Bryan Schwartzman: From my home studio, at least for now, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. Carin Mrotz: I mean, I think that inherent in that thinking is that there's a specific type of, like there's a unique Black antisemitism or a unique Muslim antisemitism. I actually just don't think that's a thing. Bryan Schwartzman: I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. And my guest today is Carin Mrotz of Minnesota's Jewish Community Action. I'm going to be speaking with Carin about her Evolve essay: "Fighting Antisemitism is a Critical Piece of a Racial Justice Agenda". This essay explores the relationship between antisemitism and white supremacy and efforts to build alliances to combat intolerance of all kinds. Carin is steeped in progressive activism in Minneapolis, and we not surprisingly spend a bunch of time talking about what's been going on in the city since the murder of George Floyd a year ago, and more recently since the conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin. Bryan Schwartzman: So a couple of episode notes: the most important is that my conversation with Carin took place really before the shocking violence between segments of Israel's Jewish and Arab citizens, and certainly before the 11 days of violence between Israel and Hamas. And of course, before the chilling spike in anti-Semitic incidents we saw, seen throughout North America and Europe. And those events clearly would have influenced the questions I asked and might've really impacted the trajectory of the interview. But it's a thoughtful interview about antisemitism and the role that progressives and inter-communal alliances can play in combating it. And I would say recent events only serve to make this conversation more salient. And looking back -- and I'm always looking back as a host, I'm in the self-critical podcast host category -- maybe I should have introduced Israel into the topic regardless, in the interest of modeling conversations on difficult topics, even when you don't know, or especially when you don't know where exactly it's going to lead. I'm sure Carin would have been game. Bryan Schwartzman: So what do you think did we miss something? Email us, let us know. We always want to hear from you. This is a conversation between podcasts and listeners. I'm at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. So the next note, Carin makes a brief reference to a one-day news story involving a spat between Jewish communal leader, Nancy Kaufman, and a group called the Democratic Majority For Israel. It was a news story I'd missed prior to the interview. And if you followed it at the time, you've probably forgotten about it by now, but just really to keep the organic nature of the conversation, we decided to leave it in the episode and we'll be including in the show notes a JTA story explaining the kerfuffle by Ron Kampeas, a veteran reporter who I admire and have had the chance to spend some time with, a great person, reputable journalist. Bryan Schwartzman: So before we get to the interview, the essays discussed on this show are available to read for free on the newly redesigned Evolve website, which is evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. I'm really digging the new look. The essays are not required reading for this show, but we recommend checking them out. All right, time for today's guests. Carin Mrotz is the executive director of Jewish Community Action, a 25-year-old nonprofit organizing Minnesota's Jewish community for racial and economic justice. On staff since 2004, she has worked on campaigns for immigrant and workers' rights and played a key role in leading JCA's work to organize the interfaith partners in support of marriage equality in 2012. And since becoming executive director, she has built on ongoing campaigns for affordable housing and criminal justice reform. And she has launched a new program to work statewide with other progressives to build a shared analysis of antisemitism and white nationalism. And, growing up in Miami, she was a teenage punk rocker. And if I had more time, I would've focused a little bit more on the music, but I promise we'll get into that a little bit. So, Carin Mrotz, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Lots to talk about. Carin Mrotz: Thanks for having me. Bryan Schwartzman: Oh, it's my pleasure. I've really enjoyed getting to talk to you a bit off-air and now excited to do it on-air with everybody listening. So great to have you. So first off, you run this organization called Jewish Community Action in Minneapolis, where there's been a bit going on this past year. