At the age of 18, Yael Shafritz was among the 10 people who founded the first Jewish LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in the U.K. Shafritz now channels that changemaking energy into their work as the D.C. director for Jews United for Justice, a role they took on in 2022.
Local organizing and local journalism are both important to Shafritz because “local organizers are the ones who actually come to the rescue and help, form mutual aid groups and have the network to fight back” when disasters happen. They moved to D.C. five years ago and currently reside in Petworth.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I grew up in the U.K., in London in the Reform Jewish community and went to an Orthodox Jewish school and generally was very engaged Jewishly. [I had] a huge love of Judaism and Jewish community.
When I was in my teens, I came out as queer and had a really not fun experience being queer in the Jewish community. I think that was my move towards organizing and activism — I wanted to be Jewish and queer; those are who I am. I found that my community wasn’t welcoming and I wanted to change my community to make it more welcoming. I always felt that I could be both [Jewish and a member of the LGBTQ+ community]. I did a lot of organizing in the U.K., originally with an organization called KeshetUK to make the U.K. Jewish community more inclusive of queer people.
What did that activism look like?
We had a training program that was run by volunteers, and we would go into Jewish institutions that would work with us, which originally was a very small number, and we expanded into more and more mainstream institutions.
We would run an inclusion training that would meet Jewish institutions where they were and try to move them along the spectrum of inclusion to really think about ways they can be more welcoming to LGBTQ+ Jews. That was really powerful. I remember, it must have been 10 years ago now, going into an Orthodox Jewish school for the first time and doing LGBTQ talks and trainings, and that was a really, really big deal at the time.
What was it like being involved in the founding of the U.K.’s first Jewish LGBTQ+ advocacy organization?
I was definitely on the younger end of people [involved] and less experienced, but I worked with some amazing organizers who were like, ‘We need a Jewish LGBTQ+ advocacy organization.’ It was really powerful to have an idea, push it into existence and then do a lot of work that may or may not have worked, and in hindsight, it was really successful in trying to change the Jewish community.
What inspires you to do advocacy work?
For me, my Jewish identity is bound up with fighting for justice, and that’s both on a personal level of having experienced exclusion primarily as a queer Jew, but also just knowing Jewish history and knowing that we, as Jews, are safer when the world is a better place. It’s good for everyone else and it’s good for us.
Anti-Jewish oppression is real and the way we fight back against it is by building strong multiracial coalitions and movements that fight for a better world everywhere and in every context. The work I do has always been grounded in this, on some level, self-centered thing of ‘it’s good for the Jews.’ And on some level, I just believe in spending my time and making the world more just.
Tell me about your work for JUFJ.
One of the things that was exciting was being given an opportunity to take what was working and build new or shift things. My team specifically organizes Jews in D.C., where we’re part of a number of big campaigns and coalitions. We work on housing security, whether that’s supporting unhoused neighbors, campaigning for expanding and strengthening rent control, looking at the future of housing — social housing, genuinely affordable housing and how to organize our community to support that.
Similarly, in areas around economic justice, we work on issues like fair taxation, which, in D.C., is often down racial lines. We work a lot on these kinds of issues and with lots of different people.
We have our core leaders and also work with synagogues and Jewish institutions. We’ve done a lot of events in the last few years with the JCC and the Capital Jewish Museum and it’s really fun [and] really serious. It’s kind of everything you want in between. I feel really inspired by the leaders that I work with who are invested in the city that they either grew up in or they moved [to].
What advice would you offer young queer Jewish people?
One of the reasons I moved to the U.S. is because there’s a much bigger community here with a lot more options. And that isn’t to say everywhere else in the world, there aren’t places to be a queer Jew. But if you live in the U.S., you’re extremely lucky to have a lot of queer Jewish spaces or opportunities to build new queer Jewish spaces, and I would just recommend not settling for a space that doesn’t welcome you. You don’t need to settle; you can go and find common spaces or work to make spaces more inclusive.
There are amazing things and welcoming spaces and people doing incredible organizing. Go find your people. Go find people to be safe with. We all owe it to each other to make the Jewish community and the country at large a better place to be a queer person. I want that for all of us, but that’s not on young people to have to do themselves.
