16 | SEPTEMBER 3 • 2020 

PHOTO COURTESY OF BECCA LUBOW

is against ICE detention centers 
and commends Ocasio-Cortez 
for bringing light to the issue on 
a national scale, she expressed 
caution when using terms like 
“
concentration camps,
” which 
are tied to a specific injustice. In 
her Holocaust Memory class, she 
starts the semester by asking the 
students for Holocaust compar-
isons.
“The two that always come up 
are abortions and eating meat, 
and I ask other people in the 
class, ‘
Are those legitimate and 
can you tell me why not?’
 For 
those that disagree, it’
s really 
hard to describe why it’
s wrong,
” 
Pollin-Galay said.
According to Pollin-Galay, 
Ocasio-Cortez’
s comparison fal-
ters when it refuses to acknowl-
edge the memory of Holocaust 
survivors.
“With people’
s memories, 
not just of the Holocaust, but 
of Holocaust denialism and 
Holocaust trivialization, I think 
that the survivor community 
and their families feel fatigued 
by constant comparisons,” 
Pollin-Galay said.
Caron felt similarly to Pollin-
Galay about how memory and 
political rhetoric can distort a 
word’
s original broader meet-
ing. As an AIDS scholar, Caron 
researches Holocaust compar-
isons in AIDS activism in the 
1980s and ’
90s. As in instances 
where French writer and AIDS 
victim Hervé Guibert com-
pared his body to an Auschwitz 
prisoner, Caron said activists, 
including organizations like 
Never Again Action, use these 
metaphors to provoke discus-
sion.
“When activists themselves 
take on [a war or Holocaust] 
metaphor, then the meaning 
changes, and these metaphors 
were often used by AIDS activ-
ists in order to convince people 

of the magnitude and the injus-
tice of the AIDS epidemic and 
… also to unite the communi-
ty,” Caron said. “The meaning 
changes according to who uses 
the metaphor.”

THE MAIN FOCUS?
Seeing this debate overwhelm 
the mainstream media cycle, 
Adlerstein said she thought the 
main focus of the debate — the 
detention centers themselves — 
was being obscured.
“What’
s happening now is 
incredibly cruel and wrong. We 
can spend our days arguing what 
to call these detention centers or 
we can say what’
s happening now 
is enough to shut them down,
” 
Adlerstein said.
In response, Adlerstein did 
what most modern activists do 
to connect with other activists — 
she took to Facebook. Recalling 
her experiences as a young Jew 
whose grandfather fled Nazi 
persecution, she made a post on 
June 24, 2019 calling on Jews to 
join the immigrant rights move-
ment as allies and shut down 
detention centers.
Adlerstein said she saw four or 
five organizers say they were in. 
That night, Adlerstein and the 
other organizers were on a group 
call, and the following night, 
30 more activists joined. With 
those conversations, Never Again 
Action was formed.
Becca Lubow, an organiz-

er with leftist Jewish group 
IfNotNow, was part of the first 
Never Again Action protests 
during the summer of 2019. 
On June 30, hundreds of Jewish 
protesters blocked the entrances 
to the ICE detention center in 
Elizabeth, New Jersey. Lubow, 
one of the 36 Jewish protesters 
who were arrested at the demon-
stration, said it was an event she 
will never forget. She described 
activists from all over the coun-
try traveling to New Jersey to 
take part in the action.
At the gates of the detention 
center, Lubow remembers sing-
ing a song that her friend put 
to music based on a poem his 
grandfather wrote during the 
Holocaust. The poem reads “
Oh 
my friends, freedom as I see it, is 
the most beautiful delicate rose.
”
“I watched one of the immi-
grant leaders cry and she said, 
‘
I’
ve always felt really alone doing 
this work and I don’
t feel alone 
right now,
’
” Lubow said.
A moment that stood out to 
Lubow was when the protesters 
said the Mourner’
s Kaddish for 
those who had died while in ICE 
custody.
“I had grown up saying it in 
synagogue and it never felt so 
raw and powerful to me,
” Lubow 
said.
Thirty to 40 additional actions 
were staged that summer across 
the country by Never Again 
Action and Cosecha. Originally, 

Adlerstein expected the move-
ment to dissolve after the 
summer was over. But after con-
versations with undocumented 
organizers, she said their work 
as allies for the immigrant rights 
movement is far from over, espe-
cially given the predictions from 
organizations like the American 
Civil Liberties Union that 
detained migrants are “
sitting 
ducks” for the coronavirus.
Over the past few months, 
Never Again Action and Cosecha 
have been organizing car rallies, 
where demonstrators surround 
detention centers in their cars to 
maintain social distancing guide-
lines and protest the centers.
Lubow said these rallies are 
necessary to keep up past cam-
paigns while making sure they 
aren’
t putting protestors at risk. 
“Releasing people has always 
been urgent, but now with coro-
navirus, there’
s potential for these 
camps to become death camps. 
There’
s no way for people inside 
to protect themselves from coro-
navirus. There’
s no way for them 
to social distance,
” Lubow said.
As Never Again Action and 
Cosecha continue to work 
together to support undocu-
mented communities that are 
disproportionally affected by 
coronavirus, organizers like 
Adlerstein and Lubow stress 
Never Again Action would not 
have been possible without 
undocumented activists fighting 
for decades to protect immi-
grants’
 rights. As Adlerstein 
works from her home in Maine 
for Never Again Action as one 
of its 10 full-time staffers, she 
said Jews need to be constantly 
standing up for undocumented 
rights.
“We really need to be in 
this fight for the long haul,
” 
Adlerstein said. “We need mil-
lions of people to understand the 
problem.
” 

During COVID-19, some members of 
Never Again Action continued their 
ICE protests from cars.

Jews in the D

continued from page 14

