That's the Tradition: Jane Wishner on Conflict, Community, and the Jewish Future

By Ellen Marks

Jane Wishner tells this joke: a Jewish congregation can’t decide whether the proper tradition is to sit or stand during the Shema, so they visit the nursing home and ask the old rabbi (who’s a little senile) for a ruling.

They each argue that their side is rooted in deep tradition:
“Rabbi, don’t you remember? We always stood up.”
  “No, rabbi, we always stayed seated! That’s our tradition and who we are.”

The rabbi looks confused and says he can’t remember the tradition.
Both plead: “Rabbi, you have got to take care of this. We’re fighting each other, we won’t talk to each other, half of us want to leave.”

At this, the rabbi lights up. “Yes, now I remember! That's the tradition.” 

Wishner, a mainstay in local Jewish circles, grew up with that joke, and it underlies why she remains optimistic, despite troubling times for Jews around the world. “I grew up knowing that there were profound disagreements and debates,” she says. “So there is nothing new to me, even if it feels so profound, and the rifts in the Jewish community, the divides, are real, they're upsetting.
But “there's something about our people that has been able to surmount and survive those kinds of conflicts, and that I believe to my core. We are part of a living, breathing, evolving and adapting people.”

A Life in Law

Wishner, a lawyer, has a long history of involvement in Jewish causes.
Her recent achievements include co-founding the Jewish Community Relations Coalition of New Mexico (JCRC-NM) with Santa Fe community leader Alonet Zarum in October 2023, just after the Hamas attack on Israel.

Wishner was board co-chair of the JCRC-NM and is now on its steering committee, while also taking on the new job of chairing the Jewish Community Foundation of New Mexico after serving as vice chair. Earlier, she held board positions with Congregation Albert and the now-defunct Jewish Federation of New Mexico and the Solomon Schechter Day School of Albuquerque, which has also closed.

Wishner graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University and got her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Afterward, she headed to Washington, D.C., to become a law clerk to Judge Abner J. Mikva at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She then spent more than 20 years as a litigator, becoming one of three founding shareholders of an Albuquerque law firm.  

A little known nugget in Wishner’s career as an attorney was her job as prosecutor for  the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office from 1987-1990, focusing on white collar and political corruption cases.

“That, actually, as a practicing attorney, was my favorite job,” she says.

She later returned to Washington, D.C., to work on the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion and health insurance exchanges, and she also worked as a researcher at the Urban Institute, starting in 2014. Her family remained in New Mexico, and she returned for good in 2018.

“I had worked in Washington when I was young and always wanted to go back, and so this was an opportunity to do so,” she says. “And I got it out of my system, and I'm done with that.”  Wishner is now vice chair of the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange.

But some of her proudest moments, she says, stem from work done by the Southwest Women’s Law Center, which she founded in 2005. The inspiration for that grew after she attended a “Decade for Women” conference in Kenya with her mother in 1985. 

“I was so deeply moved by the things I had taken for granted growing up in my generation and the opportunities I had that even my mother's generation had not had here,” Wishner says. “I knew when I went to that conference, I never took for granted that I was a Jew. And I was never again going to take for granted that I'm a woman, and that requires special attention and advocacy, in the same way as being a Jew always has meant to me.”  

Among the law center’s victories were a yearslong battle to ensure that Medicaid in New Mexico covered over-the-counter emergency contraceptives and an effort to ensure domestic violence survivors could take time off work to meet with law enforcement and to testify against their abusers. 

Throughout her time in the legal profession, Wishner also was immersed in community activities, including policy work for national nonprofits and Jewish causes. She has long been involved with the Commission on Social Action for Reform Judaism, first as a lay leader, then as a national chair  and now as a lifetime member.  

Wishner proudly calls herself a Zionist, adding that she’s a liberal Zionist “kind of in the mold of Reform Judaism and the Association of Reformed Zionists in America.” What that means, she says, is “a vision of Zionism that's democratic and free and respectful of all people who live in Israel, including non-Jews, including Palestinians, including Muslims, Christians, and everyone there.”

Roots

Wishner grew up in a “very Jewish” and religiously secular family in the Chicago area, with parents who believed deeply in social justice and activism.

Her father was involved in the American Jewish Committee, and her mother was active in early childhood development through the Jewish Family and Children's Service and Head Start.

When they moved to the suburbs of Chicago, the family chose a home in nearby Evanston “so that we would be in an integrated community and school district. That was something I grew up with as being very important in life.”

Wishner’s involvement centered on music: She played guitar and was a song leader at a Jewish camp and later was a synagogue youth group adviser when she lived in Washington, D.C.

“Music was a piece of my Jewish soul,” she says.

Israel is also part of Wishner’s soul and an enduring part of her upbringing. She and her two siblings each spent a summer there as youngsters.

“Our home was very much focused on the civil rights movement and on Zionism and a strong commitment to the state of Israel.”

She has since been on three missions to Israel with a Jewish group, one of which gave her an opportunity to confront Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas during a 2017 visit to Ramallah, in the West Bank. 

“I advocated to explain why they (Palestinian Authority) shouldn't (continue) to provide … financial support to the families of suicide bombers and terrorists,” she says. 

She went back to Israel as part of her involvement with the Commission on Social Action in February 2024, just months after Hamas killed or captured 1,200 Israelis along the Israel-Gaza border. Wishner met the Israeli human rights lawyer, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who was working on a report about rape and sexual attacks during and after the Oct. 7 attack. Elkayam-Levy’s team recently released its findings, which revealed systemic sexual violence against both women and men.

“I just remember thanking her for taking this on personally and what that meant to so many of us that she was willing to do that,” Wishner says.

But Wishner was most profoundly moved during a visit to the Hostage Square area in Tel Aviv, a memorial site for victims and their families. Wishner met a mother who was putting up a photo poster of her abducted son. At the time, the woman wasn’t sure whether her son was alive, but she would later learn that he had perished. For a long time, Wishner kept an image of him on her desk.

“There were a lot of different stories like that,” she says. “That trip just stayed with me. I think it strengthened me. It gave me more courage, which sometimes I found I needed during that period, and commitment.” 

She says her vision for Israel “is under threat by the current government in Israel, in my opinion, as some of our foundational rights and tenets for the United States of America are also under threat. But it doesn't mean I'm not a strong American and a strong Zionist.”

Wishner worries about antisemitism, particularly “what looks like some emerging alliances between the extreme right and the extreme left antisemites.” She recalls a frightening experience while walking into a legislative dinner at a Santa Fe hotel in January 2024. She encountered a group of protesters with Palestinian flags outside, shouting, “There is only one solution” and "intifada revolution.” 

“I walked through this gauntlet of what I thought were people calling for the killing of Jews —  that is exactly what it felt like .. and I was trembling,” Wishner says.

“I agree, free exercise, free speech, free assembly, they can say what they want, but it was chilling.” 

Building Community

The genesis of the Jewish Community Relations Coalition of New Mexico is rooted in Wishner’s arrival in New Mexico nearly four decades ago. 

One of her first local volunteer activities, she says, was organizing and recruiting members for what was then called the Jewish Community Relations Council.  That effort, a committee of the Jewish Federation, “ebbed and flowed” over time. 

Wishner and Zarum resurrected the group several years ago due to “a vacuum in the Jewish community because the federation wasn't there…  and nobody was able to unify and speak for and pull together elements of the Jewish community.”

The security of Jewish places in the state has recently become a focus of JCRC-NM, particularly after an incident at the Jewish Community Center during an appearance by the Israeli Consul General to the Southwest in March 2024. More than 150 protesters showed up, some of whom blocked parking lot entrances, chanted pro-Palestinian slogans and blocked and terrorized several motorists.

Within days, the Albuquerque Police Department changed policy so that an institution like the JCC could communicate directly with an APD area command rather than having to first go through headquarters, Wishner says.

Jewish leaders later met with then-deputy police chief Cecily Barker. Wishner says Barker, who has since become police chief, “made it a priority to make herself available to our community, and to continue to do so, and to make sure that the right staff in the right parts of APD are working closely with Jewish institutions to help ensure safety.” 

Wishner says she’s pleased with JCRC-NM’s accomplishments under the direction of Juan Dircie, who previously worked with Jewish community services in Miami and held a position with the American Jewish Committee. He joined the Albuquerque community last year.

“I think it's brought together the Jewish community in a way that I hadn't seen in decades here in Albuquerque in a really positive way,” she says.

She cites public events the JCRC-NM has sponsored at the state Capitol, but also its “behind-the-scenes” efforts to work with local government and law enforcement leaders. “There are public events the JCRC plans, but it is that relationship building that to me is the most important,” she says.

The organization recently partnered with the Secure Community Network, a safety training and incident response organization that works with Jewish groups nationwide. A longtime law enforcement officer named to oversee the efforts covering West Texas and New Mexico is based in El Paso at the Jewish Federation of El Paso and Las Cruces. 

In Wishner’s new role as board chair of the Jewish Community Foundation of New Mexico, she is working with Executive Director Sarah Winger, who joined the organization at the beginning of 2025. The community foundation administers charitable giving, both for Jewish and non-Jewish causes. It also maintains endowment programs with synagogues and organizations to create permanent funding sources in support of their missions.

Winger previously was Director of CareLink Services at UNM Hospital and has deep roots in the Jewish community, having served on the foundation and New Mexico Jewish Historical Society boards. Winger replaced founding executive director Erika Rimson, who led the organization through the difficult years following the closure of the Federation, Covid, and the turmoil after Oct. 7, 2023. Rimson now is co-chair of the JCRC-NM.

For Wishner, chairing the community foundation “has brought me back to my roots. It is that recollection of a common past and a belief in our Jewish future, and that legacy. I don't know what the Jewish community in New Mexico will look like in 50 years, and I find that exciting and hopeful.”

Ellen Marks has been a journalist for more than four decades, including stints in Boise, Idaho, Seattle and Albuquerque. She came to the Albuquerque Journal in 1986 and retired from there six years ago, but continues to do regular assignments for the newspaper.

Her story "We Cannot Be Defined by the Hatred of Others," Antisemitism in New Mexico Now, published in May 2025, just won the American Jewish Press Association's Rockower Award for Writing about Antisemitism, in good company alongside The Forward and Chabad.org.

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