The Jewish stake in standing up for immigrants

Have they come to your town yet? They have to mine.

The deportation troops grabbed six people off Montclair streets a couple of weeks ago and carried them off to their big immigrant detention center in Newark. We learned that two of those taken were kitchen workers in a popular local restaurant.

My wife and I were among the members from three local synagogues who came out to protest. I joined a friend in reciting a poem written by Rabbi Simkha Weintraub of the human rights group T’ruah.

The arrests in my town weren’t a one-off. The academic group Deportation Project has gathered information it obtained from federal sources that showed seizures by ICE, which dropped somewhat around the country after the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and others by DHS agents last winter, are expanding and reaching all-time highs now. In New Jersey, apprehensions have recently doubled.

This new data also demonstrated conclusively that Trump’s promise that his vastly expanded immigration force would be targeting hardened criminals has been a sham. In July, the share of detainees with a past violent criminal conviction was less than 4 percent. People with no criminal charges, like the two local restaurant workers, make up the vast majority of those grabbed. Those targeted included many people married to U.S. citizens, those who entered the country legally and were pursuing asylum claims and others who until quite recently were living and working here under the national program of temporary protected status for those whose native countries were suffering from environmental disasters and armed conflicts.

Immigrant advocates in Montclair have concluded from the limited information available that Macedonia Maldonado and Jero Jimenez Garcia, the restaurant employees grabbed on their way to work, were taken in a racially profiled sweep.

Jewish Americans have stood up in large numbers to support our neighbors kidnapped by ICE. A hundred rabbis joined protests in Minneapolis after the violent assaults by federal agents there. The New Jersey chapter of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has been advocating for state legislation to protect immigrant rights, citing our religious tradition as far back as the book of Leviticus: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Standing up for immigrants is also an inseparable part of our cultural DNA. If there were a single American Jewish national poet, it would undoubtedly be Emma Lazarus, who wrote the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” These lines are still etched into the Statue of Liberty’s base. They were written in 1883, when my maternal great-grandparents joined the first big wave of Jews coming here to escape the Russian Empire’s pogroms, as so many others of that era did. Few know that Lazarus, who was born into a well-off New York City family, became one of the first people to volunteer for the then newly formed Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (now HIAS), which continues to provide assistance for refugee resettlement here and in many other parts of the world.

The other side of the coin of our collective immigration saga, spoken about less often, was the ugly battles we were forced into against immigration restrictionists. A post-World War I national recession became one of the catalysts to a broad effort to cut off immigration that produced the heavily restrictionist Immigration Act of 1924 (“Johnson-Reed Act,” “National Origins Act”). It was explicitly racist to an unprecedented degree against Chinese and Japanese people, and its authors also declared their intent to handicap further immigration from Italians and Jews under the idea of ending “pollution of the national (white) gene pool” from allegedly “inferior stock.” The resulting very small discriminatory quotas were justified by the heavily unscientific theory that called itself “scientific racism.” This approach, and the legislation, were duly praised a few years later by none other than Adolf Hitler, and Jewish immigration here was severely cut back for almost the whole of the three decades that included the rise of fascism in Europe.

The damage was aggravated by antisemitic bureaucrats in the State Department like Breckinridge Long. Long circulated an infamous memo in June 1940, in which he said, “We can delay and stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would […] postpone the granting of visas.” According to the 1994 PBS documentary “America and the Holocaust,” some 190,000 people who might have been spared the Nazi atrocities were stopped from coming here by this policy alone.

Most Americans who draw our ideas from the real world understand immigration as a natural byproduct of large events, like the famine in the land of Canaan that the book of Genesis says drove our Hebrew ancestors to take refuge in Egypt in ancient times. We embrace a realistic view of our immigrant neighbors, and we feel the need for compassion. However, the currently empowered minority that propounds the mythology of white Christian racial purity sees only conspiracy, with Jews playing the role of puppet masters, somehow controlling the reality. They defame us as “plotters” aiming to alter the demographics of our home countries by “replacing” white Christians in Europe and the U.S. with members of other racial and religious groups. This was the case very explicitly nine years ago, when neo-Nazis and Klansmen held their torchlight march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and screamed, “Jews will not replace us.” And again, when the delusional Robert Bowers murdered 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, posting on his social media, “HIAS likes to bring invaders to kill our people,” using Trump’s preferred label for immigrants.

Once we understand this toxic dynamic of Jew-hatred mixed with anti-immigrant hysteria, we will not be mystified by some of its manifestations. In another recent op-ed in this paper, I wrote about a newly revealed Department of Homeland Security secret investigation that is attempting to criminalize anti-ICE protests in Minnesota. Not coincidentally, it was named “Operation Puppet Master.”

Despite some setbacks and loss of public support, the Trump administration’s crusade against immigrants is still growing and harming hundreds of thousands of people. It’s beyond the scope of this column to discuss the details of the most horrendous aspects of this war. I would venture to say that the observations of Adam Serwer, who assessed the tactics of the first Trump term in a well-known essay in the Atlantic, published in 2018, are being born out: The cruelty is the point.

There are a number of ways in which we can assist immigrants and effectively protest the massive seizure and deportation agenda we are seeing. My shul’s tikkun olam committee is initiating training for members in how those of us who are citizens can accompany immigrants and asylum seekers to hearings for due process in their cases. Other folks have been collecting mutual aid, like grocery store coupons, to support immigrant families who have been forced to carry on without the breadwinners who are now in detention.

Rabbi Anne Laurent of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, who has been leading monthly protest services with some fellow rabbis at the overcrowded and disgusting Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, put the need for Jewish action particularly eloquently in a recent interview. “This is the ethical foundation of Judaism. …Do I stay safe and not risk anything, cultivate my little garden, or do I want to put into practice what our tradition asks us to do? This is a moment for action. The soul of Judaism is justice and kindness and looking after the stranger …”

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.

Opinion