National Member Meeting

Rising for Justice: Baltimore • May 1-4, 2025

The 2025 JVP National Member Meeting

Last month, thousands of us gathered in Baltimore for JVP’s National Member Meeting, where we learned together, built community, skilled up, and planned how we’ll make our strongest possible contribution to the movement for Palestinian liberation, as well as the fight against fascism at home.

Over the four days of the NMM, we held 85 packed workshops, many led by JVP members, from students to local leaders to those who have been in the movement for more than half a century. Member leadership was reflected at every level, from workshop programming to the plenary stage to our brilliant access team and free childcare programming.

Many of our Palestinian partners were in attendance, physically and virtually, grounding us in the dire urgency of Israel’s genocide and starvation of Gaza and offering insights from their decades of struggle against Zionism. During our featured panels, five banner plenary sessions, and skill-building workshops, we received guidance from veterans of the work: movement leaders, organizers, cultural workers, scholars, and those on the front lines of the fight from Palestine to the U.S.

As Jewish Currents reported, the NMM demonstrated the powerful breadth of JVP’s base: from daily morning services and Shomer Shabbat-accessible workshops, to spaces for Jews of color, to 100 self-organized meet-ups — “a rare glimpse of abundance in left Jewish life.” Reflective of JVP’s membership, the NMM was also deeply intergenerational. Uniting us all was a clear sense of purpose, woven throughout the weekend; at a performance night featuring the poet Mosab Abu Toha and the singer Jamila Woods, among others, JVP members also raised more than $100,000 for the Middle East Children’s Alliance.

For everyone who has given their all to the fight to end Israel’s genocide over the last year and a half, the NMM was a place to gather, grieve, and take in the enormity of both the horrors we face and of the movement that we’ve built in response — and the enormity of the work yet to be done. It was also a place to confront, head-on, the ruthless crackdown that the Palestine solidarity movement is facing:

“Look around,” [JVP Executive Director Stefanie] Fox entreated the attendees, some of whom, after four days of nonstop workshops, lectures, performances, and organizing meetings, were spread out on the floor at the periphery of the audience, where they stretched, tended to children, or lay with heads resting on friends’ bellies. “This movement is an old growth forest. You can’t stop a forest from growing.” “What can we do,” she asked, “to ensure that no matter what they take from us, we are nurturing this movement forward?”

"Look around. This movement is an old growth forest. You can’t stop a forest from growing.'
'What can we do to ensure that no matter what they take from us, we are nurturing this movement forward?'”

Executive Director Stefanie Fox, as quoted in Jewish Currents

With clarity and purpose, we assessed the political moment: Israel accelerating its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, relentlessly seeking to ethnically cleanse the West Bank, and the U.S. government backing these atrocities while intensifying fascist policies at home.

No one panel, or even four-day meeting, brings us all the answers, but together we are finding pathways forward. As the NMM closed, we committed collectively to the need to escalate pressure from every angle — economically, politically, culturally.

Facing the unending horrors in Gaza, under Israeli bombardment and starvation at the very moment we met in Baltimore, we understood the need to bring ever-greater commitment, rigor, and creativity to our work.

We’re clear on what that work is, even as the fascist state amps up its scare tactics and repression. Our work continuig the fight to stop the genocide, running strategic divestment campaigns, growing a united front against Trump that has Palestine at the center, and working to fully make obvious the lie that mass murder of Palestinians and crackdowns on free speech have any relationship to keeping Jews safe.

While the struggle only gets more difficult, 2,000 of us left the convening recommitted to giving everything we have to the next stage of the fight.

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