A founding organizer for the Women's March,

my guest today is Sophie Ellman-Golan.

Now she helps lead Never Again Action,

a mass mobilization of Jews who are organizing to

shut down ICE and hold the political establishment

accountable for enabling both the deportation

machine that has separated immigrant families across the

U.S. for decades and the current crisis at the border.

"Conservatives purport to defend Jews even as they

embrace policies that most Jews deplore,

and infuriating and intolerable," is how

Ellman-Golan describes this climate and the

resurgence of white nationalism and

anti-Semitism, in part fueled by President

Trump's own politics.

"It's imperative that we loudly speak for

ourselves," Ellman-Golan told the New York Times,

"because if we don't, the loudest voices that claim

to speak on behalf of Jews will be right-wing

Evangelical Christians." Welcome,

Sophie, a pleasure to have you here.

ELLMAN-GOLAN: Thank you so much.

HEFFNER: Is it not that false equivalency in the

dynamic between how we think of attacks on Jews

from the right and left that is really troubling today?

ELLMAN-GOLAN: Absolutely.

I would say the first troubling thing is this

rise of white nationalism and anti-Semitism and the

ways that both have been completely embraced by the

Republican Party, overall.

But I agree that the discourse we see around

anti-Semitism is particularly troubling

because of a false equivalence between

violent acts of anti-Semitism,

violence that comes from manifestos that are

written about Jews trying to replace a white

population versus a, an anti-Semitic cartoon or a

comment that has to do with the criticism of the

state of Israel or tweeting Tupac lyrics.

And we just have to be able to say that these

things are not the same.

We have to be able to say that inciting murder is

not the same as tweeting Tupac lyrics.

HEFFNER: How do you differentiate between the

comments of someone like Congressman King of Iowa

and Congresswoman Omar?

ELLMAN-GOLAN: I would say that probably the,

the primary difference is that Steve King is pretty

adjacent to Nazis and that representative Ilhan Omar is not.

I mean, Steve King has gone on trips to meet with

people who helped found or are inheritors of

publications that were founded by Nazis.

He has come pretty close to saying the 14 words,

which are of course the 14 words of white

supremacists that talk about securing a future

for white children, et cetera.

I mean this is a man who is not in a state that was

ever part of the confederacy,

has a confederate flag on his desk.

It's pretty clear what he stands for.

So I think one of the primary distinction is

that for Steve King white nationalism,

above all is what he stands for and what he promotes.

Anti-Semitism is a facet of that.

I think that for representative Omar,

who is undeniably a progressive champion

right now, she has criticism of Israel.

I think that she said things that she probably

could have raised differently.

I think that we can argue, you know,

we can argue until the cows come home about

whether something was or was not anti-Semitic.

It's important to note that while a large

percentage of the Jewish community felt troubled

by it, that's worth mentioning,

which is why she apologized.

Steve King has never ever done that and refuses to

take accountability and instead continues to

spout off absurd offensive things,

even the most recent being that we wouldn't have a

population today or Western civilization were

it not for rape.

So I mean there's no end to,

to kind of the limits of his,

of his patriarchy and white nationalism and anti-Semitism.

I think with representative Omar,

we're also witnessing that attacks on her come not

just from people who are genuinely concerned about

anti-Semitism, but by and large from people who are

deeply concerned about the fact that a black Muslim

woman who wears a hijab is in Congress and dares to

be any of those things at once.

HEFFNER: I think qualitatively you answered

it in the way that our audience can understand.

There has been this disconnect and it's

growing between the community that's very

small in this country of Jews who put Israel's

security first and the larger majority of

American Jews who put American Jews security first.

And why in the aftermath of Trump's election those

Republicans were not outraged about the

desecrations, the increase in hate crime against the

Jewish community.

I don't think Jews, the majority of Jews are

responsive to President Trump's attempt in what

I thought was his most anti-Semitic day yet,

to call Jews who don't support him disloyal.

ELLMAN-GOLAN: Yeah.

I mean polling shows pretty clearly that Israel

is not even close to the top issue that American

Jews vote on.

J Street did a poll, did some of the great polling

about 2018 Jewish voters, and I think it was

something like 4 percent said that Israel was a

priority for them.

Predominantly it's been healthcare and the economy

and lately gun violence is up there pretty high too.

So these are the issues that Jews,

shockingly like Americans because we are, care about

and are voting about and are taking action on.

