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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Patrisse Cullors, an organizer who co-leads Bridging Histories, a Black-Jewish dialogue series at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, has been named an honorable mention for The 36 Award in its inaugural year. Her work rests on a belief that the safety and dignity of Black and Jewish communities are bound together, and that the coalition between them is worth fighting for.
Cullors traces that belief to the Los Angeles she grew up in, a multiracial community in the San Fernando Valley that she remembers as loud, warm, and full of people disagreeing, singing, and feeding one another. “Belonging in that community was not quiet,” she said. “It was full of contradiction and full of love.” She wants every child in Los Angeles to grow up with that same fullness, in a life organized around showing up for one another rather than around fear.
Cullors is candid about how she came to this work. “Before October 7, 2023, I did not consider antisemitism one of the central fights of my life,” she said. Her organizing had focused on ending police violence against Black people. In the weeks after the attack, she watched Black and Jewish communities being pitted against each other.
“I have been organizing long enough to recognize when our communities are being separated on purpose,” she said. “I could not stay silent.”
She called Jessie Kornberg, CEO of the Skirball Cultural Center, and asked whether she would co-host a Black-Jewish dialogue series. Kornberg said yes. The result, Bridging Histories, brought a committed cohort of Black, Jewish, and Black Jewish Angelenos together each month for a year. They shared meals, studied texts, watched films, practiced healing work, and had what Cullors called “some of the hardest conversations our communities had not yet had.”
Cullors said the cohort created something that had not existed before: a place where Black participants could have hard conversations about antisemitism, and where they also could call on Jewish participants to reckon with how anti-Black racism shows up in Jewish spaces. The model was deliberate. By returning to the same room month after month, participants made space for Jewish grief, Black grief, and the complexity of Black Jewish lives without forcing those experiences into competition.
Partners in the work have included Rabbi Sharon Brous, Dr. Avriel Epps, Van Jones, and Rabbi Beau Shapiro. Cullors said she deliberately stays in relationship with people across the full range of Jewish political views, as well as across the Black community, from grassroots organizers and artists to politicians in City Hall. “I do not require sameness before I will build with someone,” she said. “I do not confuse agreement with solidarity.”
The work drew opposition before it began. Just before launch, a group of Jewish community members objected to Cullors’ leadership of the series and brought their concerns to Kornberg. According to Cullors, Kornberg came straight to her and said she wanted to talk with her, not about her, and that the controversy was exactly why the program was needed. Cullors names Kornberg’s courage before her own.
But the risk to Cullors was real. As a nationally visible Black organizer leading a dialogue at a Jewish institution, she faced scrutiny from several directions at once. She chose to stay, and Jewish women she had built relationships with spoke with the objectors and vouched for the work.
“Courage, for me, has not looked like fearlessness,” Cullors said. “It has looked like staying in a hard place with people who chose to stay in it with me.” She described the work as threading a very thin needle and said abandoning it would mean abandoning “one of the most important coalitions this country has ever produced. I am not willing to be the person who lets that coalition go.”
Cullors said the program has sharpened her understanding of antisemitism inside progressive and left movement spaces, where it often goes unnamed. She hopes recognition from this award will send a signal in two directions: to Black progressives, that a more nuanced conversation about antisemitism is part of their fight and not a distraction from it, and to Jewish communities, that the answer to this moment is relationship, not retreat.
Her nominator, Ginna Green of Horizon Philanthropy, said Cullors’ approach “shows that bridge-building is not a soft alternative to confronting hate. It is one of the most rigorous tools we have for transforming the conditions that allow hate to take root.”
Cullors has developed an exhibition, Wishes Made Material, at the Skirball based on the project and plans to travel to Germany to exchange ideas with leaders building progressive coalitions there.
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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