Due to a protest at my college, Hillel had to move tonight’s Seder to a secret location and have barred last-minute registrations.

I signed up in time to go, but I’m disappointed that some people who want to go may not be able to. I really wish this was an event that could be more open to students who may have been on the fence about going.

The fact that Hillel has to hide the location of a Passover Seder is horrifying to me.

The people chanting that Jews should just go back to Poland irritates me on many levels.

I am ethnically polish and Jewish. Not one person tells me to go back to Poland as a polish person. Because that's straight up xenophobic.

So I shouldn't even have to unpack why you shouldn't be telling Jews this.

Modern antisemites really don't have anything original. This is just a remix of a Nazi classic:

"Jews aren't indigenous to Southern Levant"

My guy, you literally used the word jew. Jews comes from the old kingdom of Judea, it literally means from Judea. Judea existed before Palestine.

How tf are you going to claim jews are not indigenous whilst using a word which is linked to jewish indigenousness

Pesach is, to me, the most difficult holiday to celebrate right now. Since Oct 7th we've had a few holidays, but Pesach is the one that pains me most so far.

Hanukkah made sense. We are fighting to keep our homeland, as the Maccabees did. We have Israel now, and we will still have Israel. The holiday celebrating our resistance against those who wished to destroy us in our home made sense.

Purim made sense. Yes, it was painful to celebrate the holiday of joy, but we have resisted a force that wishes to eliminate each and every one of us. Just as we did in Persia against Haman, we are defending ourselves because never again will we be put in the position of being at our oppressor's mercy.

Pesach does not make sense. How are we to celebrate being taken out of captivity when over a hundred of our brothers and sisters are still being held captive? How are we to cheer about our freedom when our own people are not free? How can we celebrate G-d's hand coming down to free us when members of our Jewish family have not been free for over half a year?

It is painful. It physically hurts my chest to think about all of this. I wish for G-d to carry our people again, this time from the tunnels under Gaza. From the violent antisemitism we have been seeing happening all around. May we yet again experience freedom from those who wish us harm.

I in no way am saying that we should not celebrate Pesach. If anything, it is more important now than ever to celebrate and pray for freedom. I am just sharing my own feelings on the matter.

As was said then, we say now: LET OUR PEOPLE GO!

I can’t believe i forgot to post this, chag sameach guys 😂

It’s genuinely annoying how many people want Jews to think about Palestinians during our Saders.

Well, my family, and I will not.

It’s terribly sad what’s happening in Gaza, but don’t expect Jews on a holiday where we celebrate our liberation and remember our suffering to turn it into another group’s tragedy.

No, that’s not how it works.

Sorry, not sorry.

Passover is the Jewish festival of freedom.

Israel has 133 hostages, alive and dead, still held in captivity. I'm grateful for each one released, but as long as some of our people, Jews and non-Jews alike, are hostages, we all are. Also, yesterday alone, Israel saw no less than 6 terrorist attacks (attempted or thwarted) with zero casualties, and I'm grateful no one got hurt, but what kind of freedom do we have, when this is our daily reality, and it's not even recognized?

At the end of every Passover Seder, for 2,000 years now, Jews have concluded the holiday feast with, "Le'shana ha'baa bi'Yerushalayim (לשנה הבאה בירושלים)," next year in Jerusalem.

(here's a Passover Hagaddah from Casablanca, in Morroco, with this phrase and a drawing of the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem -)

Passover is the festival of freedom, the story of a nation breaking its bonds of enslavement, it's a story of emancipation, and as such, it is a beacon of hope and a reminder that freedom is possible for all those who yearn for it. That's why slaves in the US south adopted this language, and expressed their hopes for freedom through the story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt.

But the story doesn't end as soon as the Israelites have left Egypt, it doesn't end in the desert. Achieving freedom is a process. That ancient story demonstrates that, but we have other, more recent examples. Jews liberated from the Nazi camps were still re-living the horrors of the Holocaust every night, if not more often than that. The hostages who have been released from their captivity at the hands of murderous, rapist Hamas terrorists are still working to recover. Freedom is a process. And in the story of the exodus from Egypt, which Jews have been re-telling annually for thousands of years, guiding our thoughts and understanding of what our freedom is, the story doesn't end when our ancestors left Egypt. The final note of the story defines our freedom as only being fully achieved after going through the journey in the desert, the process, when we are once more living freely in our ancestral, promised land, when we return to our holy city. And no matter where we live, we express this idea in Hebrew, our native, ancestral language.