And of course also on immigrant justice,

which we've been seeing recently with the rise of

Jews Against ICE.

So I'd say all of that to say just that I think it's

a fundamental misunderstanding of the

Jewish community to even think that that is a

priority that Israel is a priority for us.

It's also anti-Semitic to constantly assume that

Jews care the most about Israel.

That stems from, of course,

deep anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish loyalty,

about this idea of a global Jewish cabal that

cares more about another country than the country

they reside in.

HEFFNER: You are really drawing the public's

attention to a crisis in these detention centers.

And because again, we have to be intellectually

honest I want to start by asking you about the conditions.

Some including representative Ocasio-

Cortez have compared the detention centers to

concentration camps.

ELLMAN-GOLAN: I would say myself,

and the many amazing folks who are leading Never

Again Action from folks like Serena Adlerstein and

Alyssa Rubin and Ben Doernberg and many others

who are really at the helm of that work as well.

We've been taking action because we simply see that

the conditions are concentration camps.

Representative Ocasio- Cortez was not the first

person to say that.

Many people said it beforehand.

I think we saw her political opponents jump

on that: use Jews as an excuse to take her down

and express more outrage about the word she used to

describe a blatant human rights abuse than they've

ever expressed for the actual human rights abuse.

So when we're talking about what's happening on

the ground, and you know, I want to also say that

immigrant rights groups have been doing this

organizing for a long time.

Movimiento Cosecha has been doing this organizing

since the Obama Administration,

where they, you know, stepped up and spoke out

against the 3 million deportations we saw during

that era as well.

But what's happening right now is pretty blatantly:

people deprived of food, deprived of water,

deprived of healthcare, deprived of sanitary products.

I mean, just the blatant abuse from sexual violence

to emotional and physical abuse is beyond belief.

And the fact that we would,

the fact that there are people who would rather

argue about what words we use instead of argue about

how we can abolish these atrocities is shocking to me.

And it's a clear; it's a clear attempt I think to

deflect away from talking about the conditions.

But the other thing that I say is that we should be

using the strongest possible words to describe

what's happening right now.

I do know concentration camps is a strong term to

use and we use it intentionally because we

should be using strong language to describe the

horrors that are happening on our southern border and

at ICE detention centers around the country. Yeah.

HEFFNER: I think that morally,

emotionally and physically,

there is the precipice of, you know,

exterminating people's souls more than human

bodies at this point.

But internment camp is an analogy that I think maybe

more approachable to people who remember how we

treated the Japanese or Japanese Americans.

So you have a politics in a public policy that is

completely at odds with your hope to free or

enfranchise ultimately a population of the people

who've lived here, worked here with their families

and communities and have been detained and deported.

I mean, we're talking about I think two subsets:

the current crisis on the border escaping violence

or economic hardship from central Latin American

countries; and then we're talking about the

historically problematic immigration law where

there are people who've been here for 20 years,

10 years, five years, who've demonstrated their

contributions to this country and we want to disown them.

ELLMAN-GOLAN: The perfect answer to that is actually

the policy that Cosecha is pushing for,

which is they called the dignity plan or Dignity 2020.

And what that calls for is an immediate end to

detention and end to deportation.

And papers for the 11 million undocumented

people living in this country.

And it's a push and it might seem to a lot of

people like a big one, but I mean,

we have been watching the immigrant rights movement

try so hard and work tirelessly to fight for

dignity and instead we've seen from our elected

officials, tiny, tiny scraps of gains.

I mean important legislation has passed for

sure, but legislation that has separated out families

or felons this idea of good immigrants and bad immigrants.

So we need to be asking and demanding that people

and our legislators in particular,

but also all of this country recognize the

humanity of all people regardless of whether or

not they are good or bad or fit into good or bad stereotypes.

HEFFNER: You even acknowledged that your,

that plan is radical in some sense,

but it's departing from what has been common law

in this country for some time.

ELLMAN-GOLAN: Yeah, I mean,

I think, well first of all,

I like radical so I'll say that.

Look, I think that when we have particularly the

climate crisis that is just completely changing

the way that people can even live on this earth,

forcing migration.

When we have mass violence that is caused in large

part by American foreign policy or certainly

exacerbated by it.

I think that just simply the conditions are changing.

We are not living in the same world that we were

20 years ago, 40 years ago, you know, 100 years ago.

Not only is there more communication between

other countries, but also just in terms of what

is livable land.

So I don't know if it's feasible to act as if we