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Behind the scenes of Justin Jones’ viral ‘tikkun olam’ encounter with Jewish teens in DC
(JTA) — Sam Rosen and Noah Segal were sitting with their friends on the steps of the Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., on Monday when they spotted one of America’s most talked-about politicians.
Justin Jones, a Democratic lawmaker in Tennessee whom Republicans kicked out of the state’s legislature in retaliation for a gun-violence protest, was walking by in his signature white suit.
“I remember me and my friend looking at him and being like, ‘Is that him? Is that really one of the Tennessee Three?’” Rosen recalled on Wednesday from his home in Dallas. “To me, he’s kind of the face of upholding democracy right now, so it was very cool to see that.”
Jones waved at their group, this year’s crop of Bronfman Fellows, a prestigious leadership program that aims to empower Jewish teens. That initiated an encounter steeped in Jewish lingo that went viral after a liberal news outlet in Tennessee shared a video on social media.
“Can I shake your hand?” Segal, a high school senior from Ardsley, New York, asked Jones. Several of the other teens introduced themselves, too, and one explained that they were all Jewish teens from across North America.
“This is a Jewish program?” Jones asked after giving a brief pep talk about getting more young people involved in politics, drawing an affirmative response.
“Tikkun olam,” Jones ventured, seemingly testing whether he had correctly named the Hebrew term meaning “repair the world” that has come to signify social justice in progressive circles.
“Yes,” the teens replied in unison, many of their faces lighting up with excitement. “We just talked about that!” Rosen said, with apparent delight. After chatting with the group for a few more minutes, Jones said he had to head off for a White House meeting with President Joe Biden — but he took the time first to pose for a picture with the group.
For many of the people who saw and shared the video, produced and posted Tuesday by the Tennessee Holler news site, the exchange offered an example of cross-cultural solidarity at a time of polarization. The video has been seen well over 2 million times on Twitter and more on other platforms.
“It seems like it resonated because it was a genuine, uplifting moment that showed how impactful it can be to have young leaders showing other young people the way forward — and because it crossed lines. Racial lines. Religious lines. Geographic lines. It shows how essential it is to come together,” Justin Kanew, Tennessee Holler’s founder and editor, told JTA. (The site was the first to report that a Tennessee school board had banned the Holocaust novel “Maus” last year.)
Kanew added: “Also: Justin Jones is the real deal. Sincere, and inspirational. So that helps.”
Jones burst onto the national scene last month when he and another Tennessee lawmaker were ejected from the state legislature after staging a protest over the Republican-led body’s inaction after a school shooting in Nashville. Both men are Black; a third lawmaker who protested is a white woman and she was not ejected. The racial disparity in the lawmakers’ treatment drew widespread criticism, even after local elected officials in Nashville and Memphis reversed the ejections.
The saga has made Jones into a folk hero among progressives, as well as an inspiration to those who want to see young adults — he is 27 – play an active role in shaping the country.
“Thank you for being a role model for the young,” Dan Libenson, the head of a Jewish education philanthropy who teaches in the Bronfman program, tells Jones in the video.
WATCH: “Thank you for being a role model for the young.”
As the #TennesseeThree arrived at the White House a group of Jewish students from across were there on a tour, and they were thrilled to meet @brotherjones_. #TikkunOlam pic.twitter.com/vii89sTsIp
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) April 25, 2023
Libenson told JTA that it had taken the group a moment to realize that the man in the white suit was in fact Jones, as the group had been sequestered at a Jewish retreat center in Maryland and had not heard about Jones’ visit, or about the backlash from some conservatives against it.
“As you can see from the video, as soon as it registered, we all rushed down to greet him,” Libenson told JTA in an email. “It’s clear that Gen Z has been traumatized by the mass shootings that seem to happen every day, and I think many of the fellows see Justin Jones as a hero for not taking no for an answer with regard to the safety of young people like them.”
Said Segal, “The whole seminar theme was vision and the future, so it was random and funky and cool to see someone who is right there making a change.” About Jones’ invocation of tikkun olam, he said, “I was impressed with him before that and impressed with him after that.”
The Bronfman Fellows program is not partisan, and participants hold a wide range of political views, according to Becky Voorwinde, the group’s CEO. But she noted that applicants for the fellowship must write about a contemporary issue that matters to them, and many choose gun violence. “It cuts across political viewpoints,” she said. “They grew up after Sandy Hook. This is their reality.”
