The challenge

Like many urban regions, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul suffer a severe shortage of affordable housing, particularly for low-income residents – many of them immigrants. In 1999, bulldozers demolished the Glenwood-Lyndale public-housing complex in Minneapolis but the city failed to build replacement housing. A year later, St. Paul announced an industrial and commercial redevelopment plan for its Gateway neighborhood — again, without providing any new affordable housing. Meanwhile, developers continue to build new housing for more affluent residents. Inadequate housing often is accompanied by other social ills. And in the post-9/11 era, low-income immigrants carry an added burden of suspicion and exclusion. Vic Rosenthal challenges the Jewish community to recall its own immigrant roots, and to act on the Jewish traditions of tzedek (justice) and tikkun olam (repairing a broken world).

Seeds of commitment

“My passion for social justice is inextricably linked with my Jewish heritage,” says Rosenthal. Learning of the collaboration between the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the noted professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, inspired him to “combine religious values, nonviolent action and cross-community understanding into fundamental change.” While attending college, he served as student chair of the New York Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), concentrating on meeting the needs of the elderly. After working as a nursing-home ombudsman for the state of Ohio, Rosenthal directed the Coalition for the Institutionalized Aged and Disabled (CIAD) in New York. There, for five years, he helped nursing-home residents set up councils to advocate for themselves. For nine years after moving to St. Paul, his wife’s home turf, he directed the Minnesota Senior Federation.

When the Federation’s campaign for prescription-drug reform failed to make progress, Rosenthal concluded that he needed to learn more about using one-to-one relationships to build grassroots power. As a Bush Foundation leadership fellow, he attended the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) 10-day organizing training in Boston, and conducted months of one-to-one visits alongside experienced organizers. These experiences changed his organizing philosophy.

Accomplishments

Rosenthal has led Jewish Community Action (JCA) for the past six years: first as a board chair, then as lead organizer, and now as executive director. He chairs the social-action committee at his own synagogue, (the Conservative Temple of Aaron), and each of JCA’s staff members works directly with at least one local congregation. Through JCA, social-action committees from synagogues across the state investigate and develop strategies for promoting affordable housing, racial justice, and reinvestment in communities. Under his leadership, JCA developed Tzedek Institutes, which offer seminars on local social-justice issues and community-organizing techniques. JCA’s volunteer-led racial-justice working group offers no-cost workshops on racial and religious identity and holds multi-faith Passover Seders and monthly dialogues between Muslim and Jewish women.

JCA’s community-reinvestment initiative has invested $2 million in five small, inner-city banks. This program provides access to affordable credit to small businesses and nonprofit developers in urban neighborhoods, including north Minneapolis, where Jewish immigrants settled a century ago and many African-Americans live now. Of all his accomplishments with JCA, Rosenthal is proudest of building Gateway Interfaith Table for Affordable Housing (GIFT), a coalition that works with the city of St. Paul and private developers to bring hundreds of new units of affordable housing to the Gateway neighborhood. GIFT also has prevented hundreds of existing affordable-housing units from being converted to market-rate housing. Largely as a result of a coalition of housing groups, including GIFT, the city of St. Paul has built more affordable housing in the past two years than it had in the previous decade, and the city now has a four-year development plan for affordable housing. Mayor Randy Kelly has praised Rosenthal for his major role in these successes.

JCA has created a powerful coalition from diverse Jewish traditions and perspectives — urban, suburban and rural; Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and secular. JCA members work within multi-faith, multi-ethnic coalitions to promote the civil liberties of immigrants, including Somalis and Latinos. The JCA coalition counts scores of organizations and congregations among its partners. Working closely with the Muslim community, the coalition successfully lobbied for ordinances that now prevent the use of Minneapolis and St. Paul police as deputies of Homeland Security to monitor immigrants.

Leadership style

“My work is influenced by the long history of Jewish involvement in social change, from the Eastern European bund (labor movement), to organized resistance to the Nazi regime, to American labor and civil-rights activism,” he says. “None of these movements relied on private, individual, righteous acts; rather, all built power through community organizing.” Like many community organizers, he follows the grassroots-organizing model developed by Saul Alinsky of the IAF. As Rosenthal notes, Alinsky, a Jew, taught that “congregations are but sleeping giants, ready to be awakened to social change,” and “within communities of faith resides power for good.” Adapting IAF’s model for use specifically in the Jewish community, Rosenthal emphasizes mentoring, reflection and strategic action. The central organizing tool of his work is the face-to-face, one-to-one visit. JCA now has enlisted nearly 600 member households. Members lead working groups on affordable housing, racial justice, community reinvestment and immigrants’ rights. To continue his own growth as a leader, Rosenthal seeks frequent leadership mentoring. “I think any organizer who doesn’t have people he considers mentors is not trying to learn anymore.”

“Jewish Community Action does not serve. We develop partnerships,” says Rosenthal. He distinguishes between the traditions of public collective work toward tzedek (justice) and private individual acts of tzedakah (charity). Although charity meets the recipient’s immediate needs and gives the volunteer instantaneous satisfaction, he notes that these effects do not last long or address root causes of poverty or racism. “Such charity reinforces the power relationships between the ‘haves’ and the 'have-nots',” he says. “I want to move the Jewish community from direct-service volunteerism to effecting social change while affecting policy.” To do so, he reminds fellow Jews of their traditions of social activism, and he urges them to reflect on the paradox of their dual heritage — not only as subjects of virulent discrimination and anti-Semitism, but also as beneficiaries of privilege and assimilation. “Only by working as a community in coalition with other, diverse communities – Christians, Moslems, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans – can we build a social movement that will have the power to shift public priorities.”

The future

In the future, Rosenthal hopes to increase the organization’s membership and leadership base. To do so, JCA is embarking on an extensive round of one-to-one meetings with hundreds of members of local congregations. He wants JCA to continue to “challenge the whole of the Jewish community to heed the call for social justice.” JCA may, indeed, serve as a model for Jewish — and non-Jewish — communities in other cities. He believes that Jewish communities, particularly because of their experiences with discrimination and immigration, could ignite a powerful new movement, based on social justice and the spirit of tikkun olam.

More about Vic Rosenthal and JCA

“His quest for social justice and tikkun olam comes from deep in his marrow.”
— Geoff Lieberman, executive director, Coalition for the Institutionalized, Aged and Disabled, New York

“He’s in it for the long haul.”
— Dorothy Bridges, president, Franklin Bank, Minneapolis