When immigration policies turn violent and inhumane, how do we decide when to show up, who we stand beside, and what we’re willing to risk when the stakes feel both immediate and overwhelming?
This week, Identity/Crisis follows that moral question out of the beit midrash and into the street. Yehuda Kurtzer passes the mic to Identity/Crisis producer, Tessa Zitter as she attends a Jews against ICE rally in Washington, DC. Through her experience at the protest and interviews with the organizers and attendees, including Executive Director of T’ruah Jill Jacobs, former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, and Hartman colleague Annie Beyer-Chafets, she explores what it means to bring Jewish moral language into the public square.
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A full transcript of this episode is available below.
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For more on the day of learning: In the Face of Cruelty, Jewish Responsibilities to Neighbors and Strangers, click here.
To listen to America Betrays the Stranger, click here.
Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartmann Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life today. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording this introduction on Friday, February 20th, 2026.
It’s inevitable in a weekly podcast that some episodes land much more powerfully than others. We see, often, that when we’re really pegged to the news cycle, amidst a horrific war or a domestic crisis that our shows do better. I think this is just because the urgency of the issues creates a different relationship to the listener who may be coming in need of something more than entertainment.
I’ve heard from enough people over the years that, at times, this podcast, or For Heaven’s Sake, can serve a pastoral role. It can be calming or agitating in ways that feel more interactive than a one-way medium normally should. This knowledge has helped me reconcile myself to this medium. Because I never went into this line of work to become a media personality, and I thought I had left behind my radio DJing days when I graduated from college. This work, these kinds of podcasts make me feel like an educator.
Our podcast from two weeks ago, “America Betrays The Stranger,” was one of those episodes that landed differently. We have some scientific ways of measuring this, but I can usually tell from the text messages, the reposts, and from what I’m told by friends and colleagues. It felt differently recording it. I was in Jerusalem at the time and I was sleep deprived. I wrote it from a place of anger and sadness and desperation. And it was much more direct and candid than I usually am. It was an effort to speak a language of moral truth, which is a departure for a podcast that tries to give airtime to complicated ideas, to let them breathe and to create conversations about them.
Moral truth. This is a hard idea in pluralistic society. I really believe in moral conviction, in trying to speak and lead from a place of well-thought-out and serious commitments. And sometimes I believe in moral clarity, which is the willingness to believe that you’ve come really close to fully, clearly articulating an ethical position. But to speak in the language of moral truth is to go one step further. It’s to claim to speak a language of certainty even on issues that are so clearly publicly contested.
I generally fear such claims, one of the reasons I prefer the rabbi to the prophet. I identify with thinkers like Isaiah Berlin, who asks us to build bridges rather than to stand on ledges, and Yitz Greenberg who argued that one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that we may make no absolute truth claims anymore about anything because the Nazis represented absolutism and they showed us how absolutism can lead to destruction and dehumanization.
But this episode pushed us into moral truth territory. It was complicated to write and it may have been different—for some of you, maybe difficult to hear. You know, you’re living in perilous times when you find yourself speaking differently than you ever anticipated.
Another good indicator that this podcast landed differently for people was in the mail. I didn’t hear a lot of disagreements to my core claim, that it was a morally clear obligation for us as Jewish Americans to stand up against what’s been happening, not only in Minnesota, but all over the country, in these often illegal, violent, unconstitutional immigration crackdowns. Maybe some people dissented quietly, maybe some people I managed to persuade.
But I do want to respond to two pieces of mail that came in that largely agreed with what I wrote, but felt that I missed something. One came from Judy and from Susan in New York, in which they took issue with my characterization that major Jewish institutional leaders were too silent in response to this crisis. They cited to me the work of HIAS, major rabbis, many synagogues, and many local activists. I appreciate the correction, and of course that’s right.
In fact, in the podcast itself, on social media about this podcast, I expressed admiration for those who had taken to the streets in Minnesota, and of course, HIAS, whose work we’ve talked about in this podcast last summer and JCPA and other organizations, those folks have indeed been out front.
I still think, though, that my point stands as it relates to the organizations who claim to represent the American Jewish community more generally, to the public, to public officials, some of whom constitute what’s called the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. I think their silence is frankly embarrassing.
