If you’re a leader feeling a sense of urgency, take a breath. Urgency isn’t an antidote to complacency. In fact, it reinforces white supremacy culture because it intensifies disconnection and increases implicit bias in decision-making. For inclusion efforts to be sustainable, it's crucial to step back and assess before launching into frantic fixes. As Tema Okun has famously argued, our “imposed sense of urgency serves to erase the actual urgency of tackling racial and social injustice." Social acceleration is not social justice.

Why does authentic inclusion remain so elusive after so many of us have been working so long to achieve it? One answer to this question is that inclusion can't be achieved without meaningfully addressing difference, identity, and inequality. "Celebrating" difference requires transforming those systems that exclude marginalized and multiply marginalized people in the first place.

How does calling others out (or in) foster a culture of safety, trust, and inclusion? I think people call others out or in because they believe that if someone caused harm, that individual must be held accountable for their words and actions. Calling out others can be an important way for people who have been silenced or traumatized-- especially women and those from minoritized communities--to step into their power and advocate for justice. However, the public performance of call-outs (on social media, especially) is seldom grounded in reparative practices, because they seek more to police/punish than to educate. As a result, call outs often don’t foster meaningful accountability, connection, or trust.

I’m struggling. World events are challenging, the impact on my family is challenging, and on top of that, yesterday something happened that made me feel excluded simply because I’m Jewish. If you’ve been reading my blog you know that I typically have something to say, but this is one of those times when it feels difficult to find the words. To my Jewish, Muslim, Arab and other siblings who are also struggling, I see you. To employers, teachers, managers, and leaders, how are you supporting directly and indirectly impacted communities?

School curricula, films, TV, and popular culture in the US have tended to universalize and sanitize Holocaust history, making our efforts to remember Jewish trauma also—at least to some extent—a way of forgetting it. On Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), I invite you to consider that ubiquitous cultural images of the Holocaust--Anne Frank, barbed wire, railway cars, crematoriums, and piles of shoes--have probably taught you very little about a traumatic past whose full meaning eludes our comprehension.

I've spent my career facilitating difficult dialogues, but I've learned that when things heat up, conversations that you've carefully planned can go sideways quickly. That's why it helps to have go-to tools in your back pocket. One of my favorite tools is LARA, a bridging method used to communicate across difference. LARA, which stands for Listen, Affirm, Respond, and Add, is a simple and extremely effective method for building trust, increasing understanding, and engaging in conflict with compassion.

The reason I’m so passionate about the importance of speaking up is because I know the cost of surrendering a part of ourselves to silence. That’s why, as an educator, DEIB practitioner, and inclusive teaching specialist, I have spent my career empowering others to use their voices and creating spaces where people feel safe to speak up.

If we want to create equitable and inclusive environments, we must first recognize the humanity of people who are different from us. Did you know that the US is experiencing the highest number of anti-Muslim incidents recorded in 30 years? I want to invite leaders and managers to consider the issues faced by Muslim coworkers and neighbors in light of the huge surge in anti-Muslim hate since Oct. 7. Nearly half of last year’s incidents of backlash violence were reported after the Israel-Gaza war began.

If you don’t have to think about it, it’s a privilege. Cisgender people don’t have to think about our gender in the way that transgender, nonbinary and gender expansive people do. Whiteness means not having to think about racism and anti-blackness. In ways large and small, obvious and subtle, cisnormativity and whiteness are both systemically privileged. There are many different types of privilege that impact the complex ways we all move through the world. This means that people can be privileged in some ways and not privileged in others. But this doesn’t make privilege—or its unequal and discriminatory effects— any less real. We must be vigilant in checking our privilege precisely because it is often invisible to those of us who possess it.

On International Women’s Day, I want to express my solidarity with both Palestinian and Israeli women and girls. As a Jewish feminist, I am committed to listening to Muslim and Arab women and taking proactive steps to decenter whiteness and the colonial gaze in my work. During these difficult times, I'm working on cultivating a spirit of peace, compassion, and justice in myself so that I may manifest it in the world.

Leaders, if you aren’t visibly supporting the LGBTQIA2S+ community right now, you’re most likely causing harm. Non-trans folks, it’s time to stop acting as though the rights of transgender people have nothing or little to do with you. If you think these equity issues don’t impact you, I would like to gently suggest that you’re probably underestimating the number of people in your organization or institution who are gender expansive or who love someone who is gender expansive.

The antiracism framework of DEI isn't the cause of antisemitism. Antisemitism is known as "the longest hatred" because it's existed for thousands of years! It's simply ridiculous--and wildly ahistorical--to blame DEI for anti-Jewish hatred. We must strive to fight against the real harms of antisemitism while also calling out those who have turned it into a political football.

It's been a week since Columbia University students were targeted with a chemical attack while attending a peaceful pro-Palestine rally. This attack is a serious crime, possibly a hate crime. Although the "alleged perpetrators" have been banned from campus, no arrests have been made even though there were multiple witnesses.

Do you know that the word “racism” wasn’t commonly used until the 1930s, when the word was coined to describe Nazis’ persecution of Jewish people? Racism is one of the most catastrophic evils of the modern world. And yet, today the term “racism” is sometimes used in ways that divorce it from a broader history of domination. For example, when anti-DEI activists claim that affirmative action is racist, what they’re saying is that treating people differently on the basis of race is, ipso facto, racism. But is this what racism actually is?

Is DEI on the down low strategic or self-defeating in the current climate? Some leaders say that it's the work that matters, not what we call it. What this argument forgets is that “repackaging” DEI closets the work and, by extension, the legitimate needs of the people whom diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging initiatives are designed to represent and serve.

One of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s greatest gifts to the world is how he embodied the power of love to solve social problems. Today, it may seem like Dr. King's work doesn't apply to the entrenched conflicts that cause tremendous violence and oppression around the world, from the Middle East to Sudan. But what he advocates for isn't a pie-in-the-sky utopia or "superficial optimism." King recognizes human beings' propensity for collective evil (this is why he rejects liberalism), but he also trusts that history--and God--is on the side of justice and truth.

As a Jewish DEIB practitioner invested in fighting antisemitism, I'm deeply saddened to learn that, after only a 6 month term, Harvard President Claudine Gay has resigned. She is the first Black person to lead Harvard and its second woman president. While antisemitism on college campuses is a real problem, anti-DEI extremists' weaponizing of antisemitism is actually a part of a broad attack on equity and justice in US society. This explains the witch hunt against Dr. Gay.

We don't solve the problem of one injustice by creating another injustice. As everyone should know by now, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. The death toll in Gaza is now over 20,000 people, making this the deadliest conflict for Palestinians since the creation of Israel in 1948. 70% of those killed in Gaza have been women and children, not combatants.

When people tell me that they are uncomfortable including religion in DEI programming, I remind them that antisemitism is not only about faith. It’s racism against Jews. Because Jews are an ethnoreligious group, addressing antisemitism requires us to challenge DEI’s tendency to separate conversations of religious inclusion from conversations about race and ethnicity.

Growing up, I was taught that being Jewish meant unwavering support for Israel. I love and support my family in Israel. Period. But I simply cannot support Israel's government, which is the most right-wing and extreme in its entire history. I've been horrified and heartbroken as I've witnessed the humanitarian deterioration in Gaza and escalating genocide against the Palestinian people, with backing from the US government.