(here's another Passover Hagaddah, this one from 1940's Cairo, in Egypt of all places, with this same phrase -)

Poet Amnon Ribak (whose career was originally in hi-tech before he started delving into what his Judaism means to him) once wrote, "Every man needs some sort of an Egypt, to deliver himself from its house of slaves, to leave in the middle of the night into a desert of fears, to walk straight into the waters and see it parting in front of him." He takes the Jewish exodus and turns it into a metaphor for personal challenge and growth. And how does he finish this poem? (my emphasis) "Everyone needs an Egypt, and a Jerusalem, and one long journey to remember forever through the feet."

Here's the poem composed as a song (composing poems is an Israeli tradition. And while we're at it, this is a reminder that the biggest center of original Jewish culture and art in the world today is Israel):

This Passover, we will be remembering and re-telling the story of our ancestors' exit from Egypt, we will collectively yearn for Jerusalem again, we will do our best to learn from this ancient story as if each of us has been personally delivered from Egypt, we will cherish the freedoms that we have, and keep in mind the ones we still have to fight for, first and foremost the literal freedom of our hostages. Please, if you celebrate Passover, consider leaving an empty chair at your Seder table for all the people who are not yet free.

And may we all have a happy and meaningful Pesach! <3

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

“ThE lEfT iS nOT aNtIseMITiC”

The left are turning into the very people they keep saying they’d slap. They’re fucking Nazis.

Swifties shut the fuck up challenge!!!

Just a reminder that there is an antisemitic history of comparing Jews to pigs. I don't think it should be too hard to criticize Israel without using historically antisemitic rhetoric.

Since I was little kid, I remember my shul having police cars outside to protect us during high holy days, someone always monitoring the door, and security cameras showing all the entrances. After the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburg, it heightened. My rabbi and cantor were once in the news after spending a day testifying against someone who had threatened to bomb our shul.

I was a bit older when I found out that churches don't have security. I was shocked. "So, you can just go in whenever you want? They don't even lock the doors?" I remember asking. The mom of a goyische friend of mine was equally shocked to discover that shuls do have security. "Why would they need security?" she asked me.

It was then that I realized that the amount of security we had - and every other shul had - was not the norm.

Columbia University is denying access to a Jewish professor, Shai Davidai, deactivated his access card, and blocked his entry into campus.

Colombia has officially taken a pro-Hamas position.

I find it fascinating how we repeatedly see Left-leaning individuals who insist that they're not antisemitic, while repeating or reinventing Jew-hatred going back literally thousands of years.

And it's like...

"You vocally condemn and demonize every aspect of Jewish life, culture, history, and society. You claim that our religious practices are duplicitous and teach evil character, that our history is a pack of lies, that we are exaggerating and inventing our (well documented) persecutions, that our identity as a people is somehow racist, that we're somehow both too isolationist and too cosmopolitan at the same time, that we are responsible for everything from the Death of Christ to the conflicts in Sudan to American police brutality, and more... and yet somehow you think that you don't hate Jews?

What is it, then, that you actually like about us? Because it sure seems that there's nothing a Jew can do that you'd approve of... other than die."

Zionism this, Ashkenazi normativity that.

When are goyim going to actually learn the true definition of Jewish words and respect the origins?

Ashkenazi normativity is not a word for goyim to use. It's part of a inter-community discussion amongst jews.

Zionism doesn't mean genocidal, it is a terms which simply means wanting Israel as a modern day state to exist. A peaceful two state solution is zionism.

The fact that yall can't leave jewish terms with their jewish definitions and intended uses is antisemitism. You are taking jewish words and giving them western definitions and acting like those new western definitions have either been the definitions all along or succeed the original jewish definitions.

If you are not wanting to use the jewish definition of jewish words, simply don't use them. Come up with your own words or use words which already fit the definition you are looking for.

Otherwise you are participating in erasure of jewish culture.

edenrachelcohen

@columbia