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‘Stop Cop City’ activists infuse Jewish rituals into their protest against Atlanta’s planned police training center
(JTA) — As the sun set on Feb. 5, signaling the start of Tu Bishvat, a group of Jews carried shovels into the South River Forest southeast of downtown Atlanta.
In the day’s declining light, they planted saplings — seven paw paws, three fig and two peach — to honor the holiday, Judaism’s “new year of the trees.” They recited the Shehechiyanu prayer, and a rabbi led them in singing “Tzadik Katamar”: “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon,” from Psalm 92.
The traditional holiday observance doubled as a protest against “Cop City,” the name that self-described “forest defenders” have given the city of Atlanta’s plan to build a $90 million, 85-acre police and fire training center on 300-plus acres that it owns just over the city line in DeKalb County, Georgia.
Two years into protests against the plans, a “week of action” that began over the weekend swelled the protesters’ ranks and brought an even greater police presence to the site of the planned training center. On Sunday night, a group of activists broke from a nonviolent protest, burning police vehicles and, police said, throwing rocks at officers. Dozens of people were arrested.
The violent turn throws into question other plans for the week, which include a Purim celebration on Monday night and a Shabbat service on Friday, the latest Jewish milestones in nearly two years of controversy and confrontation.
“They’re living Jewish values more legitimately, more sincerely than some of the biggest institutions,” said Rabbi Mike Rothbaum of Atlanta’s Reconstructionist Congregation Bet Haverim, of the Jewish protesters. Rothbaum attended the Tu Bishvat event and is scheduled to lead this week’s Shabbat service; he was speaking before the weekend’s events.
Comparing their worship to a mishkan, the portable sanctuary that the Israelites carried in the desert, Rothbaum said of the protesters, “They go to shul at ‘Cop City.’”
A sukkah constructed in October 2023 at the “Cop City” protest site in the Atlanta forest was destroyed in a police raid in December. (Courtesy of Jewish Bird Watcher Union)
Until about 200 years ago, South River Forest was home to the Muscogee (Creek) tribe, who called it Weelaunee — “brown water,” the name painted on protest banners strung between trees. White settlers drove out the Muscogee, and the land later became a slave plantation, a Civil War battlefield and a city prison farm. Portions have been a police firing range and used for explosives disposal, and it has also been the site of illegal dumping.
In April 2021, Atlanta announced plans to build a police training facility in the forest. Opponents immediately launched a protest. They oppose the redirection of natural resources to the police and want the forest maintained as a natural sanctuary.
After two years as a primarily local issue, national and international attention spiked on Jan. 18, when a protester camped in the woods was killed during what police called a “clearing operation.” The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Manuel Paez Teran fired a handgun, wounding a Georgia State Police trooper, then was killed by return fire. An independent autopsy reported that the 26-year-old known as “Tortuguita” was struck by at least 13 rounds. An Atlanta police vehicle was torched in a subsequent protest downtown. Charges against more than a dozen of those arrested include violating the state’s domestic terrorism statute.
Across Intrenchment Creek from the city property is a DeKalb County park that bears the waterway’s name and is the subject of an associated protest. Much of the “Stop Cop City” activity has taken place in the 136-acre Intrenchment Creek Park. Legal challenges are pending against a land swap in which the county gave 40 acres to the now-former owner of a film studio, whose crews leveled trees and tore up a paved path until a judge issued a stop work order.
Conservation groups and community organizations in the surrounding majority Black neighborhoods fear that any development will degrade the tree canopy in Atlanta — which calls itself the “city in the forest” — and exacerbate flooding in low-lying areas.
The larger, decentralized protest movement includes a number of Jews, most in their 20s and 30s, who have made their stand by holding Jewish rituals in the forest, some under the banner of the “Jewish Bird Watcher Union.” They have held Shabbat services, performed the Tashlich ritual on Rosh Hashanah, slept in a sukkah during Sukkot, lit Hanukkah candles, and planted trees on Tu Bishvat. Prayer books were adapted for Shabbat and the High Holidays, with illustrations by the Jewish artist Ezra Rose.
Digital fliers advertising Jewish activities during a “week of action” by protesters opposing Atlanta’s planned police training facility. (Shared on social media)
Most of the Jewish events have been held in Intrenchment Creek Park. At the entrance, signs attached to a crumpled gazebo denounce the “film site” property owner. Improvised memorials and slabs of stone bearing spray-painted slogans dot the parking lot. To frustrate machinery drivers, some trails were blocked by barricades formed from downed trees, discarded tires and anything else handy.