In the same week that we released the podcast, I read a quote from the executive director of the conference who said that mainstream Jewish leaders are nearly all in agreement on most of the core issues, such as the centrality of Israel and Jewish life, Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people, and a basic understanding of Israel’s roles and rights in a hostile region. Those are the core issues as he articulated, and not some basic elements of American democracy. Those are left out. I truly think this is shocking, and helps to explain why only some of our organizations in America, and not all of them, have the courage to speak out right now. Thank you, Judy and Susan, for the opportunity to correct and clarify the record.
I also heard from Rabbi Barry Block who nudged a bit on what criteria I was using to endorse the kind of prophetic protest voice in a moment like this and not in others. It’s a fair question. At times our organization, the Hartman Institute, has embraced and endorsed participating in protests. Even though our idea of the Beit Midrash as a place for healthy combat of ideas predominates in what we do, and even as we know that moving out of that lane to the protest lane always comes with consequences to that core mission.
The Institute, for instance, marched officially in the Pride march in Jerusalem in 2016 because Shira Banki had been murdered the previous year. And we felt that religious institutions in Jerusalem had to show up to make the case for a Judaism that cared about human rights. Both Donniel Hartman and I spoke at various rallies during the judicial reform protests in Israel in 2023 because we felt we were standing with the majority of Israeli society and defensive democracy. And similarly, we have stood up against Itamar Ben Gvir and Betzalel Smotrich through public letters in other forms of protest. And of course we went as an organization en masse to the solidarity rally in November, 2023 in DC just weeks after the attacks of October 7th, to do what I felt was the bare minimum of being with our people in that moment of crisis.
So the criteria on when to speak up are not an exact science, but we’re usually motivated to do so, that is to say, to make clear statements rather than to educate through our conventional means, when we can do pretty much all of the following: When something feels like an unusual moral imperative, and when our voice can give cover to other leaders to exhibit moral courage, and when we can contribute our ideas and wisdom to the cause.
That enables us to step out of our lane once in a while, while maintaining a commitment to the integrity of our work, of building an expansive Jewish people, a culture of pluralism and embrace of the Jewish people’s commitment to striving for greatness, to, again, once in a while, step out of the classroom and participate in other ways of creating the plausibility structure to make those ideas come alive.
Once in a while, you shed your fears about nuance and insist on some clarity. Once in a while, with the blood of our neighbor in the streets, we dare to speak the language of moral truth about what has gone wrong all around us to lead us to this catastrophe.
On February 11th, there was a Jews Against ICE Rally in Washington that was led and overwhelmingly attended by the Shalom Hartman Institute’s favorite people, a bunch of rabbis. I couldn’t go, but a few of my colleagues could. I’m thrilled to hand over the mic today to our producer, Tessa Zitter, who is behind the scenes doing the great work of making this podcast great every week, and who this week walks us through what it meant to actualize this momentary shift from the classroom to the street.
Tessa: Hi, I’m Tessa Zitter, the producer of Identity/Crisis. I really wanted to go to this protest. My family has a long history of protest and I’m a firm believer in the power of collective action. The opportunity to attend came up just two days before the rally, and it immediately brought to mind something that Yehuda said a few weeks ago in that episode “America Betrays the Stranger.”
Yehuda: None of what I’m talking about today is about me. And none of it is specifically about you. It is about we, the people, who must raise our voices in re-accepting the covenant of Americaness, its promise of the rule of law, its care for its citizenry, and its hospitality to stranger.
Tessa: It is about we, the people, who must raise our voices in re-accepting the covenant of Americaness, its promise of the rule of law, its care for its citizenry, and its hospitality to stranger.
As a member of “we, the people,” that called me to show up. The events of the past weeks and months, not just in Minnesota, but across the country, have weighed heavily on me. Watching people being taken from their families and their communities, murdered in the streets, and stripped of their rights through tiny screens has been heartbreaking, and at the same time, paralyzing. I was craving an opportunity to get out and do something, to stand in community with others and raise my voice.
I will admit, I was also curious. I wanted to hear what was bringing people, particularly Jewish people, out for this moment. After years of watching so much of our community turn inward and isolate as a means of self-protection, I was excited to see such a range of Jewish organizations opening up once again and choosing to reach out to others beyond our own circles. I wanted to join them in saying, we want to be in community with you. We are here for you.
