Bringing peace to Palestine is both a personal and political commitment for June Rose

June Rose, a political activist who is the uncommitted delegate elected to represent state Democrats at the DNC this summer. (Michael Salerno/Rhode Island Current)

June Rose spent their whole life organizing, communicating, learning how to seamlessly slip in and out of traditional circles and structures to create the world they want to live in.

A world where Palestinians are safe from war and free from Israeli occupation.

That’s why Rose is one of 36 uncommitted delegates nationwide — and the only one in Rhode Island — headed to Chicago for the four-day Democratic National Convention next month. Their task? Convince the other 3,900 delegates pledging to support President Joe Biden to select a nominee who agrees to leverage U.S. influence and aid to end the Israel-Hamas war.

The odds are against Rose and other uncommitted delegates. But Rose has overcome far greater challenges, both personal and political.

“My job has always been about outcomes, about winning,” Rose said. “Here, winning means fewer Palestinian children are killed. There would be no greater victory than helping save the lives of Palestinian children living under occupation.”

They declined to discuss strategy developed through virtual meetings with other uncommitted delegates ahead of the convention. But Rose is hopeful the growing discontent surrounding Biden’s age and ability to beat Donald Trump presents an opportunity.

“For a long time, I’ve heard anxiety that I am going to help elect Trump by criticizing Biden,” Rose said. “Now the wind under the sails of that criticism is totally gone. I know there are many Biden delegates across the country who have extreme anxiety about our situation, and I hope to encourage them to use their voices.”

Raised within an Orthodox Jewish enclave on Providence’s East Side, Rose grew up a natural questioner with a distaste for authority. They spent many hours in school detention, accustomed to being pulled aside by religious leaders who didn’t care for Rose’s political and personal “digressions” from strict Jewish law. 

Now 29, Rose came out as transgender and non-binary four years ago. Their political career began with labor organizing in college before evolving into campaigns and now, government work.

“I have never found it a challenge or a moral difficulty to cry for two people,” Rose said. “My horror for the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 is not in contradiction for the genocide that is still being perpetrated against the people of Palestine.”

This passion is matched equally by a commitment to organizing and policy work, skills Rose sharpened over five years working on political campaigns and, since January, as chief of staff for the Providence City Council, making them the highest-ranking transgender government staffer in history.

Council President Rachel Miller lobbied hard to bring Rose back to Providence to work for the City Council after witnessing their skill and dedication during the 2022 Democratic coordinated campaign led by the Rhode Island Democratic Party and then-congressional candidate Seth Magaziner.

Miller, who has spent most of her career as a labor organizer, saw in Rose many of the personal and professional qualities needed to corral a 15-member council with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.

“It’s an incredibly challenging role because you have 15 different bosses,” Miller said. “June always starts from the place of agreement. Which is what makes the group cohesive and effective.”

Rose plans to bring that same attitude to Chicago from Aug. 19 to 22.

“I am not going as a rabble rouser or to make a scene,” Rose said. “My goal is to make a difference. If we have real seats at the table as decisions are made about our party’s posture toward the war in Gaza, that’s it.”

June Rose, a political activist who is the uncommitted delegate elected to represent state Democrats at the DNC this summer. (Michael Salerno/Rhode Island Current)

Crossing a border

Rose thinks about the 15,000 children killed since the war began relative to the enrollment of Providence Public Schools — 19,600 expected in the upcoming year. The rubble-strewn streets of Gaza aren’t just TV images, but neighborhoods and homes, not far from where Rose once lived.

“It feels very disconnected, but for me, it was a 10-minute drive away,” they said.

Rose was referring to the short distance from Jerusalem to the West Bank. At 18, Rose spent a post-graduation gap year in Israel to study the Torah and other rabbinic texts.

During a Passover break, they snuck out and crossed the border into Palestine with an educational tour program unrelated to yeshiva.

“I don’t think most people can point to two days in their life that totally changed the course of their entire world,” Rose said. “For me, it changed everything, not only on the issues of Israel and Palestine, but also my politics, my relationship with my community and with myself.”

Growing up Orthodox, “Palestine” was an unspoken word. Palestinians were referred to as “Arabs” and settlement expansion in the West Bank was taught to be the Jewish people’s divine right.

“I grew up a trained Zionist,” Rose said. “Israel advocacy was baked into my education.”

Rose’s parents were more lenient, identifying as modern Orthodox and somewhat integrated into the secular world. But a stricter set of rules and culture characterized students’ education at Providence Hebrew Day School.

Many students’ families didn’t work outside the Jewish community; didn’t dine at local restaurants in order to keep kosher, didn’t interact with outsiders at all. Rose didn’t know any non-Jewish people until college.

Physical touch between students of the opposite sex was barred, but Rose’s best friends were girls. Observing the Sabbath meant no electronics, but Rose spent Friday nights covertly watching TV in their bedroom. A flexible relationship with rules made Rose a frequent visitor to school detention for talking back to teachers and flouting Jewish law. It wasn’t just teachers and religious leaders who took note of Rose’s defiance. Classmates did, too.

“I always say that my bullies knew I was queer long before I did,” Rose said.

Intense bullying in middle school led to a transfer to Maimonides School in Brookline, Massachusetts, where Rose graduated high school. While Maimonides was less strict in its Orthodoxy and more diverse in its student population, Rose continued to butt heads with authority figures.

