July 24, 2019

Never Forgetting and Always Fighting: Jewish Activists Rise Up Against Locking Away Migrant Kids

“We’ve seen this before.”

Protestors assembled by a majority-Jewish group called Never Again Action make their way to Independence Mall on July 4, 2019, in Philadelphia.Jacqueline Larma/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Welcome to Recharge, a weekly newsletter full of stories that will energize your inner hellraiser. See more editions and sign up here.

Never again. That’s the two-word message these young Jewish activists were told growing up. And that’s why they’re working to stop the targeting and imprisonment of migrant kids in US detention camps.

Only a month old, the Never Again Action movement has launched at least seven protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement nationwide, including this week in Washington, DC.

The organization is growing at a dizzying speed, said Evan Feldberg-Bannatyne, a 21-year-old student at Earlham College in Indiana, who runs a team that handles the group’s sponsorships, budgeting, and reimbursements.

“This is really how I practice my Judaism—through social justice,” he said.

Brandon Mond, 25, said young Jews of conscience have no other choice than to stand up for persecuted people.

“This is authoritarianism—we’ve seen this before,” Mond told BuzzFeed News. “This is a state agency that’s able to just roll around the streets and abduct people at random. My whole life I’ve been told these stories by my community that say that’s a bad sign, so those alarms are going off in my head.” 

Other groups are joining the cause. We reported recently on Japanese American detention camp survivors rallying outside an Oklahoma base that is scheduled to become a child detention camp. On Saturday, Buddhist priests and Native Americans joined them in protest.

Two days earlier, 70 Catholic nuns and parishioners were arrested in Congress in a protest against the detention centers. (BuzzFeed News)

Here are more Recharge stories to get you through the week:

  • The iceman cometh. The white gas station attendant hissed at the Latina customers, saying they should “go back” to the country they came from and that “ICE will come.” The convenience store owner fired the clerk after a video of the exchange went viral and protesters converged on the Naperville, Illinois, gas station. “We do not tolerate any behavior that is insensitive to our valued customers,” the company said. “Bucky’s Convenience Stores is a very diverse and inclusive company that believes in treating all individuals with the utmost respect.” (BuzzFeed News)
  • Individual action. James Neal lives by a motto: One person cannot change the world, but one person can change the life of one person. In 2016, he donated a kidney to save one person. In March, in an operation in Pittsburgh, he donated part of his liver to save a stricken stranger, Margaret Boden, who wanted to see her daughter get married. Thanks to Neal, whose liver regenerated to normal size after three months of recuperation, she did. (CBS News)
  • Books for change. An independent bookstore and social workers have joined forces to get books quickly in the hands of teens in a juvenile detention center in the Bronx. The teens are asking for titles like Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The books are a pathway to serious conversations about teens’ lives—and can lower recidivism rates, says Mary Beth Zeman, author of Tales of a Jailhouse Librarian. “If a bookstore can partner [with a juvenile justice organization], that’s nothing but beneficial,” Zeman says. (The City)
  • “One tiny bee at a time.” How can one person make a difference? For Brenna Maloney, struck by the decline of insect species, the answer is measured in bees. The Washington, DC–area beekeeper encourages others to join her pursuit, which she began on Mother’s Day. “If I’m lucky, my 10,000 bees will become a colony of 60,000 by summer’s end,” she wrote in an essay. “Maybe I can’t change the whole world, but I can take charge of my own backyard.” (Washington Post)

I’ll leave you with this stunning image from Capitol Reef National Park in south-central Utah via the Interior Department’s Twitter account. Have a great week ahead!

More Mother Jones reporting on Recharge

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate