A Movement of Memory: Reflections on a Summer of Jews Against ICE and the Meaning of “Never Again”

In late June, a post from an acquaintance of mine caught my eye as I scrolled through my Facebook feed. It read, “Jews: there is a plan to take action around the concentration camps at the border. Comment and I’ll fill you in.” In the comment section, they posted a link to information regarding a demonstration that was to take place on June 30 at a privately-owned ICE detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, led by a coalition of activists drawn from the broader Jewish left and from existing immigrant justice groups like Movimiento Cosecha.

The Jewish activists rallied under the call of “never again”—a promise that we (a collective we, whether implicating all or specifically Jews) could never allow anything like the Holocaust to happen again. Inherent in the phrase is a language of comparison, or rather, hypothetical comparison; the idea that something comparable to the Holocaust is possible in the present or future. The question of Holocaust comparability became a subject of public debate just weeks before the protest, when Democratic epresentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated on Instagram Live, referencing immigrant detention centers:

“The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are—they are concentration camps. And if that doesn’t bother you… I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that we should not, that ‘never again’ means something.”

Ocasio-Cortez did not refer to the Holocaust explicitly, arguably save for the words “never again”, which are usually used in relation to the Holocaust. And, she later defended her statement by sharing an article from Esquire magazine entitled “An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border”, which cited numerous historians and descriptions of concentration camps throughout history, and not just in the Holocaust. And yet, both Ocasio-Cortez’s detractors and defenders inscribed the specific memory of the Holocaust into her statement. While the former claimed her comparison degraded the memory of Jews killed in the Holocaust, the latter—among them the Jewish organizers of the Elizabeth protest—understood it as prescient call to action, especially considering the Holocaust’s beginnings in mass detention. So much was apparent in the post I saw calling on specifically Jews to protest concentration camps, and in the description on the Elizabeth protest’s
Facebook event page, where the organizers proclaimed that as Jews watching the current detention of immigrants, they would “refuse to wait and see what happens next.”

This first “never again” action in Elizabeth, in which hundreds of protesters blocked the entrance of the ICE detention center and 36 were arrested, precipitated a week of similar demonstrations across the country. One in Boston attracted over 1,000 activists. A self-described Never Again movement was thus born, with nearly 40 actions organized this summer. Some have provoked aggressive responses; on August 14, an officer at the Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island ran over a group of protesters with a truck, after which guards attacked with pepper spray. Five protesters were sent to the hospital. Watching footage of this violence, I could not help but be reminded of the video of a white supremacist ramming his car into a crowd opposing the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017, killing the activist Heather Heyer. Headlines thus seemed to repeat themselves, with white supremacist violence committed by state or by civilian indistinguishable.

Headlines indeed repeated themselves in the painful events of this summer, something unmistakable, I thought, from a Jewish perspective: the shooting at an El Paso Walmart this August, committed in the name of white supremacy and targeting Latinx immigrants, brought back my own difficult memories of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last October. This attack was likewise committed in the name of white supremacy, but targeting Jews. Both shooters were encouraged by the racist rhetoric and policies of President Trump, for whom Latinx immigrants constitute an “invasion” and Jews are “disloyal” liabilities. Though the latter designation of Trump’s was made after both shootings, the combined sentiment of both is all too apparent in the main motive of the Pittsburgh shooter: his belief that Jewish refugee aid organizations were responsible for bringing “invaders in that kill our people [white people].” I felt El Paso, then, as a reverberation of Pittsburgh.

Such grim repetition was a reminder that the Never Again movement, as a movement against white supremacist violence, is something urgent, specially in the coalition work it has done with Latinx and other immigrant communities. This is work in which we all have a stake, and which the messaging of “never again” has been particularly powerful in mobilizing Jews in solidarity with others. The movement “never again” has inspired has proven the phrase to be one that unifies, that demystifies, and despite some in-built limitations, holds potential as a great sign of hope as protests against ICE continue.

