I went to Minneapolis a few days after MLK Day 2026. I went for many reasons — to stave off despair through action and learning, to support and visit a friend whose child was a classmate of Renee Good’s children and because I received an email inviting me that began with history. I grew up wondering what role I would have played had I lived during the Shoah or the civil-rights movement. It’s clear we are living in a no less consequential time.
The call from Minneapolis
The invitation email which was sent out widely to clergy drew a direct line from the Rev. Martin Luther King’s telegram in March 1965 to “clergy of all faiths” across the nation to join him in Selma, to this January 2026 call by Minneapolis organizers to join them with less than a week’s notice, for a gathering of support, training and protest.
In 1965, King wrote:
In the vicious maltreatment of defenseless citizens of Selma, where old women and young children were gassed and clubbed at random, we have witnessed an eruption of the disease of racism which seeks to destroy all of America. No American is without responsibility. All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life. The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all America help to bear the burden.
The Minneapolis MARCH organizers wrote:
In the targeted violence against immigrant communities from Latine and Somali neighborhoods—where families are being torn apart by masked agents, where communities are organizing, resisting and protecting one another and where Renee Good’s life has been taken with reckless disregard for the preciousness of human life—we are witnessing an eruption of corruption, racism and the worship of money over life itself, now threatening the soul of this nation. No American is without responsibility for the 600+ and growing number of people kidnapped and missing from our communities, nor for Renee’s murder. All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Minneapolis and contaminates every crevice of our national life.
This invitation spoke to me with moral clarity. It called me in. It spurred me into action. Action that some of my colleagues were already taking locally. Local action that I had taken sporadically, but action I felt ready to intensify. The invitation also promised to bring me into community. Out of my head, out of my bed, out of a persistent and familiar isolating despair that has come and gone over these past few years, and into a place of purpose — a place of following the lead of people on the ground proximate to the harm, people on the ground with a strong history of organizing locally for justice in relationship with one another and in relationship with their community. I am so grateful that I went, that so many colleagues and mentors of mine went, too. That I had the support of my partner to go, that I had the air miles and the ability to drop everything for two days and do this.
I am still unpacking all my experiences and learning, but here is some of what I learned and want to share.
The two-sided coin
Jayce Koester, a rabbinic intern at Shir Tikvah congregation in Minneapolis, shared an image I have been carrying around with me since I heard it on that Friday morning. It was shared as part of a panel of local people involved in a range of ways of supporting immigrant communities under threat and resisting the deployment of force against immigrants, citizens, Brown and Black Minnesotans, as well as anyone seen as their accomplices. Koester asked us to take back with us not just our witness of the horror of being in an occupied city. But also, the astonishing goodness of the force of ordinary human neighbors, rising up in defense of decency, pluralism, democracy and a better vision of America than the cruel and erratic scenes unfolding daily under the current administration.
One person I met said, “When my grandmother was taken in 1939, her neighbors did nothing. We are writing a different history.”
It was not a difficult ask because it spoke to the truth of the layers of my experience in Minneapolis. It’s like holding a coin, Koester said, and the key is to hold it so you can always feel both sides — side one is terror, intimidation, daily abductions of human beings taken from their families, people staying home afraid to go to the hospital, the grocery store, work and school because they could be snatched up and detained, disappeared, harmed and, as we know, even killed. On the other side of the coin is the emergence of powerful committed networks of people who are not waiting for anyone to lead or save them from authoritarianism — often not connected to existing organizations, just informal networks of neighbors and friends who are taking it upon themselves to protect neighbors, drive people to work, make sure people have groceries, guard children and parents at daily school drop-offs, warn people when their streets are infiltrated and so much more.
This two-sided coin struck me as an updated image of the two-pockets teaching of Rabbi Simcha Bunam of Peshischa. And it made sense that in Minneapolis in early 2026, the two pockets image doesn’t work so well. It is not two separate pieces of paper in two separate pockets; it is one coin that is held in the palm of one hand. The terror and the inspirational uprising of neighbors.
When people ask me how my trip was, I always start by saying “inspiring.” They ask me if it was scary. Yes, it was terrifying, I say. But what I took away was the power of how Minneapolis residents are responding to the terror and how much they want to pass their wisdom to those of us everywhere where a surge hasn’t come in full force quite yet. Yet it is clearly in the planning and already impacting neighbors all around us, even if in smaller numbers than in Minneapolis during the height of Metro Surge.
Unable to rely on the state for protection
I was deeply moved by the young queer and trans organizers I met in Minneapolis. A Black queer clergy member, mother and organizer said something I won’t forget. There are many people who live in bodies fully aware, long before this ICE surge, of what it means not to be able to rely on the state for protection. There are many among the trans and queer community who know what’s it like to be seen by this administration as less than human. They are choosing not to hide but to stand up for their immigrant neighbors because that’s what neighbors do, and also because they know that they are targets as well, even if in different ways. And this in so many cases has translated into solidarity and courage more than fear.
