With antisemitism on the rise, Jewish leaders are expanding long-standing efforts to combat it. Some areas of Jewish and broader communal life, however, continue to be overlooked as opportunities to stand up to antisemitism. With a grant from the Jews of Color Initiative, the Crown Heights Birth Justice Project is exploring one such area by bringing diverse populations together to build bridges by supporting each others’ health journeys during pregnancy and postpartum. In doing so, the project establishes a setting for authentic connections rooted in shared experiences that can inform how the Jewish community approaches building coalitions—an essential tool needed to address antisemitism.
The Crown Heights Birth Justice Project (CHBJP) is part of a cohort of grants addressing antisemitism through a JoC lens. Led by Ilana Ybgi—a former JoCI Philanthropy Fellow—the project offers a series of facilitated sessions and resources to diverse populations of Crown Heights—a New York neighborhood community with a rich history of Black and Jewish culture, as well as enduring tensions. The project responds to strikingly high rates of maternal health issues experienced by both Haredi Jewish and Black women, highlighting shared challenges and fostering community support and collaboration. As a prototype, CHBJP brings the community together to explore overlapping challenges, examine how antisemitism and racism manifest, and test strategies for coalition building across identities in a time of heightened polarization.
Shared Birth Journeys
As a birth worker and a Haredi Jew of Color, Ilana Ybgi understands vast disparities in access to home birth. For many years, home birth in New York State was covered primarily through Medicaid, but with that coverage reduced, many families now face significant out-of-pocket costs. Ybgi explained that this particularly affects People of Color as well as Jews who are below the poverty level.
Through a three-part series, Ybgi works with the Midwifery Access Fund and other communal experts in maternal care to create opportunities for Crown Heights community members to connect around shared birth journeys. Sessions have brought together birthers, parents, birth workers, and other community members who are Black, Jewish, or both. Ybgi emphasized that focusing on a shared personal experience helps participants “come together in an organic way.”
The facilitated gatherings are designed not only for peer support but for deeper communal work: naming and confronting racism, antisemitism, and bias in the birthing world, and building community members’ and practitioners’ capacity to respond. “I want to bring people together to see each other as humans, to call out racism and antisemitism and inherent bias as we see it, and to learn different skills to be able to do something about it,” Ybgi said.
Dispelling Assumptions
The program has helped participants approach one another with fewer assumptions and more openness. “People have shared that they came in with certain thoughts [about other identity groups] and that those have started to be dispelled.”
For some, the impact has been transformative: “We’ve had [participants] candidly share that they wouldn’t otherwise be in rooms like this with people like this, and that’s where I’m hoping the paradigm continues to shift.”
The sessions have also generated new confidence among participants unfamiliar with how antisemitism shows up as a form of oppression. “We’re seeing that people who are coming in who are not Jewish and had no idea about fighting antisemitism are gaining an awareness, a confidence boost in their knowledge of the issue, and a desire to learn more.”
Each CHBJP session incorporates expertise from the field. One gathering featured a midwife, a lactation consultant, and an individual who was the subject of a documentary about bias in home birth. Another session brought in an expert from the Midwifery Access Fund, who is also a nurse at a local hospital. She shared her professional point of view, including firsthand accounts of witnessing antisemitism in clinical settings.
Her reflections also illustrated the specific biases facing Black and Brown birthers, visibly Orthodox Jewish birthers, and those who identify as both. Assumptions that Black and Brown patients have a higher tolerance for pain have been well documented throughout the medical field. Ybgi and her colleagues in the medical field have noted that, because of large family sizes, visibly Orthodox women are often perceived as “naturally” capable of giving birth without intervention. “The assumption is just, ‘oh, these are people who know how to have kids without an intervention.’ Which is really not fair!” Ybgi proclaimed. Assumptions about Orthodox Jews are less documented but can have an equally damaging impact. For Black Orthodox Jews, the biases are multiplied.
The consequences of assumptions in a medical setting are serious. “There’s a scope of practice which I think is an art. When we are racist and antisemitic toward patients, we lose that art and start being very rigid in our assumptions about identity groups. If you aren’t treating the patient as an individual, there’s a basic neglect occurring there.”
Coalition Building Beyond Birth Work
While CHBJP is focused on the birthing space in Crown Heights, its implications are broader. The program has modeled what it means to bring together people who might otherwise remain separate, offering a different path forward when many are seeding polarization. “I think in some ways it’s easier to just stay separate and stay with people who already share our ideas and beliefs, but it’s much more powerful, in my opinion, for people to come together and dispel bias in real time.”
That work can be uncomfortable, but it can also be transformative. “I think everyone being together in a room with people who look different than them, identify differently than them, and realizing every one of them has experienced some form of bias in their birth journey—it’s climate changing for the room. And it’s climate changing for the community.”
This kind of bridge building extends beyond individual sessions. Parents-to-be form friendships and exchange resources, and experts gain invaluable insights that can shape their practice. Adds Ybgi, “The experts have networks of their own, and I hope they bring learnings [from our program] about bridge building back to their settings to share with other practitioners and birth workers.”
Implications for the Field
The JoCI’s grantmaking strategy for this set of grants centers prototypes like CHBJP precisely because they open new pathways for understanding and addressing antisemitism through a Jews of Color lens. This project illuminates the ways antisemitism surfaces in perhaps unexpected contexts, and demonstrates the importance of analyzing it alongside racism and other forms of bias.
“In the birth work world and the birthing world in general, antisemitism is skyrocketing to the point that it’s creating extremely polarized environments,” Ybgi said. “And that polarization doesn’t serve anyone.”
By surfacing and confronting these dynamics in the birthing world in Crown Heights, Ybgi’s project points to new opportunities for research, training, and field-wide learning to combat antisemitism. Just as participants gained new tools and perspectives in the sessions, so too can practitioners across other fields—from health care to education to communal leadership. This project reminds us of the power of shared spaces and honest conversations: the possibility that when people enter a room together across lines of difference, they can begin to see each other more clearly, shed assumptions, and build a stronger, more connected path forward.