“What motivated me to both enter into this field and this work of Jewish social justice and to really stake my work with the vision of what Bend the Arc is becoming, is the belief that our country must be transformed in order to reflect the deepest values and the human rights and dignity of all people who are living here, and that is a unique and important role that the Jewish community can play in that tradition,” she explained. “I believe in a world where power and resources can be shared and where we can move from gross structural inequalities and historic injustices into a world where we are redistributing resources, where we are taking responsibility for the harms that have created a disinvestment in those [disadvantaged] communities, and that we can then create a different world, a vision for this country that we’ve never seen before.” She explained that Jewish traditions and wisdom provide “brilliant road maps” that activists can use to “help reimagine the world we need and that there is, in many ways, a set of radical ideas which, if we were to actually apply them, we would need to reorganize our society in some fundamental ways.” For example, Cotler explained that the concept of Shabbat shows that everyone needs a day off from work to rest and restore oneself. “It goes against the way in which, in the US, we are indoctrinated to believe,” Cotler told the Post.

There is also a sort of strategy behind keeping her Jewish identity identifiable, Cotler explained.

“We can identify with other communities who are under attack, for other communities who are not able to or want to hide their identities. There is tremendous wisdom that I draw on as a Jew to do my political work.” Cotler keeps her work strictly domestic, keeping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out of her politics: and purposely so.