ABOUT US

Our History

In June 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited the U.S.-Mexico border. After witnessing the horror and cruelty of the detention centers, she compared them to concentration camps, eliciting backlash from right-wing anti-immigrant politicians, as well as many mainstream Jewish institutions.

But it was clear where the majority of the Jewish community stood. We were outraged on two levels — first, at the atrocities happening at the border, and second, that our community’s trauma was being weaponized against immigrants and progressive politicians speaking truth to power. We knew that the words “Never Again” meant “Never Again” for anyone. And we knew what “Never Again” called us to do. On June 30th, 2019, 200 Jews shut down the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, resulting in 36 arrests. Over the next 2 months, thousands of people mobilized in over 40 #JewsAgainstICE actions across the country.

After the dust settled at the end of the summer, it was clear that despite our huge mobilizations, there was more work to do. We had activated thousands of people, but our partners made it clear that a single mobilization wasn’t enough — we needed to bring people into the movement for the long haul, not just for a single action.

Since then, we have trained hundreds of new leaders, taken on campaigns against detention centers and ICE training programs, organized mutual aid and deportation defense, and developed deep local and national partnerships. Read more about our impact here.

Our Partnerships

Never Again Action was born out of longstanding, deep relationships between Jewish organizers and immigrant organizers (which are not mutually exclusive identities!) and we continue to build strategies that follow the lead of those most directly impacted by the detention and deportation machine. We work in close collaboration with many different immigrant justice groups on the local and national level. Neither the immigrant community nor the immigrant rights movement is a monolith, and we believe that we need many different strategies and organizations in this fight.

Our Strategy

At our core, we believe in people power: ordinary people, when we organize strategically and in large numbers, can change the world. In order for the immigrant rights movement to win permanent protection and an end to detention and deportation, there needs to be a critical mass of active popular support to **make visible the crisis of the deportation machine, disrupt business as usual, and demand government action. **

That's where Never Again comes in: immigrant organizers have asked us to organize allies to be in this fight for the long haul, starting with our own communities. As Jews, many of our families carry stories of persecution, flight, and survival against all odds. This experience helps us speak to other allies with moral clarity: we know the stakes. Our task is to organize our community, speak to the public, and build a critical mass of support for the immigrant organizers who will lead us to victory.

** Learn more about our chapter strategy for 2024. **

Our Role

1. We flank the leadership of the immigrant rights movement. We flank to support the asks of our directly-affected partners by adding organizing capacity, moving money to directly affected partners, and modeling what direct ally interventions can do both materially and narratively. We use our privilege to throw sand in the gears of the detention and deportation machine wherever we encounter it.
2. We take direct action against fascism. We fight fascism through strategic, disruptive, direct action. We fight to reclaim the memories of our Jewish, queer, disabled, poor, and socialist ancestors, to make their memories a blessing. We disrupt attempts by the right to weaponize Jewish trauma against the left through a counter-narrative of solidarity.
3. We ground ourselves and our communities in the fight against racial capitalism. The fights for immigrant justice, Jewish liberation, gender justice, economic justice, racial justice, and disability justice are deeply connected to the broader fight against racial capitalism. We act as a model for the Jewish community (and other communities) of what it looks like to reject, disrupt, and dismantle racial capitalism. We build relationships of solidarity and support with others that are targeted by racial capitalism and white supremacy, and we take direct action to intervene in these systems.

Our Vision: We imagine a world where people of all races, identities, and origins come together to tear down the walls that have kept us apart from each other and build a new world.

** Read more about our role and strategy in the Never Again Action 101 Zine. **

Our Structure

Never Again Action is a decentralized national movement. Our local chapters work on a variety of issues in collaboration with local partners and national campaigns.

We have chapters in Boston, Chicago, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Washington DC and Wisconsin. Our full time staff's primary orientation is to support the work of the skilled volunteer leaders in our chapters, build our base and our collective power.

Currently, NAA has 3 staff members:

• Jules Aviv Rose, Organizational Director (they/them) is a Jewish non-profit professional, activist and writer with a background in immigration law. They are originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they worked at the YWCA Office of Immigrants and Refugees before relocating to New York in 2018 in search of deeper involvement in the immigration justice movement, as well as more diverse Jewish and Queer communities. They have been a fierce advocate for immigration justice by way of deep canvassing, mutual aid, and direct action through various organizations, including the International Rescue Committee and the New Sanctuary Coalition. Jules currently serves on the Uptown Manhattan Neighborhood Group Coordination Team for Jews for Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ). They have organized with various leftist Jewish organizations, including JFREJ, Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Never Again Action. Jules is fiercely passionate about the essential right to human mobility, holding a firm personal belief that we all collectively inherit the earth. They live on unceded Wecquaesgeek land (Harlem, New York) with their orange cat named Arthur, where they often host OneTable Shabbat meals.

• Shayna Solomon, Field Director (she/her) started out with Never Again Action as a chapter leader in Tennessee in 2020. She got increasingly involved in the chapter while working in refugee resettlement and living with the frustrations of working within the system. She joined staff in 2022, excited to support our network of chapters to fight the detention and deportation system. In addition to Never Again, she has done congregational organizing with groups such as the Pittsburgh Interfaith Impact Network and Nashville Organized for Action and Hope, with Jewish-left organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow, and through student organizing. She has also worked as a fundraiser for Kayan Palestinian Feminist Organization. She lives in Columbus, Ohio on the lands of the Shawnee, Miami, Hopewell, and other indigenous Nations, land from which they were forcibly removed. Shayna enjoys singing a little too loudly, taking walks, and cooking with her partner, Alex.

