Stosh Cotler

All of a sudden we were surrounded by hundreds of Dreamers raising their fists and filming with their phones and crying, and it was one of the moments that I feel like there was a transformative moment of the deepest kind of connection among all of us who were in that room. It was one of the most striking examples of communities seeing ourselves in one another. And actually many of the Dreamers said at that time, and have continued to say that it was so surprising to them and it has actually given them a level of hope in their ability to know that other people are with them. And that means everything.

Dey Hernández

Hola and welcome to When We Fight, We Win!. I’m Dey Hernández.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

And I’m Greg Jobin-Leeds.

Dey Hernández

We’re the authors of the book When We Fight, We Win!. In the book, we capture some of the stories, philosophy, tactics, and art of today’s leading social change movements in the United States. Greg and I joined forces to write the book, and now we’re here as co-hosts of When We Fight, We Win! The Podcast. We hope our show will help you see your role in social movements and learn how to stand up and be fierce.  And let the work transform you.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

We’re going to bring you stories of people at the heart of the social movements we talked about in the book. They’re radical folks who know that when we stand up to fight, we win!

Today, we’re going to talk to Stosh Cotler, a leader in the modern Jewish resistance movement, and the CEO of Bend the Arc, a Jewish organization that partners with immigrant-led and other justice organizations.

Dey Hernández

In our last episode, we talked to Cristina Jiménez, Co-Founder and Executive Director of United We Dream an immigrant youth organization.

She spoke with us about the crisis of family separations at the border and what organizers are doing about it.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

In this episode, we will hear from Stosh about her organizations solidarity work with Cristina and United We Dream. So if you haven’t already heard our interview with Cristina, you may want to listen to that episode first.

Archived Recording

Overnight, dozens of protesters organized at LaGuardia airport, rallying for the rights of children, separated from their families under the Trump administration Zero tolerance policy at the border.

Dey Hernández

On June 20th, 2018 Stosh got a text from a friend of a friend who was flying from Texas to LaGuardia airport in New York.

They had seen seven undocumented children flying without their parents on the flight.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

Stosh immediately contacted Cristina Jiménez, and they agreed to meet at the airport, but unfortunately they arrived to late and they missed the plane. This is Stosh.

Stosh Cotler

We were about to leave, and then we happened to see another adult walking with a young person, a boy who looked like maybe he was about seven who was carrying all of his belongings in a see-through plastic bag. And so we approached the woman asked her if in fact, she was taking this child who was an unaccompanied undocumented young person, and she said, yes, she was, and we tried to get information. I’m not a Spanish speaker, and Cristina, who is a Spanish speaker, asked him if he was okay and he was terrified and was not responding.  And so she just let him know that we loved him and that we saw him and that there were people that were fighting for him. And then we ended up seeing another group of kids had almost the same situation happen again. This time I got the, the video of it.

Archived Recording

So just so you know these young people are being transported across the country, and you should just know that this is happening, “estamos luchando por ustedes.”

Stosh

It is a horrifying thing to witness these young people essentially being kidnapped. And knowing that there is a, there is a big likelihood that they will not be able to find their family again.

Dey Hernández

We asked Stosh how she, a Jewish woman, ended up putting herself on the front lines for Latin American immigrant communities.

Stosh Cotler

I would say I do this work now out of a tremendous sense of obligation, and I think about that word obligation in its Jewish sense of obligation, which is, not actually about feelings and not about emotions, even though those are present, but a deep sense of mutuality that one is required to be in a depth of relationship with other people and to be building a justice centered community out of a spiritual expression and because it feels like the only moral way to live.

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Greg Jobin-Leeds

The atrocities at the border are horrifying and heartbreaking, and every person in this country has an important role to play. Still many people might wonder, what does this fight have to do with Stosh?

Dey Hernández

There are a few answers to that question. Part of it is the obligation or solidarity that Stosh talks about. Well, she tells us there’s another big motivation that Jews and Latin American immigrants have an enemy in common: white supremacy.

Archived Music

Dey Hernández

Chapter One, The Pain.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

Anti-Semitism has been on the rise since Donald Trump’s election. But what exactly is anti-Semitism?

