Good evening. My name is Jamie Beran. I’m calling in from New Jersey and I lead Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, where we organize American Jews to build an American future free from white supremacy, antisemitism, and racism.
I want to begin again with those who have been murdered by ICE: Alex Pretti, Keith Porter Jr., Renee Good, and the over thirty people we know of who have died in ICE custody since 2025. As we say in my tradition: may their memories be a blessing and a revolution. And we lift up all others who have been taken from our communities by this rogue agency that functions as this administration’s personal terror group, echoing crimes of the past and redoubling crimes of the present.
As many of the brilliant leaders on this call have already reminded us, this regime didn’t come out of nowhere, but is part of broader system of racial, economic, anti-queer oppression that has always been here, and has been allowed to consolidate its power, make more visible its intentions, and do away with the shrouds that attempted to hide those intentions behind policy.
Jewish tradition shares a lot with the American racial and immigrant justice movements we belong to today. Our national movements are from our nation’s people. And our nation’s people — those who were forced here, those whose lineages were erased from here, those who had to flee oppression overseas, and those whose identities have deemed them outsiders since birth — have one particular thing in common. We are the people who they could not make go away. We are people whose histories are long, crowded litanies of those who tried to destroy us and failed. From every hateful demagogue that has turned to dust while we remained, we have learned one singular, hard-won truth:
With the breath we learned to breathe even when the air is thick with grief, with the voices of our parents and grandparents telling us how they survived, and with the hands of all of our collective ancestors always at our back, we all say one thing:
We are still here.
May this country begin to know the courage that comes from radical, holy honesty: the knowledge that we are all we have, but if we accept that we truly have each other, we will move mountains. If I took nothing away from my time in Minneapolis this past week, it was this simple truth. The community there is facing down monsters and responding by moving mountains for each other.
In his final words to the Israelites, Moses implored his people to understand that we have everything we need to operationalize G-d’s commandments. Te literally tells them the work of it “is not in the heavens.” We must stop looking to the horizon for a savior. We must stop waiting for a hand to reach down from the seats of power. There is no one else coming to rescue us. We are the only ones coming to rescue us.
The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us "there is nothing new under the sun." And when we see the same violence, the same kidnappings, the same state-sponsored cruelty, it is easy to believe. It is easy to feel the weight of that eternal loop. But as we bear witness together on this call, and as we organize in Minneapolis and across our country, we answer with the words of Octavia Butler, one of this nation’s great 20th century prophets.
We say: It may be true that there is nothing new under the sun. But there are new suns.
May we have the courage to leave the old, dying light behind. May we be the ones to carry each other toward the new suns we are building with our own hands.
Amen.