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization and just what it does, what its mission is. Carin Mrotz: Yeah, definitely. So Jewish Community Action is a 26-year-old nonprofit organization. I'm talking to you from Minneapolis, I'm in my house in Minneapolis, but we actually work statewide, although primarily in the Twin Cities Metro area. We have an office in St. Paul that I'm in at this point in the pandemic about twice a week. And we organize the Jewish community in Minnesota for racial and economic justice. And what that means is primarily working on policy that supports things like affordable housing and criminal justice reform at the state and local level, municipal, city and county level. And then we also do a lot of work within the Jewish community. We do a lot of training and leadership development that is primarily focused at making the Jewish community a more just space and building our community's capacity to then be effective on the issues that we work on externally in the broader world. Carin Mrotz: We also started a couple of new programs in the last couple of years. We're doing... We're in the middle of a two year program, working statewide with progressive partners, mostly non-Jewish partners, but also within our own community, to build a shared analysis in antisemitism, and to resist white nationalism collectively. And then we also started some work last fall, shortly after the Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. We hired a community safety organizer and we now have a designated staff person who works with congregations and partner organizations to have conversations and to mobilize around public safety and also security and policing within the Jewish community. Bryan Schwartzman: So, from what I understand, I mean, antisemitism has not been a priority of you or at least of your organization. There've been plenty of national organizations, sort of "Jewish defense organizations" focused on that. You write in your Evolve essay about how that began to change or did change in 2016 when you got a call from an activist about a swastika painting on a garage. Can you tell us what happened and how that began to change your trajectory somewhere? Carin Mrotz: Yeah, I mean, I would say we never really focused on antisemitism and didn't tend to think about it as much as other organizations for whom that is their focus. And a lot of that started to change in, I guess it was November, late November 2016. I mean, that was part of it. I think it started to change gradually. But that was a big flashpoint. A good friend and an organizer with a Black-led organization called me up and said, "Hey, did you see there was this giant swastika painted on this building on the North Side?" And I was like, "I literally just saw it on Facebook. It's just a few blocks from my house." And we decided to go clean it off. And what ended up happening was, we cleaned off the swastika on a very cold day and she tweeted some pictures because she was just like, "I can't believe there was this like 12 foot giant spray-painted swastika on the North Side, that's that's bananas to me." Carin Mrotz: And so she tweeted about it. And within a couple of days, we were getting just attacked online by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and they had a really specific, I think what was surprising for my friend was they're very specific understanding of what a Jewish woman and a Black woman had done together. And that was very salient for the people attacking us. And it caused my friend to say, "I really had no idea. I really didn't realize antisemitism was still a thing. I thought you all were normal white people." Now, obviously, Jews are not all white people, but those of us who are white Jews, some of us also have been spending a lot of time thinking we're just normal white people. And it became really clear, I think to me, I always was aware that antisemitism was a problem. Carin Mrotz: I think the shift for me and the shift in our work was that number one, I started to realize that our partners and our friends, they didn't know that antisemitism was still alive and was still a problem. And that number two, if our partners and friends who we're working with in, aligned around racism and gender oppression and classism, if they don't have an analysis of antisemitism, possibly that's actually weakening the work that we're doing to fight white supremacy. So it was kind of like, we always thought about it. We never felt like we urgently needed to address it because I don't think we realized that kind of the collective knowing was not what we thought it was. Bryan Schwartzman: So, I mean, you wrote, I'm going to quote you here for a second, "For a year and a half, we've worked with progressive organizations, labor unions, multiracial coalitions, and elected officials to build a shared analysis of the threats against us and our paths to fighting back." So I assume there you were talking about antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia. Can you tell us about that work and where it is today? Carin Mrotz: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, we launched this program thinking that we were going to do a lot of community dinners, obviously that didn't happen. So we've been doing a lot, we've been doing everything virtually and we've been doing a lot of trainings. And just as an example, we have a partner called Gender Justice, which is a tremendous organization in Minnesota that works primarily in the courts protecting the rights of women and trans people and protecting reproductive freedom and choice. And they came to us and said, "We want to do a workshop. And we would love to have a better understanding of how the issues that we work on -- so, choice and misogyny -- how those intertwine with antisemitism." And we put together an hour and a half workshop, and we went and did a Zoom workshop with them. Carin Mrotz: And then we continue working in partnership. This is also sometimes -- when we work within the Jewish community, we do a lot of like virtual house parties right now, where we'll have a JCA member who will say, "I