Letter from Workers Circle CEO Ann Toback on Yom Kippur
The Jewish tradition for Yom Kippur, a day of atonement at the start of our New Year, is to examine our behaviors of the past year and perform teshuva (repentance) to account for any harm we have caused and make amends. It is important to note that verbal amends are not enough; teshuva must be coupled with direct action.
As CEO of the Workers Circle, a Jewish nonprofit that has focused on economic justice since our founding in 1900, I have long embraced a communal mentality. We organize our members to act as a collective and ensure that our community stands in solidarity with other, more vulnerable communities. And each year, our community has taken on teshuvah for what we see as societal wrongs against others, including immigrants and workers. Though we may feel at a remove from abhorant acts of racism and bigotry, our community knows that these must be acknowledged and corrected.
Yet this Yom Kippur, I find myself newly reckoning with my personal responsibility, alongside my community’s, to focus on the systemic racism and violence that I now understand we have allowed. Its dangers were so clearly evidenced this year by George Floyd’s murder, along with that of many others, and the egregious use of white privilege to threaten Black and brown people, as we witnessed occur in the Central Park birder incident.
I now understand that I cannot distance myself from the terrible cruelty systemic racism inflicts on our brothers and sisters of color. This year I truly feel responsibility and shame for a lifetime of willful blindness, at best.
I credit the Black Lives Matter movement for this new consciousness, along with the courageous tens of thousands who have taken to the streets and all those who never gave up the fight for equality, even as so many of us never acknowledged our own complicity.
I was wrong to presume we could address these inequities exclusively through an economic justice framework. This is insufficient. We must be explicit and proactive to end centuries of systemic racism and violence.
As the leader of the Workers Circle, I commit the organization to undertake an internal and external process this year to identify how our history as the Jewish people and as an organization has intersected with racial injustice, what we did to fight for civil rights and what we could have done more proactively. We will identify new ways of working and organizing to repair the harm that was done and that persists.
The Workers Circle will continue its mission to power progressive Jewish identity through cultural engagement and activism, and I, Ann Toback, commit to a lifetime of teshuva and related activism to combat these injustices.
With election season upon us, that means commencing immediately with a focus on combatting voter suppression, which inordinately impacts Black Americans. Join me.
Ann Toback
CEO, The Workers Circle