When ordinary citizens volunteer their time and draw on their varied skills and ingenuity and values and creativity, they can and are changing the lives of families and communities. They are preventing abductions. But they can’t prevent all of them. In those cases, they provide witness and support for those left behind. Detentions happen very quickly. Tactics must change quickly and constantly, because ICE learns from the actions of volunteers, just as the volunteers learn from watching ICE.
Emulate a plague of locusts
Erev Shabbat, after actions at Target headquarters, a march in the subzero temperatures that kept only my spirit warm, and a powerful, large rally, many of the Reconstructionist rabbis and others in town joined together at Shir Tikvah. There, we experienced a powerful release of singing and davening under the leadership of Rabbi Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, and for Torah you can still find on YouTube offered by Joey Glick, who urged the crowd to emulate a plague of locusts. It truly felt revelatory. This congregation and its clergy and members are a hub of moral leadership in the city. I know there are many others I didn’t have the chance to visit. After the action, the freezing march and the powerful rally, coming together to welcome Shabbat was such a gift to the soul and not one we often get after people disperse after a rally or action.
This is the way we must live right now, caring for our own families and insisting on our vision of a world where we all will fight for the safety and security of our neighbors.
One person I met said, “When my grandmother was taken in 1939, her neighbors did nothing. We are writing a different history.” Another said, “My body on ICE-watch feels like it did when I did protective presence in the West Bank.”
I thought about this connection between the ICE-watch Jewish volunteers and my pull to Minneapolis, and my experiences attending house demolitions and sitting with Bedouin families during my time in Israel as a rabbinical student. Across the ocean, I have Israeli family. My almost 80-year-old uncle, for one, has begun to spend cold nights sleeping in West Bank Palestinian villages to answer the call of his neighbors for protection — neighbors he didn’t think much about when he made aliyah in the summer of 1967.
I know that I went to Minneapolis not just as an American knowing we aren’t done with the civil-rights movement, with ending the scourge of racism and white supremacy here. I went also as a Jew who is inspired by my brave Israeli family trying to save their country from Jewish supremacy and its violent adherents. I don’t know where we will win and where we won’t, but I know that this is the way we have to live right now — caring for our own families and insisting on our vision of a world where we all will fight for the safety and security of our neighbors, knowing that their safety and well-being is tied up in our own. I am linked to my uncle and my cousin’s husband, a rabbi in Jerusalem. We are all linked by our commitment to multiethnic multiracial democracy, and we are willing one another to get braver in the personal risks we take to counter violent extremism, whether committed in the name of a white nationalist vision for this country or a theocratic ultranationalist Israel.
Multiple centers of the world
One last learning I want to share from Minneapolis. For the Dakota people, Minneapolis is a sort of Jerusalem. What I mean is (and this perhaps should be obvious for me as a Reconstructionist rabbi), it took hold in a new way as I sat listening to Rev. Jim Bear with 600 clergy that first frigid morning in Minneapolis: The center of the world is not one but many. For the Dakota, the place where the Minnesota River meets the Mississippi River, the Bdote, is the center of the earth and birthplace of civilization. That place is currently also a detention center where many abducted immigrants, and also, Native leaders, are being held. Someday, this place must be redeemed.
For the Dakota, the place where the Minnesota River meets the Mississippi River, the Bdote is the center of the earth and birthplace of civilization. … Someday this place must be redeemed.
I want this first trip of mine to Minneapolis to be just that, a first. The pride of Minnesotans in their character was everywhere: MARCH organizers insisted on outsiders learning about the history of resistance and repression in Minneapolis throughout native history, as well as the present-day roles of indigenous folk. I want to return to pay tribute again to Renee Good and Alex Petti and George Floyd, and to daven again at Shir Tikvah. And the next time, I want to pay homage to the hundreds of Dakota mothers and children separated from their families in 1862 — long before the current policy of family separation, back in the same location where the current headquarters for United States Customs and Border Protector and ICE have been given space by Secretary of State Pete Hegseth.
There is so much daily bravery and care among the Minnesotans I met and learned from. There are so many different roles to play right now and a real valuing of them all. There is exhaustion. There is a desire for more visits. There are so many amazing local rabbis and pastors. One church has turned some of its classrooms into a free health clinic for immigrants. Once a month, it offers free reiki and acupuncture in its sanctuary after services. Wow. It is a model for synagogues everywhere.
With gratitude to all the local leaders and my dear friends who hosted me while carrying on their resistance to the occupation of their city in so many ways big and small.