Dey Hernández

Anti-Semitism is a negative perception of Jews. Dehumanizing them and making generalizations about their behaviors and physical traits. It sometimes appears as hatred. And sometimes targets Jewish individuals and or their property or Jewish community institutions and religious centers. Anti-Semitism goes back centuries.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

In October, 2018 11 people were killed and six wounded in the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Archived Recording

Dey Hernández

Back in August, 2017 white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in a violent protest in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest removing the statue of Robert E. Lee.

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Dey Hernández

Lee is best known for being commander of the Confederate army during the civil war. He fought to uphold slavery and was a slave owner himself. He was born into wealth and power on a plantation in Virginia in 1807. Today, Robert E. Lee is a symbol of America’s violent racist past. So it’s especially painful that many people regard him as a hero and use him as a motivation to perpetuate racism and antisemitism.

Stosh Cotler

One of the chants was :Jews will not replace us” and I think that because they were marching in formation that was so Nazi-esque. The entire gathering had, I think, pretty implicit and explicit antisemitism.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

Moments like the Pittsburgh shooting and the Charlottesville rally were blatantly anti-Semitic. But Stosh says that most of us don’t really have a deep understanding of anti-Semitism when it isn’t so blatantly. An article called “Understanding Antisemitism” by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice has been incredibly helpful. I recommend it to all activists.

Dey Hernández

I learned a lot from the article about, both Jews and antisemitism. And I realized how little I knew and how misinformed my perceptions were about Jews, particularly in the U.S. that the Jewish community, it’s multiracial, it’s multiethnic, and that it is not a fixed identity. And it’s really dehumanizing when people become abstractions. I mean, I knew about the Holocaust, the persecution, the deaths. I read Anna Frank’s diary in my English class back in Puerto Rico that was in high school, but I was not aware that anti-Semitism, the history of anti-Semitism goes back much further. Christian Dogma was central in the development of anti-Semitism. It said that Jews were the cause of their problems, whether it was spreading the black flag or hoarding of the community wealth. Jews were an ideal group to scapegoat. It enabled attention and anger to be diverted away from the people who created the taxes and toward the quote, strange and greedy Jews.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

What really blew my mind when I read the article, which I didn’t understand, was that I had accepted a distorted and inflated understanding of Jewish power and Jewish wealth and Jewish control. And I had accepted some of these stereotypes, like, you know, I mean, not that I accepted it so strongly, but you know, things like, Jews control the media, you know, I’ve heard it, but I didn’t really think about it, or, you know, Jews control the Orthodox Jews control the New York City policy, or it’s the Jews who are controlling US Israeli policy. And then what I learned is that it’s the how this protects by creating this idea that the Jews are going to replace us, that they control the media, that they control policy protects the primarily Christian economic elite, and so it creates a scapegoat by blaming all the economic problems on the Jews instead of on the billionaires in the Christian economic elite. And despite all these anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, Jews don’t control the planet’s wealth. And it was really mind opening for me.

Stosh Cotler

Anti-Semitism is one of the only oppressions we haven’t decided to learn about, and it is simultaneously being weaponized by the right and weaponized by the right in order to keep the left weaker. So anti-Semitism has some characteristics that make it hard to identify. And some of those characteristics are that unlike other oppressions that are continuous, racism does not move in waves and cycles. Racism exists deeply at every level of society. All the time. People of color are discriminated against and disenfranchised and targeted. All the time. Anti-Semitism on the other hand, or in contrast, there are times in the cycle of anti-Semitism where it’s very obvious that Jews are in positions where we do not have power or privilege. And then as the cycle shifts over time, we move into another status of society where some Jews, actually, a significant number of Jews are given a significant amount of some power and privilege, but that is a deal that Jews have been, I would say, conditioned to make out of trauma in order to seek safety and security. And in doing that, we end up inadvertently keeping systems of oppression in place because we play sort of a middle, I sometimes think of it as like a middle management role with power. So that’s when you begin to see Jews in positions like Social Workers, Jews in Teacher roles. So we’re in, we’re in proximity with communities who have less power than us for white Jews, that is, if we’re talking about communities of color, and we are not the elite. But also as the cycle continues, more Jews then gain access to that very elite, that elite club. And you see Jews who are in very visible roles. And part of that then serves to have a very easy scapegoat community when things begin to break down. So it’s at the very moment, like we’re in right now in the United States, we’re Jews. Not all of us, but many Jews appear to be the most integrated, the most stable, the most educated, the most affluent than our community has ever been. Where we are actually the most at risk. If patterns of historic anti-Semitism continue to play out as they have many, many times in history.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