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“Never again” was a rousing call for Jews in part because of its talismanic omnipresence in American Jewish institutional discussion of the Holocaust. It is a phrase many American Jews have heard all their lives. I personally remember its constant repetition in Sunday school classes at my synagogue growing up. In refrain, especially as absorbed by a combatively (and embarrassingly so) atheist middle schooler, “never again” dissolved into banality, yet another prayer I had to memorize but failed to understand, like the Hebrew lines of scripture that I merely learned to mouth phonetically.

The Jewish institutional spaces in which “never again” is usually uttered imbue it with a self-collapsing dual meaning. In my synagogue, I was told “never again”—as stated, a phrase embedded with comparison, the implication being that something like the Holocaust could happen again, and thus that the Holocaust, at least in abstract potential, did not stand
alone—while simultaneously being told that the Holocaust actually did stand alone, incomparable, of unique historical evil. This proprietary treatment of Holocaust memory was perhaps at its most explicit in the statement the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released in response to the controversy around Ocasio-Cortez’s “concentration camp” comparison, proclaiming that the Museum “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.” This statement was promptly and strongly criticized in a letter signed by a long list of scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies in the New York Review of Books, which rightfully called the Museum’s words “fundamentally ahistorical.”

There are few ways I have seen these two conflicting messages—the “never again” insistence on the Holocaust’s reproducibility, and the counter-insistence on the Holocaust’s singularity—awkwardly synthesized. One way is to understand “never again” to specifically mean that the Holocaust, in all its minute, defining detail, could never be allowed to happen again, rather than that an event simply like the Holocaust could not be allowed to happen. This makes the bar for comparison extremely high, allowing opponents to disarm critical comparison by pointing out that such and such detail of the Holocaust is not happening now, and thus any comparison is unwarranted. At its extreme, this position amounts to a facile truism that historical events, in all their contingencies, cannot perfectly repeat themselves, and feeds into the sentiment of the Museum’s statement.

Another route of synthesis, quite complementary to the first, is to interpret “never again” as, of course, referring to the Holocaust, but only referring to it narrowly as the massacre of six million Jews (exclusive of the millions of others systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis—Roma people, LGBTQ+ people, communists, dissenters, and others). To limit the scope of “never again” further, at least in my Jewish community, “Jew” and “white Ashkenazi Jew” were often near completely elided—to the exclusion of Mizrahi Jews, Sephardic Jews, Jews with roots in the Middle East and Africa, non-white Ashkenazi Jews, the many and varying Jewish communities of color. So, in sum, “never again” became reduced to never allowing the massacre of specifically Jews who, like myself, now go through the world as white people.

Thus, in my Long Island hometown, where much of my congregation was comfortable in a state of white, usually Ashkenazi Jewishness, where our synagogue shared a street with two other synagogues not a mile apart, my generation, separated as it was from the 1940s by several decades, likely could not conceive of the Holocaust—as reduced to the killing of our specific slice of white Jewry—as possibly happening again. In my specific Jewish world (I certainly cannot speak for others), “never again” was therefore less a promise and more a statement of certainty: we were so safe! It could not happen here. A binding combination—the Holocaust was incomparable, and any event that would have been close enough to merit comparison was impossible. “Never again,” as this statement of certainty, thus became devoid of meaning, applying as it did to an inconceivable reality.

A deeper significance of “never again”, however, was salvageable yet. The action in Elizabeth and those that followed, under the Never Again banner, injected new meaning into the phrase for me, forcing it to live up to its significance as a promise. These demonstrations are drawing upon a long history of American Jewish protest politics that has tied our experience of oppression to that of others in solidarity (notably, as now, in immigrant and racial justice movements; internationalist labor organizing in the early 20^th century and Jewish radical involvement in the Black freedom struggle of the 1960s come immediately to mind).

