Episode 46: Recovering from Zionism: An Unscheduled Chat w/ Barb Parnet

This is David’s unscheduled talk with Barb Parmet, a “Recoverd Zionist” whom we hosted 3 months ago, but so much has happened since.

Barb says,

Before October 7th, Jewish Voice For Peace had spent a year reorganizing chapters throughout the country and talking to our community organizers and members, surveying what had been working and what had not been working and coming up with a new internal structure on how to organize. JVP was much smaller then and so a small conference of chapter leaders was planned up in Monterey at the Asilomar conference center.

After October 7th, the membership expanded exponentially, by the thousands all over the country. Some chapters in New York and Washington and LA have had hundreds of new members . The completely new and unexpected challenge was to figure out how to take in so many people who were willing to be arrested as they called for Ceasefire while integrating them into the culture of the organization and all the contradictions that implied. So the nature of the conference changed dramatically. We shifted to organizing organizers, including many young college students and younger Jews who wanted to be a part of the struggle.

So, while organizing massive sit-ins and direct actions of various kinds all over the country, the national leadership was re-organizing the conference by the seat of their collective pants. The amazing result was a conference with Young Jews, Black Jews, Palestinian Jews, Mizrachi, Sephardi Jews along with the huge number of queer cultural and art practitioners with our elder culture of radical Jewish anti-zionists. The result was miraculous. We sang and danced and grieved together while we integrated and discussed together how to struggle together to fight for Palestinians to be treated as human beings with equal rights.

I will add that JVP made this conference FREE to all who applied and were accepted as representatives of their chapters. They offered travel stipends as well so our East Coast and midwest organizers could join us. JVP wanted NO financial barriers to stop people from coming. This was a gorgeous miracle.

ABOUT YOUR HOSTS:

David is a University of California Santa Barbara alum and leads Santa Barbara’s Beloved Community Church, and also Jesus Collective, an online community which exists to foster wholeness and equity by healing relationships and cultural divides, honoring the dignity of all peoples, and protecting the biodiversity of our planet, through actively listening, understanding, partnering, and serving. He is the author of Making America Great Again: Fairy Tale? Horror Story? Dream Come True? Learn more at www.davidnmoore.com

Kerry Connelly, (she / her) MDiv, CCLC is the author of Good White Racist? Confronting Your Role in Racial Injustice and Wait, Is This Racist? A Guide to Becoming an Antiracist Church. Kerry holds her Master of Divinity from Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, where she is currently pursuing her Doctorate of Ministry. She is a Certified Coach with additional certifications in DISC personality styles, conflict resolution (Cornell University), + she is a NYC Leadership Fellow. Passionate about all things spiritual, she is also trained in a number of intuitive energy healing modalities, including traditional Usui Reiki and Angel Reiki. When she is not consulting with predominantly White churches to help them deconstruct White pseudosupremacy in their daily operations, she is working 1:1 with clients to help them connect with their own higher guidance and to live deeply intuitive lives. You can learn more about Kerry at www.kerryconnelly.com.