Asked whether the issue was one he thought a lot about, Rosen answered, “How can it not be?”
He went on, “It’s not like it’s one awful shooting a year. It’s every day. It seems like it’s only a matter of time before it’s me. It’s not something that controls my entire life, but it’s always in the back of my mind.”
What the Bronfman Youth Fellows’ group photo with Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones looked like from the vantage point of where they’d been sitting before they spotted the prominent lawmaker. (Courtesy of Becky Voorwinde)
Segal said that he, too, viewed the threat of gun violence, alongside climate change, as one of the widest problems facing young people. In fact, he said, for part of a final project in the fellowship, he’d facilitated a discussion about what it means to fight antisemitism for a generation surrounded by mass shootings.
The Washington trip was a closing activity for the cohort of Bronfman Fellows, who first spent five weeks together last summer before getting together throughout the year virtually and in person. Before running into Jones, the group had been meeting with four Jewish White House staffers; afterward, they broke into small teams to meet with past fellows working in a wide array of jobs in the area.
The day before the viral encounter, the group visited a haredi Orthodox yeshiva in Baltimore. There, too, tikkun olam came up in discussion — but the head of the yeshiva seemed to dismiss it as a meaningful framework for Jewish life compared to the commandments of traditional Jewish law.
Rosen, who belongs to a Reform synagogue in Dallas and is headed to Brandeis University in the fall, pushed back.
“I said, ‘Rabbi, this is an obligation that we all uphold in our community. It’s a core value of Judaism and who I am,’” he recounted. “To me, that’s why it was so cool that Justin Jones said that.”
The entire encounter with Jones, Rosen said, felt authentic and empowering. And that feeling, Kanew said, could be contagious.
“Everything we need to save this country from descending into a dark place was right there in that exchange,” Kanew said. “And the beauty of it is everything that moment represents will inevitably come to fruition if people stay engaged and keep fighting for it. So it’s an incredibly hopeful moment, and hope is what people are looking for right now.”
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How would Jews fleeing Europe have fared under Trump’s anti-immigration policies?
Donald Trump’s vision of foreigners worthy of emigrating to the United States appears to boil down to this: white, Nordic, Christian, politically conservative, not obese, and not a potential drain on public services. It’s a fantasy that’s reminiscent of Nazi values, and one that is being rejected by many Americans.
Trump’s Thanksgiving Day responses to the Washington, D.C. shooting of two National Guard members — one of whom has died — are among the most overtly racist statements he has ever made in public. Trump said he would stop migration from “all Third World Countries” and deport foreign nationals who are “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
Trump has faced accusations of racism since he was a young real estate developer working with his father. During his first term as president, Trump said America should welcome more immigrants from places like Norway, rather than from Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations — which he dismissed as ‘shithole countries.” Trump, during his second term, has been enacting something like a purity code: Hispanics guilty of nothing more than being in the country illegally get deported; right-wing extremists who tried to carry out a coup in his name get pardons.
About 66,000 migrants are currently locked up under Trump’s immigration crackdown — the largest detention population in U.S. history. Many have no criminal record. Social media is flooded daily with videos of ICE agents smashing car windows, masked men in battle gear dragging immigrants from vehicles, and children left crying as parents are hauled away in handcuffs. Each outrage carries the same message: You are not wanted here.
More than 250 Venezuelan migrants were sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, branded by critics as a ‘black hole of humanity.”
Other migrants have been spirited away to South Sudan and countries where they had never set foot — their destinies left unknown.
The Trump administration’s unequal treatment of white South Africans and Palestinian survivors of Gaza is an infuriating display of heartlessness and racism. Even though Afrikaners were the architects and beneficiaries of apartheid’s cruelty, they have been promised the lion’s share of America’s drastically reduced refugee slots. Meanwhile, Gazan Palestinians — whose homes have been destroyed, whose loved ones have been killed by the tens of thousands, and who have endured famine for months — are excluded entirely. In Trump’s America, whiteness and ideological alignment matter more than human suffering.
I can’t help but think of the plight of refugees in postwar Europe after Nazi Germany’s defeat. Up to 60 million people were uprooted across the continent. Some 11 million refugees crowded into Allied‑run displaced persons camps, including hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma, and other survivors of Nazi camps.
