Podcast

What the Jewish Left Learned From Occupy

Join Haymarket and Jewish Currents for a discussion about what the Jewish left learned from Occupy Wall Street. This fall, the tenth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street also marks a decade since what came to be known as “Occupy Judaism,” a loose series of ritual protests that emerged at Zuccotti Park and at other Occupy encampments around the country. The most visible of these took the form of a Kol Nidre, the evening service that marks the beginning of Yom Kippur, which fell on October 7th in 2011, a few weeks into Occupy Wall Street’s short history. As the holiday approached, a group of Jewish participants in the nascent movement, led by organizer Daniel Sieradski, began planning a service to be held in a plaza across the street from Zuccotti Park. The event that is remembered as Occupy Yom Kippur drew hundreds of people and attracted considerable press attention, registering a new current in American Jewish life. Occupy Yom Kippur, and the broader activities of Occupy Judaism, turned out to presage a much larger wave of left Jewish movement-building. Though most Jewish organizers at Occupy were not involved in Occupy Judaism, or in Jewish organizing more generally, many of the founders of organizations like IfNotNow first came together in Zuccotti Park; the movement’s energy also revitalized already-existing groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). Ten years ago, identity-based organizing occurred only on Occupy’s fringes, and anti-racist and anti-imperialist organizing, including around the occupation of Palestine, was pushed outside the movement’s frame altogether. But in the years since, Occupy’s limitations have impelled a generation of organizers to try to rectify its omissions, galvanizing anti-racist organizing in the US and a new wave of Palestine solidarity activism. Following a Jewish Currents oral history on the same topic, this event will explore how the contemporary Jewish left was changed—perhaps, formed—by Occupy Wall Street ten years ago. Speakers: Daniel Sieradksi is a web developer and digital strategist as well as an advocacy journalist, digital organizer, and movement-builder. He has worked with a variety of organizations, including Repair the World, JTA News, JDub Records, the JCC in Manhattan, the Educational Alliance, Jewish Funds for Justice, and the New Israel Fund. Sieradski is the former publisher of the pioneering weblog Jewschool.com and the founder of Occupy Judaism. Tamara Shapiro (Tammy) is the Program Director for the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives. Previously she was one of the lead coordinators of Occupy Sandy, a citizen-led relief effort, as well as Rockaway Wildfire and Worker Owned Rockaway Cooperatives, a worker-owned coop incubation project with residents hit by the hurricane. She also served as a lead strategist and facilitator of the InterOccupy network, created and implemented a networked hub structure for The People’s Climate March, and worked at The Murphy Institute for Labor Studies. Prior to these roles, she was the first Director of J Street U, and one of the founders of IfNotNow. Audrey Sasson is the Executive Director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, and the organization’s first Mizrahi leader to serve in the position. She has 25 years of broad movement experience as a social worker, organizer, coalition-builder, and campaign director, on issues ranging from immigrant worker struggles and tenant rights to sustainable economies and racial justice. Arielle Angel is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Jewish Currents. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/le12N2Q06t0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

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May 18, 2026

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February 24th marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Right now, it is bombing the country’s energy system, cutting off heat and electricity for millions in the depths of a bitterly cold winter. At the same time, the Trump administration is trying to bully Ukraine into a land for peace settlement that rewards Putin’s aggression and, with the willing collaboration of Ukraine’s oligarchs, puts the country up for sale to Western multinationals. Join this webinar to hear about Ukraine’s struggle.

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Artem Chapeye is the author of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Guns (Washington Post 2025 best non-fiction) and The Ukraine. He is a writer, translator, activist, and, after the 2022 invasion, an enlisted member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine .

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Denys Bondar is a native of Ukraine and an associate professor of physics at Tulane University as well as a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction.

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May 18, 2026

We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities

Join editors and contributors of We Are Each Other's Liberation, a major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.

A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.

Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.

Get a copy of We Are Each Other's Liberation from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2519-we-are-each-other-s-liberation

Speakers:

Rachel Kuo is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, which engages intersectional feminist politics grounded within Asian diasporic communities.

Jaimee A. Swift is the creator and executive director of Black Women Radicals, dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender-expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African diaspora.

TD Tso is a feminist writer, editor, cultural organizer, and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

Pratibha Parmar’s films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades. From experimental shorts to activist documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice. Her practice engages the image as a site of struggle—challenging the power relations that determine who is seen, how they are represented, and what forms of visual expression are made possible. Her films are a site of narrative transformation, where memory, activism, and artistic expression converge to resist erasure and imagine new futures. Pratibha is a published author and editor of of several anthologies. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) and Sming Sming Books published, Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar in 2025.

Margo Okazawa-Rey is an activist-educator working on issues of militarism for over 30 years. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, with Du Re Bang and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, respectively. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, its US group. She also hosts feminist radio program Women’s Magazine, broadcast on KPFA Berkeley California station of the Pacifica Radio network, and is known as DJ MOR Love and Joy, transnational feminist virtual dance party DJ.

Dr. Beverley Bryan is a lifelong educator and political activist, who is co-author of the classic book Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) which detailed the experiences of Black women and their fight for equality from post-war up to 1980s Britain. Dr. Bryan was a founding member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD); a Saturday school organiser, a mainstream primary school teacher who pioneered Black history teaching in her classroom in the 1970s and a member of the British Black Panther Movement. A lifelong educator, Dr. Bryan is a retired Professor of Language Education from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.

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