Bend the Arc is uniting progressive Jewish voices across America to fight for justice for all.

Pursuing Justice 2020 Online took place May 3-4, 2020, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, increasing antisemitism, and the most critical election year of our lifetime.

For two days, 1,100 Jewish movement builders, leaders, experts, and allies gathered virtually as a community committed to political transformation. Together, we dove into the most urgent and complex problems facing our nation, bolstered by wisdom from our ancestors and tradition, and inspired by brilliant leaders and partners who are dreaming of a better world.

Learn more about the speakers, sessions, and resources from Pursuing Justice 2020 Online: https://conference.bendthearc.us/

From the moment Steve Bannon was announced as a Senior Advisor to President Trump, we fought against the normalization of his brand of bigotry in the White House. In November 2016, we organized a petition with Muslim Public Affairs Council that was signed by 29,000 Jews and Muslims.

After Charlottesville, we increased the pressure, demanding the firing of Bannon and two of his allies, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller. We brought our voices to Capitol Hill where we demanded Congress choose a side: either with or against white supremacy. We were part of the coalition that made it untenable for Bannon and Gorka to continue, and they were out of the White House that month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kgMpf0MA90

We helped win a big victory for the resistance by making it harder for Trump’s deportation machine to tear apart immigrant families.

In California and New York, Bend the Arc leaders joined immigrant-led coalitions to win statewide reforms which will prevent local law enforcement agencies from collaborating with federal immigration enforcement agents.

The California legislation, SB54, is the strongest such legislation in the country. The wins resulted from months of organizing, phone banking, lobby visits, and acts of civil disobedience.

“Only one Jewish organization fully mobilized to defeat the threatening rise of Donald Trump’s candidacy: Bend the Arc.” —Jewschool.com

In the year leading up to the 2016 election, from days of action in over 50 cities, to videos seen by millions, and the largest Jewish get out the vote operation, our community rallied to demonstrate unprecedented resistance to Trump’s politics of hate and bigotry. We made it clear that Jews across the country rejected Trumpism, leading to 76% of Jewish voters voting against Trump at the ballot box.

The day after the election, we published an Open Letter from American Jews — signed by 45,000 people — to everyone threatened by Trump’s election, promising that we will stay by their sides in solidarity. We’ve been working tirelessly to uphold that promise throughout the Trump presidency.

In their 2016 Progressive Honor Roll, The Nation named We’ve Seen This Before the “Most Valuable Activist Campaign” of the year.

Bend the Arc leaders in both California have organized for several years alongside our partners to reform the state’s broken criminal justice system.

Through organizing and lobbying, we’ve helped shift public policy that addresses years of systematic neglect — from ending the “three strikes” law in 2012 and reforming sentencing with Proposition 47 in 2014 to ending the inhumane practice of solitary isolation for incarcerated youth in 2016.

The growth in income inequality in this country is not only an economic crisis; it’s a moral crisis as well. Federal minimum wage still isn’t nearly enough to pay for basic needs.

In 2016, our #JewsFor15 campaign joined with the sustained efforts of low-wage workers and labor organizers to win passage of historic bills to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in New York and California, two of the most populous states in the nation. The bills also each provide a form of paid sick days or family leave.

In the year after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, we launched an effort to mobilize American Jews to protect voting rights.

We commemorated the 50th anniversary of the murders of three civil rights activists — Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, who were murdered while working to register black voters in Mississippi in 1964 — by delivering a yahrzeit candle to every Member of Congress and creating a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial with 3,000 candles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2mDzyLFyoY

The landmark labor reforms of the New Deal in the 1930s left a few categories of workers out of basic labor protections. In 2013, we worked to fix that.

Following a multiple year campaign in partnership with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, we helped pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in California in 2013, which extended the basic labor protection of overtime pay to 200,000 domestic workers in the state.

We also mobilized American Jews to support new Department of Labor regulations extending basic labor protections to homecare workers.

In 2013, we mobilized a nationwide Jewish campaign in support of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, which passed the house and came close to passage in the Senate. Our supporters attended dozens of lobby meetings with elected officials, and we helped shape the narrative with our campaign website www.entrydenied.org, which let visitors learn if their ancestors could have immigrated under current laws (over 95% could not).

In 2012, we launched Bend the Arc: Jewish Action to bring a clear and unabashedly progressive Jewish voice into our nation’s political discourse — shifting the narrative that Jews are a single-issue constituency. Two years later, we launched Bend the Arc: Jewish Action PAC to form the only national Jewish political action committee that is solely focused on domestic progressive policy.

Bend the Arc formed out of a merger between two Jewish social justice organizations in 2011 — Progressive Jewish Alliance of California and Jewish Funds for Justice of New York, which created Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice, a nonprofit charitable organization. Our collective organizational history goes back to 1987, when Jewish Fund for Justice awarded their first grant to a young community organizer on the South Side of Chicago named Barack Obama.