This Passover was riven by division
Student protesters sit in front of a tent during the Pro-Palestinian protest at the Columbia University campus in New York, Monday April 22, 2024. Credit: AP/Stefan Jeremiah
In coinciding with Passover, this week's ramp-up of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel and often antisemitic protests, particularly on college campuses, illustrated the significance of the moment.
Passover reminds us of the journey from slavery to freedom, from Egypt to Israel, from darkness to light. But this year, many pro-Palestinian protesters have used it as a cudgel to amplify their messages — and their antisemitic rhetoric.
We've celebrated Passover in dark moments before. But usually, generations of Jews have stood together against the hate.
This year, however, disturbing divisions have erupted within the Jewish community, divisions that some pro-Palestinian communities and outside organizers seemed to exploit in recent protests. As groups with seemingly innocuous names like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now join in the campus encampments, they've used any Jews' participation as a shield, to wrongly suggest that what is clearly antisemitic speech is somehow not, because Jews are involved.
Some fissures seem to fall along generational lines. Some younger Jews, some with lives of privilege and a “progressive” mentality, have joined the pro-Palestinian protests. They hang on to rhetoric of “oppression” and “apartheid,” sometimes with passionate opinions, but at times without the knowledge or nuance to understand the harm they're causing.
Most Jewish college students are able to both support Israel as a Jewish state and express concern over specific actions by the Israeli government. They back both humanitarian aid in Gaza and the return of the hostages. Yet, when they celebrate their faith or love for Israel, they become the target of acrimony and antisemitism, just by walking through campus wearing a yarmulke or holding an Israeli flag.
Take chants aimed at Jewish college students on Columbia's campus over the last week, for example: “Go back to Poland.” “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.” And: “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”
It's impossible to take seriously or support any pro-Palestinian ask for humanitarian aid, or even “liberation,” when it's accompanied by calls for hate, violence or the destruction of Israel. The underlying goal is anything but peace.
The clear divisions, even within the Jewish community, shock many of us and show we have a lot of work to do in educating, trying to understand and, somehow, moving beyond pithy catchphrases full of hate.
Nothing showed the dividing lines more clearly than this week's Passover seders. At Columbia University, some Jewish students required escorts to and from their traditional seder tables. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seders shifted to an undisclosed location. But at pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and beyond, the Jewish Voice for Peace's “seders” used a problematic “anti-Zionist Haggadah” with the theme “Exodus from Zionism.” In it, they described the “10 spiritual plagues of genocidal Zionism,” rewrote a traditional song with the antisemitic phrasing “Let us pray that it will be, From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free, Dayenu (enough for us),” and even turned the Israeli government into the Pharoah of their story.
In our own boisterous, traditional seder, one song stood out: “For more than once have they risen against us to destroy us; in every generation they rise against us and seek our destruction,” says the translation. But each time, the song continues, we survive.
Survive we will. But the ugliness in our schools and on our streets portends a long struggle ahead, both within our own communities and beyond, to repair the divides and to focus on keeping every generation — especially our students — safe.
Columnist Randi F. Marshall's opinions are her own.
Randi Marshall is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
