BALTIMORE — On
the morning after Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) broke a record
for the longest filibuster in the history of the House of
Representatives — an eight-hour defense of immigrants — a Baltimore
amateur genealogist named Jennifer Mendelsohn sat in her home office and
logged onto
Ancestry.com
to begin her own form of protest. “Let’s see,” she said, typing in the
name of a Republican congressman whose anti-immigrant comments had been
controversial. “I was searching for him earlier and thought I might have
found something.”
She made a few clicks, going deeper into the past of the anti-immigrant congressman. His family? Immigrants from Norway.
Mendelsohn,
49, is the creator of “Resistance Genealogy,” a term that has suddenly
brought her a considerable amount of fame, to which she is still
adjusting. And that is, essentially, a tweet-by-tweet exposé on
hypocrisy, and a commentary on the stories America tells about itself.
Resistance
Genealogy. The concept began several months ago, when Mendelsohn
watched White House adviser Stephen Miller go on CNN and tell the anchor
that immigrants should be required to speak English.
Something in the statement rankled her, so Mendelsohn, a journalist
whose genealogical research had been mostly contained to her own family
tree, logged on to a few research databases, then responded with two
sentences that were promptly retweeted 17,000 times:
“Stephen
Miller favors immigrants who speak English. The 1910 census shows his
own great-grandmother couldn’t,” Mendelsohn wrote. She included a PDF of
the census document, which specified that Miller’s grandmother spoke
only Yiddish.
A few weeks later, Mendelsohn read conservative
commenter Tomi Lahren’s assertion that the country needed to punish the
“illegal behavior” of undocumented immigrants. Mendelsohn took to her
databases, landing on court documents for Lahren’s
great-great-grandfather. He’d been born in Russia, and then immigrated
to North Dakota, where he was indicted on a charge of forging his
naturalization documents.
Mendelsohn went back to Twitter: “Law-abiding citizens like her
great-great-grandfather, indicted by a grand jury for forging
naturalization papers?” She went viral again.
She wasn’t trying to stir up trouble, she says, so much as she was
trying to point out a truth about the history of America: almost
everyone came here from somewhere else, whether that migration happened
one generation ago or six, whether the migration was a hopeful choice or
a forced imprisonment. “Spending as much time as I do looking at these
documents and looking at family trees — all of those stories go back to a
boat.”
In Mendelsohn’s personal history, the boat in
question carried her infant grandfather. His parents, a shoemaker and a
housewife, boarded in Latvia and eventually settled in New York. Rosie
Mendelsohn, Jennifer’s great-grandmother, birthed 10 children and saw
all but one die in childhood. Rosie herself died at age 36 from
tuberculosis, though when Mendelsohn managed to track down her grave
online, the cemetery informed her regretfully that none of headstone’s
writing was legible.
“When I think of the opportunities afforded
to me over two generations, it’s nothing short of mind-boggling,”
Mendelsohn says. “The fact that I can type something on my computer and
hot food will come to my door. Or that in 10 minutes I can be at Johns
Hopkins and have the best medical care in the world. I am the
manifestation of everything [my ancestors] were hoping to do.” On
Mendelsohn’s long to-do list, she recently added: Buy Rosie Mendelsohn a
proper headstone.
Partly because her own American story began with her infant
grandfather, when Mendelsohn saw conservative Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)
tweet, “We can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies” —
“It made me crazy.”
“Congressman,” she tweeted back, attaching
papers in the public record from King’s ancestors: “here’s your
4-year-old grandmother arriving steerage class at Ellis Island, 1894.”
When
Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson declared that the United States
shouldn’t accept immigrants from “failing countries,” Mendelsohn dug up a
narrative written by his great-great-grandfather, who said he’d left
Switzerland because his prospects there were so limited.
King and
Carlson never responded to her findings. Neither did Lahren or Miller.
When The Washington Post reached out to all of them for comment, only
Carlson called back: “The United States is a completely different
country now,” he said. “The idea that [having] a relative who came 150
years ago means I have to have a specific view on immigration? It’s so
dumb it’s hard to believe you have to respond to it.”
He continued: “There’s only one question that matters: what’s good for the country in 2018?”
Discussions
about what’s good for the country have become a flash point: debates
about DACA were at the heart of the government shutdown, and the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services agency recently decided to remove
the phrase “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement. The new
mission statement prioritized “protecting Americans, securing the
homeland, and honoring our values.”
“Part of what’s going on is
this incredibly powerful mythologizing,” Mendelsohn says. “People are
insisting that, oh, the immigrants of yore, they did everything right.
That they came here legally, and walked to school uphill both ways, and
learned English immediately. But that’s B.S.! . . . In 1751, Benjamin
Franklin was complaining that the German immigrants in Pennsylvania
would never learn to speak English.” She wants people to interrogate
their own histories. If people are unbothered by their own ancestors’
immigration, but opposed to it now — why? What deeper issues have come
into play?
Something about her work has spoken to people —
particularly to liberal armchair activists who have no political power,
but who are looking for ways to apply their own bookish skills to the
cause.
Mendelsohn
has been contacted by television producers. Book editors. People
wanting her to find their relatives. People wanting to know if they are
her relatives. One local artist sent her an email, “I feel really
inspired to create a visual project on the work you do”; another man
asked whether she ever did “non-political, non-adversarial genealogical
research,” which she took mean that he just basically wanted help
locating distant cousins.
“
This poor girl emailed me asking me for a job,” Mendelsohn says, scrolling past another email. “And I’m like,
I don’t even have a job.”
Her
genealogical research is all done in her spare time, squeezed in
between paid freelance writing work and raising two children. Sometimes
she’ll trace a famous family tree for hours and decide not to post
anything. Her most successful tweets have been the ones laden with
irony.
“So Dan,” she wrote in January to Dan Scavino, the White
House director of social media who had recently tweeted that it was
“time to end chain migration.” “Let’s say Victor Scavino arrives from
Canelli, Italy in 1904, then brother Hector in 1905, brother Gildo in
1912, sister Esther in 1913, & sister Clotilde and their father
Giuseppe in 1916, and they live together in NY. Do you think that would
count as chain migration?”
“Gosh, I love when you slap people with genealogy,” responded one of the 58,000 people who liked the tweet.
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Lately,
Mendelsohn has been trying to figure out whether to keep going. There
aren’t a lot of surprises in this work — every line of inquiry
ultimately leads back to the same place: a boat. “I don’t know whether
the fact that all these stories end up looking the same is a reason not to do it or a reason to do it,” she says. The sameness of the stories is the through line of America.
“I
look at my great-grandmother,” Mendelsohn says. “Literally, she got on a
boat for me because she saw something here. How can I look at anyone
else and say, sorry, but the door is closed?”
Recently,
Mendelsohn was at a party when she learned she had at least one
high-profile fan. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, also a
guest, said he knew her work — his daughter had introduced him to
Mendelsohn’s tweets, he told The Washington Post in an interview.
O’Malley and Mendelsohn talked for a bit, and he later sent an email:
“It was an honor to meet you,” it said. “Keep writing. Your country
needs you.” It was the best compliment she could have imagined.
Monica Hesse is a staff writer for The Washington Post's Style section and author of "American