I also recognize that I, Tessa, and we, at Identity/Crisis have an opportunity to make an impact. I have the privilege of making a show every week that is heard by thousands of Jewish leaders across North America and the world. By going to this rally with the express purpose of speaking up, I would do what I could to amplify the voice of this protest and call others to join in. S
o I bought a train ticket to DC and gathered my equipment and a colleague, Annie Byer Chafetz. There’s a running joke that Annie and I tend to come as a package deal, but she had her own reasons for wanting to attend.
Annie: I felt the absence of good thought leadership around this and that episode had a clear call to action, that despite all of the concerns and anxieties about being part of a movement, being, you know, in community, maybe, with some organizations that we have felt alienated from over the past couple of years, and showing up in public as Jews at a time when showing up in public as Jews is scary, it felt very clear to me and very continuous to me that if we were going to issue that call to action—and in my job at Hartman, a lot of what I’m doing is building calls to action—it felt very hard for me to promote that idea without living out that truth and taking Yehuda’s advice and goingm and being Jewish in public, and saying, we don’t stand for this.
Tessa: Annie and I have gotten to spend a lot of time digging into Hartman ideas together. And aside from it being nice to get out of the office a little, I was intrigued to hear about her own experiences with protest, which were pretty different from my own.
Annie: So I mentioned to my mom that I was going to DC for work to go to this protest, and she asked me how I felt. And I was like, I feel fine about it, why? And she’s like, I don’t know. I just don’t know you to be someone who goes to protests. Which, just as an aside, is hilarious to me because I famously started a playground riot in elementary school over kickball roles, so there is this, like, revolutionary streak within me that is very drawn to protest and activism and always has been.
But my relationship to protest has gotten complicated. I worked in politics for a brief stint after college and I found that very disillusioning. I saw that very few things actually move the needle other than money, and the things that you see as an activist and a volunteer are very disconnected and different from what’s going on behind the scenes a lot of times.
And I was living in DC during a time where there were a lot of protests there that looked less like civic engagement and more like street fairs. And many of them seemed like excuses to break COVID protocols, more than anything. So that really made me question, what is a protest? What is a protest for? What does a protest do? Is protest important? Does it matter?
Crowd: Jews against ICE, Jews against ICE. (Chanting, singing.)
Tessa: The crowd was packed in front of the ICE headquarters building. Rabbis, cantors, and laypeople wore kippot and tallitot and carried shofars and whistles and giant cardboard signs, some even in the shapes of shofars and whistles. They contain slogans like “Faith melts ICE,” “ICE is a shanda,” “Let my people go,” and “This is what theology looks like.” They sang protest songs, old and new, in English and Hebrew. The rally was organized by Tru’ah and Bend the Ark, but they were joined by more than 60 co-sponsoring Jewish organizations, from HIAS to If Not New.
Crowd: We call upon ICE agents to leave their jobs and to join us.
Join us. Join us. Join us.
Tessa: At Hartman. We usually traffic in ideas. We wrestle with them in the Beit Midrash, where we have the space and time to dive deep into issues and swim around in the nuance at protests between the megaphones and the slogans and the throngs of strangers, it can be far more challenging to find that nuance.
The beauty of collective action is the power of many voices raised together in solidarity, but it can also reduce our demands and ideas to their simplest form. And for that very reason, many people would rather not engage in the act of protest at all.
So how do you possibly create a space where people who disagree with one another can stand in solidarity with each other anyway, without worrying about signing on to ideas that they don’t believe in?
Jill Jacobs: We’ve certainly had a lot of divisions in the Jewish community and beyond over the past couple of years, mostly around Israel and Gaza and Zionism. And sometimes those differences have threatened to tear us apart and the fact that more than 60 organizations, including synagogues that don’t necessarily normally sign on to rallies for anything, have chosen to support this, shows that this is a consensus issue in the Jewish community.
Tessa: That’s Jill Jacobs, CEO of Tru’ah and one of the organizers of the rally.
Jill: I really believe, and Tru’ah believes, that in coalitions you come together about what you can agree on, and it might be that you don’t agree on other things, but that’s how we win. And especially now when there’s so many emergencies and when democracy is at stake in the United States, and when there’s rising autocracy, we knew that we had to take action. But of course, once the ICE raids became more intense in Minneapolis and in Chicago before that, in LA, it became clear that lots of members of the Jewish community wanted to come out and to be with us.