The day before Tu Bishvat, three of the young Jewish activists met with a reporter, in an unheated community center a short drive from the forest. Expressing concern about their personal security, given the heated atmosphere around the issue, they spoke on condition that they be identified only by their first names and that their photographs not appear.
Cam, 24, is a labor union activist who grew up in Atlanta, attending Conservative and Reform congregations. Ray, 24, is a software engineer and Georgia Tech graduate, who grew up attending a Reform synagogue in Maryland. Ruth, in her late 20s, works in “regenerative landscaping” and moved to Atlanta with her Israeli family as a child. All said they feel disconnected from the mainstream Jewish community in Atlanta, religiously, politically and ideologically.
“Mainstream Judaism has completely lost touch with the radical history and radical tradition of the Jews,” Ruth said. “The things I like about Judaism, I want to live them in real life.”
She added, “When Sukkot came around and we built a sukkah in the forest, this is the closest I’ve been to relating to the story of traveling, of being in the desert and sleeping under the canopy.”
A makeshift memorial for environmental activist Manuel Paez Teran, who was allegedly killed by law enforcement during a raid to clear the construction site of a police training facility that activists have nicknamed “Cop City” near Atlanta, Georgia, as seen Feb. 6, 2023. (Cheney Orr/AFP via Getty Images)
Upwards of 50 to 60 Jews have participated in the forest-based worship, and hundreds of people have streamed into the “living room” section of the woods. “I don’t know if they’re all gathering for Shabbat or not but they all gathered around with us and listened to us sing prayers and light candles,” Ray said.
Rothbaum said he admired what he saw the Jewish protesters doing. “Whatever your opinion of the activists at ‘Cop City,’ you have to admire their commitment,” he said, adding, “These kids are reacting to the assimilation of a great heritage of meaning and justice.”
The sukkah survived for two months past the end of Sukkot, until a Dec. 13 police raid against encampments on both sides of Intrenchment Creek. A photo posted on Twitter showed the dismantled poles and torn sheets. The disappearance of the large menorah from the Intrenchment Creek parking lot after Hanukkah was blamed on crews working for the film site owner.
May the candle lights of Khanukah ignite the flames of rebellion. @defendATLforest pic.twitter.com/kdh6mqhMHY
— Fayer – פֿײַער (@FayerAtlanta) December 22, 2022
The morning after Tu Bishvat, city and county SWAT teams, along with state police, were deployed as construction equipment was brought into the police training center site. Two weeks later, at a Shabbat dinner in the forest following the Jan. 18 raid, attendees recited a Mourner’s Kaddish for Manuel Paez Teran and sang the traditional prayer “Oseh Shalom Bimromav” — “They who make peace in their high places.”
The Jewish activists see parallels between their activism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what’s happening in their local forest.
“Anti-Zionism was a major part of what brought us together in the first place, even before the forest movement,” said Cam, who said he saw the two issues as “related struggles.” Opposing Israel is “a big part of what leads us to feel alienated from most mainstream Jewish communities and the inability to be accepted there, and the necessity of forming our own.”
Ruth participated in activism on behalf of Palestinians while visiting family in Israel last summer. “I was hearing and seeing old ancient olive orchards that were destroyed, burned or cut by settlers in order to disempower Palestinians from living there,” she said. “It made me really feel, like, defend the forest everywhere.”
Atlanta officials say they do not plan to defile the forest and argue that the city’s police training facilities are inadequate. The planned complex would serve the police and fire departments, the 911 call center and K-9 units. It would include a shooting range, a “mock city” (with a gas station, motel, home and nightclub) and a “burn building.” The remainder of the land will be developed for recreational use, officials say.
“This is Atlanta and we know forests. This facility will not be built over a forest,” Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said at a January news conference. “The training center will sit on land that has long been cleared of hardwood trees through previous uses of this site decades ago.”
Activists accuse the city and county of a lack of transparency throughout the process. In a February interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dickens conceded that the city could have done a better job selling the project. “We didn’t do that. And because we didn’t do that it started getting painted by anybody that had a brush,” he told the newspaper.
The mayor’s words have not deterred activists, whose goal is nothing less than cancellation of the project.
“They have destroyed a lot of the beauty already,” Cam said. “They have created this place of desolation and death and destruction, and that is in opposition to our task as Jews to create a world of beauty and joy and holiness. By coming to this place and planting trees, we are reclaiming it, making a place of peace and joy.”
Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, seen here in Massachusetts in 2017, is an Atlanta rabbi who has participated in “Cop City” protests. (Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The local Jewish protesters have lately gotten a boost from a progressive Jewish organization based in Philadelphia. The Shalom Center launched in the 1980s to oppose nuclear proliferation and now focused largely on climate justice.
“Our sacred text is called ‘The Tree of Life,’” wrote the center’s founder, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, and national organizer Rabbi Nate DeGroot in a Feb. 28 letter to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp that noted Jewish law’s prohibition on uprooting trees. “We pray that the trees of the Weelaunee Forest remain trees that support the flourishing of sacred life for generations to come.”
Rothbaum said he was inspired by the young Jewish activists. “They are reminding us of the Jewish values that come to us through Torah, through the rabbinic writings, that are timeless,” he said. “They are reminding us of what we’re supposed to be. And we owe them a debt of gratitude.”
Ruth had a message for Atlanta’s Jewish congregations and communal organizations, most of which have not engaged publicly on the issue: “I would invite them to join us, to put their Jewish values into action,” she said. “Everything we’re doing here is really Jewish.”
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I’m an Israeli who watched ‘Naza.’ And I am shook.
I have seen NAZA and I am shook. Not simply because of what the film reveals about how Israel is waging the war in Gaza, but because of what it reveals about how a society becomes capable of doing this at all. And as I’ve watched the reaction in Israel since the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, I’ve come to see that the reaction itself reflects the very systems the film exposes.
There are two systems at the center of NAZA, which opens Sept. 30 in New York City. The first is the technical one: the surveillance, targeting, artificial intelligence and military technologies that allow the Israeli army to identify and kill people at enormous scale. The second is the psychic and narrative system that makes the first one possible. It allows people inside the military to participate in this machinery, and journalists, filmmakers, politicians and ordinary people outside it to absorb what is happening, rationalize it, defend it or simply carry on.
The reaction to the film has become part of the evidence. That is what has shaken me.
The film, by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, takes us inside the systems of surveillance, targeting and killing used by the Israeli military in Gaza. But it is also an investigation into the people inside those systems and the stories they tell themselves about what they are doing.
Some of the officers interviewed are members of Israel’s elite military and intelligence units. They speak about their work with an almost surreal normalcy. One talks about coming home after his work and continuing to work on his Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Another talks about going to Poland on a Holocaust trip in high school, being taught that the Nazis were pure evil, and now understanding them.
Abraham asks those they interview whether anyone questions what they are doing. No one.
This blindness doesn’t stop with the military.
It lives in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we are defending, whose lives we are responsible for, and whose suffering can be pushed outside the frame. It lives in the deep Israeli and Jewish memory of vulnerability and annihilation, in the knowledge that Jewish safety is not an abstraction. It lives, too, in what happens when that memory becomes so consuming that another people’s suffering becomes something we can only see through our own fear.
I have watched that dynamic reveal itself over and over since Venice.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attacked the film and announced plans to pursue legislation that could strip citizenship from Israelis who “defame” Israeli soldiers abroad, explicitly citing NAZA and its filmmakers. Culture Minister Miki Zohar has called Abraham and Szor traitors and sought to have their citizenship revoked.
Protesters have gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home for multiple nights, chanting “death sentence for traitors.” Demonstrators have sought out the offices of Local Call, where Abraham works, and activists have threatened to track down the filmmakers and their families. Graffiti depicting the filmmakers as traitors has appeared on the streets.
And all of this is happening before almost anyone in Israel has even seen the film. The film has not even been released in Israel — but the fury has not waited for a screening.
I cannot get past that.
The reaction is not some separate story happening around NAZA. It is part of what NAZA is showing us.
Attack the person asking the question. Question their loyalty. Invoke existential danger. Change the subject. Make the person holding the mirror into the threat.
This is where Oct. 7 enters the story.
Of course Oct. 7 happened. Israelis were murdered and kidnapped. The trauma is real. The responsibility of journalists to verify serious allegations is real.
But there is a difference between acknowledging Oct. 7 and requiring every critique of Israel’s military actions to pass through it before it can be heard.
I watched veteran journalist Raviv Drucker’s interview with Abraham and found myself increasingly disturbed by the frame. The questions repeatedly returned to whether the film was sufficiently balanced, whether Abraham had sufficiently accounted for Oct. 7, whether his sources could be trusted.
