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Co-sponsored by: Jewish Youth Climate Movement
We are Young Jews for a Green New Deal and together we are fighting for a just and equitable future for all people and for our planet.
As young people, at a time when we should be starting our adult lives, we find ourselves in one of the worst economic downturns in living memory, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in the throes of a catastrophic climate crisis. Forest fires have devastated the west coast, extreme storms have left millions of Texans without power or water, and across the nation disastrous flooding has regularly destroyed neighborhoods. Fossil fuel production continues apace accelerating the destruction of neighborhoods, traditional native lands, and the air we all breathe. Communities of color have experienced the primary force of this devastation. Centuries of extractive economics that treats people and the land as disposable, has placed communities of color on the frontlines of harm. We must act now.
We’re fighting for a Green New Deal, a bold proposal at a scale fit for the enormous problems at hand. The Green New Deal means a promise of 100% renewable energy in 10 years, the creation of millions of living-wage union jobs, and moving resources to communities of color on the frontlines to address infrastructure and food security. The Green New Deal ensures that frontline communities who have disproportionately experienced devastation and death are at the forefront of our national and global response.
We are energized by the radical history of the Jews who fought for labor rights and the original New Deal, and we seek to revive this legacy. Earlier American Jewish immigrants fled poverty and antisemitism to come to this country, only to find a society riddled with the same problems they sought to escape. They fought to change the exploitative systems they found themselves in, and to improve working conditions for others and those that would come after them. Now it is our turn to do the same—to protect our own future and that of generations to come, in the spirit of l’dor v’dor, the Jewish value of responsibility to future generations.