PHYLLIS BENNIS (Washington, DC) is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She is a longtime activist and analyst on Israel/Palestine, other Middle East and U.S. war issues, and helped found both the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and the United for Peace & Justice anti-war coalition. She writes and speaks widely, and her most recent books are Understanding ISIS & the New Global War on Terror, and Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. Phyllis has worked closely with UN officials and agencies on Palestine, co-chaired the UN-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine, and was short-listed twice to become the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine.
SCOUT BRATT (Chicago, IL) teaches body-positive sexual health education in Chicago Public Schools and community-based organizations. Originally introduced to anti-occupation organizing through feminist philosophy and feminist critiques of the occupation, intersectional feminism remains a key part of not only Scout’s Judaism but also Scout’s Palestinian solidarity work. Scout majored in Peace Studies and Philosophy at Goucher College and is currently studying Youth Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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.
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.
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.
SHAHAR ZAKEN (Sacramento, CA) is a Mizrahi anti-Zionist Jew who was born and raised in Israel. His political journey started in the Israeli NGO Zochrot which seeks to promote acknowledgment of and accountability for the ongoing injustices of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. Upon moving to the U.S., Shahar joined the JVP Indiana chapter as a chapter leader, and has worked with the community in creating educational workshops and training, as well as co-created a multi-faith, multi-racial justice-based Jewish monthly ritual space. He recently moved to California to pursue graduate studies in Sociology.