want to bring my neighborhood organization." During the uprising over the summer, following the murder of George Floyd, there were a bunch of white supremacists that came to our town, like organized white supremacist groups, and lots of folks want to understand "What are the symbols that I'm seeing. Like, I see the stickers on their trucks. What does that mean?" And so we've also developed curriculum about that. And so we're just doing a lot of really relational workshops and kind of like virtual house parties at this point. Bryan Schwartzman: Has that... I mean, you mentioned the murder of George Floyd where we're a ways out now from the guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin, has that work continued, has it been changed by the aftermath of the murder and its verdict? Carin Mrotz: For us, I think it's changed in a couple of ways. We organize all over the Twin Cities Metro area. We build affordable housing teams in suburbs and in the cities where we're working to pass ballot initiatives around rent control in Minneapolis and St. Paul or ordinances to do rent stabilization. But another way that our affordable housing work has shown up in the last several years or so is that every year, our mayor -- Minneapolis, it's a weak-mayor system, so the city council passes most policy. The main thing that the mayor is really in charge of is the police. And every year the mayor puts forth his budget with these massive increases to the police force. And every year, those of us who are organizing in the affordable housing space show up with our members. We bring JCA members who live in Minneapolis to City Hall and they testify and say, "We actually don't want to spend more money on police. We want to spend more money on supportive housing. We want to spend more money on building affordable housing and getting more folks housed." Carin Mrotz: And that has for us been what we would call defunding the police has looked like over the last number of years. In the last year or so since the murder of George Floyd, our work has shifted in two ways. One is that we are actually, and we've actually been engaged in real policy conversations about not just shifting money away from the police to other things that we like, but to fundamentally restructuring police accountability in Minneapolis, through our participation in a campaign to get a ballot initiative. So that many Minneapolitans, that's what we call ourselves, Minneapolitans, can vote in November for whether or not the city is allowed to restructure police and take them from the sole control of the mayor into a larger public safety department. So we're engaged on that. Carin Mrotz: The other thing is just that we have really increased the amount of work we're doing in the Jewish community. Our community safety organizer is holding these like, so you Jews want to learn about abolition. And we're packing these Zooms with like 80, 90 people saying, "Teach me about this. I need to understand. I need to understand the spectrum of police reform to abolition and where does defunding fit." And we've really just found a tremendous amount of interest and energy within the Jewish community to learn more and to start challenging ourselves on how we think about this. Bryan Schwartzman: And does Jewish Community Action take a position on that question, on the spectrum of abolition to defunding to reform? Carin Mrotz: Yeah, I mean, we're organizers. We are community organizers, which means we meet people where they are, which means we're actually willing to meet our own community on the spectrum of where they are and find those people meaningful work to do where they are, and hopefully bring them closer to, I mean, we're not working on any type of statewide policy to abolish the police. We definitely do work on like tangible policy and what we're working on right now is about fundamentally redesigning and restructuring the Minneapolis Police Department. I think it's very hard to argue that this is a department that can be reformed. It's been reformed dozens of times. It doesn't work. They are a fundamentally broken department, and I think we start over with them is the answer. And I think that's JCA's position. Carin Mrotz: But more broadly we want to meet, because this conversation isn't just about, do we abolish the police in this suburb of St. Paul? It's also about what does it mean to have security at our shuls and who are we working with and what does that mean in the community. So for us, it's really more about meeting our community where they are on the spectrum, and then finding meaningful ways for them to engage there. Bryan Schwartzman: Has being at the, kind of the center of the national spotlight, which Minneapolis has been this past year, has that changed, magnified the work you do? Has it brought more attention to it, more scrutiny? Carin Mrotz: Yes. All of it. Yeah. It's definitely brought more attention and more eyeballs. I mean, people know where Minneapolis is who didn't, and especially in the Jewish community and yeah, there's a lot more scrutiny. There's also just a lot more pressure not to mess up. If you just look at the Chauvin trial and what that meant to so many people around the country, when all eyes are on you, the pressure is really on. And it's been, I mean, it's been stressful even just down to the decisions about whether George Floyd's family