These are not illegitimate questions. But when they become the ritual through which every serious critique of Israel’s military actions must pass, something else is happening. The burden keeps shifting onto the person asking the question: Prove that you understand us. Prove that you see our pain. Prove that you are not erasing us. Prove that you are still one of us.
Only then can we begin to talk about what Israel is doing.
And then there was something that happened to me personally. The head of one Israeli film forum told me it would be better not to defend Abraham and Szor publicly because it could cost “us” the elections.
I understood exactly what she meant. And that is what frightened me. Don’t make things harder. Don’t give ammunition to the other side. Don’t jeopardize the political outcome. Don’t defend these two young filmmakers too loudly. The instinct is the same: don’t disrupt the story that allows us to keep going.
The kind of collective psychosis allows my people, including my people in Tel Aviv, to go about their lives as if things are normal while Gaza is being destroyed is not separate from what NAZA describes. It is part of it.
I am my grandfathers’ granddaughter. One was killed in 1948 fighting for the creation of Israel. The other survived the Holocaust and became a human rights activist. I have spent my life carrying these two parts of Jewish history inside me: the absolute necessity of Jewish safety and the absolute necessity of human rights. I don’t experience those things as contradictions.
What NAZA has forced me to confront is what happens when one of those truths becomes a shield against the other.
That is what shook me about NAZA. Not only what it shows us about Gaza. Not only what it shows us about the technology that makes killing possible, or the people who learn to participate in it. But what it shows us about the stories we need to tell ourselves in order not to see what is happening in front of us.
And what happens when someone holds up a mirror and refuses to let us look away.
The post I’m an Israeli who watched ‘Naza.’ And I am shook. appeared first on The Forward.
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In a legal settlement, UC Berkeley offers a dance scholar a position it denied her because she’s Israeli.
(JTA) — (J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — For more than nine months, UC Berkeley has failed to honor a legal settlement with an Israeli dance scholar who was denied a teaching position due to her nationality.
In response to a J. inquiry, a university spokesperson said the delay was caused by “internal miscommunication.” The university now promises that the scholar, Yael Nativ, will receive the job offer she was guaranteed in the December 2025 settlement “no later than the week of Sept. 28.”
“We deeply regret this unfortunate delay and look forward to welcoming Dr. Nativ back to our campus,” UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said in a statement.
Nativ said she received an apology for the delay and the promise of an imminent job offer in a Sept. 21 email from a university administrator.
“It’s always a surprise when I get emails from them because the correspondence was so little to none,” Nativ said. “I’m so tired of this case.”
Nativ, a sociologist specializing in Israeli dance, taught in UC Berkeley’s dance department during spring 2022 as a visiting professor through the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. Her course focused on contemporary dance in Israel through social, political and cultural perspectives.
The institute invited Nativ to reapply for another year of teaching. But after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, SanSan Kwan, chair of the dance department, informed Nativ that she would not be rehired. In November 2023, Kwan told Nativ in a WhatsApp message: “My dept cannot host you for a class next fall. Things are very hot right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”
The university’s civil rights office investigated the matter and concluded that Nativ was discriminated against based on her Israeli identity.
Nativ sued the university, with representation from the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, in August 2025. When the two sides settled the lawsuit in December 2025, the university acknowledged its wrongdoing and committed to apologizing to Nativ and inviting her back to campus.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons apologized to Nativ over Zoom on Feb. 3, but no job offer arrived.
The lapse was publicized by Malcolm Feeley, a retired UC Berkeley Law professor, who wrote about Nativ’s case in a Sept. 16 article in the Jewish Review of Books.
“Justice delayed is justice denied. This is justice delayed in the extreme,” Feeley said in an interview. “It takes a concerted effort of badgering to get [the university] to move an inch.”
In a statement to J. following the publication of Feeley’s article, Mogulof said the university hadn’t sent Nativ a job offer due to a misunderstanding among administrators about who was responsible for doing so.
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Ben Hermalin will personally ensure the offer will come within the next two weeks, according to Mogulof.
Nativ went on to work as a research fellow at Ben-Gurion University in Israel after she left Berkeley. She said her main goal since the lawsuit has been to hold UC Berkeley accountable, not to land a job.
“It wasn’t urgent for me to go [back to campus]. It’s more about making a point, getting my justice,” she said. “But if they invite, I will consider.”