After school religious leaders rejected an article Rose wrote for the school newspaper supporting marriage equality, Rose printed their own copies and stuck them in every student’s locker.

But Rose succumbed to pressure to spend that gap year in Israel where their thinly veiled skepticism of religious and political doctrine was punished with extra hours of supervised religious study, the ideological equivalent of running laps or doing push-ups.

“They treated me like I was a hospital patient who they were trying to cure,” they said. 

Returning from that illicit trip across the border, Rose was reprimanded and told to “never do something like that again.”

Clockwise, from top left: June Rose attends a march outside the White House with Providence City Councilman Miguel Sanchez (left) in November 2023; June Rose at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in 2013; June Rose with their Palestinian friend, Haya Tarawa (left), in Hebron, Palestine in 2014; June Rose in Israel in 2013. (Courtesy of June Rose)

A new sense of purpose

So Rose quit, moving into a cheap Jerusalem apartment found on Facebook Marketplace to live with a half-dozen strangers. Rose continued to work with the Encounter Program that led Palestinian trips as an unpaid intern, living off meager savings collected through high school camp jobs. In their free time, they wandered the streets of the West Bank, spending hours talking and smoking hookah with a Palestinian girl, Haya Tarawa, they befriended.

Hearing Tarawa’s experiences living under Israeli occupation, passing through military checkpoints and being harassed by Israeli soldiers as a part of everyday life confirmed something Rose had suspected all along: There was another side to the narrative they were taught in the Orthodox community. Palestinians were, in fact, as human as their Israeli neighbors.

They returned to Providence unrecognizable to family and friends. They came out as bisexual — the only term they really knew to describe feeling something other than heteronormative sexuality — and stopped even pretending to observe Sabbath traditions to work on Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’ 2014 gubernatorial campaign.

It was through Taveras’ campaign that Rose met Kat Kerwin, still a high school student at the time. 

“We were the youngest people on the campaign,” Kerwin said. “Both of us were kind of just learning how to be an organizer.”

Their connection quickly flourished in shared passion for political justice. They kept in touch, reuniting for Thanksgiving as Rose traversed the country, first to attend college at Tulane University in Louisiana and through the next six years working on political campaigns up and down the Eastern seaboard.

Kerwin found herself turning to Rose for advice during her four-year term on the Providence City Council, beginning in 2019. 

“I was a teenager when I was elected so I didn’t have all of this communications training,” Kerwin said. “They really helped me work through messaging.”

Rose also lent expertise from afar to Providence City Councilman Miguel Sanchez after he was fired from his job with Gov. Dan McKee’s office in late October for his public stance and involvement in the pro-Palestine movement. Rose was in D.C. at the time, already juggling protests and sit-ins at the U.S. Capitol, even twice getting arrested. Charges were dismissed both times.

Clockwise, from left: June Rose is arrested while protesting at the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 3, 2023; June Rose as a child circa 1998; June Rose leads sit ins outside U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries office in D.C. in October 2023; June Rose participates in a protest outside U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz office in D.C. in November 2023. (Courtesy of June Rose)

Yet Rose put together a working document with messaging and strategy for Sanchez to deal with the avalanche of media requests coming his way.

“I think I asked for it on a Sunday morning and by Sunday night, I had a whole plan,” Sanchez said. “I think June might be one of the best comms folks in the state in the way they are able to deliver a message that resonates.”

A few months later, fresh off a trio of wins for competitive seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, Rose was figuring out their next move. That’s when Miller swooped in with the city council job offer.

“I definitely had to do a little persuading,” Miller said. 

The key selling point was Miller’s promise to Rose that the incoming City Council would do “big things.”

“That was my condition for taking the job,” Rose said. “I love Providence, and it has become so much more vibrant over the years since I left. But I am really, really scared about the direction in the sense that Providence is a city where you have to be upper middle class to live.”

Their January homecoming has been marked equally by familiarity and a sense of outsiderness. Rose isn’t in touch with any of their childhood classmates; they see their parents, who still live in the area, and visit their brothers who both work at Eastside Marketplace. 

Rather than the traditional black hat and suit worn by male Orthodox members they once went to school with, Rose favors brightly patterned thrift store finds and dangling earrings. They still identify as Jewish, at least culturally, but have turned their religious upbringing into a foundation from which to advocate for peace in Palestine.

“Symbolically, I think that 29% of voters say ‘Joe Biden does not speak for us’ on this issue is extremely significant,” Rose said.

They were referring to the percentage of city voters who voted uncommitted in the April 2 presidential primary. Rose is committed to both those uncommitted voters as well as the Palestinian people

“I am in this role not to represent the Biden is too old movement,” Rose said. “I am in this role to represent the freedom and justice for Palestine movement. Whether it is Biden or one of the other names floated…my role remains relatively similar even if the ground is shifting beneath me.”

That role is no less important in Rose’s eyes even if the Democratic National Committee moves ahead with a contested plan to virtually nominate Biden before the convention takes place.

“Locking up the nomination is a tiny part of this,” they said. “This is about winning the presidency. In order to win in November, the Democratic nominee needs to take a bold stance on ending the war. There is a role for us as uncommitted delegates before the nomination, during the nomination and after the nomination.”

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