Shalom Center

Shalom Center

Innovations in Jewish Life Collections

2023

Gregg Drinkwater, Hilary Kalisman, Samira Mehta, Maggie Rosenau

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In 1983, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a longtime social justice activist and a leader in both Jewish Renewal and the Reconstructionist Movement, co-founded The Shalom Center as a Jewish voice in support of nuclear disarmament during the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the decreased threat of nuclear conflict, The Shalom Center increasingly focused on other threats to peace, the planet, and justice and often centered the evolving theology and practice of Eco-Judaism, a key aspect of Waskow’s life’s work.

For 40 years, The Shalom Center has engaged Jewish and multifaith communities in activism grounded in a religious and prophetic tradition. The Shalom Center’s campaigns have centered the climate crisis and Eco-Judaism, dismantling white supremacy, eradicating Islamophobia and anti-LGBTQ bias, advocating for women’s rights, and calling for an end to war and violence. Waskow visited Norlin Library in 2015 for “Freedom Seder: American Judaism and Social Justice,” an event honoring the Freedom Seder, an innovative celebration of Passover created by Waskow in Washington DC in April 1969 to build links of solidarity between Jewish and African American civil rights activists.

The Shalom Center defines prophetic Judaism as “the active reframing of Jewish wisdom to transport people into a new and compelling vision for timely moral action and a spiritual conviction of the interbreathing of all life.”