could be vaccinated before they attended the trial, right? There's this moment where it's like all eyes are on our city and this trial and we have to get it right, because so much is at stake. This was the first time for us as Minnesotans that a white police officer was even successfully charged and prosecuted, much less convicted. Carin Mrotz: And so, yeah. The pressure's been on, but it does also mean that we're getting a lot more resources -- and I don't necessarily mean financial, but that would be great. But I just mean like people reaching out to say, "This is my area of expertise, or I've done research in this, or can I help you with this?" And so that's been helpful too. Bryan Schwartzman: So, getting back to antisemitism, I mean, first off Minnesota, it's a very white state in terms of racism work, in terms of antisemitism, maybe even in terms of Islamophobia, is there a goal you're reaching towards and working with some of these programs or is it just kind of one foot in front of the other, changing attitudes a little bit at a time? Carin Mrotz: Yeah. I mean, we tend to have policy goals and then culture change, like incremental checkpoints. And so because developing a shared analysis of antisemitism is not like a bill that we can pass or something that we can vote on. It's something that we just look for shifts and changes that indicate that we're going in the right direction. That's more of what we're doing. Bryan Schwartzman: So I'll follow up on antisemitism, and I'm going to try to keep it question and not soap box. So this paradigm of "the enemy is white supremacy" is really powerful. I think we can back it up a little bit strong arguments that white supremacists represent a very physical clear and present danger to Jews, Blacks, People of Color. And you also really get at some of the complexity in your article in terms of acknowledging that racism and Islamophobia really persists in the Jewish community. I guess I wonder if this paradigm can make us miss the full scope of antisemitism or other threats. I mean, we've had, certainly pre-pandemic there was a spate of violence against folks, primarily Orthodox Jews perpetrated largely by African-Americans from what we can tell in police reports. We know antisemitism certainly globally is ongoing within certain segments of Muslim communities. Bryan Schwartzman: So, I guess I'm wondering how does, so the question part, how do we, in your view as an activist, do you see any danger or that sort of keeping the focus on white supremacy misses the full spectrum of antisemitism or what we have to deal with? Carin Mrotz: I mean, I think that like inherent in that question or in that thinking is that there's a specific type of, like there's a unique Black antisemitism or a Muslim antisemitism. It's probably appealing if you're trying to puzzle this out and not in deep relationship with other communities to say, "Oh, Black people are antisemitic in a different way than the Proud Boys." But the fact is this is all coming from the same place, right? Somebody asked me a few weeks ago, "So how did white European, Christian antisemitism spread to all the world and all of these cultures?" I mean, the answer is colonialism. The answer is, the spread of imperialism and Christian supremacy. Black Americans grew up here in the same culture that you and I did, and we've all absorbed white supremacy in the way that we've been raised in this culture. Carin Mrotz: And I think the idea that other people who are targeted for their race or their nationality should be less impacted by white supremacy or this idea that... I often find that when... Let me just go back. I often find, this a good question. I often find this sentiment that because other people are oppressed or experiencing racism or Islamophobia, it's more disappointing or more egregious in some way that they might hold antisemitic beliefs. And for me, it's just like evidence that this is extremely large and cultural and that no one is immune. For me to say, yes, I, as a white person have deeply ingrained racist thought patterns that I received from the culture I was raised in, and it's my job to undermine them and work on that, means that it's perfectly normal for my Black neighbor who lives two houses down to also have absorbed some of those patterns. Carin Mrotz: And so I think it's an interesting question. And I realize I've gone maybe a little afield of your question, but I don't think that studying the ways that all of these things, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny are all just transmitted by white supremacy and white supremacy culture. I don't think that makes us ignore the very real problem of this very unique, like antisemitism that exists in minority communities, because I actually just don't think that's a thing. Yeah, so. Bryan Schwartzman: What's not a thing? Carin Mrotz: Like unique black anti-Semitism or like unique Muslim antisemitism. We -- Bryan Schwartzman: It's just an expression of the greater stew that's out there in your world. Like racism in the Jewish community is. Carin Mrotz: Yeah, I mean, that's been my experience and I work very closely with people of other cultures. And that has been my experience. Yeah. I'm sure we'll talk more about this. Bryan Schwartzman: Short time out here. Do you want others to experience level of dialogue? Please take a moment to give us a