Biography

In 1993, Waskow co-founded ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a flagship for the Jewish Renewal movement. He has said to have coined the term "Jewish Renewal" which is a movement grounded in "Judaism's prophetic and mystical traditions" . This was in an issue of Menorah, a magazine for social justice and ritual issues he launched in 1979.

In 2019, he was arrested outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Philadelphia while protesting the Donald Trump administration's treatment of migrant women.

Activist and author of more than two dozen books that refracted progressive causes such as civil rights, economic injustice and, most pressingly in his last decade, climate change through Jewish text and tradition.

Newsweek named him one of the 50 most influential American rabbis in 2007.

In 2004, Waskow was arrested in a nonviolent sit-down protest against passage of a federal tax bill that enriched what he called "the hyperwealthy" and found it imposed more burdens on the poor.