After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, Norri Leder dedicated herself to fighting gun violence as a founding member of Moms Demand Action, the gun control group created after the shooting. 

And last year, there was another single defining moment that pushed her to create something new, just like she did after Sandy Hook: A candidate running in a Houston school board special election in 2025 sent out a mailer showing herself in a photo with a virulently anti-Israel politician. When Leder ran into the candidate at the polls, she told the candidate that she was “unknowingly alienating yourself, potentially, from members of the Jewish community.” The candidate had no idea.

“She asked me if there was a Jewish group that meets with candidates as they’re running,” Leder recalled. “I said, there are Jewish groups, but it occurred to me that many of them don’t have the bandwidth to meet on these races that are at much more of a local, state and county level as [candidates are] running for office.”

So Leder created one. Where she was once a single-issue activist fighting for gun control measures, now she is putting everything else aside to focus on Jewish communal concerns with her new organization, Houston Jewish Women Vote. Less than four months into its existence, the group has met with candidates running in local attorney, city council and judicial races in 2026. 

“We are narrowly focusing on physical security for the Jewish community, antisemitism, targeting of Jews in academic and professional settings, prayer in school and staying in your lane for state, local and county offices — just please don’t engage in foreign policy issues that undermine bridge building in the community and accomplish nothing in the world of foreign policy,” said Leder. “There’s a feeling of, we’re Jewish women, and a lot of us feel politically homeless right now. People feel good knowing that they’re participants and that they can exercise their voice.”

Houston Jewish Women Vote joins dozens of other Jewish advocacy efforts that grew out of the desperation people felt in the days after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks to fill a void in local politics. 

In Pittsburgh, the Beacon Coalition was created when community activist Jeremy Kazzaz saw that local politicians were too afraid to criticize a colleague who posted pro-Hamas messages. The group is now urging Jewish Democrats in the Pittsburgh area to run for seats on the Allegheny County Democratic Committee to be able to help shape the party’s endorsements. 

In California, Israeli immigrants helped launch the Bay Area Jewish Coalition (BAJC), in part to help locals make sense of the many local races for positions most people have never heard of. 

“Even when we have special elections for things that seem totally unrelated, like the county assessor, which is in charge of property taxes and things like that, at this point, people are reaching out to us and saying, ‘Who do we vote for?’” said BAJC co-founder Keren-Or Reiss, who was born in Israel and now lives in San Mateo, Calif., where she works as a product manager at a tech company. “Is there someone here who’s going to somehow use this platform to spread hate or to normalize antisemitism against us?” 

Some in the Jewish community turned to religious practice after Oct. 7, or to supporting charities helping victims of the attacks in Israel, or to pro-Israel political advocacy through establishment groups like AIPAC, or some combination. Leder, Kazzaz and Reiss represent a new class of Jewish American activists: people who were disappointed by the apathy or even outright hostility that some co-workers, teachers, neighbors and local elected officials demonstrated towards Jews and Israelis suffering in the aftermath of Oct. 7, and who felt no one was doing what needed to be done to reach those leaders. 

They saw a new kind of opportunity in an American political landscape reshaped by Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza. Advocating for Congress to vote a certain way on weapons sales to Israel would not do much to affect the swell of antisemitism growing in their communities. Although the war was happening thousands of miles away, they understood that its impact would be local.

“Almost every other community and interest group is doing this on the local level, and not the Jewish community. So we’re really trying to close that gap,” said Tyler Gregory, CEO of the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council, which in 2024 became the first JCRC in the country to launch an affiliated advocacy arm to fundraise for candidates and engage in elections. “I think it’s a combination of Congress being sexier and there being fewer issues at the local level.”

After Oct. 7, it became clear that there were not, in fact, fewer issues locally. City council members who were elected to work on municipal governance were now tasked with voting on contentious ceasefire resolutions and calls to divest from Israel. School superintendents and principals had to decide how to respond to teachers who were bringing biased, anti-Israel instruction into the classroom. These were battlefields where existing Jewish communal infrastructure did not have the capacity to fight — either because their nonprofit status kept them from engaging in political races, or because they simply did not have the manpower to reach the hyper-local spaces where debates about Israel, Zionism and antisemitism were now front and center.

“Local community members can’t just wait for institutions to have enough bandwidth to do everything. People can take responsibility to step up and engage. And that’s what people were doing,” said Jeremy Burton, CEO of the Boston Jewish Community Relations Council. “Part of this revitalization of American Jewish life that we’ve seen has been this emergence of these activists.” 

The new Jewish activism did not begin in Jewish federation board rooms or congressional office buildings in Washington. It was grassroots campaigns that started in WhatsApp groups and recruited dozens of volunteers through word-of-mouth conversations. These were people who showed up to city hall hearings or met with candidates running for local offices that prior to Oct. 7 may have seemed irrelevant to Jewish concerns. 

For Sam Gechter, who works in tech in Boston, a call from a friend in early 2024 alerted him that the city council of Somerville, Mass., where he lives, was trying to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The language, Gechter recalled, was “atrocious,” pinning the blame for the war on Israel and hardly mentioning Hamas. 

“I got off the phone. I turned to my wife, who was standing next to me, and said, ‘We gotta start a WhatsApp right now of everybody we know in Somerville and get people to come and speak against this,’” Gechter told JI. “That was my moment of being politically activated.”

Soon, that WhatsApp group became Shalom Somerville, a group of Jewish people in the small Boston suburb — an uber-progressive city that neighbors the better-known Cambridge — committed to advancing “a Somerville that is safe for Jews and Israelis.” Despite nominally being an advocacy organization, Shalom Somerville has also become a lifeline for people who otherwise weren’t connected to Jewish institutions. 