five-star rating or review. These reviews really help other people find out about the show. If you're enjoying this interview, and I hope you are, please hit the subscribe button and be among the first to know when a new episode appears. And if you're a new listener, welcome, hello. Check out our back catalog for lots of other groundbreaking conversations. Okay. Now back to the interview with Carin Mrotz. Bryan Schwartzman: So you wrote that the fact is that white Jews both benefit from whiteness and are targeted by white supremacy, which -- I feel like this is hard and it takes work for Jews to really parse that out and understand what that means. And maybe that process is still early going in a lot of Jewish communities. So how do... Going back to where we started a little bit and your friend who was really surprised by the appearance of the swastika, how do our allies in other groups relate to that? Is that something that if you feel like you're having to explain to other communities? Carin Mrotz: I mean, the only stumbling block is that there is a generational factor in other communities that, and we talk about this within our organization. On my board I have people who, as children were not, who are white Jews, who as children were not considered white by the U.S government, right? And who have in their lifetime experienced themselves taking on a different identity. And so, and that gets flattened over time, and by people who don't have that experience. And there's also a generational split, I think in some of the communities that we work with. I was on a panel about two years ago about Black and Jewish relationships. And so there were non-Jewish Black folks, there were white Jewish folks, and there were also Black Jewish folks. And just on the panel, the older Black folks felt a more obvious connection to the Jewish community around a shared story of oppression. And the younger Black folks said, 'No offense, but we really just see you as regular white people." Carin Mrotz: And so, I think that sometimes our, I mean, the Jewish community, like in many ways, part of the reason we persist is because we really organize collectively and we build institutions and we build organizations and we support each other. And I think that's the folks on the outside of that, they just see us as normal white folks. And don't get that there is something different or unique. Again, I just want to name the way that Christian hegemony just erases the ways that we are different and the ways that we often feel marginalized within society that are not obvious to people who are not us. Carin Mrotz: Minnesota, you said Minnesota is very white. It's also extremely Christian. I've been married for 18 years to a man for whom I was the first Jewish person his family ever met. And so it is really normal for folks outside of the Jewish community to not get what's different about Jews. I don't say that as a good thing, I just say that as like a level-setting expectation-setting thing. And so, I mean, part of what we do is we bring them into that and we say, "Here's how we're different. Here's what this looks like for us." And then we use that as a way to have conversation. Bryan Schwartzman: That really reminds me of James Baldwin's essay from '67 where he makes a similar argument in that blacks have a problem with Jews because... Carin Mrotz: They have a problem with whiteness. Bryan Schwartzman: And which he, I mean, I think he doesn't get enough, if it's possible, that he doesn't get enough credit. He doesn't get enough credit for that essay, which really just skewers prejudice on all sides. And he doesn't give anyone any break for that. It really calls us... Carin Mrotz: Yeah, that's a beautiful essay. It's one that we use in our workshops. And because part of it is that he's not just indicting whiteness. What he's saying to the Jewish community, or what I take from that is that, it's not that I critique the Jewish community because you're white, it's "I critique the Jewish community because of the bargain that you are making to get to be white", right? That... So that shows up sometimes in our work too, that what are the things, what are the pieces of our individuality that we are trading away in order to gain safety? And how do other groups who will never feel safe in the way that we seek out, how is that received by them? So sorry to cut you off. Bryan Schwartzman: No, not at all. So since we're on Black -ewish relations, I know you've worked very closely with, with Keith Ellison, who's now Minnesota's attorney general. He was a Congressman from- Carin Mrotz: Minneapolis. Bryan Schwartzman: Minneapolis. And he was a leading candidate a couple of years ago to be the next Democratic National Committee chair. And it really became a flashpoint in Black-Jewish relations where some of his statements to Israel were brought up, is the question of whether or not he had had, and what his ties were, to the Nation of Islam. And I was just wondering, did that experience teach you anything about Black-Jewish relations? Was there anything hopeful that came out of it, or was it just kind of an ugly episode in your view? Carin Mrotz: I mean, the main thing that it taught me -- so I'll say, so Jewish Community Action has had a relationship with Attorney General Ellison since before he went to Congress, which I think was in 2006, maybe, he was elected