What Stosh says speaks so clearly to my family’s own experience. Both of my parents were refugees who fled Nazi Germany. My father was the last Jew in his high school in Hamburg, Germany. His father fought in WWI, and his dad never believed that the country could turn against them after that. So as things got worse, they still felt they were safe because of their past service and allegiance. Luckily, they fled before the deportation camps kicked into full gear. And then finally, the death camps that killed 18 million people, including 6 million Jews.

Dey Hernández

When we’re talking about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is clear. It’s less clear today in 2020 when there are so many other obviously oppressed groups.

Stosh Cotler

And so part of what is very tricky is that Jewish vulnerability looks very different than vulnerability among other communities, and it is almost impossible for people who are literally being, when they’re having ICE break down their doors and seize people in their family, or when people are seeing that their family members are being shot without consequences by the police. I could go on and on and on. Compared to seeing Jews who appear to be quite comfortable, materially, quite comfortable in many aspects of life, to be able to reconcile that with the deepest vulnerability. It’s like cognitive dissonance. And so part of what we need to understand on, in progressive spaces is that anti-Semitism is playing a function that is not serving the left. And it would, it is important for all of us on the left to understand that by addressing antisemitism, we’re actually better equipped to successfully defeat racism, specifically to defeat anti-black racism. And without ourselves doing that work, we actually are, we’re not as able to fight our shared opponents, which are the white nationalists and white supremacists who now are in formal places of government and leadership in this country. As Jews is important, I believe, to name the anti-Semitism and be really clear. It is real. It exists. It is a core, it is a core component of white nationalism. In order to defeat white nationalism, we must actually fight actively against anti-Semitism. And to do that does not mean, and it’s necessary that it doesn’t distract us from simultaneously really, really fighting against racism and fighting against anti-Muslim bigotry and fighting against the Xenophobia that the communities who occupy those identities are really at the front lines in this moment of getting the most intense experience of daily violence and a physical threat.

Archived Recording

Dey Hernández

Hola this is Dey Hernández.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

And this is Greg Jobin-Leeds.

Dey Hernández

And we’re the hosts of When We Fight, We Win! The Podcast.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

In 2016 we published our book When We Fight, We Win! 21st century Social Movements and the Activists That are Transforming Our World. And we did it with our dear friend Jorge Díaz, who is Artistic Director and founder of AgitArte. You’ll be hearing from Jorge in each episode, in the word of the day segment.

Dey Hernández

Since we published our book so much has happened #MeToo, Standing Rock, Extinction, Rebellion, No Bond, No Wall. Hurricane Maria.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

Trump.

Dey: Don’t get me started. Anyways, we decided it was time to gather new stories of resistance, resilience, and hope.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

Yes, there are people out there who are fighting to transform our world for our collective liberation, and our podcast is about sharing their stories in their words so folks can be inspired and know how to join the fight.

Dey Hernández

If that sounds like something you need in your life right now, please subscribe wherever you find your podcasts and visit our website whenwefightwewin.com or you can follow the organizations we write about in the book. You can also buy our book and other swag. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram @whenwe fightwewin and on Twitter @wefightandwin.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

Chapter Two, The Fight.

That’s the question I’ve been wanting to also ask is, are Jews white?

