In 1935, Bernard Weinstein, an Odessa-born Jewish labor activist living in New York, published Bilder fun yidishn arbeter-lebn in Amerike (Sketches of Jewish Workers' Lives in America), a Yiddish book aimed to educate Jewish youth worldwide about the topic in the title. 1/9

Weinstein begins by narrating his journey (he was 16) from Odessa to New York. A print, captioned "Migrants--with bundles and packs on their backs" illustrates Weinstein's descriptions of masses of Odessa's Jews leaving town in the 1880s: visibly, publicly, in large groups. 2/9

Weinstein takes the train to Hamburg, where he eventually boards an ocean liner to New York. "On every train station along the way," he can see "Russian Jews [stuck] without means to travel further." In Hamburg, he sees "tired Jewish migrants languishing in the streets." 3/9

This bears some similarity to Trump's 2018 stories of a "migrant caravan" and the "invasion" of our country. Except in contrast to Weinstein, Trump uses dehumanizing rhetoric to describe refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants. 4/9 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/26/migrant-caravan-disabled-children

Five years ago I took a train from Vienna to Frankfurt, and found myself in the midst of a human flow to Germany. Unlike Weinstein, I already carried my US passport, and was not taken off the train, like 99% of the passengers, at the "non-existent" border in Passau. 5/9

My fellow passengers were lucky: they had made it to Schengen, dominated by a benevolent German chancellor. Outside Schengen borders, one could--then and now--see "migrants languishing in the streets," like these Afghans in Hadžići, Bosnia. (Photo by @AhNidzara, follow her.) 6/9

We believe in fictions, as @_edinh calls them. I got my US passport "legally." I had not, like a man I talked to on that train, flown from Islamabad to Istanbul, taken a bus to the sea, a boat to Lesvos, then to mainland Greece, then walked to Vienna, all "illegally." 7/9

Passports are made of paper. They can be destroyed easily, or simply stamped "J," like Germany did with Jewish passports in 1938, rendering them useless. We can all be forced to leave our home in search for a better life, or even bare survival. No one is "illegal" 8/9

Or, as http://klezmatics.com  put it in one of my favorite songs:

"You glance away, your house has disappeared,
The sweater you've been knitting has unfurled.
You live adrift, and everything you feared
Comes to you in this undoing world." end/