to Congress. And he was my Congressman for 12 years until he became the attorney general of Minnesota. But before that, he was in the state House representing North Minneapolis, which is where I live. And JCA had a relationship, a long relationship with him. And we have had at multiple points as, he has either achieved more public notoriety when he ran for Congress, this would come up, "Oh, Keith has ties to the Nation of Islam. Oh, Keith has ties to Farrakhan." And in 2006, when he ran for Congress, a number of Jewish organizations, JCA included, and like our local JCRC, all wrote letters saying we unequivocally are in relationship with Keith Ellison. He's a good guy. Carin Mrotz: And so I think the thing that my experience in working with Keith and supporting him even through being part of his transition team when he was elected attorney general, my experience, it has taught me just how pernicious the idea of an accusation of antisemitism can be against a Black, progressive leader, Muslim or not, but certainly Muslim. And just how reliable it is as an attack, right? It's not surprising. It's not unusual. It's like the safe resting place for his challengers and his attackers. And I think it's also given me the ability to see it when it's coming in other places, right? So yesterday the Democratic Majority for Israel, whatever that means, attacked Nancy Kaufman as an anti-Semite, because they're opposing her appointment as antisemitism envoy to the Biden administration. Bryan Schwartzman: She's the former chair of the National Council for Jewish Women, or the director? Carin Mrotz: Yeah. So Nancy ran NCJW. And before that she ran the Boston JCRC. And so I think what I'm saying is that it's taught me just how reliable, trusty and predictable this, oh no, this person is progressive, let's drag out the antisemitism allegations, right? Like it's, and it's extremely played out. And I think that for a long time, progressives were very behind on this and I think we're catching up and trying to get stronger in fighting it. But yeah, that's, I mean, my work with Keith has really been... The main thing it's taught me besides the fact that he's a tremendous attorney general, and we're extremely lucky to have him in Minnesota, it's really taught me about how useful and just, it's like the trusty hammer in the tool belt of the right. Bryan Schwartzman: I guess I'm curious about you and how you came to this work. I understand that once upon a time you actually had the kind of job where you've made more money and had a more lucrative career and somehow chose to focus on organizing and making the world a better place. I was wondering how you made the choice and how you've stuck with it, because you've been in this field for more than a decade now. Carin Mrotz: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I kind of came to progressive activism through probably just growing up the child of two public school teachers who were very involved with their teachers' union. My parents were both, I grew up in South Florida in a suburb in Broward County and actually spent my childhood going back and forth between my mom and my dad in South Florida, and then my father in Philadelphia on breaks and summers and stuff like that. And so I was most, I mostly grew up in a household with two public school teachers who were both the first person in their family to go to college and to become middle-class people whose parents had been blue-collar and had benefited from the GI Bill, and had been in the military. And my parents were pretty involved in the teachers' union and, like I remember the first political campaign I worked on was Dukakis when I was in middle school. Carin Mrotz: And then when I became a teenager, I got really involved in the punk rock scene and really started developing a more left political analysis than just kind of liberal, and went away to college and learned organizing through the lens of trying to save low-income housing. And yeah, I ended up in Minnesota after I finished my undergraduate degree and was just really trying to support myself while my boyfriend went to graduate school. And so I developed this career in private higher ed. I was a teacher and a trainer, and I ended up in a suit everyday doing what felt like performance art in this very corporate private for-profit college environment. Carin Mrotz: And in the beginning of 2004, I just decided I'd had enough. I was experiencing, I felt like I was constantly fighting really ingrained racism and misogyny and experiencing some really special Minnesota, low-key antisemitism, there's a really special way that this happens in Minnesota. Like just everyone standing around the coffee maker and somebody bought a new truck and they're really excited because "The guy wanted 10, but I jewed him down," and I'm like standing there with my mouth hanging open, and none of these people have ever met a Jew before me so they don't even realize what it is they're saying. And so I was like, "You know what? I've had enough of this." And so I left my job and I enrolled in graduate school for public policy, public administration. And I took a job in April 2004, 17 years ago, with Jewish Community Action, and every moment that I thought I would be ready to move on, or I would be ready to do other work, or like you said, make more money. Carin Mrotz: The work has just like risen up and