Stosh Cotler

Yeah. So, I love this question, and I would start by saying the American Jewish community is a multiracial, multi-ethnic community. So when we look at our community right now, we know that between 10 and 20% of the Jewish community identify as Jews of color, people who are people of color. Who are also Jewish. When we think about our Jewish community, we are in fact multiracial and multi-ethnic. And that’s something that both non-Jewish communities don’t know and it’s also Jewish communities don’t necessarily know and are not aware of how multiracial we actually are. But going to your question about, are Jews white? There are Jews living in the United States that are white. As we understand whiteness right now, which is a social construction. We know that racism is real, and race is a social construction, right? I, for example, identify as a white Jew. The thing that I think is interesting, and you talk about family members who were racialized as Jews, is that Jews have become, in the United States context, have over time become racialized into whiteness. And, the thing that I think is so important for us to know and remember is that because of antisemitism. And how anti-Semitism functions. The whiteness that Jews experience in the United States right now, the whiteness, my white identity is always entirely conditional. It is not a static identity. It is not given, and then is forever more. So I would say for example, people right now who we might identify as white Irish Americans, the white identity of those white Irish Americans is not a contested white identity. It has been given over with a sense of permanency. And so far as any racialized identity can be considered permanent. But for Jews, Jews are always in a conditional status to the extent we have racialized or, identities that are given a degree of privilege. That privilege is always, always temporary. It’s revocable and it is based on us playing a very particular set of roles that is explicitly utilitarian and about us helping to maintain status quo power. So when Jews refuse to maintain that status quo power role, that’s when we both are at risk of actually becoming even more in like really being in solidarity. And it’s also when we’re the most at risk of losing all of the accrued privileges that, for example, white Jews have accrued over the last five decades.

Archived Music

The way different immigrant communities have managed to succeed in this country is in the context of white supremacy. So part of then that assimilation and success becomes tied with whiteness and becoming white, being considered white. And that’s certainly been part the Jewish story for Jews who are identified as white Jews.

Dey Hernández

Greg, I know you’re Jewish, but when I met you, to me, what’s like, it’s a white man from Boston. I’ve never really heard how you identify yourself.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

Yeah. So. I mean, at this point, I now identify myself as a Jewish man of privilege. I certainly know that I benefit from white privilege. Right? And it’s also interesting as a Jew that many people don’t know you’re a Jew. But in terms of my own, you know, what I grew up with was these contingency plans about when the next war comes. ‘Cause my parents had gone through it. The assumption was that there would be another Holocaust or another war of some kind because that’s what they knew is that was their normal. And so we had this, plan that after the war.

‘Cause one of the problems that for a lot of families was they didn’t know how to reunite after the war. So we had this plan, send letters to the Denver post office and for general delivery at the Denver post office. And so I just grew up with the assumption that we would at some point have to flee cause and every one of my parents friends growing up were not only Jewish, but they were Jews who had a refugee story, had an escape story of some sort.

So, you know, it’s, yes, I grew up with all these privileges of people assuming I’m white. So my identity was never really something I had to think about. I’ve gone from a place where my parents were victims of racism to a point where I’m the benefit of, I have the benefits of being on the side of white supremacy to now, as you know, there’s the marches in Charlottesville, you know, knowing that there is this other threat out there. So, you know, when Stosh talks about this conditionality, it’s like in my, and my mother would wave her finger at us and say, don’t think it can’t happen here. And now as there’s this rise in hate crimes it’s still pretty low compared to what women go through every day. Right? It’s still pretty low compared to what blacks go through every day but it’s, but it’s there.

For me the critical message that I’ve taken from all of this, and from my parents is to be silent, is to collaborate. And that because if you look at my parents’ story and the history is, there were too many people who were silent and didn’t resist. It seems like this question whether or not Jews are white is on a lot of people’s minds these days. Even Spike Lee brought it up in his 2018 film, Black Klansman. The film is about a block police officer in 1970’s Colorado who infiltrates the KKK. It’s based on a true story, but Spike Lee made a fictional change. He decided to make the main cops partner, Jewish.

Dey Hernández

When people ask him why spike Lee said that as far as the KKK goes, Jewish people are number two on their list.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

The subplot of the film focuses on the Jewish cop as he essentially discovers his Jewishness and the limits of his white privilege. Here’s a clip from the film.

Archived Recording

Dey: Before he goes under cover with the KKK. He doesn’t really think twice about his own safety. He realizes that for most of his life, he’s been passing as white and Christian.

