Imagining the World to Come

By Ben Ratskoff Because Haredi communities have historically detached their work in Jewish law from the carceral Israeli state, their perspectives on incarceration seem worth exploring in order to imagine alternative political visions of...

How to think and what to do about race in order to abolish prisons By Anonymous In 2010, I had a 4-month long psychotic episode during which time I broke several laws, including public disturbance, shoplifting, stalking and whatever it is...

How do we achieve real safety?

At JVP, we work hard to imagine a different future for Palestinians and Israelis, one without walls, checkpoints, home demolitions, and child detention. One where everyone has freedom of movement, access to clean water, the right to live and worship as they please.

For those who struggle for liberation then, Shabbat offers the weekly opportunity to cease the struggle, if but for a day, to dwell in the world that we are ultimately fighting for.

It seems crucially important to me, at this time when hatreds divide us and violence upends whole countries’ civilian populations, that we retain the ideal of the City of Refuge, a place of peace and mutual respect where human needs are met and all are welcome who wish to begin anew.

“zog nit keyn mol,” is a collage-based work from research I have been doing on Jewish women partisan fighters from the second world war and Nazi Holocaust.

We see the centuries of Jewish thought, culture, and practice, which has always engaged in questions of envisioning a transformed world, as a rich source of inspiration and challenge to our questions about abolition today.