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Jewish Voice for Peace

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a Berkeley, California-founded American organization of self-identified Jews that has, since 2019, formally committed itself to opposing Zionism and eliminating the state of Israel as a Jewish state, and that serves as the primary vehicle through which the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement claims Jewish backing. It is not a terror group and carries no government terror designation anywhere, but it has honored people convicted of terrorist attacks, its own watchdog record includes a federal fraud settlement, and its central branding value, that Jews themselves reject Israel, is deployed constantly by activists well beyond its own membership.

What it is

Section titled “What it is”

JVP was founded in 1996 by a small group of University of California, Berkeley students and Bay Area activists, initially as a broad-tent group open to varied views on Israel. That changed in 2019, when the organization formally adopted anti-Zionism as an organizing principle, a shift the Anti-Defamation League documents as a rejection of its earlier pluralism. ADL’s backgrounder describes JVP today as “a radical anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activist group that advocates for the eradication of Zionism and the boycott of Israel,” adding that JVP “does not represent the mainstream Jewish community, which it views as bigoted for its association with Israel.” JVP’s own materials describe itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.”

The organization restructured in 2026 around JVP Action, a 501(c)(4) advocacy arm that now operates publicly as “JVP,” with a separate 501(c)(3), JVP Lab, handling nonpartisan educational and cultural programming. As of that restructuring it reported roughly 35 active local chapters, more than 30 campus chapters, and about 32,000 dues-paying members. Financially it reported revenue exceeding $11 million in fiscal year 2024 from around 31,000 individual donors, supplemented by documented institutional grants: $300,000 from the Open Society Policy Center in 2024, $215,514 from the Kaphan Foundation in 2024, and $50,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 2024, among other foundation support that NGO Monitor has tracked despite JVP’s public framing of itself as grassroots-funded.

What it does

Section titled “What it does”

JVP fully endorsed the BDS movement’s goals in 2015 and has since run some of the most visible boycott campaigns aimed at American institutions, including pressure campaigns against Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud over their cloud contracts with Israel, against Israel Bonds, and against companies with any Israeli supply-chain connection. In 2017 it launched “Deadly Exchange,” a campaign alleging that law-enforcement exchange programs between American police departments and Israeli security agencies are a direct cause of police violence against Black Americans, a causal claim ADL and other critics say is unsupported and that functions mainly to attach the language of American racial-justice politics to anti-Israel advocacy.

JVP is also a prolific organizer of mass civil disobedience. Its highest-profile action came on 27 October 2023, when JVP-New York City led a Shabbat-themed sit-in that shut down the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal, drawing thousands of participants and resulting in hundreds of arrests, the largest act of civil disobedience in New York City in two decades. Protesters wore shirts reading “Not in our name” and rabbis lit Shabbat candles and recited mourning prayers as part of the demonstration. The organization’s campus chapters have repeatedly run afoul of university conduct rules since October 7: Columbia University suspended its JVP chapter alongside its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on 10 November 2023 for an unauthorized walkout event that the university said involved “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” and other campus JVP chapters have faced suspension since.

Its relationship to Israel and to the Jews

Section titled “Its relationship to Israel and to the Jews”

JVP’s stated relationship to Israel is openly hostile: it does not merely criticize Israeli policy, it opposes Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and calls for that opposition to be understood as an expression of Jewish values rather than a departure from them. Its own language describes Zionism as “fundamentally racist,” and its literature and protest signage have repeatedly compared Zionism and Israeli policy to Nazism and framed the conflict in terms overlapping with classic blood-libel imagery, both documented by ADL as recurring features of JVP-affiliated events.

The organization has gone beyond rhetoric to honor individuals with direct terrorist records. It has publicly celebrated Rasmea Odeh, convicted in an Israeli military court for her role in the 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two Hebrew University students, and it has called for the release of Ahmed Sa’adat, secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, convicted for orchestrating the 2001 assassination of Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi. JVP chapters have also coordinated with Samidoun, the PFLP-linked prisoner-solidarity network that several Western governments have since moved to ban. In the aftermath of the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023, JVP’s public statements placed responsibility on Israel rather than on Hamas, a framing ADL logged in real time as it happened.

What makes JVP distinct from a purely anti-Israel pressure group is that it genuinely is an organization of self-identifying Jews. Its Grand Central protest opened with the lighting of Shabbat candles and recitation of the Jewish mourner’s prayer; its literature invokes tikkun olam and Jewish ethical tradition; its members include ordained rabbis. That authenticity is exactly why the organization is valuable to the wider anti-Zionism movement beyond its roughly 32,000 members set against an American Jewish population near seven million: it supplies the rebuttal to charges of antisemitism, even though polling consistently shows large majorities of American Jews retain a connection to Israel, which makes JVP’s dissent real but numerically marginal, not representative, however loudly it is cited as proof otherwise.

The findings against it

Section titled “The findings against it”

JVP carries no terrorist designation from any government; that distinguishes it sharply from Hamas or the PFLP, whose members it has defended. NGO Monitor and ADL both maintain standing profiles tracking JVP’s funding, rhetoric and campaign activity as part of their broader monitoring of anti-Israel advocacy organizations operating in the United States. Its documented record also runs through one federal enforcement action: in January 2025, A Jewish Voice for Peace, Inc. agreed to pay $677,634, twice the value of a $338,817 Paycheck Protection Program loan it had received and had forgiven, to settle federal False Claims Act allegations that it falsely certified to the Small Business Administration that it was not primarily engaged in political or lobbying activity when it applied for pandemic relief. The case originated from a whistleblower complaint, and JVP maintains any misstatement was inadvertent, but a federal fraud settlement is not a matter of contested framing.

Section titled “Related pages”

Anti-Zionism · BDS · Students for Justice in Palestine · Samidoun · NGO Monitor · Anti-Defamation League

Sources

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