Episode 45: An Unscheduled Chat w/ “Recovered Zionist” 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.