The Rabbis Taking on ICE with Rabbis Sharon Kleinbaum and Tamar Magill-Grimm

Today on Word on the Street Live, we were joined by Rabbis Sharon Kleinbaum and Tamar Magill-Grimm for a powerful and unsettling conversation about what’s unfolding in Minneapolis/St. Paul – and what it’s demanding of Jewish leaders right now. Rabbi Magill-Grimm leads a Twin Cities–area synagogue and was among local clergy who helped amplify and participate in the call for national faith leaders to come to Minneapolis in solidarity with immigrant communities targeted by ICE. Rabbi Kleinbaum answered that call and traveled in from New York City to join the convening. We heard first from them about the situation on the ground and what the Minneapolis/St. Paul community is enduring. Here’s a snapshot of what else we covered: - Torah, memory and moral responsibility. We dug into what Jewish texts demand in moments like this: Welcoming the stranger, protecting the vulnerable and refusing state violence. We also wrestled with history: The echoes of MLK Jr.’s call on clergy to march in Selma and where Holocaust analogies illuminate versus where they risk obscuring more than they clarify. - ICE, the West Bank and abuse of power. Ilan reflected on his writing about comparisons between ICE agents and violent West Bank settlers – not as a slogan, but as a way of naming shared patterns of state-backed or state-enabled violence and the dispossession of vulnerable people from their homes. - What comes next for the Jewish community. We closed by asking what responsibility lies beyond individual rabbis and with established Jewish institutions that should be willing to lead. It’s not just faith leaders who are being asked to choose between caution and conscience; it’s all of us. We’re deeply grateful to Rabbis Kleinbaum and Magill-Grimm for joining us, and we hope their words and actions can instill more moral leadership in our grim reality.