“For a number of people who haven’t found their place Jewishly in the community, this has become their main Jewish community,” said Gechter. “We had, like, 150 people at our Hanukkah party. It’s gotten to be a pretty big group.”

New organizations that formed to focus on important but unglamorous posts like the county commission and municipal human relations councils are heading into a major election year with ambitious plans to activate Jewish community members to flex their political muscle. They want to show local officials that they ignore Jewish voters at their own peril — and that, conversely, Jewish voters will miss a chance to improve their community if they sit out these races that have a real impact on their day-to-day lives. 

Each local outfit has a different strategy. Mindy Miller, a former top aide to the Colorado Senate president, co-founded the Colorado Jewish Action Alliance to educate her former colleagues about topics that they never expected to address but that are now everywhere, even in state politics.

“We ask them what they think Zionism means because it’s been so weaponized, and I would say virtually all of them have been appreciative of being able to have those conversations without being fear of being canceled or called out or vilified, because they have to walk a tight rope,” Miller told Jewish Insider. 

Chicago Jewish Alliance founder Daniel Schwartz has taken a more confrontational approach. During the city council’s vote on a contentious ceasefire resolution in January 2024, he showed up at City Hall draped in an Israeli flag. He created a WhatsApp group — called the “Zionist Information Group” — to get Chicagoans out to protest. 

“Around the country, there was this awakening, and an understanding that the cavalry wasn’t coming for anybody,” Schwartz told JI. 

In Lexington, Mass., a suburb of Boston, a group called Lexington United Against Antisemitism, is focused on interfaith work, and connecting members of the town’s Jewish community with Christians. 

“Quickly we understood that people, actually, even in Lexington, know very little about Jews altogether. Jews — what do they think? What do they believe?” said Francine Jacobs, a retired Tufts professor who created LUAA. 

The group was founded several months before Oct. 7, but its founders have doubled down on their mission, particularly as some liberal Christians who are critical of Israel have taken stances that crossed into antisemitism.

“It took some of the steam out of our effort. There were some folks who just said, ‘Oh, Israel, I’m so angry about it, I just can’t hear the word Jew,’” said Stephen Van Evera, a retired MIT international relations professor, who is Christian and leading LUAA with Jacobs. “I mean, why are you connecting these dots that way? Do you really think that the Jewish community in Lexington is deciding how to fight the Gaza war?”

What drove many people to get involved was their kids. Viviane Safrin became an education activist in San Francisco after the pandemic, when she felt frustrated that public schools were not doing more to reopen. After Oct. 7, parents started calling her to report that their children had experienced antisemitism. So she created SF Jews in School, with the tagline “advancing Jewish inclusion in San Francisco schools.” 

“We respond to incidents. We guide families through working with their school. We also engage directly with principals and administrators to support them in ensuring that our schools are welcoming spaces, but we also celebrate our heritage. We build Jewish pride and belonging across the city,” Safrin told JI. “We bring apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah and sufganiyot for Hanukkah.”

Two thousand five hundred miles away, in the Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion, Dani Shaw created a WhatsApp group for 75 moms soon after Oct. 7. They wrote to the diversity, equity and inclusion director in their school district to ask to talk about ensuring Jewish perspectives were included in the office’s programming. They wound up meeting with the superintendent instead and having a productive conversation. But, shortly after, an op-ed in a high school newspaper that Shaw said spread “blood libels” against Israel caused the moms to step up their activism. 

“We created an organization called the Jewish Families Association with a board that consisted at the time of about 15 parents who were all representing different schools in the district,” Shaw told JI. There are now several other Jewish Families Associations in small school districts across Pennsylvania. “It’s really representation — a bridge between the parents and the administration, the school district, to make sure that these incidents, whether they be bullying or problematic curriculum, are dealt with appropriately.” 

The group in Lower Merion, a heavily Jewish suburb, supported three Republican candidates for school board last year. They all lost in the liberal town. Keeping activists engaged in the work is hard — “they have to get on with their lives and their livelihoods,” Shaw acknowledged — particularly because the group plans to remain volunteer-led and grassroots, with no fundraising arm. 

Fatigue is real. The work of building ties with dozens or even hundreds of local elected officials requires dedicated volunteers and resources. BAJC, the Bay Area group, created a voter guide in 2024 tracking dozens of races — work they want to replicate in 2026, even as they see some people in the community losing interest. 

“It’s a constant fight to activate the community. I wouldn’t take that for granted. People prefer to go and watch a football game than to go to a demonstration,” said Oded Shekel, a BAJC leader and an Israeli immigrant who is the CEO of a financial technology startup. “You need to find ways to keep people motivated, activated, connected. I think local fights are easier to connect to than, ‘Would you like to come and support, like, a D.C. bill that we are going to promote?’ Yeah, whatever, I don’t care. ‘Would you like to meet the school boards who actually create policies for the teachers or the kids in your class?’ That’s more likely.”

Not everyone who got involved in this work after Oct. 7 remains involved. But many still are. There is now an entire class of American Jews, many of whom were not engaged politically at all before, who now wholeheartedly believe that the way to make their communities safer and more welcoming is to get involved in local politics. And as both the Democratic and Republican parties face internal fissures over Israel at the national level, an awareness is starting to solidify that reaching politicians at the beginning of their careers, when they are unpolished and open-minded, is a winning strategy. 

“We’re not seeking to educate candidates about our issues once they announce for Congress. We want to have multi-year relationships and be able to explain the many nuances of Judaism and Zionism long before they’d like to run for higher office,” said Sam Jefferies, co-chair of The Kids Table, a political action committee in Washington state that is supporting “pro-Jewish” candidates. “You can’t solve antisemitism, but you can prevent antisemites from being in positions of power.”