Archived Recording

Jorge Díaz

The word of the day is white supremacy. White supremacy is the ideology driving race based oppression in the U S. It is a comprehensive belief system that shapes the lives and livelihoods of whites and people of color alike. White supremacy asserts the inherent superiority of white people over all other races, most specially the descendants of enslaved Africans. And that is deeply embedded and the social and economic fabric of all white settler states, making it a global phenomenon. White supremacy is anchored to the discredited concept of races, a social construct emerging in the late 17th century. First to define the legal status of individuals viewed as property. Later as pseudo scientific categories, justifying the kidnapping, exploitation, murder, and dispossession of enslaved Africans and displaced Native Americans. Tales of courage and sacrifice made by white settlers, white soldiers and white statement who carved civilization from an empty baron and hostile wilderness are central to the origin myth of all white settler states.

That said, what we now call white privilege is best understood as a social relationship based on the cumulative unearned advantages afforded most whites as a birthright against the cumulative, disadvantages and burdens, and on most blacks and many other people of color. These conditions are rooted in asymmetries of power, bait into the nations of founding documents institutions, culture and habits of mind.

Today’s access to the benefits of whiteness is no longer rooted exclusively in skin color. Indeed, even some people of color, especially lighter skin ones, can secure a level of entry into white America by actively distancing themselves from American born, blacks, indigenous and other people of color and embracing dominant white cultural norms and values.

Still, the darker ones skin, the harder it is to access quality housing, healthcare, education, and living wage jobs with benefits. The ability to fully exercise white privilege is still mediated by one social economic class and a capitalist social order. In other words, a white person might be spared the dangerous and indignities of racial profiling, routine brutalization by police and the courts and most forms of discrimination.

But access to the full range of privileges and opportunities afforded white elites remain beyond their grasp. The genius of white supremacy ideology lies in its ability to redirect the anger and frustration of poor whites onto scapegoated, people of color, LBGTQI folks, Jewish Catholics, immigrants, and other marginalized groups throughout history. This has been the word of the day.

Archived Recording

Dey Hernández

Chapter 3, The Win!

Stosh Cotler

We see very much that this is a moment where our community can and must play an active role in lifting up the cruelty and the immorality of the criminalization of Brown immigrants how this is racism and white nationalism in action. We believe that the Jewish community, because of our own story has an important role. We can play a really, really important role in shifting the narrative and shifting the public’s perception potentially about what it means to be immigrants who have a story of coming to this country and then having an opportunity to thrive. For many of us, not all of us. Again, it’s also, I believe so important that Jews and other, if you’ll faith communities, people of different faith traditions are also talking about how these policies, zero tolerance policy, all of these policies that are criminalizing immigrants are not only racist, but they betray our deepest moral values and that they are, they’re unnecessary. And we are on the wrong side of history.

Archived Music

Greg: In January, 2018 Stosh led a group of Jewish leaders to the Russell Rotunda in the U.S. Senate.

Stosh Cotler Archived Recording

My name is Stosh Cotler. I’m the CEO for Bend the Arc Jewish Action, and we are here on behalf of American Jews who stand with Dreamers and your families to say that we demand a clean Dream Act now!

Stosh: We had really, I wanted to demonstrate that the Jewish community, not just Bend the Arc as an organization, but Jews in the United States want justice for our immigrant family, friends, neighbors, community members, and that we were willing to increase the level of risk that our community was willing and practicing to take to really show up in this moment in a way that we believed would be helpful.

Dey Hernández

Stosh and Bend The Arc also called on mainstream Jews. She wanted to show that the larger Jewish community would also show up.

