In polarizing times, here’s something both sides can agree on: Opponents of Donald Trump’s agenda are struggling to offer any resistance.
“Democrats are like hamsters on a wheel, running furiously and going nowhere,” crowed Liz Peek of Fox News.
“If Trump’s first Presidency was characterized by widespread revolt, his second term has so far been defined by the lack of dissidence,” lamented Brady Brickner-Wood in The New Yorker.
A high-profile New York rabbi is trying to change that. Working with other clergy, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum hopes to build “visible resistance and organized compassion” through regular, localized demonstrations by individuals who reject Trump’s actions on immigration, free speech, the environment and LGBTQ rights, to name a few.
Kleinbaum — rabbi emerita of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan, New York’s flagship LGBTQ+ synagogue — is director of The Beacon, which since Jan. 20 has been holding weekly organizing and morale-building Zoom calls for Jews and others desperate to push back against a president they consider a despot. The Beacon’s first major action will take place on Thursday, March 20, at 7 p.m., when people are invited to gather wherever they live and hold up signs declaring “whatever we’re feeling in our souls in the face of this regime’s actions,” according to a release.
A spreadsheet offers suggestions for signs, from “I Stand With Our Immigrant Neighbors” to “Honk if You Love Ukraine” to “Trans Rights Are Human Rights.”
The Beacon wants people to share their gatherings on social media and organize WhatsApp or Signal groups for their neighborhoods. It is experimenting with more targeted actions, like organizing a letter-writing campaign in support of Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York physician who was indicted by the state of Louisiana for prescribing abortion pills to a Louisiana resident.
The Beacon is “trying to spread light where there’s darkness,” said Kleinbaum, who stepped down last July after leading CBST for 32 years. “We might not be able to change a particular policy, but we can show up for people who are targets or where there’s racism or violence, and we can try and spread light.”
Kleinbaum drew inspiration from Tag Meir, an Israeli project launched in 2011 that organizes interreligious visits to the victims of anti-Arab violence, as well as CBST’s own efforts at the start of the first Trump term to show solidarity with the targets of the administration’s so-called Muslim ban.
In 2016, days after Trump was first elected, Kleinbaum and others from her synagogue visited a local mosque carrying signs reading “Jewish New Yorkers stand with our Muslim neighbors.” Members of her congregation kept up the weekly vigil until COVID hit.
The Beacon grew out of conversations Kleinbaum had with Rabbi Sharon Brous of the independent IKAR congregation in Los Angeles and Rabbi Stephanie Kolin of Congregation Beth Elohim, a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn. “How do we strengthen each other?” Kleinbaum remembers the rabbis asking each other. “How do we insulate our souls so that we’re not crushed by this cruelty?”
Kleinbaum said she was also inspired by a trip to the Mauthausen concentration camp with her congregation in 2017, when she learned that the Nazis would tell Austrians living along the roads leading to the camp to close their blinds when a transport of Jews or political prisoners was scheduled to pass by.
“That’s how every person living in those houses knew a transport was moving,” said Kleinbaum. “They could hear the rumbling of the trucks, but they somehow could avoid knowing what was going on. So I’m very motivated by that image to say, we can’t close the blinds.”
While three rabbis were in on its founding, The Beacon is close to formalizing a relationship with Union Theological Seminary, the liberal Christian seminary in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Kleinbaum is also on the board of the Interfaith Center of New York, “which is very actively a part of this as well,” she said.
“I would call it multifaith and secular, because we want it rooted in spirituality, but not a specific religion,” she said.
Between 120 and 190 people have attended the Monday Zoom calls, and The Beacon has a database of more than 1,100 people, according to a spokesman.
Kleinbaum said she is aware that people are frustrated with the slow pace of resistance, as well as overwhelmed by the volume of executive orders and norm-breaking actions being taken by and in the name of the administration. She compared the first 30 days of Trump’s second term to shloshim, the 30 days of mourning and detachment that follows a Jewish death.
The Beacon is “trying to spread light where there’s darkness,” said Kleinbaum, who stepped down last July after leading New York’s flagship LGBTQ+ synagogue for 32 years. (Courtesy CBST)
And yet she feels that’s starting to change, and that The Beacon is part of an emerging “landscape” of resistance. She mentions the work of Indivisible, the progressive movement founded during the first Trump term, and Markers For Democracy, which organizes postcard-writing drives on behalf of progressive causes.
In the absence of large-scale demonstrations or a unified Democratic response, local and even individual protests have sprung up, like the businesses that have prepared escape routes for immigrant employees, stay-at-home strikes by agricultural workers in California and the refusals by teachers in school districts like Los Angeles to let immigration agents enter school grounds.
The progressive group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action organizes petition drives and co-sponsors rallies, including an “emergency rally” in New York’s Foley Square on Thursday to protest the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University. The Interfaith Center stages weekly Multifaith Mondays: Witness to Democracy vigils at New York’s Columbus Circle; sponsors include CBST, the Jewish Theological Seminary, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the Union for Reform Judaism.
A coalition of liberal groups is planning nationwide protests on Saturday, April 5, with a “Hands Off!” march planned for Washington, D.C.
Kleinbaum draws particular inspiration from Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., who at the Inaugural Prayer Service issued a direct plea to a scowling Trump to show compassion for immigrants, refugees and LGBTQ+ communities.
Kleinbaum took a cue from Budde on Jan. 30, when she attended New York Mayor Eric Adams’s annual interfaith breakfast. Kleinbaum and other clergy held up a sign reading, “Mr. Mayor, show mercy to our immigrant friends,” shortly after Adams publicly pledged his cooperation with the White House’s hardline immigration enforcement agenda.
Photographs of the clergy holding the sign made it into much of the media coverage of the event. “I also want this group to create a split screen, so when there’s cruelty, we also have an image of people doing something of compassion and kindness,” she said.
Long associated with a politically active synagogue, and married to American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, a frequent target of right-wing ire, Kleinbaum knows she is in a different place than the pulpit rabbis who try to avoid politics lest they alienate one faction or another in their institutions.
The Trump administration has also claimed that some of its most controversial actions, like the detention of Khalil and freezing $400 million in funding for Columbia, are being done in the name of fighting antisemitism.
“I really feel for people who are struggling with how to be spiritual leaders in communities that are divided,” she said. “I am also very sensitive to how difficult it is right now given this outrageous antisemitism that we’re facing.”
And still, she sees the current political stakes as “existential.”
“There are ways to be a leader in these moments, which means not just hocking people,” she said, using a Yiddishism meaning nagging or scolding, “but trying to lead people in a way that helps provide comfort and also some leadership and vision of where we need to go.”
Handwritten signs and neighborhood demonstrations might seem a quaint response to an administration that has a Republican-led Congress behind it and that has threatened, and acted, to disregard traditional checks on presidential power such as the courts and a free press.
Kleinbaum acknowledges that reality, and foresees connecting Beacon volunteers to political action efforts as the group gathers momentum. The Beacon has held trainings about local government and is considering ways to leverage local political power.
In its initial stage, however, The Beacon is about empowering people who feel powerless.
“We’re facing a very different scenario, and we have to kind of build our muscles so that we’ll be strong enough to be engaged politically,” she said. “We want to inflate people so that they don’t disappear and we don’t feel so crushed by the cruelty that we just want to stay in bed all day, which is a very real response.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