This story was first reported by J. The Jewish News of Northern California and is reprinted with permission.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In a legal settlement, UC Berkeley offers a dance scholar a position it denied her because she’s Israeli. appeared first on The Forward.
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The choice in Michigan between El-Sayed and Rogers is one all American Jews have to make
Sometimes the most important part of making a decision is articulating what the decision actually is. What are the choices?
So it is in Michigan, where Jewish Democrats are asked to choose between Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat who is against providing military aid to Israel and who campaigned with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, and Mike Rogers, a Republican and an election denier who would help keep the Senate in the hands of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and who is presenting himself as the choice for Jews offended by El-Sayed. Either Rogers wins; El-Sayed wins without Jewish support; or El-Sayed wins with Jewish support. Those are the only possible outcomes.
Two groups have shown two different ways of dealing with this choice. The first, “Nonnegotiable Michigan,” a group of Jewish Michiganders including rabbis and cantors, has listed five “baseline needs,” or “nonnegotiables,” for their support, which include “Jewish sovereignty in Israel” along with full and safe participation in American life for all Jews including Zionists and a vision for a better Middle East.
The second, Michigan Jews for Democracy, has pledged its support for El-Sayed while noting some reservations and concerns. As one signatory, David Jaffe, put it in a statement released along with Michigan Jews for Democracy’s declaratory letter, “I am a proud Jew. I’m voting for El Sayed despite our disagreements, to support domestic policies that reflect Jewish values. I’m voting against grave threats to the safety of Jews and to American democracy. Rogers unquestioningly supports an authoritarian administration, its arbitrary arrests, its white Christian nationalism, and myriad terrible policies that have never in history been ‘good for the Jews.’”
In other words, one group has said the Democratic candidate cannot count on their support because of their disagreements with him, while the other has said that he has their support despite them. One is trying to get a candidate to say what they want to hear before the election; the other, that they will support him in the election and hope to be a “voice at the table” after.
Jewish groups are, of course, not the only ones who have grappled with such questions (“Nonnegotiable” calls to mind the “Uncommitted” movement to press for a ceasefire in Gaza and to end military aid to Israel from the 2024 presidential election). But to consider these two specific groups together is to consider a choice that an increasing number of Jewish Democrats — which is to say, the vast majority of American Jews — all over the country can expect to be making soon if they haven’t already had to.
Democrats (and younger Republicans) are less supportive of Israel and of US support for it. Candidates will need to speak to their voters and make campaign promises that are aligned with what those voters want to hear. And Jewish Democrats will have to be honest with themselves about the limited options before them and decide for themselves whether they want these candidates to win with or without them.
Per an AP-NORC poll from this summer, about 58% of Democrats think the United States is too supportive of Israel, while roughly half think Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. Not every candidate who makes it out of a primary and into a general election will say the same, but many will, both because of their own conviction and because they want to win Democratic votes.
For some Jewish Democrats, this presents no tension or contradiction; the same poll said that roughly three in 10 Jewish adults agree that Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. There are American Jews for whom El-Sayed’s vision for the Middle East is not threatening but comforting and correct. But about half of American Jews rejected the idea that Israel carried out a genocide. And, as JFNA found, the vast majority of American Jews want Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state (though just 37% now identify as Zionist). Many may feel a tug of war between their support for or attachment to Israel and their liberalism.
There will be some who say that American Jews should reject the idea that this is a choice, that there is no contradiction between being a liberal Democrat and supporting Israel. That is all well and good in theory, but, come election day, voters in Michigan will make a choice between these two men. There is El-Sayed, who does not want to send military aid to Israel and who said “hurt people hurt people” after Temple Israel was attacked, referring to the fact that the perpetrator’s family was reportedly killed in an airstrike in Lebanon (El-Sayed has since apologized). And there is Rogers, who says he loves Israel and also denies the results of the 2020 presidential election (and pushed to ban abortion and opposed marriage equality, to take two examples from his record).
While Jewish Democrats can, of course, try to influence where Democratic candidates and voters are on Israel, they do not get to dictate it. They do not, in the Michigan general election, get to choose a candidate who supports democracy and also talks about how much they love and want to support Israel. They get to choose whether they want El-Sayed to win and Mike Rogers to lose and, if so, whether they want to be a part of making it happen regardless of El-Sayed’s views on Israel. Every Jewish Democrat, like every other voter, will have to make that choice, and can withhold their vote for whatever reason. But they should be clear about the reality of what they are choosing between.
There are only so many choices in Michigan. And outside of Michigan, too.
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