No borders, no wall, no USA at all.
JEWISH CURRENTS: July 15, 2019 Posted by Greg Afinogenov [teaches at Georgetown!]
The fact that American Jews are mobilized on behalf of migrants like never before is an important step in the right direction. ...
[I]s there such a thing as a border that is both strong and just? The historical record and present-day realities suggest that there is not, and that what we need is not immigration reform, but open borders. ...
[C]enter-left immigration arguments—which on the surface appear compatible with the pro-migrant politics of progressive Jews—rest on the same foundation as those made by the right. ...
Obama and Clinton permitted most of the same abuses as Trump, if not with the same overtly racist glee. ...
The borders between Israel and Palestine exist definitively for the have-nots, not the haves; ...
[A]n open-borders perspective is not just a tactical intervention in a debate about immigration, it is a new vision of a more just society. ...
[W]e should look to the radical alternatives that large numbers of Jews once supported in Europe and in immigrant communities across the world. ...
Jewish activists in the anarchist and internationalist socialist tradition argued that the answer was not to build a Jewish state, but to seek Jewish emancipation as part of a broader anti-capitalist movement. ...
The vast majority of Jews had more in common with Latvian, German, or Russian workers than they did with the few wealthy and powerful members of their own community, and Jews joined revolutionary socialist parties in the Russian Empire in disproportionate numbers. Even in a specifically Jewish socialist party like the Jewish Labor Bund, nationalism was anathema. ...
Many of these Jewish radicals, whether anarchists, communists, or socialists, retained their loyalty to the international working class when they immigrated to the United States. ...
Jewish immigrants came together with other foreign-born groups in organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World, helping to create one of the cornerstones of the American left. These left-wing Jews were among the earliest targets of the first Red Scare that followed the Russian Revolution. Woodrow Wilson’s Palmer Raids swept across the country, deporting immigrants who refused to abandon solidarity and internationalism in their new country. ...
The way out of the nationalist trap in which Jews have been caught since World War II goes through Jewish cosmopolitanism, but not in the form that antisemites have imagined. The idea that Jews are more loyal to Jews in other countries than to their fellow citizens should be replaced . . ..