And we asked everybody who was interested in co-sponsoring to agree to the message of the rally, and to be clear that it’s about ICE and it’s about immigrants, it’s not about anything else. We ask people not to bring flags of other countries, for example, not to bring either Israeli flags or Palestinian flags or whatever flag of whatever other country you might be thinking about. This is a rally that is hyper-focused on ICE and on immigration and not on anything else.
Tessa: As I mentioned, I’m a believer in the power of collective action, and I’m still sometimes confronted with the fear of my voice getting lost among the crowd, lumped in among broad sloganing and ideologically estranged organizations that I don’t feel represented by.
But there is something so empowering about showing up anyway. It’s not that I don’t care or worry, but that I think it’s more important to show up worried and uncomfortable than to not show up at all.
In this climate, it is too rare to find ideas that have escaped being turned into political binaries, or communities who refuse to see them that way, to wait for the perfect time and place. It takes a strong force of unity to rally people together, and in a lot of places across the US, the pull to protect our neighbors has become one of those forces.
I was glad to know that I might be standing next to people that I don’t agree with and that they knew that they were standing next to me too.
Speaker: I see the faces of Jews, who sometimes disagree with each other.
Tessa: But this rally really was laser focused. Everyone I spoke to that day kept coming back to the same point. Protecting our neighbors isn’t a partisan issue; it is a moral responsibility and no matter where we are coming from, that is something we can agree on.
Jill: Immigration is a consensus issue in the Jewish community, and this is something that the Jewish community understands really well because of our own family history as immigrants, because of our own history of our people being displaced over and over. And so the Jewish community, as we saw today, it can put aside differences that we have in other issues and say, yes, this is the thing that we can come together on because it’s urgent.
Speaker: We know why we’re here. We are here to stand for our immigrant neighbors and loved ones. We do this because we are furious. We do this because we know it’s a threat to the democracy that we need to keep all of us safe. And we do this to say in one voice, get ICE out of our cities.
Crowd: Get ICE out of our cities. Get ICE out of our cities. Get ICE out of our cities.
Brad Lander: I mean, look, Jews have been having many of the same arguments for 2,600 years. I, I take it back to like the first exile in Babylon. So we have these arguments. We’ve been having ‘em a long time. Since October 7th. Our communities, our hearts have been ripped apart in really impossible ways.
I think one thing Jews overwhelmingly know, however they feel about Israel and Palestine, however they pray, religious, secular, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Charedi—we stand with immigrants. We are immigrants. We stand with immigrants, and you can feel that here today.
Tessa: You may recognize that last voice. Brad Lander, the former city controller of New York, and in his words, most importantly today, a Jew against ICE. He, like me, was one of the many Jews who flocked to DC from far and wide to attend this action, driven by a sense of moral responsibility and love for his fellow New Yorkers.
The focus of this rally was really driven by this message of a moral imperative to speak up. And as each Rabbi continued to mention, it comes straight from our tradition.
Crowd: Through drought, quakes, and in collapsing buildings, the rabbis argue about whether neighboring towns should also sound the shofar. How far should the loud alarms spread? How many neighboring cities need to know and muster to protect the people? For dangerous beasts and violent attacks, matr’im bechol makom, we sound the shofar everywhere. Because those are calamities that spread.
What about when a city is occupied by a fighting force committed to dehumanizing violence and cruel action? The Mishna teaches that when such a group surrounds a city, we sound the shofar everywhere. The Jewish tradition gives us a roadmap. In our most profound grief, when we feel too broken and enraged to change the world, we are reminded that this agony is not all that there is. When we recite our mourners’ prayer, we declare at the moment it feel most impossible to believe that there is a world that is for peace and justice and wholeness.
Tessa: The passion behind that moral imperative at the rally was palpable and moving, and it was moving to watch people recognize our Hartman hats and welcome us into the crowd, happy to see us there. It reminded Annie of an experience that she had a while ago attending another protest with Hartman.
Annie: About a year ago, we signed on to a anti-Ben Gvir demonstration and petition. I went with another colleague to that demonstration, and there were people who saw us and recognized us from, you know, the logos on our clothes and talked to us and said, you know, it means a lot to us that you’re here, and also what are you doing here? You don’t usually show up to these things and where have you been?
Tessa: Being present means something to people, and being willing to stand next to others means something too. It’s meaningful to the people that you’re showing up for. It’s meaningful to the people that you’re showing up next to. And adding one voice to another always makes the collective harder to ignore even when you don’t have any words left.