Most of these souls would not pass muster in Trump’s America. His new guidance to embassies and consulates instructs visa officers to screen out applicants who are overweight, elderly, or suffering from chronic conditions — diabetes, heart disease, depression. Applicants must prove financial self‑sufficiency, English proficiency, and the ability to work without reliance on public benefits. Yet multitudes of Europe’s postwar refugees were sick, stripped of education, and dependent on government support just to survive. Compassion has no place in Trump’s transactional brain; these are not the kind of people he would deem worthy of America’s embrace.
What Trump apparently did not see coming was the backlash against his terror campaign against foreigners. In towns and cities across the country, neighbors have rallied as immigrant friends, business owners, and longtime contributors to their communities were hunted down and disappeared. Vigils, marches, and local resolutions have sprung up, with ordinary citizens insisting that their communities will not be defined by terror.
Charlotte offers one example: when ICE launched Operation Charlotte’s Web in November, agents stormed immigrant neighborhoods and even a church, prompting pastors to prepare sanctuaries and residents to organize vigils and rapid‑response patrols. In St. Paul, Minn., rapid‑response networks sprang up to protect immigrant families, alerting neighbors when ICE vans appeared and mobilizing lawyers to defend detainees. During Trump’s first major sweep, in Los Angeles, mass protests turned the city into a showcase of resistance rather than submission.
Community members have demonstrated an incredible fearlessness in their efforts to protect immigrants from federal agents — shouting at them to identify themselves, to show a warrant, and that they’re not welcome in the neighborhood. Sometimes the agents have retreated, getting back into their van or SUV without making an arrest.
ICE agents’ attempts to arrest a 16‑year‑old high school student in Rhode Island this month offers a stirring example of community compassion in action. The teen, interning for Superior Court Judge Joseph J. McBurney in Providence, was misidentified by agents who surrounded the judge’s car and threatened to smash the windows. McBurney stood firm, insisting they had the wrong person. Only after confirming his words did the agents back down, and the boy was freed.
In several communities, high school students, peers and teachers have stepped in to defend migrant classmates against ICE and Border Patrol agents prowling neighborhoods, often accused of racial profiling based on skin color or accents.
In Oregon, nearly 300 students walked out of McMinnville High School to protest the ICE arrest of a classmate during lunch break and demanded school administrators create protocols to alert migrant students whenever ICE agents are spotted nearby.
“Honestly, after what happened to that kid, the 17-year-old, I don’t feel safe going to school,” fellow student Alexis Hernandez Flores told KOIN 6 News.
As depressing and alarming as the past several months have been — as Trump has brought the United States to the abyss of autocracy — I have found reason for hope in ordinary citizens’ bold actions to protect foreigners in their midst from illegal and racist roundups. From Chicago to Charlotte, from Los Angeles to Providence, neighbors, churches, and even judges have refused to be silent. Their defiance recalls what was missing in Nazi Germany: a public willing to stand up, to insist that fear and violence will not define their communities.
If Trump sends federal agents into neighborhoods to arrest and deport foreign nationals who are deemed “non-compatible with Western Civilization,” as he has threatened, the backlash will surely become louder, and the resistance against him stronger.
The post How would Jews fleeing Europe have fared under Trump’s anti-immigration policies? appeared first on The Forward.
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Most American Jews believe Zohran Mamdani will make NYC Jews less safe, Israeli poll finds
(JTA) — More than two-thirds of American Jews believe that New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will make the city’s Jews less safe, according to a new survey by a nonpartisan Israeli research institute.
The finding came in the Jewish People Policy Institute’s latest Voice of the Jewish People Index, which surveyed 745 American Jews about a range of topics last month, just 10 days after Mamdani was elected. It offers the latest insight into Jewish sentiments about Mamdani, whose staunch criticism of Israel has drawn attention, and at times allegations of antisemitism, from Jews around the world.
The survey found that 67% of respondents believed Mamdani’s election would make New York City’s Jews less safe, while 6% believed they would be more safe and 18% believed he would make them neither more or less safe.
Among Jews identifying as politically conservative, 93% said they believed Mamdani would make New York City Jews less safe. Concerns were lower among liberal-leaning Jews, but still one third of respondents who identified as “strongly liberal” said they believed Mamdani would make Jews less safe.
Over half of respondents said they felt “worried” about the election of Mamdani, while 11% said they were “afraid.” Another 13% said they were “hopeful.”
A different poll in August found that 58% of Jewish New Yorkers believed the city would be less safe for Jews under Mamdani.
The Jewish People Policy Institute conducts regular surveys of Jewish sentiment, drawing on a pool of Jews who have agreed to be part of a survey pool. The institute notes that as a result, “the survey tends to reflect the attitudes of ‘connected’ American Jews, that is, those with a relatively strong attachment to the Jewish community and/or Israel and/or Jewish identity.”
It found that 70% of respondents identified as Zionist, while 12% identified as “not a Zionist, but a supporter of Zionism.” Additionally, 7% identified as “neither a supporter nor an opponent of Zionism,” 5% identified as a post-Zionist and 3% identified as an anti-Zionist.
Among strong liberal respondents, 52% identified as Zionists, while 79% of strong conservatives identified as Zionists.
Asked whether they believed that Zionism is racism, a charge frequently leveled by Israel’s critics, 59% of respondents said they believed that Zionism is “not at all racism.” Among strong liberal respondents, the proportion was 28%, compared to 86% of strong conservatives.
The survey also asked respondents about their perception of antisemitism coming from the political left and right in the United States. In recent months, calls to condemn right-wing antisemitism among Jewish conservatives have revealed growing rifts within the party.
Among the survey’s respondents, 62% said they were worried about antisemitism from both the left and the right, while 20% said they were more worried about antisemitism on the left and 17% were more worried about it on the right. Among strong liberals, just 5% were worried about antisemitism on the left while just 1% of conservatives were worried about antisemitism on the right.
The post Most American Jews believe Zohran Mamdani will make NYC Jews less safe, Israeli poll finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Palestinian restaurant opening near Columbia names its location to honor girl killed in Gaza, campus protesters
(JTA) — A Palestinian restaurant in New York City has named its new location “Hinds Hall” after the moniker pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University gave to a campus building they occupied last spring.
In a post on Instagram on Thursday, the restaurant, Ayat NYC, which has eight locations, announced that its new storefront in Morningside Heights would be renamed in solidarity with the protesters at Columbia.
“It stands right next to Columbia University where students stood up for Gaza and renamed Hamilton Hall, a campus building to Hinds Hall and we choose to stand with them and carry that name forward,” the post read.
Critics of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protests at the time accused its participants of antisemitism and calling for violence against Jews. In June, a report by the Columbia University Task Force on Antisemitism found that over half of its Jewish student body had experienced discrimination and exclusion after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
The new location for the restaurant, which is owned by restaurateur Abdul Elenani and his wife, Ayat Masoud, faced criticism from some of the neighborhood’s Jewish residents, who say they have been overwhelmed by pro-Palestinian symbols and sentiment since Columbia became an epicenter of the encampment movement last year.
Ayat wove pro-Palestinian advocacy into its practices throughout the war in Gaza. In January 2024, one of its locations drew a public outcry after its menu featured the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” a phrase frequently used by pro-Palestinian activists that Jewish watchdogs view as a call for Israel’s destruction. Afterwards, the location hosted a free Shabbat dinner for over 1,300 people that drew anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian Jews and others.
“Our restaurants will not only ever serve food. It will serve memory, truth, and responsibility,” the new post from Ayat NYC continued. “The least we can do is carry her name in our hearts and on our storefront so that everyone who walks by knows that Hind mattered and every single child matters.”
The location’s name, which was also adopted in a song by rapper Macklemore, pays homage to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in Gaza in January 2024. (The Israeli military denied responsibility for her death, but a Washington Post investigation found that Israeli armored vehicles were present in the area.)
Her heavily publicized death, and the phone call she made to paramedics with the Palestine Red Crescent Society while stranded in a vehicle, also inspired the docudrama “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” which won a top prize at the Venice Film Festival in September.
“Her name carries the weight of all the children whose voices were silenced and whose blood was treated like it meant nothing,” the post by Ayat NYC continued.
An opening date has not yet been set for the Upper West Side location. A new location opened in late October in Astoria, the Queens neighborhood that is home to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and home to a thriving pro-Palestinian activist community.
The post Palestinian restaurant opening near Columbia names its location to honor girl killed in Gaza, campus protesters appeared first on The Forward.