Jewish Democratic Initiative

Our biggest event of the year is TOMORROW! Don’t let price be a barrier; email info@jdisa for a discount. Booking links in bio.

Jonathan Shapiro, better known as Zapiro, is South Africa’s most widely syndicated editorial cartoonist. He grew up in a Jewish family in Cape Town, the son of a lawyer and a mother who had fled Nazi-occupied Lithuania. As a student he refused to bear arms during his military conscription, throwing himself instead into the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front, for which he designed the End Conscription Campaign’s logo. He was detained under the Illegal Gatherings Act before leaving on a Fulbright scholarship to study cartooning in New York under Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman.

Since returning to South Africa, Zapiro has spent over three decades skewering power across the political spectrum, from the apartheid state to the ANC, in the Mail & Guardian, Sunday Times, and now Daily Maverick. His cartoons have provoked lawsuits and death threats in equal measure to prizes and honorary doctorates, and he remains one of the country’s fiercest defenders of free expression.

His presentation will be livestreamed to Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Our Festival of Dangerous Ideas is THIS WEEKEND. Full programme and Quicket in bio. Price shouldn’t be a reason to stay home, email as at [email protected] to organise a discount.

Avraham Burg, one of Israel’s most influential political figures and sharpest critics, will be coming to Johannesburg and Cape Town for our festival. Book to hear him speak, meet him and ask him questions.

Sally Abed grew up in Mi’ilya, an Arab village in the western Galilee, and studied economics and political science at Earlham College in the United States before returning to Israel in 2015 — the same year she founded Standing Together. She has since become one of its most compelling public voices: a fierce critic of the occupation who nonetheless sees people on every side of the conflict as fully human, and wants them all to thrive.

She describes the movement’s foremost mission as debunking the myth that Jewish security depends on the military suppression of Palestinians.

In February 2024, Abed became the first Palestinian woman ever to lead a joint slate onto Haifa’s city council, where she now chairs the board of Haifa Museums. She rejects the politics of permanent conflict: liberation and equality for all who live on the land, she insists, aren’t a compromise — they’re the only way forward.

Her presentation will be livestreamed to Cape Town and Johannesburg.