30 years on, Stand Up’s social justice vision turns full circle

When you ask a social justice or human rights group to name their biggest achievement, you expect to hear an answer that’s noble, decent – and bland. But when the leaders of Stand Up were asked to consider this question on the organisation’s 30^th anniversary, their response was, perhaps unwittingly, rather radical.

“Stand Up has changed the conversation around such social justice within the Australian Jewish community. It’s normalised the idea of Jewish charity and philanthropy facing outward, not inward,” say Chair Dean Levitan.

There’s a powerful subtext to the word “normalising”: it’s a criticism of the Jewish establishment, suggesting Jewish communal philanthropy has been so focussed on helping other Jews that the idea of looking to help others outside the community seems unusual, strange. Not that Jews don’t give individually to the broader community, but that institutionally it was not top-of-head, something that came naturally.

Whether or not that judgment is accurate, the question of looking inward and outward has never been more relevant than it is now. A year after October 7, 2023, the Melbourne-based social justice organisation faces a set of challenges it could never have contemplated when it was set up in 1994 by a group led by academic Mark Baker in response to the Rwandan genocide.

The founding of Keshet, as Stand Up was known at the time, marked “the first time an Australian Jewish organisation launched an appeal to directly support non-Jewish survivors and refugees,” the group says.