Stosh Cotler

Jews who may or may not consider themselves to be progressive or left, but who recognized that the situation was intolerable and immoral and wanted to do something about it. So we actually ended up partnering, for example, with the union for reform Judaism and the religious action center, and ask them to join us in this civil disobedience. And one of the really interesting outcomes from this action was that it created an opening for that entire movement that actually represents over 2 million Jews to understand that this was a moment different then others that had come before it, and that it required us as a community to potentially take on new tactics that had not been done before because it would be one of the only things that would work in really, really demonstrating what our community’s values were and actually what needed to happen at a policy level. And so we ended up getting almost 80 Jews who represented every denomination. For a lot of people it was the first time that they had ever really done any kind of nonviolent civil disobedience. We also heard powerfully from, for example, a number of black Jews who are with us, that when American Jews say all of us are immigrants, that that invisiblizes their family’s story. A number of us were wearing very visibly Jewish, I was wearing my, my grandpa, Leo’s tallit which is a prayer shawl, and he came to this country, in 1912 as an immigrant himself. And we began singing and linking our arms together and all of a sudden we were surrounded by hundreds of Dreamers and this was actually not planned in the action at all.

We knew that we were showing up as allies and really as co-conspirators in solidarity with the Dreamers, and it was at a time when we were all pushing for a clean dream act and just being present, showing up as dreamers anywhere publicly is itself a courageous act. Because all of those young people know that they could have legal consequences. Just by saying, I am undocumented and I’m here. And in fact, hundreds of Dreamers ended up circling our entire action. We were on the floor of the Rotunda, there’s a balcony and there were hundreds of dreamers who were standing on the balcony who were raising their fists and, filming with their phone and crying, and it was one of the moments that I feel like I would, I would describe it as, a transformative moment of the deepest kind of connection among all of us who were in that room. And it turned out that after that event it was not only, it changed the lives of many of the Jews who didn’t win back into their communities and really reinvigorated them to take action and bend the arc ended up then catalyzing 23 more actions across the country that week because so many of our immigrant justice partners were totally fatigued at that point in time, understandably. I mean, they had been doing this day in and day out and day in and day out. So 23 actions, it also spurred a group of Catholics to show up and do nonviolent civil disobedience, that it spurred a group of Muslim leaders who we then partnered with the next week to show up together to do an action. And one of the most beautiful things for me personally was that when the Dreamers came back to do their own CD civil disobedience, the following week, or a week and a half later, they occupied the same space and they sang a song that we sang, “Olam Chesed Yibaneh” we will build this world with love.

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Stosh Cotler

It was one of the most striking examples of communities seeing ourselves in one another, and actually I believe deeply knowing that when we say our fates are, are in that, that my fate and your fate and everyone, like when we have a collective liberation commitment, I know that for myself, I understand that, I understand that in my being, and I often talk about that, but I can be in my head when I’m saying it. I know it’s true, but in this moment I felt, and I knew that it was true, and many of the dreamers said at that time and have continued to say that they could not understand why the Jewish community would ever choose to stand up for them.

It, for a number of these young folks they did not have any idea of one how strongly our community feels about immigration, but they were not, they, it was so surprising to them and it, for them, they, they, a number of them have shared with me that it has actually, given them a level of hope in their ability to know that other people are, and that means everything.

Archived Music

Dey Hernández

Are you with them? The young activists at the forefront of immigration justice.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

Bend the Arc is uniting Jewish voices across America to fight for justice for all.

Dey Hernández

For more information, visit their website bendthearc.us to sign petitions, donate and to register for actions all across the country.

Follow them on Twitter @jewishaction. Organize your friends and family to form a moral minion. Want to know what that is? Go visit their website.

Greg Jobin-Leeds

And of course you don’t have to be Jewish to get involved. We have more resources on our website whenwefightwewin.com and don’t forget United we dream is still at unitedwedream.org or at @UNITEDWEDREAM on Twitter.

Dey Hernández

This episode was produced by Marielle Carr and Osvaldo Budet, Yooree Losordo is our managing producer. The word of the day segment was produced and hosted by Jorge Díaz and recorded by Juan Carlos Dávila.

Greg:

Our work was created by Primo Jose Hernandez Díaz and the music generously shared by Reverend Sekou.

We’d like to thank our friends at The New Press. Publisher of When We Fight, We Win! available at our website whenwefightwewin.com and wherever books are sold.

Dey Hernández

Like what you heard, please share, subscribe, and follow us on social media. I’m Dey Hernández

Greg Jobin-Leeds

And I’m Greg Jobin-Leeds.

Greg Jobin-Leeds and Dey Hernández

Thank you for listening.