Jacob Feinspan Feinspan is executive director of Jews United for Justice, a Washington group that advocates for social justice on local issues — on everything from the Purple Line’s effect on affordable housing in Maryland to fair wages for Wal-Mart workers. Feinspan has spent his career in nonprofit Jewish advocacy, working on global poverty, AIDS relief, debt relief for developing countries, the genocide in Darfur, aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina and more. He also helped create Tikkun Leil Shabbat, a Jewish congregation that meets near Dupont Circle every few weeks to sing, eat and learn about social justice. A native of Silver Spring, the 31-year-old Feinspan now lives in Wheaton with his wife and young son.
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I’m Jewish. To be honest, I don’t particularly identify with one of the specific movements within Judaism. I would say I’m a practicing Jew. And the thing I most appreciate about Judaism is the constant questioning that comes with it. It’s a living religion that is constantly looking at our texts and our tradition and understanding what the ancient texts say that has relevance in modern life. The minority opinions are saved next to the majority opinions in the text. There’s always a debate, and both sides of the debate are recorded.
How did your faith lead you to advocacy work?
Growing up Jewish, in my family one of the most important religious holidays was Passover, where you retell the story of the Jews being slaves and then freeing themselves. And that was something that stuck with me. And in college I was studying government and sociology, and looking at why there was poverty. And I felt like there was a really unique opportunity to mobilize the Jewish community. Most of us in the Jewish community can trace our roots to immigrants to America around the turn of the century. We’re the sweatshop workers and the struggling small business owners who came to the U.S. with almost nothing, who have benefited tremendously from the freedoms America offered, and we have privileges that our grandparents never though we could have. And that gives us the ability to partner with immigrant communities now who are where we were 100 years ago.
What Jewish teachings fuel your passion for social justice?
One is the Jewish imperative to repair the world. There’s a teaching that the world was created but was made so full with divine presence that it couldn’t contain it all, and it broke. And it’s our job to put the pieces back together. The idea that we’re partners with God in creation and we need to do our part to make the world whole is an idea I find deeply moving.
It seems like it would be hard for struggling minority communities to understand why Jewish rabbis and believers would want to help them. How have you overcome those barriers?
What we’ve found that helps us overcome those barriers, and a common sort of “fear of the other,” is working together over a long period of time. Jews United for Justice has been working with the Latino community in Maryland for almost a decade now. One of the things that makes us valuable is that elected leaders often downplay the voices of people they think are self-interested in an issue. It’s much harder for them to ignore when there are unusual voices. Of course the low-income Latino community of Langley Park is going to object to disappearing affordable housing, but who’d have thought that rabbis from around Prince George’s County would speak up about it as well?
Do you ever feel your compassion drying up, and what do you do to replenish it?
I’m not sure that it’s a sense of compassion that drives my work. It’s a belief that something better is possible. It draws on the relationships I have with people and on the vision for the world that exists in our prophetic writings. It doesn’t have to be this way.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
That we’re all partners with each other and with God, however you understand God, in creating the world. And that we can’t stand idly by and let it direct itself — that we have to be part of making it what we want it to be.
– Liz Essley
