Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder: the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike, the ritual that is inherently portable, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but each other: no walls, no temple, no rabbi, a role for everyone, even – especially – the smallest child. The Seder is a diaspora technology if ever there was one, made for collective grieving, contemplation, questioning, remembering and reviving the revolutionary spirt.
she should ask herself why? Why are Jewish traditions “inherently portable”? Why have Jews traditionally gravitated towards professions that they can take with them wherever they go? Why does all our ceremonies, traditions, and festivals include moments of collective grief?
Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call in the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students daring to ask them basic questions, such as: how can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?
do they call in the NYPD against the grave threat of students questions? Or do they call them in because Jewish students have been attacked, threatened, assaulted, and forced off campus? Or because a student called for ten thousand October 7ths (ie the death of 12 millions Jews)? Another said I am Hamas? And other formed human chains to prevent the Jewish students entering (very reminiscent of another human chain barring Jewish students off a uni campus)?Or because a student was stabbed in the eye by a flag pole? The videos coming out of Columbia and other universities I never ever thought I would see in my lifetime and I am sickened to my core.
We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children to be afraid, that wants us to believe the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress and beneath its iron dome, or at least keep the weapons and donations flowing.
Do we want to be perennially afraid? Is the world against us? Are we just brainwashed to be victims? Looking at the videos coming out worldwide, the hate on social media, the antisemitism that has bubbled up in countless places, the alleged rape and kidnap of a Jewish woman in France this week, she has a fucking nerve. We have agency, we have eyes and ears, we know what we are seeing.