The Necessity of Solidarity

My Jewish faith commands that I show up for the Haitian community.

My Jewish soul compels me to speak up against the violent rhetoric targeting the Haitian community.

And my Jewish history demands that I call this what it is - a blood libel.

In the aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting (a mass shooting motivated by hatred of Jews and Jewish efforts to support immigrants) Ilana Kaufman, the CEO of the Jews of Color Initiative, was interview on NPR about the intersection of antisemitism and white supremacy. I’ve oft quoted this, and I continually come back to her words as they ground and guide me. She had this to say:

“I think the thing that we need to remember is that white nationalism is designed to marginalize all of us. And so the most important strategy we can develop is to come together to develop friendships and trust and relationships so that when we need each other as neighbors and as friends, and when the white supremacists come knocking on our doors or when they come marching down our streets, that we know each one of us is going to come out of our houses to support the other, that we will not question who needs this kind of advocacy, but it becomes part of our culture as a nation and as a people. That is our most important strategy right now.”

My Jewish community, we need to come out of our houses to support our Haitian friends and neighbors, as well as the folks in the Haitian community we will never meet.

As Jews, there is one thing we are commanded to do more than anything else: welcome the stranger. Mentioned no fewer than 36 times in the Torah, we are exhorted to not just welcome but to embrace the stranger for reasons that are deeply personal. Because we ourselves were strangers in Egypt. Because we ourselves have a history of being targeted by hate and oppression, and we are required to draw on that experience to guide our actions now.

When you are trained as a community organizer, you are challenged to investigate your “why”. My training culminated in being asked three times over “why are you here”, challenging me to dig a little deeper each time into why I was showing up for the work of change. My organizing mentor wanted me to push past the external reasons (“I want to help others”) and figure out my deep down internal reasons for doing this work. Basically, what my skin is in this game.

The Jewish community has skin in this game. When we see Haitians and other immigrant communities vilified, targeted, othered, harassed, and abused - we know what this is. The history of being oppressed is baked into our communal experience. It’s handed down through the intergenerational trauma that informs how we see the world now. When we see other communities being targeted we have very personal reasons to speak up and out, because we have been on the receiving end throughout our history. And because the Torah, the foundation of who we are as a people, demands that of us.

Last night my husband and I saw the play Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard. To say it was powerful would be an understatement. I will be thinking about this play for a long time and would really recommend seeing it if you are able. It is absolutely a Holocaust story but also a deeply personal look at family relationships under the strain of a changing and increasingly oppressive society. It is about trauma and loss and the destruction of a vibrant community at the hands of the Nazis and their enablers. It is about what happens to the survivors, and the trauma that they carry.

I think it is also a call to action.

In the play we see the impact of political change on the big, boisterous, complicated family that is loosely based on Tom Stoppard’s own. We see the decision-making points for them (should we stay or should we leave?) and also hear about the role of the non-Jewish population of Vienna in the horrors that ensued. We leave the play with tears in our eyes for all that was lost, and carry the disbelief that such a thing could ever happen.

But we as Jews know very well what can happen, and I think we have a particular mandate to ensure that it never does again. For us or anyone else. To be clear, Trump and Vance’s ongoing lies about the Haitian community are a blood libel. A disgusting racist lie that serves no purpose but to maintain power and control by eliciting hate and fear.

That blood libel - we of all people know how this ends. And we of all people must speak out about it, in as full throated a way as we do about the rising antisemitism in this country. Because it is the right thing to do and it is what we are commanded to do. But also because we have skin in this game. Ultimately we cannot address hate targeting any of us unless we call out the hate that impacts all of us. Antisemitism never exists in a vacuum, it lives and flourishes in an environment where racism and misogyny and other forms of hate go unchecked.

I will keep shouting this from the rooftops - our safety is in our solidarity. To paraphrase Ilana Kaufman I will come out of my house to support the Haitian community. I will work to build a culture where we build trust and relationships and show up for each other. Because I truly believe that the only way forward is together.