ASHLEY BOHRER (Chicago, IL) is a queer, feminist, abolitionist activist who splits her life between Illinois and Indiana. She has been a chapter leader and a chapter co-founder for JVP. In addition to years of Palestine organizing, Ashley also has over a decade of experience in racial, gender, and economic justice movements; she sees the liberation of Palestine as inextricably bound up with the liberation of all people.
AMY LAURA CAHN (Plympton, MA) is white Jewish queer femme attorney and organizer who practices community-based movement lawyering and teaches on issues of environmental, climate, land, and food justice. She is a co-founder of Lower Manhattan’s Bluestockings Bookstore, and has over twenty years of combined board service, supporting social justice philanthropy, community land trusts, and environmental and food justice. Amy Laura reconnected to her Jewish identify during the Second Intifada through organizing with Jews Against the Occupation, the International Solidarity Movement, and the Philadelphia Palestine Film Festival—all of which inform her current work. For over a decade, she has supported JVP as a strategic, organized anti-racist Jewish voice grounded in Jewish political, social, cultural, and spiritual life and community.
ESTEE CHANDLER (Los Angeles, CA) is the founding organizer of JVP Los Angeles which was launched in 2010. She hosts and produces the long running Middle East in Focus Radio show on KPFK along with Nagwa Ibrahim; and is the executive producer, co-creator and host of The Middle East Minute+, a short format weekday news report also on KPFK.
CANDACE GRAFF (New York City) is an attorney from New York City. She is currently employed by the Legal Aid Society in the criminal defense practice. Returning to New York after college, she became one of the founding members of JVP New York’s coordinating committee, during a time of immense growth for the chapter. She is a graduate of Berkeley Law School and Harvard University.
NOAH HABEEB (Brooklyn, NY) has been a member of JVP-NYC since 2017. Previously he was involved with JVP-Boston and student organizing related to Palestine. He has been involved in university BDS resolution organizing, the Deadly Exchange campaign, legislative and JVP Action organizing, and grassroots fundraising. Professionally, he is a DOJ accredited representative (non-attorney legal representative) and directs an immigration legal clinic for LGBTQ and HIV+ asylum seekers. He is also a member of NYC DSA where he has served on the DSA Translation Network Admin Committee and Citywide Communications Committee. His writing about Palestine has appeared in the Nation, Truthout, Tikkun Magazine, and Foreign Policy in Focus.
ANNIE KAUFMAN (Chicago, IL) is a plus-size fashion designer who lives in Baltimore, where she teaches patternmaking and Talmud, enjoys her Yiddishist community, and organizes with Baltimore Palestine Solidarity and JVP.
JONATHAN MATZ (Los Angeles) has been a member of Jewish Voice for Peace for five years. In his half-decade as a member, he has participated in the grassroots fundraising team, Deadly Exchange meetings, the Tameres study group, Havurah Network and Resilience Circle. Jonatha lives in Los Angeles (unceded Tongva land) with his wife and three year old daughter. He is on the Steering Committee for the East Side Jews Activist Collective, and served as DSA Neighborhood Captain in Atwater Village, where he was also elected to the Neighborhood Council and organized a slate of candidates that captured the majority of seats. Jonathan has a background in Jewish activism, having worked as Southern California campaigns organizer at the Progressive Jewish Alliance. Jonathan currently works in active transportation, managing California policy for the Safe Routes Partnership. What he loves most about JVP is grounding Jewish Palestine Solidarity work in ritual and liturgy and confronting head-on the largest American Jewish institutions through campaigns like Deadly Exchange.
IRIT REINHEIMER (Philadelphia, PA) is a filmmaker and long-time Jewish Voice for Peace member. She is currently part of local JVP Philly organizing and was a member of the JVP Artist Council. For the past ten years, Irit has worked as a non-profit communications professional (formerly at the Leeway Foundation and the American Friends Service Committee). Her films have screened internationally and examine Jewish identity, loss, and inheritance through a queer lens. She is currently writing a book that explores her relationship with her mother, as it is framed by the politics of Palestine/Israel.
LISA ROFEL (San Francisco, CA) is a white U.S. American Ashkenazi Jewish lesbian who was raised as an Orthodox Jew taught to support Israel wholeheartedly. The long and painful journey she has taken to become an anti-Zionist gives her insight into how to encourage others to fearlessly challenge Israeli settler colonialism. As an academic-activist (she is a professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz), she has taken a public, visible role in speaking out in support of Palestinian freedom and rights on campus, nationally and in the BDS campaign in the American Anthropology Association (her professional association) and at large.
ERIC ROMANN (Los Angeles, CA) is a white Jewish guy from the middle class suburbs of New Jersey who became a political radical at a young age and has never looked back. He has been active in movements, organizations, and campaigns to challenge white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, US empire, and environmental destruction for over 20 years. He has also been a self-identified anti-Zionist Jew and an activist and organizer in solidarity with the Palestinians’ movement for justice and self-determination dating back to the beginning of the second Intifada.
ISAAC LEV SZMONKO works as a philanthropic advisor to get more money into grassroots movements working for transformative structural change. He organized with Critical Resistance to abolish prisons, police and other forms of criminalization. He served as Resource Generation’s first Campaign Director and later on the National Member Council. As staff at Catalyst Project, Isaac Lev worked to strengthen racial justice politics and practice with white organizers and majority-white organizations. He is white, trans, queer, Jewish and middle class. His passions include cooking, hiking, rambunctious laughter, leadership development, and figuring out how to make revolutionary politics popular.