In doing so, the organizers behind the Never Again movement are also making a conscious decision about both to what “never again” refers, and how the Holocaust should be historically understood. “Never again” in the narrow context discussed above seems only to apply to antisemitism, and at that, the specific way antisemitism manifested itself in the Final Solution of the Holocaust (that is, the attempted extermination of Jewry): hence the neutralization of the phrase’s potential comparative power. In contrast, by using the phrase in opposition to the racist brutality of the US immigration system, the movement clearly situates this system within a continuum that accounts for the Holocaust in all its layered history—including not just its extreme of attempted extermination, but also the racial ideology behind it, the political conditions of Nazism, the policing and targeting of marginalized groups preceding and concurrent to their systematic murder. The movement thus implicitly identifies the Holocaust as but one example of racialized state violence (and mass murder to be but one possible modality in a range), rather than an anomalous catastrophe of runaway antisemitism; the movement asserts, through protest, the boundaries of historical comparison to be far wider than previous iterations of “never again”—at least those iterations with which I was familiar— let on. Indeed, the movement organizers add an addendum: statements on their website do not only say “Never Again”, but also “Never Again means Never Again for anybody.”

Transposing the memory of one instance of racialized state violence upon another depends on an understanding that such violence rarely, if ever, stands historically unique, and that its manifestations are often connected. This understanding, central to the Never Again movement, was also the subtext of Ocasio-Cortez’s statement; the way she used “never again” was not just about Jews, but about the mechanics of the Holocaust more generally (and thus in any historical instance where similar mechanics were at play), and her object of comparison was not the end result of the Holocaust, but concentration camps and where they may lead. As made clear in the Esquire article she shared, concentration camps were certainly not unique to the Holocaust, nor have they always led to or been intended for racial genocide. These are simply camps that, according to Andrea Pitzer (author of a recent book on the history of concentration camps, and one of the scholars cited in the Esquire piece), involve “mass detention of civilians without trial.” Extricating ourselves, for a moment, from the question of “never again” and racialized state violence, which is the main issue here, we may make a short, incomplete list for the sake of historical demonstration, and to counter those who conflate “concentration camp” with “Nazi gas chamber”: there were concentration camps before the Holocaust (notably in colonial southern Africa, Cuba, and the Philippines, mostly utilized by Western powers to dominate subjects of empire), during the Holocaust (as we well know), and after the Holocaust (not limited to but including in colonial Kenya, the USSR, and yes, the USA). Point being, when Ocasio-Cortez said “never again” (and when the movement does, too), she said it in a way that is not exclusively in reference to the Holocaust, antisemitism, or mass extermination.

Granted, these examples of state violence through concentration camps were not all racialized per se, but as an exercise of comparison, the argument against the Holocaust’s supposed singularity stands. Where the racialized aspect is clear, the connecting threads are more visible. The Nazis learned from Jim Crow and from Western imperial endeavors; as French- Algerian activist Houria Bouteldja writes in her decolonial polemic Whites, Jews, and Us: “Before mass crimes were tested in Europe, they were first tested in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia. To dehumanize a race […] is already inscribed in the colonial genes of National Socialism. Hitler was nothing if not a good student.” And, before the current American immigrant detention system began to develop over the past few decades, there were Japanese internment camps, racist immigration quota acts, vigilante and military violence at the southern border to keep stolen land white land, Native reservation policies. In addition to insisting that “never again” need not only refer to the Holocaust, the memory embedded in the usage of the phrase by these protests also insists that our current ICE crisis did not come out of nowhere.

The deliberate reworking of “never again” away from a cultivated myopia towards a more meaningful universality—while still maintaining its particular salience in the mobilization of Jews—has thus been a triumph of solidarity. Jews, as they have before, are organizing their communities based on their own historical experience, standing in protest with activists from the immigrant communities directly affected today; in addition to Movimiento Cosecha, other Latinx, working class immigration justice groups like Mijente and Make the Road have organized actions with the Never Again movement.

