Megan Jelinger/Sipa via AP Images
Demonstrator holds a placard during protest in San Ysidro (San Diego) California, July 2019
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this edited excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: Is it not the false equivalency between how we think of attacks on Jews from the right and left that is really troubling today?
Sophie Ellman-Golan: The first troubling thing is this rise of white nationalism and anti-Semitism and the ways that both have been completely embraced by the Republican Party, overall. But I agree that the discourse that we see around anti-Semitism is particularly troubling because of a false equivalence between violent acts of anti-Semitism, violence that comes from manifestos that are written about Jews trying to replace a white population versus an anti-Semitic cartoon or a comment that has to do with the criticism of the state of Israel or tweeting Tupac lyrics. And we just have to be able to say that these things are not the same. We have to be able to say that inciting murder is not the same as tweeting Tupac lyrics.
Heffner: How do you differentiate between the comments of someone like Congressman Steve King of Iowa and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota?
Ellman-Golan: I would say that probably the primary difference is that Steve King is pretty adjacent to Nazis and that Representative Ilhan Omar is not. Steve King has gone on trips to meet with people who helped found or are inheritors of publications that were founded by Nazis. He has come pretty close to saying the 14 words that white supremacists [use to] talk about securing a future for white children.It’s pretty clear what he stands for. So one of the primary distinctions is that for Steve King white nationalism, above all, is what he stands for and what he promotes. Anti-Semitism is a facet of that.
Representative Omar, who is undeniably a progressive champion right now, she [criticizes] Israel. She said things that she probably could have raised differently. We can argue, you know, we can argue until the cows come home about whether something was or was not anti-Semitic. It’s important to note that while a large percentage of the Jewish community felt troubled by it, that’s worth mentioning, which is why she apologized. With Representative Omar, we’re also witnessing that attacks on her come not just from people who are genuinely concerned about anti-Semitism, but, by and large, from people who are deeply concerned about the fact that a black Muslim woman who wears a hijab is in Congress and dares to be any of those things.
Heffner: There has been this [growing] disconnect between the community, that’s very small in this country, of Jews who put Israel’s security first and the larger majority of American Jews who put American Jews’ security first.
Ellman-Golan: Polling shows pretty clearly that Israel is not even close to the top issue that American Jews vote on. Predominantly it’s been health care and the economy and lately gun violence is up there pretty high, too. So these are the issues that Jews, shockingly like [the rest of] Americans, care about and are voting about and are taking action on. So I’d say all of that to say that it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the Jewish community to even think that Israel is a priority for us. It’s also anti-Semitic to constantly assume that Jews care the most about Israel. That stems from, of course, deep anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish loyalty, about this idea of a global Jewish cabal that cares more about another country than the country they reside in.
Heffner: You are also really drawing the public’s attention to a crisis in these detention centers. Some including Representative Ocasio-Cortez have compared the detention centers to concentration camps.
Ellman-Golan: We’ve been taking action because we simply see that the conditions are concentration camps. Representative Ocasio Cortez was not the first person to say that. Many people said it beforehand. Immigrant rights groups have been doing this organizing for a long time. Movimiento Cosecha has been doing this organizing since the Obama Administration, where they stepped up and spoke out against the 3 million deportations we saw during that era as well.
What’s happening right now is pretty blatantly: people deprived of food, deprived of water, deprived of healthcare, deprived of sanitary products. I mean, just the blatant abuse from sexual violence to emotional and physical abuse is beyond belief. That there are people who would rather argue about what words we use, instead of argu[ing] about how we can abolish these atrocities is shocking to me. It’s a clear attempt to deflect away from talking about the conditions. We should be using the strongest possible words to describe what’s happening right now. I do know concentration camps is a strong term to use and we use it intentionally because we should be using strong language to describe the horrors that are happening on our southern border and at ICE detention centers around the country.
Heffner: We’re talking about two subsets: the current crisis on the border escaping violence or economic hardship from central Latin American countries; and then we’re talking about the historically problematic immigration law where there are people who’ve been here for 20 years, 10 years, five years, who’ve demonstrated their contributions to this country and we want to disown them.
Ellman-Golan: The perfect answer to that is actually the policy that Cosecha is pushing for, which is they called the dignity plan or Dignity 2020. And what that calls for is an immediate end to detention and end to deportation and papers for the 11 million undocumented people living in this country.
Heffner: You even acknowledged that this plan is radical in some sense, but it’s departing from what has been common law in this country for some time.
Ellman-Golan: Look, when we have particularly the climate crisis that is just completely changing the way that people can even live on this earth, forcing migration. When we have mass violence that is caused in large part by American foreign policy or certainly exacerbated by it—just simply the conditions are changing. We are not living in the same world that we were 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 100 years ago, just in terms of what is livable land. So I don’t know if it’s feasible to act as if we can have the same policies when the land that people can physically live on is literally shrinking.
Heffner: Does support for ICE intersect with white nationalism?
Ellman-Golan: Yes: ICE right now is out a white nationalist project. ICE needs to be abolished because the constant terror that the 11 million undocumented people in this country are living under with this constant fear of ICE raids of ICE detention of ICE separating their families and abusing people and tearing them apart. We’ve seen this in part also because we’ve seen Latinx citizens of this country who’ve actually been detained by ICE. People who have Latinx last names are being denied passports right now or forced to jump through extra hoops to prove their citizenship. It’s clearly race-based.
Heffner: When you have such pernicious rhetoric emanating from the office that oversees ICE and you see examples of ICE officers who are justifying their behavior by virtue of Trumpian rhetoric. Then the description you offer of a white nationalist project, I mean it’s a slippery slope and, I see you find the current conditions intolerable and you see them as potentially leading to extremism.
Ellman-Golan: The end goal of white nationalism or, perhaps, the end result of white nationalism is inevitably mass slaughter and mass violence or mass expulsion, right? Because the idea of a white ethno-state requires that people who don’t fit within those parameters are not there. And how are we going to be gone? We’re either going to be forcibly expelled or we’re going to be slaughtered. And I truly don’t mean to fear monger because I think that that’s not productive either. But I’m just talking about the logical conclusion of what we’re seeing from both a policy standpoint and from the rise of far right movements that are cozying up closer and closer to elected officials.
Heffner: How has your mobilization, the protest that you’ve led and driven outside of ICE facilities, how can that lead to bettering the conditions there? In the event that there is a Democratic president in 2021, how can your mobilization lead to a further action?
Ellman-Golan: What Never Again Action is doing right now is what we wish we as Jews wish that non-Jews in Germany had done in 1938, 1939 and onward, which is essentially to do everything we can to stop this deportation and detention machine. That means disrupting the ability of DHS officers and agents to go to work and continue engaging in basic human rights abuses every day. A short-term plan is abolishing ICE and a longer-term plan involves again, papers for people who are living in this country. But an end to these detention centers and an end to deportations is absolutely necessary. This entire idea of the criminal, dangerous immigrant is completely inflated, just even if you look at the numbers of who engages in violent crime in this country.
When we look at who poses a violent mortal threat to communities in this country, it’s [the] growing white nationalist groups that actually are getting less and less attention. What we’ve seen from history is that there will always be people who will find reasons to justify not doing the basic humane things that we know we must do. And that begins with dehumanizing the people who we know we have to help or at least extend a basic sense of dignity to. We saw that back in, in the 1930s and 1940s, and we’re seeing it now.
