At 12 years old, Jonathan D. Greenberg was leafing through his family’s Life magazine when, to his horror, he came across images of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. These evoked other haunting images he’d seen before—the civil war and famine in Biafra, and the Watts riots in Los Angeles, just on the other side of town from where his family was living. These senseless acts of violence disturbed and alarmed his sensitive heart. Inspired by his rabbi, Leonard Beerman, who was outspoken against the Vietnam War as well as against inequality in the United States, Greenberg, still in middle school, participated in his first protest against the Vietnam War. The passion and empowerment he felt would come to ignite a lifelong calling in restorative justice and human rights.

In 2018, Greenberg co-founded the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco, whose purpose is to “disseminate the teachings and strategies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi in response to the moral emergencies of the 21st century.”  The institute aims to serve students, activists, and thinkers to advance the theory and practice of transformational nonviolence—as a means to powerfully confront and overcome injustice and systemic violence and contribute to the just resolution of communal conflict. Greenberg founded the institute with his friend and colleague Dr. Clarence B. Jones, who served as Dr. King’s lawyer, strategic adviser, and draft speechwriter from 1960 until Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, having spent countless hours together “in crisis and action, negotiation and decision, intimate conversation and prayer.”  

Prior the Institute, Greenberg spent more than 30 years researching, writing, and teaching, primarily at Stanford Law School and the Stanford Program in Public Policy. His teaching stood out for its direct, experiential formats. For example, in a favorite course at Stanford’s International Conflict and Negotiation Center, he arranged for students to spend a weekend together, holed up in the mountains, to mock-negotiate an end to the Serbian-Kosovo conflict. The close quarters and the diversity of students—which included an Israeli and a Palestinian lawyer—made for lively engagement, with students laboring into the night. “This is the space where I come alive,” Greenberg said, “in those moments of true connection, soul to soul.” 

Greenberg also directed a research project on Martin Luther King, Jr., at Stanford’s Daniel Martin Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, and served as faculty at Stanford’s Center for African Studies and Center for Latin American Studies. Today, Greenberg focuses his life-long study of Dr. King and Gandhi as the director of the USF Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, where he explores a wide scope of issues: racial inequities, women’s issues, Myanmar, democracy crackdowns in Hong Kong, to name a few. In each case, he focuses on the transformative power of organized, disciplined nonviolence the face of injustice. His leadership in Step Up on Second, a community-based organization that provides permanent housing for homeless adults living with mental illness in California and the greater United States echoes this wide scope.

Please join Janessa Wilder in conversation with this public servant for peace and nonviolence.