Published in the Spring 2026 issue of Leviathan

I was five years old when my parents moved our family from Israel to America. The night before we left, my entire extended family gathered at my grandmother’s house for a farewell dinner. We ate her food, talked for hours, and when it was time to leave, I asked her if she would come visit us every week. I didn’t understand yet that she couldn’t. When I finally understood what goodbye meant, I just started crying. 

My parents moved our family of five across the globe for the same reason parents do anything: for the hope of improving the lives of their children. After we landed in America, we stayed in a hotel for weeks. My brother and I would play what we understood football to be (in our attempts to be American) while my parents would go and spend every day looking for a house for us to settle down in. I started the first grade without speaking a word of English and needed constant help from my teachers, my siblings, and most of all, my incredible mother.

This is a Jewish story. For thousands of years the generational sacrifice of our ancestors allowed us to continue to exist and live the lives we are blessed with today. We live with these stories every day, using them as fuel and motivation to better ourselves and our communities. Just my father’s side of the family can be traced back to their initial diaspora to Spain, from there they were exiled to Germany, Hungary, to end up in Israel and now the United States. Whether by choice or by force, Jews have existed as a migratory people for thousands of years. Thus, who better to stand up for current immigrants than our communities.  The stereotypical overprotective Jewish mother is known to be overbearing with often infantilizing love. But Jewish love also has a different quality: an unrelenting effort to always do whatever it takes to improve the lives of their loved ones. 

When I see the immigrants in our country today, I recognize that love. Behind every statistic is a parent who made the same calculation my parents made. On the 26th of January, 2025, days before Donald Trump retook the office of the presidency, about 6.4% of people in ICE detention had no criminal record. One year later, on January 25, 2026, according to official government data, over 43% of all ICE detentions were placed onto people with zero prior criminal record or pending charges [1]. This is not a war on dangerous criminals, this is a war on people. As the President spewed lies that immigrants were eating the dogs and cats of their neighbors, it is hard for me as a Jew to not see echoes of the blood libel of old, in which Jews were dehumanized and defamed in order to justify hate. 

There is a difference between enforcing the law and building a culture of fear and militantly targeting entire groups of people. As the danger of raids and violence grows for our immigrant communities across America, we lose something deeper than political unity; a part of the grand vision that drew so many Jews to this country throughout the centuries. 

Jewish history should not only teach us to improve our own selves, but to look outward and spread good and justice across our communities and beyond. We were also once strangers to this land, our identity being passed down from generation to generation through stories like my grandmothers’ dinner table the night before leaving everything I knew behind. Our people know what it is like to move towards something greater and hope we are respected and allowed to exist.

Works Cited:

1. Craft, Will, and Andrew Witherspoon. “By the Numbers: The
Latest Ice and CBP Data on Arrests, Detentions and Deportations in
the US.” The Guardian, April 13, 2026.