The Jewish Holiday of Shavuot Links Economic Justice With Expanding Social Freedom

In the recent U.K. elections, voters widely rejected the currently ruling Labour Party. Commentator Aditya Chakrabortty credited Labour’s resounding loss to three things: “Gaza … racist [anti-Muslim] Home Office policies, and then finally housing and cost of living.” Some voters swung their support to the far right Reform Party, led by Donald Trump ally Nigel Farage. But the U.K. Green Party, which opposes the genocide and promotes economic and social justice, overperformed expectations.

It could not be a more appropriate time in the Jewish calendar for economic justice and cultural pluralism to triumph — both, and their interrelation, are the core message of this holiday and its central text, the Book of Ruth.

Like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, U.K. Green Party head Zack Polanski faced hostile questions posed by journalists accusing him and his party of antisemitism by pointing to his anti-Zionism and opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, escalating settler violence in the West Bank, and the illegal U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Unlike Mamdani, however, Polanski is Jewish.

Because he is Jewish, Polanski’s political commitments provide a sharp contrast to the alliance of centrist and right-wing Jewish billionaires who oppose Polanski’s and Mamdani’s shared political program and are often the most vocal about being persecuted as Jews, and are the least persecuted in every other respect. Theirs is a noxious conflation of Judaism, Zionism, and capitalism. In one particularly ridiculous recent example, real estate developer Steve Roth claimed the phrase “tax the rich” was “hateful,” comparing it to “racial slurs” and “from the river to the sea.”

Centrists and those further to the right frame this stance as “protecting Jewish safety” — as if many other communities are not also afraid, as if they have not feared both the state and their neighbors for decades or centuries — when the dangers that most Jews face have more to do with other aspects of our identities: being LGBTQ, women, people of color, immigrants, or all of the above.

“All of capitalism is racial,” sociologist Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us in Abolition Geography, “so all aspects of the social reality are part of what has to change.”

Bad-faith accusations of antisemitism are used to oppose such change and undermine broadly popular left-wing leaders and torpedo the holistic, expansive solutions they propose in opposition to both the right’s ethnonationalist appeals and the inadequate status quo advocated by centrist standard bearers such as Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer.

Opposing such change is baked into “Fortress Judaism” — religious institutions designed to wage the politics of capital against social democracy. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove recently said on Peter Beinart’s podcast, “I don’t pay for everyone’s education, I pay for my own children’s education” as a metaphor to explain why he supports a Jewish state over other states. That’s not Judaism — that’s just capitalism.

But just because capitalists misuse allegations of antisemitism doesn’t mean the left can ignore the real antisemitism of figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Farage, and others in their orbit. Right-wingers will use the real, majoritarian concern about the genocide in Palestine to twist legitimate opposition to Israel into the “socialism of fools.” We must take seriously the danger posed by such an argument to true participatory, redistributive, social democratic politics. That commitment to redistributive politics was what brought progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, and now some in the U.K. Green Party, including Polanski, into power. These leaders marry economic justice with expanding social freedom; improving society through insisting on benefits to all people — not just the poor and the vulnerable. This, we argue, is how to read the Book of Ruth this year.

Abolition Judaism: Holy, Holistic Solidarity at Shavuot

Beginning at sundown on May 21, many Jews celebrate Shavuot, one of the most overlooked moments in the Jewish calendar. The holiday has carried various meanings throughout history: a celebration of the barley harvest, a commemoration of the moment God revealed the Torah to Moses and the Israelites at Sinai, a celebration of teens’ commitments to Judaism through Confirmation.

As we did during the High Holy Days, we are looking to read sacred texts in a way that sustains our solidarity and expands our political and spiritual imaginations. For that we need to hold our left texts alongside our Torah readings, especially the abolitionist ones. Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes abolition as “emancipation in rehearsal.” To achieve it, “we only have to change one thing, which is everything.” In the mythopoetics of Shavuot, the one thing that changes everything is Ruth.

The Book of Ruth is set during the time of the Judges, after the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, but before the establishment of the monarchy. In it, Naomi, an Israelite, has moved to live in a neighboring country, Moab, with her two sons who have married Moabite women. Tragedy strikes, and both sons die. Her daughters-in-law have two different responses: Orpah returns to her home, but Ruth vows to stay by Naomi’s side. The two of them return to Naomi’s home in Bethlehem, where Ruth is seen as a Moabite foreigner, but is able to integrate into the community, and eventually marry Naomi’s wealthy kinsman Boaz after he provides Ruth with the capacity to feed Naomi and herself. The story ends with Ruth bearing a child, highlighting a redemptive moment for Naomi after the loss of her two sons.

