Building a United Front Against Antisemitism

By The 36 AwardOct 19, 2026

The 36 Award elevates and supports courageous individuals pursuing new ideas to confront antisemitism and hate more broadly. Read full bio →

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Wynn Howell, co-founder and state director of the Colorado Working Families Party (CO-WFP), and Ilana Spiegel, an elected member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, have been jointly named an honorable mention for The 36 Award in its inaugural year. The recognition honors years of building trust among Jewish, immigrant, labor, and progressive leaders in Colorado. That trust faced its hardest test on June 1, 2025, when a firebombing on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall targeted Jewish community members.

The two came to this work from different places. Spiegel is a former classroom teacher, a longtime public-school advocate, and the granddaughter of refugees whose family fled to the United States during and after the Holocaust. She rejects the idea that she must choose between her Jewish identity and her progressive values; her Judaism, she said, is the source of them. Holding that position as a Jewish progressive has cost her. Activists using anti-Zionist rhetoric once targeted her home for a protest. About 150 members of the Jewish community came and sang Jewish songs behind the house while protesters gathered out front.

“I’ve had to really lean into my Jewish identity in a very public way, having been targeted at my home as an elected official, that I never imagined having to do when I first ran for office,” Spiegel said.

Howell, who is not Jewish, is a longtime labor and community organizer who was raised in a Christian nationalist church and home. Howell’s focus on antisemitism began in late 2023, when Jewish elected officials who were allies in their work said they felt politically homeless. Howell listened, then began building relationships beyond the usual CO-WFP coalition, including with leaders of the Colorado Jewish Action Alliance and the Jewish Community Relations Council.

Those relationships were already in place when the attack came. Immediately after the firebombing, Howell and Spiegel worked with Jewish and immigrant rights leaders on a statement that condemned the attack and rejected attempts to use it against immigrants. More than 100 of Colorado’s most prominent Jewish and immigrant rights leaders signed it, as did nearly every Jewish member of the state legislature.

A year later, federal authorities were still seeking to deport the attacker’s ex-wife and five children, even though the FBI had acknowledged the family was not involved; they had already spent ten months in detention. Howell and Spiegel organized the circulation of a second statement in support of the family. It set off what they called “deep, powerful, and sometimes difficult conversations” about whether a community still in mourning should be asked to carry this family’s pain as well. The relationships held. In Denver, Rabbi Liz Sacks of Temple Emanuel, the state’s largest synagogue, devoted much of a sermon to the question and concluded that Jewish teaching requires the community to stand with the family.

The pair has also directly challenged antisemitism on the left. Howell’s op-ed, “Antisemitism Is the Socialism of Fools,” ran in both the Boulder Daily Camera and The Denver Post. Spiegel wrote a resolution condemning a student group’s celebration of the attack, which the Board of Regents passed unanimously.

Jacob Feinspan, national board chair of the Working Families Party, said the depth of their partnership makes it a model. “I am not aware of any similarly deeply rooted effort happening anywhere in the country that wasn’t led or catalyzed by an established Jewish justice group,” he said.

Through Bringing Our Communities Together, a committee they helped start, Howell and Spiegel have convened elected officials and leaders from the Rocky Mountain ADL, immigrant rights organizations, and labor, many of whom had not been in the same room in years. They are now launching a new Colorado nonprofit that will track hate groups across identity lines, build shared resistance to white Christian nationalism, and deepen a sense of belonging for all Coloradans.

“Hate never stays in one place,” they said. “Any one of us being hurt means that all of us are being hurt, and that’s how we have to respond.”