WHAT: The Justice Fellowship is a learning and community-building program designed to foster the field of Jewish social justice leaders working effectively and sustainably in Chicago and New York City.
Build your network and join a pluralistic cohort of local changemakers excited to dig into a more holistic approach to making change. Through evening and weekend sessions, retreats, mentoring, and community events, you’ll:
- Co-create a Jewish learning community. Find your people and take part in cultivating a powerful, creative, diverse Jewish community oriented in social justice. You’ll build a network grounded in mutual trust and respect where your Judaism flourishes and integrates with your understanding of collective liberation.
- Deepen your justice analysis. Develop a systemic analysis of the root causes and effects of economic, social, racial, environmental, and other injustices. Through a year-end leadership project, you’ll build a tangible articulation of how you’ve advanced your analysis and work for justice.
- Advance your Jewish framework for justice. Engage in deep learning of Jewish texts, history, rituals, and culture. You’ll develop throughlines between your Jewishness and your justice commitments, and locate yourself in an unbroken history of progressive Jews resisting oppression. In Chicago, learn through a lens of environmental stewardship to unify your understanding of sites of social injustice, and Jewish justice movements.
- Join our active alumni network for life. Our community of over 1,700 Jewish social justice professionals and activists across the country are there to help with apartment hunts, job references, Shabbat dinner invites, mentorship, and everything in between.
WHO: The Justice Fellowship brings together a pluralistic cohort of Jewish adults working on a wide variety of local issues in their city. Our Fellows aim to break out of their personal silos and explore a more holistic learning approach to making change in their communities. They seek to build power, solidarity, language, resilience, and strategy for a Jewishly-rooted movement committed to doing this work effectively, collaboratively, and sustainably.
Fellows tend to be in their 20s and 30s, in their early and mid-career stages (though we also welcome applicants in that age range whose justice work is on a personal/volunteer basis rather than professional!) Past Fellows have included activists, organizers, educators, social workers, non-profit staffers, movement leaders, artists, lawyers, health care professionals, students, those in-between jobs, and so much more.
In short, they:
- Have some experience in either their professional, volunteer or personal life working on domestic social, racial, environmental, and/or economic justice issues;
- Have a demonstrated interest in exploring the intersection of Jewish life and social justice, and developing a deeper relationship between the two;
- Have an active interest in building a values-based community and developing the power of a local Jewish network during and after the Fellowship.
- Have an ability to listen and stay in relationship with others in a diverse community that reflects a multitude of ways of living and thinking Jewishly, and an interest in growing from productive discomfort.
The Fellowship seeks to build a cohort reflecting many Jewish practices. We encourage people of all Jewish backgrounds to apply. Prior knowledge of Hebrew or Jewish texts is not required or expected and the program will be stimulating regardless of one’s textual experience.
WHEN: The program will run from November 2025 - June 2026. Applications will open on July 1st and the application deadline is September 9th. We’ll accept late applications for a November start so long as space allows.
WHERE: New York City & Chicago
Tuition & Fees: Thanks to the generosity of several funders, the tuition needed for Fellows to participate in the program is subsidized to a rate of $250 – $1,500 per participant. Since the Avodah Justice Fellowship is both a professional and personal development program, we encourage employers to cover all or at least part of the tuition. We will do our best to ensure that no accepted candidates are prevented from attending due to financial reasons. Learn more about cost on our website.
Are you the next Justice Fellow, or do you know someone who could be? The application deadline for the 2025-2026 program year is September 9th. Request an application today.