FOR A YEAR NOW, a struggle has ensued in Medford over an ordinance that would have the city divest from companies that manufacture weapons, produce fossil fuels, operate private prisons or contribute to regimes that commit severe human rights violations, including practicing apartheid or genocide.

Proponents of the measure argue it aligns with the values of Medford’s citizens. Opponents, including Gloucester’s Tina Snider, insist the real intent of the ordinance is antisemitic: to further the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement – BDS – against Israel.

“‘Values based’ sounds really good,” Snider says. “But then you actually dig deeper, and you wonder, ‘Wait, whose values? What are these values?’”

The values that Snider set up the Tina Snider Foundation and her non-profit, the Gevura Fund, to protect are what she calls “‘American values.’ So it’s free markets, free speech, freedom of religion, the things that are very important to us.’”

The Medford City Council first passed its ordinance in August 2025. Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn vetoed it that October, noting legal and financial concerns, and the council overrode her veto a month later. In February 2026, the Gevura Fund and its legal partners, the National Jewish Advocacy Center and the law firm of Libby Hoopes Brooks & Mulvey PC, sued to block the ordinance’s implementation.

It’s been in legal purgatory ever since.

“ONE OF THE thingsabout this ‘lawfare’ that we do,” notes Brigette Herbst, Gevura’s executive director, “is that the court system takes a really long time to parse all these things out. Unfortunately, these lawsuits can take years to go through.”

Besides being time-consuming, defending against lawsuits is costly. Herbst says Medford spending public money to defend the ordinance is a breach of its fiscal responsibility.

“The biggest thing we should think about is the perspective of the taxpayers,” she says. “By pursuing these things that the city council knows are illegal, they’re not doing their fiduciary duty. They know that a lawsuit’s going to ensue, and the taxpayers are going to have to pay for that lawsuit.”

Indeed, in April, the Medford City Council authorized Mayor Lungo-Koehn to allocate $75,000 to defend the ordinance against the Gevura-led lawsuit.

“If we decline to defend this ordinance, we’re not being cautious, we’re surrendering,” said Councilor Justin Tseng on April 14. “We’re telling residents who called, wrote, or showed up that their voice only matters until someone with resources decides to challenge it.”

Conversely, Snider maintains it is Medford’s ordinance, not Gevura’s lawsuit, that is undemocratic, in that it discriminates against Jews.

“I’m not looking at Israel when I do this, if I’m being perfectly honest. My motivation is to protect the Jewish community,” she says. “I like to preserve what I see as the best and worst parts of our democracy. If we have one group with a loud voice that has learned a playbook of how to capture financial institutions and nonprofits, and they get inside, and they have a plan, and it’s working…

“As go the Jews, so goes everyone else.”

Gevura and its partners make other legal arguments against the ordinance. Rachel Sebbag, litigation counsel with the National Jewish Advocacy Center, says that according to the U.S. Constitution, “It is not the province or purview of the town to reach into foreign policy concerns, which is what this does.”

In addition, Sebbag says, the ordinance violates Massachusetts laws about the management of municipal funds, which require Medford to take into account what’s best from a financial perspective. The ordinance, she says, “elevates political and moral concerns above that. It will bring the treasurer of the City of Medford in breach of their fiduciary duty to the taxpayers.”

For Medford’s retired workers, return on investment (ROI) trumps all ethical concerns, argues Snider. She offers the example of a teacher whose pension loses 60% of its value because Medford divests from Israeli firms.

“You were invested,” she says. “Israeli companies happen to do really good work and are an American ally. But a group comes in that wants to penalize Israel, and you claim divestment is a moral imperative. Everyone loses financially. Politically propagandized values open up a can of worms for governance.”

Snider admits all the tumult around the Medford ordinance has had an upside. “I’m a little gleeful because it did two things,” she says. “It’s gotten the town to wake up and be interested in their own community. [Residents say,] ‘Medford can’t even pick up our trash, but now you want us to put all this money towards a lawsuit?’ It’s helped them look at all the fiduciary mismanagement.”

