In today’s Word on the Street Live, I sat down with Rabbi Jonah Pesner, CEO of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC), and Orly Erez Likhovski, Executive Director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), to talk about the Reform Movement’s advocacy work in the US and Israel – and how democracy is inseparable from Judaism.
Please excuse any choppy audio/video – we had a few connectivity hiccups and a couple of restarts – but we still managed to have a really strong conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.
Orly focused on IRAC’s frontline work defending Israeli democracy during Netanyahu’s ongoing judicial overhaul. She described how IRAC moved rapidly from mass street protests into the Knesset committee rooms, challenging legislation aimed at weakening the Supreme Court, the attorney general, and core checks on executive power.
She also highlighted a striking recent incident in Israel, where a government minister referred to a leading Reform rabbi and fellow Knesset member as someone who “marries dogs” – underscoring how important the fight for religious pluralism remains in Israel today.
Jonah traced the RAC’s origins from the Civil Rights Movement to its role in shaping landmark voting rights legislation, grounding his work in the idea that fighting for democracy is something we are commanded to do – just look at the Torah, he said.
He argued that same urgency has to carry through to today as we confront renewed threats to democratic institutions in both the US and Israel, because these are ultimately threats to Jewish values themselves.
