By Diana Brement ,
JTNews Columnist
Joshua Friedes says he’ll be able to use a lot of what he learned championing marriage equality in this state in his new job as director of regional operations and strategy at J Street. The pro-Israel organization supports a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians (www.jstreet.org).
The former executive director of Equal Rights Washington, Josh has spent most of the last 15 years campaigning for the rights of same-sex couples to marry first in Massachusetts and then in Washington.
“It wasn’t too long ago that people said, “˜I’ll never see marriage equality in my life,'” he points out, which makes him “more optimistic about a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
“The truth of the matter is that things change,” he says. “You have to live not in the past, but in the present and the future.”
Marriage equality moved quickly into law these past few years, Josh says, because it had “far greater support than people realized.” He thinks the same applies to American Jews’ thoughts about the two-state solution. “We see from polling that people are with us,” he says. J Street’s role is to listen to the poll numbers and “urge the administration to play a leadership role…and not pull back.”
The organization is growing, he says, especially on college campuses. “People are listening to our message.”
Josh grew up in East Brunswick, N. J., and took his first trip to Israel with United Synagogue Youth. He was very active in Hillel at the University of Rochester and took a semester at the University of Tel Aviv. After the Peace Corps in the Philippines, he returned to law school in Colorado to study environmental law.
“It bored me silly,” he says.
Turning to civil rights, after law school he worked for Common Cause in Massachusetts on campaign finance and political ethics reform, becoming a volunteer in the early “organized freedom-to-marry movement.”
An eight-week consulting gig for Equal Rights Washington brought him here in 2006, and he never left. Since then, among other things, he managed the Approve 71 campaign and helped set up Washington United for Marriage. Josh also sat on the board of Reform congregation Kol HaNeshamah in West Seattle.
This past year he began thinking about what he called his other passion, Israel, deciding the world had changed enough for an openly gay man to become involved in Israeli-Palestinian issues.
“In both America and Israel LGBT people can participate fully in civil life,” Josh says.
There is a more open discussion about the two-state solution in Israel, while “here in America…we have not had this vibrant conversation.” Those who question Israeli government policy risk being “portrayed by some as not being supportive of Israel,” he says. J Street’s message, he adds, is that “one can have a deep love of Israel and question the policies of the Israeli government.”
And despite the fact that Josh’s new job is in New York, he will bring a West Coast sensibility and awareness to his role. J Street’s Pacific Northwest office is in San Francisco, where the organization will host its 2014 national summit in June, its first on the West Coast. Josh invites members of our state’s “Pro-Israel, pro-peace community to attend and hopes people will get involved with J Street’s Seattle chapter.” There’s more information at the website.
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Nadine Strauss, who just celebrated 25 years with Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative congregation.
By the time you read this, Nadine Strauss, executive director of Mercer Island’s Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative congregation, will have already been honored by her congregation for 25 years on the job.
“It’s been a privilege,” she reflected recently, and “an unusual privilege to be able to work at a job that one loves for so long and to continue appreciating it.”
The congregation was much smaller when Nadine started. “There were still a lot of typewriters in the building,” she says.
Rapid changes — cultural and technological — meant adjusting along the way, but staying “tethered to the values and traditions” of Conservative Judaism.
A native of Houston, and graduate of University of Texas, Nadine had been in town only a few years when she applied for the job. Although her background was in education, through some coincidences she “made my way into synagogue life,” she says, and the congregation took a chance with someone different from the norm at a time when most synagogue directors were men from a business or non-profit background.
“Adrenaline,” Nadine quips, when asked what keeps her going, “and a lot of Diet Coke.”
But seriously, she gets energized “because no one day is the same as the other.” She is quick to point out that she doesn’t do it alone. “I have a terrific group of people in my work,” she says. “Nobody works these jobs alone; it takes a whole community to succeed.”
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Short takes
On a list of presidential appointments from the White House last month you’ll find Suzan LeVine of Seattle, a cofounder of the Kavana Cooperative and former president of Hillel at the University of Washington, as a nominee to become “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Swiss Confederation, and to serve concurrently and without additional compensation as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Principality of Liechtenstein.”