A month after Medford passed its ordinance in August 2025, the City of Northampton, 100 miles west on the Mass Pike, passed a measure calling for the city and its Retirement Board to stop investing in Israeli bonds. It also directed divestment within two years of Northampton’s $71,000 invested in companies identified as complicit in human rights abuses in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

There, as in Medford, Gevura and its partners are waging ‘lawfare’ against the ordinance with a two-prong approach. In their suit, they argue that a municipality may not use public money to influence an

international dispute, which is the sole province of the federal government. They also claim that subordinating ROI to ethical considerations is a breach of a locality’s fiduciary duties.

Snider said the American Friends Service Committee and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are “really running the show on all these divestment things. Apartheid-free Western Mass, apartheid-free this, apartheid-free that. These divestments are all connected to Israel. Nothing else. They’re not divesting from actual massively bad actors. Interpret it as you will. It’s an agenda.”

The Northampton ordinance remains tied up in court.

Finally, in Somerville, which borders Medford, voters passed in November 2025 – and the City Council is currently considering – a measure that would prohibit Somerville from contracting with corporations that do business with countries engaging in “apartheid, genocide or unlawful military occupation” or engaging in conduct that violates international humanitarian law, “including without limitation in Israel and Palestine.”

Gevura initially worked alongside activists in Somerville, as it did in Medford and Northampton, to combat the measure (community members are named as complainants in those lawsuits). In the last couple of months, though, Snider says, the fight in Somerville has been taken on by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

“They do great work,” she says, “but I don’t really agree at this moment with their strategy, because this has to be a fiscal-based strategy. This is not about discrimination. It’s about fiscal responsibility over the towns, and it’s about legality.”

Herbst believes the Somerville City Council may be watching Medford.

“Part of the strategy in Somerville may just be to wait and see what happens with the Medford case,” she says. She suggests town officials may be thinking, “If Medford loses, then we drop this because we don’t want our own lawsuit. And if they win, then we have some legal standing to go ahead and push it forward.”

The Somerville City Council’s Legislative Matters Committee has been debating the ordinance for three months.

WHILE GEVURA has been making headlines recently battling municipal divestment from Israel, Snider, Herbst and their team also fight religious intolerance in other areas, including labor and education.

Snider’s interest was first piqued by a pre-Oct. 7 case at the City University of New York (CUNY), where two Jewish professors were battling their union over anti-Israel policy. This opened Snider’s eyes to what she calls the “deep capture” of educational unions across the country – including those representing K-12 teachers, college professors and graduate students – by anti-Israel politics.

Jewish and Israeli educators with “any type of Jewish affiliation” are being pushed out of their unions, she says.

“They would hold meetings and votes on Friday evening because they knew that the practicing Jewish members weren’t going to be there because they were practicing Shabbat,” Herbst says. “These members felt very ostracized from a group that they thought was supposed to be inclusive and representative of everyone.”

More recently, Gevura, along with the National Jewish Advocacy Center and the Deborah Project, filed a civil rights complaint against the U.S. Department of Education for crafting an inadequate agreement to address antisemitism in Philadelphia’s public schools and for then failing to enforce that agreement.

Herbst calls lawsuits the “last resort” when discrimination arises, after people have been rebuffed by school boards, city councils, union leaders and corporate management. “We help them organize,” she says. “Creating these community groups is really where the power is. Helping these people who feel voiceless.”

“You have to have an operating manual and trust that it works,” Snider says. Gevura’s approach rests on defending the rule of law, resisting discriminatory and illegal divestment schemes, and standing up for religious minorities – starting with Jews – when institutions want to push them out.

“This is not just a Jewish question,” Snider says. “I’m not the most religious person, but I’m sure as hell going to protect your right to practice what you believe. That’s one of the core values for a free and open society to flourish.”

Contact reporter Brett M. Rhyne at brett@jewishjournal.org.