Crowd: When we come to the end of our words, when we have spoken everything that is on our hearts, but there is still more to try, we reach for shofar. Shofar holds the wailing we know intimately and the grief we know as our own, and it holds the wailing of another grief, the grief we observe or imagined from farther away. Shofar’s wailing lifts all of this grief up in one voice.
Tessa: I was glad to add my voice to that collective wailing. But I kept coming back to this question that Annie asked me at the beginning of all of this: What does protest actually do? If it’s about making your voice heard, what does it mean if no one’s listening? If your impact was small or nobody heard you, did you still fulfill your moral obligation to oppose cruelty? If a Jew attends a protest and nobody hears them, did it even happen?
I learned later that Annie was still asking herself those questions too. But during her crisis of faith, something happened.
Annie: I was in an Uber in DC, and this Uber driver, who is a Kurdish immigrant, is here trying to earn money any way that he can and send it back home to his family in Turkey and hopefully bring them here at some point. And we’re just having a friendly chat and I get a call from our boss, Maital, about something else entirely, and I’m on the phone with her really feeling the push and the squeeze of like, I’m here to do this thing, but it’s a work day and you know, should I have really come all this way? And I’m talking to her on the phone.
And suddenly, I realized that my Uber driver is also talking on the phone, on speaker phone in the car while I’m talking on the phone, and I’m getting very distracted. I wasn’t really tuned into what they were saying. I had my headphones on and so I, I asked Maital to hold on a second, and when I took my headphones off, I realized that the person that he was talking to was very angry and yelling at him in English, and he really wasn’t able to understand her. And because we were on speakerphone, she could also hear me.
And so she started asking like, hello, I hear you, can you talk to me please? And so I start talking to her and she’s very upset. She has clearly hired this Uber driver to do some work for her, and she seems to be under the impression that he took photos of private information of hers and posted them online and wanted them to be taken down. I was like, I don’t know how I can help, but tell me how I can help.
She was very upset and she was screaming at me and saying, I don’t even know if he’s legal. I think I should call ICE. And it was so shocking to me because I’ve never heard anybody threaten to call ICE on somebody. It obviously happens, but it felt so strange to be in an actual situation where somebody was questioning the status of somebody, and they wanted to wield this power over him, knowing everything that that would entail.
And I said, look, I’m just a stranger trying to help the two of you get through a miscommunication. I don’t think you need to call ICE. Tell me what it is that you want, and I will try to help communicate that to him because he doesn’t speak very good English. And then she started to calm down and she said, yes, and thank you and I’m sorry, I’m just upset. And it felt a little bit like I was being punked like I was on hidden camera or something, because here I am in DC, but it was a situation I’ve never found myself in before.
And suddenly the question of “does showing up matter?” looks very differently to me because had I not literally gone to DC to go to this anti-ice demonstration, I would not have been in the Uber to be there to talk to this woman. And I don’t know if us going and standing outside of an ICE building with a bunch of shofars and signs changed anybody’s minds or moved the needle on any of the policies that we were out there protesting against. And I don’t know if talking this woman down on the phone changed the way that she’s gonna treat her neighbor.
And at the same time, it helped clarify for me what matters to me, and why it feels important to me to show up and why it feels important to me to be engaged in this project.
Tessa: Putting aside the Uber and the podcast and the interviews and the institutions, I attended the protest. I affirmed to the world, to my neighbors, and to myself, what I will and won’t stand for. That was enough of a reason for me to show up. How about you?
Yehuda: And now, at Hartman, we go back to our regular business, the work of ideas, leadership, the slower work of discerning truth thriugh complexity, the work of moral striving while building expansive community across difference.
I appreciate those of you who may disagree with what I say on this podcast, or what I said a few weeks ago, but who listen anyway, and I appreciate those of you who wouldn’t go to the protest, maybe even think we shouldn’t either, but were willing to hear us out. You too are part of this growing Hartman community.
We go back to business as usual, but our commitments don’t. On March 12th, we’ll be hosting a major online day of leanring, including a live podcast recording with Professor Seyla Benhabib, on this very issue of how we think about our responsibilities to neighbors and strangers. I hope you will be with us that day as we continue to work our way through this darkness. May Torah be our guide.