• Symone Saul, Membership & Field Organizer, (she/they) takes her cues from the wisdom of many: decolonizing with the elders at Indigenous resistance camps; learning mutual aid at the asylum seeker camp in Matamoros, Mexico; practicing anti-racist theory and direct action modeled by the Black and trans leaders in her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA on unceded Haudenosaunee Territory, while working on electoral campaigns and grassroots community organizing; and rooting in her Jewish ancestry with the community of Never Again Action. Her life is bound in finding freedom from oppression and finding healing in our universal struggle. She enjoys sleeping and watching her girlfriend’s band play shows in DIY punk venues.

Our Principles

Principles are the basic agreements that everyone acting as Never Again Action agrees to. They hold our movement together, protect us from threats, and guide our people through action.

1. Never Again Action is a Jewish-led mobilization against the persecution, detention, and deportation of immigrants in the United States. We take direct action to raise the alarm about the current system and disrupt its operation, and to catalyze a popular movement for permanent protection for all undocumented people.
2. Our Jewish ancestors call us and sustain us. We see what is happening to immigrant communities in the US today, and we are called to act as we would have wanted others to act for our families. We are differently affiliated, unaffiliated, and allied, but together we draw from a rich well of Jewish traditions to unify and sustain our action.
3. We take action proportional to the moment. We take direct action that targets the system, demonstrates the stakes to the public, and inspires them to join us.
4. We’re empowering the public, not making compromises with the powerful. We don’t negotiate with candidates, politicians, or companies--but we welcome them to move to the right side of history. We act to change the common sense among the American public, to create the political conditions that politicians will have no choice but to follow.
5. We know that everyone has skills and experiences to contribute to the movement. We need people to organize, to plan, to hold us together, and to simply show up. We welcome all Jews and allies, regardless of age, ability, or background. We believe working toward justice isn’t an extra task that only some people can do — it’s an obligation all of us can uphold in our own way.
6. We trust each other to lead. We engage each other in good faith, trusting that we are all committed to our collective cause. If we’re going to win, we need people empowered to take action everywhere: to try new things, to make mistakes, to seek support, and to grow. We remember that we share the same goal, especially when we have different ideas about how to achieve it.
7. We learn how to build power together. We are new to an immigrant rights movement that directly-affected people have been leading and living for decades. We know that those affected by the daily violence of the immigration system know most about how to fight it—and that we can effectively contribute to that fight only when we build in real relationship with them. Our community has privilege and resources to support this fight: we know we have to learn from undocumented communities how best to do so.
8. We commit and we grow. We are committed to showing up even when it’s messy. We approach difficult conversations with humility in order to build trust across differences in privilege and oppression. We root ourselves in the Jewish practice of tshuva, our capacity to seek forgiveness and return to relationships when we cause harm.
9. We aren’t leaving anyone behind. The persecution of immigrants won’t end when the camps close, or when DREAMers alone gain permanent status. We don’t settle for compromises that benefit some people at the expense of the many. We join the tradition of those fighting to seek fundamental change for all undocumented people.
10. When we show up in the collective struggle against white nationalism and white supremacy, we show up for others—and for ourselves. We see how today’s antisemitism, anti-immigrant hatred, and other forms of bigotry uphold one another—and that our safety lies in solidarity. When we fight for ourselves as Jews, and for our allies in the immigrant community, we recognize that we are all in this together. Never again means never again for anyone.

Our Palestine-Israel Process

As Jewish immigrant rights organizers committed to collective liberation and the fight against racial capitalism and settler colonialism, we at Never Again Action recognize the imperative of including Palestine in our work. Our vision of olam ha-bah—the world to come—cannot be separated from the pursuit of justice and freedom for all people, including Palestinians.

Before October of 2023, Never Again Action’s work had overlapped with those working for Palestinian liberation, but we did not have a clear, centrally available and articulated stance on our views on Palestine-Israel. Since October 2023, Never Again has responded to significant events of escalation or protest that felt urgent in various ways, through several social media posts (including on 10/9/23, 10/13/23, 1/26/24, and 5/9/24) and, by vote of the NAA National Strategy Team, signing onto this solidarity letter with the Palestinian people by the immigrant rights movement. Staff organizers also encouraged Never Again chapters to make the choices that made sense for their local contexts, but stopped short of providing recommendations.

Beginning September 2024 and hopefully (ken yehi razon, or “may it be so”) concluding in December 2024, we will embark on the NAA Palestine-Israel Process, a crucial step in collectively defining our organization's position on this issue. The goals of this process, established by our staff and approved by the National Strategy Team, are:

• Provide an opportunity to engage all stakeholders in the Never Again Action network, including staff, teams, National Strategy Team, board members, chapters, member-leaders, and others, on the issue of Palestine-Israel
• Write a collective statement which speaks to Never Again Action’s overall position on Palestine-Israel and its connection to our work as Jewish immigration organizers.
• Create a toolkit for chapters to use in their specific city/region to help them in speaking about Palestine-Israel while organizing.

To achieve these goals, the NAA Palestine-Israel Process Committee has formed as a time-bound, task-oriented group. This ad hoc committee, comprising members from various roles within the organization, will review our past work and that of our partner organizations related to Palestine-Israel. They will then distribute a thoughtful survey to gather input from our broader community and membership. Finally, the committee will analyze the survey results to craft a statement that reflects our collective stance.

This process is a living commitment to deeply and transparently engage with this critical issue as we continue to stand against all forms of oppression.

While our previous social media posts linked above were a needed response to urgent human rights abuse and genocide, you can revisit this page near the end of 2024 for Never Again Action’s collectively written statement on Palestine-Israel, as well as chapter toolkits and potentially other resources crafted by the committee.