Max Berger
Max Berger works at Justice Democrats, was a co-founder of AllOfUs, was on the original core team of Momentum and was a leading participant in Occupy Wall Street.[1]
IfNotNow Founders
Days after Israeli ground troops invaded Gaza in 2014, a group of leftist millennial Jews gathered to plan a public protest of the military operation.
The new group, which called itself IfNotNow, discussed a public demonstration in front of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an establishment Jewish umbrella group.
Max Berger was one of the planners who urged them to take it a step further: The protesters should get arrested at the Presidents’ Conference headquarters in New York, he suggested. And they should recite kaddish, the traditional Jewish mourner’s prayer, for Israelis and Palestinians who had died in the fighting.
When the protest took place, on July 28, 2014, that’s what they did. Berger was one of nine Jews arrested in the Presidents’ Conference building.
“Max, because of the experience that he brought, understood the value of raising the stakes and bringing the crisis to the door of an institution through the strategy of direct action in that way,” said Simone Zimmerman, a fellow IfNotNow cofounder. “He knew how to bring that seriousness and depth of pain and anger and betrayal, how to support a group into bringing that out.”
IfNotNow was a new group, but for Berger, disruptive protest was an old game. Berger, 33, is already a journeyman of the activist left, from Occupy Wall Street to IfNotNow to Justice Democrats, the outfit that supported Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unlikely primary win.
Now, he’s working for Sen. Elizabeth Warren as her director for progressive partnerships, placing a leader of the millennial Jewish left-wing insurgency inside an ascending Democratic presidential campaign.
The Warren campaign did not make Berger available for an interview. But his friends, as well as the reams of online articles by him and quoting him, indicate that he clicks with Warren’s combination of anti-establishment rhetoric and detailed, wonky plans. In addition to IfNotNow, Berger co-founded Momentum, a group that trains progressive activists.
“Warren matches even his demeanor and his style of politics, which is very deliberate and well thought out,” said Waleed Shahid, who has partnered with Berger in progressive movements and is now the communications director at Justice Democrats. “It’s funny that Warren’s slogan is ‘I have a plan for that.’ Max would do trainings at Momentum about how organizations don’t plan enough.”
Carinne Luck, a co-founder of IfNotNow, clarified that while Berger personally supports Israel boycotts, he does not identify with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.
For much of the Jewish pro-Israel mainstream, on the left as well as the right, BDS is anathema, because its Palestinian leadership refuses to accept a Jewish state in any part of historic Israel. Critics of IfNotNow note that, according to its principles, the Jewish group does “not take a unified stance on BDS, Zionism or the question of statehood.”
Berger’s presence on Warren’s campaign may be paying off for those who want candidates to be tougher on Israel: When IfNotNow activists asked Warren, at a campaign event, if she would “push the Israeli government to end the occupation,” she replied, “Yes, yes,” then added, “So I’m there.”
In a June interview with The New York Times, Warren called Israel a “good friend” and voiced support for a two-state solution with the Palestinians. She said that the United States “cannot dictate the terms of a long-term settlement” but added that “the current situation is not tenable.”
“They face enormous challenges and they are our strong ally,” she said. “We need a liberal democracy in that region and to work with that liberal democracy. But it is also the case that we need to encourage our ally, the way we would any good friend, to come to the table with the Palestinians and to work toward a permanent solution. I strongly support a two-state solution.”
Berger has more moderate views than some of his Jewish leftist comrades. He criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar’s statements echoing anti-Semitic stereotypes, as well as the Movement for Black Lives accusing Israel of genocide. He also encouraged the Jewish community to stand with both Omar and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Berger grew up in Massachusetts and attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His leftist streak started early. In high school, he organized a trip to Washington, D.C. to protest against the Iraq War. His mother, Judy Berger, remembers that he submitted a middle school paper about social issues in Chiapas, Mexico, after he got interested in the local politics on a family trip there.
“One of the teachers accused him of plagiarism and I was livid,” she said. “There was no plagiarism involved. This was something this young kid was concerned about and read about and knew about.”