One of Shavuot’s longest-standing customs, reading the Book of Ruth, rarely receives its due. The traditional reading often emphasized in Zionist contexts treats Ruth’s declaration to Naomi — “your people shall be my people, your God my God” — as a paradigm of conversion that absorbs her fully into an exclusivist Israelite (or Jewish) nation, with her Moabite identity erased in service of a unified ethnic-national belonging that anticipates contemporary ideals of Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty in the land. But the text itself resists that flattening — and this resistance feels even more important today.

Ruth is a Moabite, and her introduction does not arrive at random. The Book of Deuteronomy, which precedes the Book of Ruth, reads: “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants for ten generations may be admitted to the assembly of God.” For the Book of Ruth to open in direct tension with that injunction, placing a Moabite at the center of its moral universe, signals what is to come. Throughout the story, Ruth is continually called “the Moabite,” her difference never erased even as she becomes fully integrated into Naomi’s kinship system. The text insists on her belonging precisely as she is, without demanding the dissolution of the very identity that marks her as “other.”

Importantly, Ruth’s introduction to Boaz comes through her need for food, and through the already-existing humanitarian injunction to leave the gleanings of the field for those without. The portion of Leviticus that describes Shavuot ends with what may feel like a non sequitur: “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I am your God.” This mitzvah forms the core of Ruth’s story. Leviticus thus sets up the material precondition for Ruth to remain fed, married, and free of any demand to give up her prior affiliations in order to belong. Ruth need not abandon her other identities to be a full member of society, or to be materially supported by that society. From that stable footing, she changes everything: Her child becomes the grandfather of King David, the lineage through which the messiah will eventually be born and redeem the entire world.

This duality, of being fully in and yet not fully of, speaks to our experience as Jews and to the political power of diasporas. We see something of it in modern political life as well. Mayor Mamdani is fully a New Yorker, fully an American, fully African, fully South Asian, fully Muslim. His election, especially his early candidacy, was powered by diasporic communities and anti-Zionist Jews with diasporic commitments (Mamdani’s Day One endorsers included Desis Rising Up and Moving, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, New York Communities for Change, and Jewish Voice for Peace; his candidacy emerged from the Democratic Socialists of America). Many of these groups represent communities whose ancestors survived British colonialism and then the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal revolution. Margaret Thatcher famously declared that “there is no such thing as society.” But in New York in 2025, and in some U.K. constituencies now represented by the Green Party, those communities are rejecting neoliberal logics to assert that both political democracy and social fabric are good and necessary, and we can have neither without an economic floor for everyone. It’s right there in the Book of Ruth.

With Naomi’s guidance, Ruth finds her way into the Israelite community of Bethlehem as a Moabite, first through the gleanings and then into close connection with Boaz. As a result, she can make a home both for herself and for her mother-in-law, whom she refuses to leave behind. The lesson here reads less as generational than as political. The usual Jewish Zionism/anti-Zionism discourse flattens that distinction, eliding the many other identities held by those on either side of that divide. What is required of us is to stop over-indexing on those who cannot see the need for redistribution of resources. The Jewish institutional world has, for decades, traded its prophetic tradition for proximity to power and the security promises of state violence. Ruth points us elsewhere — to “the politics of recognizing that all of us are composed of multiple social identities … the counter-politics of the local,” as Stuart Hall once called it, organizing “people through their diversity of identifications.” This positional struggle, Hall wrote, “is the beginning of antiracism, antisexism, and anticlassism as a war of positions. The notion of the struggles of the local as a war of positions is a very difficult kind of politics to get one’s head around; none of us knows how to conduct it. None of us even knows whether it can be conducted.”

What does Ruth’s story tell us, finally, about the level of material stability a functional society depends upon, and how that stability allows for the cultural diversity necessary to bring about a better world? It tells us that the divisions the ruling class manufactures and depends upon, the divisions between Jew and Moabite, between citizen and stranger, between those who own the harvest and those who subsist on its edges, are precisely the divisions that foreclose the universal liberation that the Torah envisions. Through overcoming the xenophobia of earlier generations and providing sustenance to a Moabite, the Israelites make a better future possible. The story shows that redemption arrives through the abolition of all forms of oppression and separation, while leaving room for the difference that makes that redemption beautiful. The messianic dream of global redemption, on Shavuot, becomes real in precisely that paradox.