Building on Success: Farm Forward Celebrates the Launch of the Center for Jewish Food Ethics

Farm Forward is proud to announce the launch of a new nonprofit, the Center for Jewish Food Ethics (CJFE)—the culmination of our eight years of incubation and support for farmed animal advocacy in the Jewish community.

In 2016, Farm Forward launched our in-house program, the Jewish Initiative for Animals (JIFA) as the centerpiece of our religious outreach. Every day since, JIFA has advanced its first-of-its-kind mission to help Jewish communities align their food choices with their Jewish values. 

JIFA supported Jewish communities connecting animal welfare, food, farming, and advocacy with Jewish identity, values, and rituals. It started off with a bang in 2016, by training educators, reviving non-factory-farmed kosher heritage chicken for the first time in decades, and designing the animal welfare audit of the Hazon Seal of Sustainability, a LEED-style certification with animal welfare provisions that were adopted by institutions serving 17,000 individuals and an additional 2,000 families.

With Farm Forward’s help, JIFA continued to accomplish great things over the next eight years, including:

• Leading training programs for Hillel International—representing over 500 Jewish community campus centers globally—on serving plant-based food by default.
• Providing programming for 100+ Jewish camps, synagogues, youth groups, community centers, schools, college programs, affinity groups and conferences to spark inquiry into how Jewish values can influence how we treat animals. 
• Developing educational materials such as the Jewish Animal Ethics Community Study Guide, The Ark Project Service-Learning Workbook, and many Jewish holiday resources. 
• Supporting the first American Jewish organizations, including synagogues, in committing to serve plant-based foods by default at all of their events. 
• Co-organizing yearly interfaith webinars, the most recent drawing more than 400 participants from five countries. 
• Presenting on animal welfare and Jewish food justice to countless conferences, and shifting several of those conferences to serve higher welfare animal products and more plant-based foods.
• Providing educational resources used by 1,500+ educators and students, and delivering educational presentations to 5,000+ people.
• Placing content in leading Jewish publications including The Forward, Jewish Journal, JWeekly, Tablet, and Times of Israel, as well as major media outlets like Religion News Service and The Washington Post, on why kosher shouldn’t be factory farmed, reimagining our food practices, pandemic risk, and sustainable food choices. 
• Launching the Jewish Leadership Circle, supporting and recognizing Jewish institutions (including Yale University’s Hillel) shifting to higher welfare animal products and reducing animal consumption.
• Inspiring more than 250 rabbis and senior Jewish leaders and 20,000 individuals to call out kosher humanewashing of factory farmed animal products and urging institutions to adopt more sustainable food practices.
• Commissioning novel research on consumers’ perceptions of kosher certification, and unearthing new American misconceptions about what a kosher label means for animals, workers, and the planet.
• Posting 11 billboards, and social media reaching hundreds of thousands, directing viewers to JIFA’s “Is this Kosher?” website. 
• Influencing the Rabbinical Assembly to pass a resolution stating that “shifts to our institutional food practices, such as reducing factory-farmed animal product consumption, would help us to better achieve our values.”

The aforementioned resolution tasked the Rabbinical Assembly’s Social Justice Commission with creating a subcommittee that would “revisit [the RA’s] work in the area of ethical food consumption.” This led directly to forming JIFA’s Partnership for Sustainable Dining with the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), which has yielded the first-ever Jewish denominational cohort to establish plant-forward food policies and continues under the direction of CJFE. Not only have the cohort members immediately slashed their buying and serving of meat and dairy, but their commitment to upholding this practice as an expression of their religious moral values has wide-reaching cultural significance. Normalizing plant-based foods as the default among Jewish communities, while intensive work, shows that plant-based eating is, in fact, a resonant way for them to put Jewish values of compassion, justice, and repair into action.

JIFA’s stellar run over the past eight years validates Farm Forward’s commitment to movement building, and our approach to community-centered advocacy. Our theory of change assumes that advocates can be highly influential when they focus their advocacy within their own community, and ground their objectives in the unique cultural, political, economic, and overlapping social justice concerns specific to that community. This strategy is quite distinct from campaigns run by national organizations in which mainstream advocates target particular demographics with the aim of mobilizing that demographic to support the agenda of the larger movement. 

The value of JIFA’s authentically embedded, community-focused advocacy has been recognized as so significant that JIFA and its longstanding partner in this work, Jewish Veg, can now come together to create a new nonprofit to steward this work indefinitely. The new CJFE will continue to transform dining practices, and establish more sustainable and humane food sourcing, as the norm in Jewish spaces. 

Formerly the Director of JIFA, CJFE Executive Director Rabbi Melissa Hoffman writes, “Over the eight years Farm Forward incubated JIFA as one of its programs, culminating as JIFA’s partner and fiscal sponsor in this launch, our close work with Farm Forward made a deep impact both practically and philosophically on JIFA & CJFE. Practically, CJFE would not exist if not for the support and guidance JIFA received from Farm Forward. Philosophically, we continue to be proud to serve as a vehicle to bring Farm Forward’s values and experience transforming the food system to Jewish institutions, as a model for change for other religious communities.”

CJFE will carry on JIFA’s legacy of sparking inquiry into topics of food justice through the lens of long and evolving Jewish traditions and values, while strengthening communities in the process. We celebrate that CJFE’s three inaugural staff members are all former staff of JIFA (under the incubation of Farm Forward), that two of its Board members, Lisa Apfelberg and Ilana Braverman, are similarly former JIFA staff, and that a third Board member, Dr. Aaron Gross, is Farm Forward’s founder and CEO. 

This is not the first time that Farm Forward has spun off a new nonprofit organization. If the wild success of Better Food Foundation and Greener by Default are any guide, CJFE will be a force to reckon with in the years to come.

To learn more about CJFE and stay apprised of their work, head over to their website (check out that logo!) and add your info to the “Stay in the Know” form at the bottom of any page.