held me in place and kept me really excited about doing it. In 2008, I'd had a child and I thought I might be ready to move on to do something else. And ICE raided a kosher food producer in Iowa, in Postville, Iowa. And I was like, "Oh, I need to stay. And be part of the response to that." In 2011, I was like, "I've had my second child, I'm ready to move on." And that year, Republicans in Minnesota put marriage equality on the bill. And I was like, "Oh, I'm going to stay and organize Jews for marriage equality." And it's really just kind of continued to hold me in this work. And in March 2017, I became the executive director of JCA. Bryan Schwartzman: One comment. I was crushed in middle school when Dukakis lost. I was, that just floored me at the time. Carin Mrotz: Right. Bryan Schwartzman: I was pretty young and I was like, "Wait, but..." Carin Mrotz: Did you think it was unfair the way that a simple moment of public image can derail somebody who actually has a really good message? Bryan Schwartzman: That was the tank thing? Carin Mrotz: Yeah. Bryan Schwartzman: Yeah. I've heard him speak, but yeah, sure, it was unfair. But that's I guess, I guess that's politics. Okay. Another short time out here, if you'd like to support these groundbreaking conversations of Evolve, on the podcast, on the website, in our web conversations, or even the curricula we're producing, you can engage in citizen philanthropy and support us. Every gift matters. There's a Donate link in our show notes. Thanks for listening. And thanks for your support. All right. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Bryan Schwartzman: All right, Carin, you mentioned the punk rock scene and my music brain just went on. I sort of grew up more along the classic rock, hard rock, metal spectrum and came to punk later. And really think of like, say The Clash and --which you could say really had an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, certainly a pretty left leaning, progressive message in a lot of their music. You told me you've actually had your first real encounter with sort of right-wing white supremacy in the punk movement. So is that right? And how do these two elements sort of co-exist or not co-exist? Carin Mrotz: Yeah, I mean, and likewise, I kind of came to punk rock through like an entry point of like Fugazi and like D.C. super political punk music and Rites of Spring. And, but at the same time, and so for me, punk and kind of like left politics are very intertwined. At the same time, punk scenes are like super misogynist, bro places. And they're also places where I would spend half the weekend rage-tweeting about Glenn Danzig making these terrible comments about how with cancel culture, the punk scene would never happen today because you can't sing about raping girls. And so I digress. Bryan Schwartzman: I've missed that. Wow. Carin Mrotz: You know what? You didn't miss a thing. But it's fine.[Laughter] So yeah, like the Miami punk scene where I was a young person, we have Nazi skins. There are anti-racist skins. There are racist skinheads, and it's this really just chilling mix. I mean, you see it online now, like with, I have a staff person who actually tracks online white supremacists, like radicalization. And the way that the racism and the antisemitism and the misogyny are all really bound up and closely connected, I don't think it's surprising that this shows up in like loud, aggressive music scenes that are dominated by men. But yeah, the first time I ever really stared like open white supremacists in the faces was at punk shows. It's not good, man. Bryan Schwartzman: Yeah. So you've been really heavily involved in progressive politics at least since, or organizing at least since 2004. It sounds like fair to say before that. Where do you feel like things stand now? It seems like there's plenty of reason to be optimistic and pessimistic. Where do you think we are? Where do you think we're heading beyond...? I mean, you could couch that for your own state or more for the country as a whole. Carin Mrotz: Yeah. Minnesota has one of the... I believe Minnesota actually has the only divided legislature in the country at this point, where we have a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate and a democratic governor kind of holding his finger in all of the holes. And it's of concern. Yesterday our Republican controlled Senate spent... I mean, we're sitting here in a very short legislative session. We need police reform. We need a budget. There's millions of federal dollars that have come into Minnesota that we need to spend. But the Republican-controlled Senate decided to spend their day yesterday passing a bill requiring picture ID for voting, which will not pass because the House will not accept it, the governor will never sign it, and also, newsflash, in 2012, this was on the ballot and Minnesotans voted against it, right? Carin Mrotz: And so it does concern me that for Minnesota, with this divided legislature and these deeply ingrained political divisions, we're not getting anything done to help anyone. We need to spend money. We need to figure out how, once our eviction moratorium from the pandemic is lifted, how to not trigger just thousands of evictions and families losing their homes over the two weeks after that ends. And so I'm pretty challenged. I think like the one, I mean I do see a lot of