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While participating in this fel-
lowship, Adlerstein learned about 
the long history of immigrant 
rights organizing and was wel-
comed into what she describes 
as a family of organizers, both 
undocumented and not.
“The power the undocument-
ed community has is the fact that 
our entire economy depends on 
immigrant workers, and we don’
t 
have to ask politicians nicely 
because they’
re not going to do 
anything,
” Adlerstein said.
After she completed the fel-
lowship, Adlerstein moved to 
Grand Rapids in April 2018 to 
help organize the local Cosecha 
branch’
s second May Day strike. 
Adlerstein and Cosecha organiz-
er Gema Lowe met during the 
weeks leading up to the strike.
“In Cosecha, we have 14 
principles and one of them is 
that it’
s not a job; it’
s a passion,
” 
said Lowe, who’
s lived in Grand 
Rapids since 1991 after immi-
grating from Mexico to join her 
family.
Adlerstein and Lowe worked 
together on a number of proj-
ects during her years in Grand 
Rapids, including their push 
to end ICE’
s contracts with the 
Kent County Sheriff’
s Office. If 
an individual was arrested on a 
non-immigration charge, ICE 
could previously issue a detain-
er and ask the jail to hold the 
accused for up to three days past 
their release date until ICE offi-
cers could begin their case.
After protests at the Kent 
County Board of Commissioners’
 
meetings and sites of detainment, 
the Sheriff’
s Office changed their 
policy and now requires a war-
rant for ICE to hold those arrest-
ed past their release date.

A CONTROVERSIAL COMPARISON
While Adlerstein was working 
with Lowe to make these chang-
es in Grand Rapids, the words 

“Never Again” and her conver-
sations with her mother came 
to the front of her mind when 
Democratic Rep. Alexandria 
Ocasio-Cortez of New York first 
used the words “concentration 
camps” on June 18, 2019, to 
describe ICE detention centers 
on Twitter. In so doing, Rep. 
Ocasio-Cortez sparked a fiery 
nationwide debate — and galva-
nized leftist Jewish activists like 
Adlerstein, who saw the compar-
ison as powerful and apt.
“The fact that people can be 
put in detention centers indef-
initely with no due process at 
all is incredibly terrifying, and 
the slowly creeping level of 
dehumanization and cruelty is 
becoming so normal … When 
is 100 deaths going to turn into 
1,000 going to turn into 10,000?” 
Adlerstein asked.
However, many scholars and 
Jewish organizations found and 
continue to see Ocasio-Cortez’
s 
words as not only inaccurate but 
insensitive and diminishing to 
the experiences of the victims 

and survivors of the Holocaust. 
In a press release from June 
2019, also signed by the heads of 
five other Holocaust Memorial 
organizations, the Holocaust 
Memorial Center in Farmington 
Hills wrote that the term should 
not be used in a partisan discus-
sion.
“The Nazi regime targeted 
Europe’
s Jews for murder. It cre-
ated a vast forced labor and camp 
system to exploit Jewish labor 
before murdering them. Ocasio-
Cortez’
s inaccurate reference 
diminishes the inexpressible hor-
ror suffered at the hands of Adolf 
Hitler, the Nazi regime and col-
laborators, and wrongly equates 
current U.S. immigration policy 
with the systematic murder of 6 
million Jews and the persecution 
of millions of others,
” the center’
s 
release read. 
The center declined the JN’
s 
requests for an interview for this 
story, but Rabbi Eli Mayerfield, 
its CEO, sent an updated state-
ment on the movement. “The 
Holocaust Memorial Center 

firmly believes all people should 
be treated humanely with 
inherent dignity and provided 
the protection of fundamental 
human rights. At the same time, 
it is completely inappropriate and 
offensive for Never Again Action 
to use the term ‘
concentration 
camp’
 as they are,
” Mayerfield 
said in the statement.
“The disgraceful phenomenon 
of Holocaust analogies is danger-
ous and should never be used for 
political gain or leverage. This 
politicization of the Holocaust 
must stop.
”
Even Sen. Bernie Sanders 
(I-Vt.), the Jewish Democratic 
Socialist and former presidential 
candidate who has been a huge 
rallying force for the Jewish left, 
told CNN in 2019 he doesn’
t use 
“that terminology.
”
Judaic Studies scholars such 
as Hannah Pollin-Galay and 
David Caron from the University 
of Michigan see the debate as a 
matter of cultural memory and 
how words change over time. 
While Pollin-Galay said she 

Members of the group Never Again Action 
have been arrested in protests against 
immigrant detention policies.

GILI GETZ/JTA

Jews in the D