Hope in this kind of solidarity was apparent on the mass debrief call I listened in on after the action in Elizabeth, which I wanted to learn more about, having not attended. Activists speaking on the call reminded listeners of the complex particularities that bound us together: that Jews and immigrants (of course) are not mutually exclusive groups, that Jews could leverage their positions and histories in this moment, and put their bodies on the line, but that the main public conversation should be focused on current crisis. In light of this last point, the whole “concentration camp” debate over terminology almost seems superfluous, a semantic disagreement over abstract form that distracts from the very real, horrifying content of what is going on in ICE detention centers. It puts Jewish history at the center of something that ultimately is not about Jewish history, and, in doing so, as one speaker on the call pointed out, allows Jewish history to be instrumentalized by the powerful to deflect criticism.

For example, Republican Representative Liz Cheney tweeted in response to Ocasio- Cortez, “Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.” Here, she preempted the Holocaust Museum’s statement—the Holocaust is raised to sacrosanct incomparability, thus what the US is doing could not be like any part of the Holocaust, and is not worthy of the urgent reproach Ocasio- Cortez provided. Cheney’s comment was demonstrative of a larger strategy of apologists for white supremacy: through selective, superficial reverence of a restricted Holocaust memory, and a broader performed love for Jews, they claim themselves not to be such apologists. Of course, this move is predicated upon their exclusive understanding of “Jews” as synonymous with “white Jews”, reflective, in part, of the way white Ashkenazi Jewry has affixed itself as the normative state of Jewishness in the Western, especially the American, mind. Considering the comparative reluctance of whites to address the legacies of Black enslavement or Western colonialism (or, in this case, to realize the horrors of ICE detention centers), it is hard to imagine them having the same sympathies for Holocaust remembrance if they did not retrospectively understand the European Jewish victims of the Holocaust (and their descendants and relatives) as white.

I do not mean at all to imply that the murder of Jews during the Holocaust should be understood as a “white on white” crime—Nazi antisemitism depended on casting Jews as a racial Other. And, to be sure, white American Jews’ whiteness and the security it affords are not absolute, but rather are a conditional historical product of the past eighty or so years: white assimilation was a complex process which deserves more space than can be given here, but in summary was built on a claim to European origin, a learned participation in anti-Black racism, the post-war boom, and a subscription to a contradictory melting-pot ideology which simultaneously downplayed Jewishness in favor of white homogeneity and celebrated a supposed Jewish distinctiveness in being able to meld into white homogeneity (in strained comparison to other, less “successful” minority groups). White Jews became white as much by their own zero-sum quest for security—whiteness and racism as an attempted defense against antisemitism—as by the always-temporary good graces of the antisemitic Christian white establishment. This arrangement by no means implied an end to antisemitism, and it placed whitened Jews in a middle position in which the whites above them could alternately emphasize (dare I say weaponize) these Jews’ whiteness or their Jewishness as needed, usually to preserve white power.

So much is apparent in this strategic white policing of Holocaust memory. The Jews whose memory these whites claim to defend (again, for them limited to white Jews) are just white enough to merit the feigned sympathy of whites, but also just not white enough, with enough of a history of persecution from whites, for the latter to flash their supposed affinity for Jews as a sign of progress. If they love these Jews, they seem to posit, how could they be racist? (Think of Trump, at a rally this summer, excoriating Somali-American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for her supposed antisemitism, while the crowd began a racist chant of “Send her back!”) If they’ve commemorated the Holocaust, why should they be criticized for failing to commemorate other histories of racial oppression for which they are responsible? The Holocaust for them, after all, as Liz Cheney implied, is incomparable. If they were to admit otherwise, they might have to account for numerous other racial crimes, and in such a way that would more greatly unsettle their position of material power (again, consider the reluctance to address the slavery and colonialism which brought such great wealth to the white world). Thus, when whites insist on the Holocaust’s incomparability in the proclaimed interest of Jews (properly “honoring their memory” or some other contrived sentimentality), they are doing so to protect themselves.

Bouteldja explains this dynamic simply and directly. Jews, she says, are used by non- Jewish whites “to solve the white world’s moral legitimacy crisis, which resulted from the Nazi genocide.” That her working context is slightly different than my own—with a particular focus on the racial guilt of white Europe, she goes on to explain how an elision of “Jewry” and “Israel” allows whites (Jewish and non-Jewish alike) to defend Israel’s colonial crimes against Palestinians on the ostensible grounds of protecting world Jewry—only affirms that such appropriation of supposedly “Jewish” interests for white ends is not an exclusively American phenomenon.

There is a way out, however. By participating in Never Again actions, purposing Holocaust memory for radical ends, Jews of all backgrounds are reclaiming the history that is ours. We proclaim that, white-assimilated as many of us may indeed be, Jews will not be used as an indulgence to absolve white supremacist sins.

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In early August, I was part of a Never Again action led by a number of New York Jewish organizations, some of them social justice activism groups, some of them spiritual congregations, a few of them both. It was one of many actions across the country organized by Jews to fall on the holiday of Tisha B’Av, a fast day which primarily commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temples in Jerusalem by Babylonian and Roman armies, but also serves as a day of mourning for the times of suffering in Jewish history: times of exile, uprooting, destruction, and the distress that follows. With these themes defining the day, it was meant to be a meaningful extension of solidarity to protest the awful conditions of exile, uprooting, and destruction fostered by US immigration policy; the idea was to mourn together in resistance.

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This particular action, as with some others preceding, targeted Amazon and its connections to ICE. As detailed in a report commissioned by Mijente, the National Immigration Project, and the Immigrant Defense Project, Amazon is a main provider of cloud storage space to the Department of Homeland Security (the parent organization of ICE), supporting a large database for immigration case management systems and biometric data, and giving ICE the tools it needs to track and detain immigrants. On this Tisha B’Av, we demanded that Amazon cut ties with ICE in our demonstration of mourning: we marched in silence to the Amazon bookstore in Manhattan, and over 1,000 people occupied the space for two hours, spilling out into the street beyond, chanting from the Jewish Book of Lamentations, reading detainee testimonies, holding a service of remembrance. As the police came and the building cleared, 44 were arrested.

As much as I was impressed and humbled by this demonstration, it also displayed what I felt to be some limitations of the Never Again movement. While most mobilized a broad idea of Jewish belonging (whether religious, cultural, ethnic, historical, familial, etc.), the Tisha B’Av actions felt closer to a faith-based organizing that, while powerful for some, did not have a great pull for me as an irreligious Jew. In fact, I felt almost out of place in an organizing space that was supposed to be for people like me.

Tisha B’Av was not one of the more frequently observed or acknowledged holidays in my Jewish community, at least to my knowledge; I admit that I did not know much about it before planning on going to the demonstration. As we stood in the Amazon bookstore, some of us (including myself) fumbling over the call-and-response prayers of the Tisha B’Av service, I heard someone behind me loudly remark that even many observant Jews—let alone those less observant—would not know these specific prayers well. I agreed, thinking to myself that this mobilizing of prayer in protest had more potential to alienate than to unify: there were not only Never Again Jews there, but also activists from Make the Road (many of them likely not Jewish), and I had brought along a non-Jewish friend.

And, again, not even all the Jews there were familiar with the ceremony; the admirable call of solidarity to organize one’s own community in common work with others, to mobilize the particularistic towards the universal, seemed in this case to be too particularistic at the expense of the universal. Was it really, I asked myself, organizing the Jewish community as such, when members of that community could not fully participate in the mode of organizing? I was not drawn to the demonstration through a religious or spiritual conviction. Nor was I necessarily drawn there because I was Jewish, or because an entire branch of my family was decimated by the Nazis (which it indeed was—my great grandfather was one of two people in his extended family to escape). In my Judaism and my activism, I rather aspire to the words of Isaac Deutscher, the great Marxist Jewish writer, in his essay “Who is a Jew?”:

“[…] what then makes a Jew? Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I, therefore, a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and the exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish tragedy as my own tragedy; because I feel the pulse of Jewish history; because I should like to do all I can to assure the real, not spurious, security and self- respect of the Jews.”

