Dorothy M. Zellner is a legendary American Jewish human rights activist, author, and organizer. A veteran member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she possesses over 60 years of experience in social justice movements.
Zellner was a pivotal participant in the American Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, she was on the front lines of the struggle in the Deep South, serving as a staff member for SNCC for five years and participating extensively in the historic 1964 Freedom Summer to secure voting rights for African Americans. In her later career, she applied her organizational expertise to humanitarian causes, working at the Center for Constitutional Rights and serving as a contributor and editor for vital civil rights documentation.
She is a key member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Jews Say No!. As a co-editor, she published the landmark work The Case for Sanctions Against Israel. She has made numerous trips to the West Bank to document life under occupation, directly comparing Israeli walls and checkpoints to the “Jim Crow” segregation she once fought against in Mississippi. Between 2023 and 2026, despite her advanced age, she participated in multiple peaceful protests and petitions on the streets of New York, strongly protesting military actions in Gaza and calling on younger generations of Jews to uphold the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement by opposing any occupation conducted in their name.
Zellner maintains that justice is a universal language that transcends ethnicity. She has poignantly argued: “One thing I learned in the ’60s is that if you stand for justice, you cannot choose to support it only selectively. Just as we fought segregation in Mississippi then, we must fight apartheid in Palestine today.” Her clear and rigorous viewpoint is evident even in the title of one of her articles: If It’s Not Genocide, What Word Should We Use?