Advocacy & Community Mobilization

Hateful signs went up on Womack Road in Dunwoody, across from a high school. When neighbors confronted the couple who put them there, the couple turned their slurs on a father whose daughter had been murdered by a terrorist. Then the call went out, and the community answered: volunteers standing peacefully outside with Israeli flags and signs of love for Jews and Israel, after Bobbi Livnat and David Lubin led the way.

That is the shape of advocacy in metro Atlanta. Something happens on an ordinary Tuesday, and what matters is how many people are reachable, informed, and willing to stand outside in the heat. More than 11,115 people have mobilized with AIC since 2018. Our job is to give them the footing: what happened, what is true, what to say, and where to be.

The coalition is the point

AIC is built across lines a lot of pro-Israel organizing never crosses. Anila Ali’s American Muslim & Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council is a partner. So is HinduPACT, whose vice president Surinder Dhar survived the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Kashmir in the 1990s. Rabbi Yitz Tendler at Congregation Beth Jacob and Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder at the National Jewish Advocacy Center both work with AIC in Atlanta and beyond it. The Mitzpe Institute is one of AIC’s own educational programs.

Bridges of Hope, in Dunwoody, is what that coalition looks like on a stage: Ghazal Mizrahi, a Persian Jewish vocalist; JoDavi of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel; Mustapha Ezzarghani of the Moroccan-Israeli Friendship Association; the Iranian-African American comedian Tehran Von Ghasri; Atlanta hip-hop producer Caleiv Jean; Holocaust survivor George Rishfeld; and Surinder Dhar. Seven backgrounds on one stage, on one position.

AIC is nonpartisan by design and a 501(c)(3). We do not support or oppose any candidate for public office. We welcome anyone across the political spectrum who is serious about Israel’s security and about confronting antisemitism, and the partner list and the speaker lists are where you can check whether we mean it.

AIC documented what metro Atlanta has actually absorbed in Facts on the Ground: Atlanta’s Jewish Security Gap: antisemitic flyers dumped across Brookhaven, Alpharetta, Roswell, Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, and Marietta; “Free Palestine” written in shaving cream across a Jewish fraternity wall at Georgia Tech; a disrupted talk and a reported assault at Emory; neo-Nazis with swastika flags outside a Cobb synagogue on Shabbat; a bomb threat that emptied the Federation building and the Holocaust museum in Midtown. The report names each one, and then asks the harder question about how institutions responded.

Georgia’s Definition of Antisemitism

Until 2024, Georgia law had no definition of antisemitism, and without one Jews didn’t get the protection the law gives everyone else against bigotry. AIC worked to change that. In 2022 Cheryl Dorchinsky co-signed an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for HB 1274, a bill to adopt the IHRA working definition. When the effort came back as HB 30, we brought people to the State Capitol to meet their legislators, and Cheryl was in the chamber when the House voted in March 2023. We went back for another Capitol Day in January 2024. On 31 January 2024, Governor Kemp signed HB 30 into law.

Beyond the Capitol

After October 7 we ran a letter campaign asking the chancellor of the University System of Georgia and every university president to adopt the IHRA definition and to protect Jewish students under Title VI. In 2022 we went to New York for the City Council’s hearing on antisemitism at CUNY. That same year AIC joined 180 organizations asking Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, to adopt the IHRA definition.

We’ve marched in Atlanta Pride. In 2022 we handed out Israeli flags at the parade. In October 2023, a week after the Hamas attack, we marched holding up the faces of children Hamas had kidnapped, Kfir and Ariel Bibas among them, under three words: Bring the Kids Back.

Antizionism is antisemitism, and AIC says so plainly: principled, informed, and unafraid.

If it happens to you, there are three steps, and our reporting page walks through all of them: report it to law enforcement, document it before the post disappears, and tell AIC. We are not law enforcement and we do not pretend to be. We are the neighbors who will know, and who can bring people out.