The Voting Rights Act Is Dead. This Is a Jewish Problem.
June 21st was the 62nd yahrzeit, or “death anniversary,” of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. One Black man from Mississippi and two Jewish men from New York City. Murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and local police in Neshoba County, Mississippi for the crime of registering Black voters during the Freedom Summer of 1964.
They were killed because white supremacists, afraid of losing their power, understood, correctly, that the right to vote is how people can remake the society that defines their lives. Lose that right, and we lose something foundational: the ability to have rights at all.
Horror over their deaths galvanized support for the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. President Lyndon Johnson called it “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory on any battlefield.” For six decades, it was the legal spine of American democracy — a guarantee that the law would not only exist on paper, but be enforced.
On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court completed a decades-long conservative project of dismantling the VRA. Jews have always been safest in a thriving democracy. The country that is safest for Jews is the country that is safest for all of our neighbors. And here is where we need to be plain about what is actually happening.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority effectively invalidated the VRA as a tool for protecting the right to vote. Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, put it plainly: states can now “without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.” This came after Chief Justice Roberts whittled away at the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 and Brnovich v. DNC in 2021 — a 40-year campaign, beginning in the Reagan-era Justice Department, finally completed. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a critical piece of legislation that would undo the harm of these Supreme Court decisions. Named after one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, it was introduced more than a decade ago and every year, like clockwork, Republican majorities have blocked it.
To witness this is to grieve. We say that without apology.
The Kotzker Rebbe taught that there is nothing so whole as a broken heart. If that is true, then our grief about what is being done to this democracy is an affirmation of our wholeness. It is the measure of what we love and what we refuse to surrender. It is what we feel when something precious is being deliberately broken. And it is, we believe, exactly the feeling from which serious action is born.
The same right-wing movement dismantling voting rights for Black Americans is using Jews as cover. They use antisemitism as a smokescreen, as a proxy, to silence dissent, discredit opponents, and further their authoritarian policies. They promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, which falsely positions Jews as the shadowy orchestrators of demographic change, while claiming in the same breath to be our greatest defenders. This is an intentional strategy of weaponizing Jewish safety to advance an agenda that has nothing to do with Jewish safety and everything to do with dismantling the multiracial, multifaith majority that can organize to make them lose their power — and prevent them from gaining even more. Silencing Black voters — including Black Jews, and other Jews of color — is part of that project. They need white Jews to look away while they do it.
We will not.
The organization that I lead, Bend the Arc, is mobilizing Jews across our country to fight back by registering voters, supporting candidates who will restore the VRA, and making clear that Jewish safety and multiracial democracy are not competing values. They are the same value.
Juneteenth and the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner teach the same lesson: freedom must be enforced, or it is not real. In 1865, slaveowners ignored the law. In 1964, the Klan used violence to circumvent it. In 2013, 2021, and 2026, a Supreme Court majority dismantled it in jurisprudence. They thought fear would crush the Civil Rights Movement in 1964, just like they thought gutting the VRA in 2013 was the end of the story. In both cases they were wrong, because we will never stop fiercely enforcing the freedom to participate in democracy.
Too often, we talk about Jewish voting rights organizing like it’s charity work. That couldn’t be further from the truth; attacks on voting rights, like antisemitism, are a canary in the coal mine for looming authoritarianism. When a government begins stripping one group of its voice in our democracy, it does not stop there. Jews know this well. We vote and organize and support candidates who will pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act because it’s our democracy, our safety, that is in grave danger. We say “no” when politicians try to use our safety to strip the safety of others because we know what it means to be treated like you don’t deserve safety and dignity. We name what is being done clearly and without apology.
We are heartbroken about what is happening to this country. And we are whole enough in that heartbreak to keep going. We know what it looks like when the machinery of the state turns on the people. Now we have to decide that we’ll do something about it.