hope and I'm also like, I am pleasantly surprised by the Biden administration. And I think that the... I'm also really happy that I'm seeing so much of not just my community, but like lots of folks in the suburbs who are far more to the left than I think I was assuming that they would be, and really fighting for issues like police reform that we deeply, deeply need, especially in the cities. Carin Mrotz: And so I think at the individual and the grassroots level, I am pretty heartened. I think at the institutional political level, I'm not really quite as sure. And I think like there is a dynamic as somebody who has worked on the progressive left, I think the dynamic that I'm watching for, and that is of concern to me is the way that, and I don't think I'm alone in this, is that I see Democrats who are more towards the center, who maybe don't think that some of the things that the right wants to do... We have currently in an education omnibus Bill in Minnesota, some really ugly anti-trans language that really shouldn't be there, right? Carin Mrotz: There's all these things that they wanted, that the far right wants to do, like anti-trans stuff and like voter suppression. And I think that Democrats don't take that as a serious enough threat and instead perceive the left as their threats, and the left as their enemy. And end up like fighting with their own left flank, right? Even though we're aligned on things like choice and labor and climate change. And so I think sometimes there are, there's this middle section of folks- Bryan Schwartzman: And we had this really common enemy, centrists and the far-left, in Donald Trump, which may or may not, we don't know what his political future is, but absent that common enemy can these two, can there be cooperation. Carin Mrotz: Right. My concern is that absent Donald Trump, what that kind of condensed center is really identifying as what they're fighting for is they're fighting to maintain the status quo. And that makes the progressive, their own progressive flank, scary for them and threatening for them. And I am concerned about how we move forward if we have so many folks who have just invested in maintaining the status quo. Bryan Schwartzman: I am wondering, are there, do you think there are any lessons from your own organizing work in Minnesota's very specific environment that might be replicated by, or modeled by other groups around the country, around North America? Carin Mrotz: Yeah. There's a few things that we've learned. I mean, first, everything has to start in relationship, especially with the antisemitism work that we're doing. Too often, Jewish organizations and leaders make pronouncements about the antisemitism that we're seeing from other communities or that we perceive from other communities completely out of relationship with those communities. And it will not shock you to learn that that's actually not the path to making things better, right? Starting in relationships, starting in a place of generosity and openness will always get us to a more collaborative-like resolution, right? So, and that goes not just for critiquing, but also for stepping up. So if you're saying we, the Jewish community support Black Lives Matter or whatever it is, great. Go build some relationships, go do this work in relationships, because it's not -- I think sometimes we as a community can act like it's for us alone to decide whether we work on an issue or not, and it's actually not. The folks who are most impacted by an issue also have to want us there, and that's about relationships. Carin Mrotz: So I think that relationships and starting from a place of generosity, being ready to recognize the dynamics in our own community that keep us from moving forward. I also think that as a Jewish community, we hold other communities extremely accountable for needing to be in good relationship with us or in good stead with us, right? So candidates have to be good with the Jews or elected people. Like how dare you not be in relationship with the Jews? But within our own community, we're just ready to throw each other away. And that's really sad. Some of the ugliest email that I get as a progressive Jewish leader are from other Jews. And for me, that's really sad and I think we can do a lot better. I mean, our community is like literally supposed to be disagreeing with each other all the time. And yet when we do, our answer is to cast each other out and to reject each other. So those are the things that I think I would say we've learned. Bryan Schwartzman: Wow. Well, Carin Mrotz, I really appreciated this chance to speak and get into some of these issues. I really enjoyed it. I think, I really thank you for your time. Carin Mrotz: Yeah. Thanks, Bryan. It was great. I appreciate it. Bryan Schwartzman: Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Carin Mrotz about the Evolve essay, "Fighting Antisemitism is a Critical Piece of a Racial Justice Agenda". So what did you think of today's episode? I'd love to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations, and you are a part of that. Send me your questions, comments, feedback. You can reach me at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. We will be back next month with a brand new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu, is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. And we'll see you next time.