After college, he worked at J Street, the liberal Israel lobby, as a new media assistant. He gained notice as an organizer of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, where he was part of its more moderate wing.
“I don’t want to live in a fucking commune. I don’t want to blow shit up. I want to get stuff done,” he told New York magazine.
Berger bounced around progressive organizations. He worked for Rebuild the Dream, founded by former Barack Obama aide Van Jones, as well as the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. In 2017, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, he and Shahid co-founded All of Us, a campaign to elect progressive Democrats that eventually merged with Justice Democrats.
In 2016, he was an outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders, writing in Haaretz that the Vermont senator “speaks with a prophetic voice that is at the heart of our tradition.” But even then, he carried a torch for Warren, writing in a Medium post on the first debate between Sanders and Hillary Clinton that “there isn’t anyone else on stage who people can imagine as president. [Clinton’s] real victory came months ago when Elizabeth Warren decided not to run.”
“He ultimately, really is much more focused on a certain kind of winning or a certain kind of impact,” said Lissy Romanow, Momentum’s executive director, who also worked with Berger in IfNotNow. “He’s ultimately much more sympathetic to Bernie’s ideology and his politics, and that ultimately, what it will take to win and to govern, you will need something more like what Warren has.”
Friends say Berger is also good at dealing with the kind of backlash he’s experienced from his pro-Israel critics. Zimmerman, who was fired from Sanders’ 2016 campaign after a similar wave of condemnation, recalls that he was supportive to her then in speaking out for her and crafting an effective response.[2]
HAMAS friendly
A staffer for Democrat Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign has come under scrutiny for a recently deleted tweet stating he "would totally be friends with Hamas."
The staffer, Max Berger, is a veteran anti-Israel activist who has come under fire in the past for disseminating misleading and false propaganda against the Jewish state. His now-deleted 2013 tweet expressing sympathy for Hamas reemerged on the social networking site over the weekend and has prompted calls for the Warren campaign to distance itself from Berger.
Berger, who identifies himself as a Justice Democrat, is no stranger to controversy when it comes to Israel. He is the cofounder of the far left group IfNotNow, alongside Simone Zimmerman, the infamous Bernie Sanders Jewish outreach director forced to resign over an expletive-laden Facebook post condemning Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. IfNotNow routinely criticizes Israel and accuses it of crimes in the Palestinian territories.[3]
Socialist Majority Caucus
DSA's Socialist Majority Caucus signatories list as of April 25 2019 included Max Berger of New York City Democratic Socialists of America.
The Nation Forum
Circa June 2014, The Nation invited leading activists from across the progressive movement to talk about how we can build power to effect real change, not simply fend off reactionary assaults.
Participants in PROGRESSIVE STRATEGIES IN A POPULIST MOMENT included;[4]
- Robert Borosage: president of the Institute for America’s Future.
- Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II: “How to Build a Powerful People's Movement”
- Carlos Saavedra: “Winning the Fight for Public Opinion”
- Sarita Gupta: “How to Write a New Organizing Playbook”
- David Rolf: “What if We Treated Labor Like a Startup?”
- Dan Cantor : “How the Working Families Party Is Already Changing Electoral Politics”
- May Boeve: “Fighting, Not Drowning”
- Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Max Berger: “How to Organize After Occupy Wall Street
- George Goehl: “Organizing Where We Have the Most Leverage: in the Cities”
Ear to the Ground Project
- We would like to express our deep respect and appreciation for everyone who took the time to talk with us, and the organizations that generously hosted us during our travels. Interviews were confidential, but the following people have agreed to have their names listed for this publication:
Most of those listed were connected to Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Max Berger was among those on the list. [5]
Momentum founders
Momentum founders were;
- Paul Engler, Co-Founder
- Max Berger, Co-Founder
- Guido Girgenti, Co-Founder
- Mirja Hitzemann, Co-Founder
- Belinda Rodriguez, Co-Founder
- Carlos Saavedra, Co-Founder
- Kate Werning, Co-Founder[6]
Momentum trainers
Momentum trainers, as of April 2, 2018 included Max Berger;[7]
Co-founders
We Will Replace You co-founders included: