenda,” she explained. “It was really just a kind of a gathering to say, ‘We're here. We are the 99% …’ and there’s an awful lot of power there, that I, in retrospect, feel like they didn't really make use of.”

Still, on this anniversary, the point stands that Occupy has created meaning for Jewish social activism beyond the grass of Zuccotti Park. By providing a scene for the pursuit of justice and Jewish ritual to meet head-on, the Occupy landscape has shown how Judaism can be a powerful part of social movements.

No longer just fueling passion for social justice, Judaism may now also be a means for social change.