April Rosenblum is a Jewish writer who studies race, class, Jewish identity and movement building in the 20th century. Her essays have been featured in The Washington Post, Haaretz and Jewish Currents.

 

As a child of white Jewish activists in Philadelphia, April was raised in the city’s interconnected movements for peace and economic and racial justice. Growing up in a Black neighborhood, she witnessed the acute impacts of race-based economic disenfranchisement, policing, and mass incarceration on her neighbors and community. Her work against police brutality and political imprisonment and for anti-racist education grew out of the skills and history she learned from veteran local Black Power and human rights organizers and from the Jewish family stories passed down by her parents.

In the aftermath of 9/11, her concern for Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities sparked the interest in Jewish history and identity that now defines her writing and scholarship. In 2007, she published the pamphlet The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, an educational tool to help Left movements better understand and resist antisemitism. Summarized by one reviewer as “shockingly inclusive,” The Past was influential in shaping the consciousness of many activists who have helped to lead Jewish resistance in the Trump era.

April is interested in how relations of domination reproduce themselves in political, communal, and interpersonal life. She is known for writing about complex issues with sensitivity to people on many sides of conflicts. She is currently researching a microhistory of Black/Jewish interconnection in the twentieth century United States.

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