I was there at the Amazon bookstore for the first quality Deutscher identified with his Jewishness—this aspirational notion of solidarity. But this quality need not exclusively be identified with Jewishness. It is at once particular and universal, and in this case, I was compelled more by the latter; it was more the action itself than its explicit Jewishness that accounted for my attendance. In retrospect, admittedly, explicit Jewishness at this protest did involve feeling the Jewish tragedy as our own, for this was the significance of holding it on Tisha B’Av. And, again reflecting in retrospect, my presence as a Jew there did help, in a way, to help to assure the “self-respect of the Jews”: I want to reemphasize that Jews in Never Again protests are reclaiming their history from its instrumentalization by white supremacists.

Still, aside from the religious tenor of this Amazon action, the particularly Jewish grounds of organizing under the Never Again banner—that is, our collective memory of repeated exile and attempted extermination—leave me with some discomfort. Unifying the Jewish community through this painful history is to unify us, to put it lightly, in a club we don’t exactly relish membership in. No one wants or asks to be burdened with intergenerational trauma. Just to focus on my own Jewish community, in which descendants of Holocaust survivors abound, Holocaust education and commemoration (paired with a heavy, related dose of Israeli nationalism) accounted for much of the idea of Jewishness impressed upon me, and the Holocaust is normal dinner table conversation: this genocide has forced upon us a consciousness of being a collectivity of the remaining few, in Deutscher’s words, a “negative community.” He morbidly, though hyperbolically, elaborates: “It is a tragic and macabre truth that the greatest ‘redefiner’ of the Jewish identity is Hitler; and this is one of his posthumous triumphs […] I would have preferred the six million men, women, and children, to survive and Jewry to perish. It was from the ashes of six million Jews that the phoenix of Jewry has risen. What a resurrection!”

What a resurrection indeed. Reading into Deutscher beyond his specific focus on the Holocaust, I worry about the sustainability—emotional as much as purely tactical—of a revived Jewish leftism that is nurtured by recollections of destruction, Holocaust or otherwise, much as other contemporary Jewish cultural forms are. A new life given breath by the shadow of death is sure to be an uneasy one. Is nothing more apparent from the chronic anxieties of a good portion of the post-Holocaust Jewish life I encounter, presenting themselves in contorted manifestations that range from my father’s sincere belief that the destruction of the Jews à la Final Solution is inevitable, to the grotesque and bad-faith appropriations of Holocaust memory by the Israeli settler regime? Another foundation of Jewish identity, of Jewish activism, is needed in the long term. Our protests cannot always be protests of mourning. I look forward to protests of striving towards the resilient new, rather than ones that seem driven by their bringing of the nightmarish past into the nightmarish present, amplifying the grating power of both to the point of near insurmountability. If the past is not past, when can we move past it?

A discouraging outgrowth of the sort of historical comparison conducted here is a seeming flattening of time, a collapsing of difference that disarms the potential for change—what is the point of activism, we may ask, if all of history is merely a process of eternal recurrence? It is politically imperative that we resist this kind of totalizing thinking, whatever useful comparisons we make. But, as long as such comparisons can be made, and we seem like we are stuck in a horrific historical replay loop, we must do all we can to make the comparisons apparent; the first step in escaping this loop of our own creation is to acknowledge its existence. This first step is what the Never Again movement is taking: right now, especially with Jewish memory damagingly mishandled, Jewish protest based on memory may be all we have, and precisely what we need.

And, the movement is not only a negative one. However much it is fueled by the painful past, and however much this fuel deserves some scrutiny, there is an unmistakable aura of hope, a constructive drive towards creation anew, surrounding this Jewish protest. As police brought each of the arrested protesters out of the Amazon bookstore, we who had been driven to the sidewalk sang at the top of our lungs: “We will build this world with love!” In this new, possible world we can build, Never Again could not be just an aspiration, as it may be now. It could yet be a statement of certainty after all.