I had planned to take it a bit easy this week. As the War grinds on, it wears me down. I am tempted to look away and write about other things, but I can’t. Still, it has been difficult to keep up the pace and engage with the horror in Gaza, and I wanted to dial it down. I wanted to spend the week focusing on preparations for Pesach.

The universe had other plans. The events at Columbia University last week stopped me in my tracks. The sometimes-brutal clearance of the pro-Palestinian/antiwar encampment on the university’s Quad, and the arrest of 100 demonstrators, brought back memories of the police assault on Occupy Wall Street in November 2011 (my sister’s birthday, no less). Watching the footage online was a flashback experience.

There is something deeply disturbing about the use of police paramilitary force against peaceful protesters that makes my skin crawl. I read some online commentary from a right-wing extremist about how “they used the police against the Proud Boys, so why not against the radical leftists.” This commenter (whose social media post exposed his politics and is now a former social media friend) was creating a false equivalence, of course. The Proud Boys are a violent gang of thugs, whose “demonstrations” were orgies of violence; the Columbia protesters were peacefully occupying a space.

Nor is there an equivalence between denying fascists like Milo Yiannopoulos the opportunity to use university facilities to address the local MAGA Jugend (also one of my former friend’s examples) and physically removing peaceful protesters from the campus. The latter’s presence in the Quad did not signal an endorsement of their message by Columbia University (although one might wish that it did endorse the message), but allowing a hateful, racist, totalitarian blowhard to speak from the bully pulpit of a university lectern most certainly did.

The encampment was calling for peace and human rights – a message that one might hope the university as an institution of liberal values (in the Enlightenment sense of the word, if not in the contemporary American political sense) might at least tolerate. I can almost hear Immanuel Kant groaning from his grave in Kaliningrad (Koenigsberg). And to invite the New York City Police onto the campus to do the deed, an extraordinary invasion of the sanctum of the university reminiscent of the brutal clearance of student strikers in 1968 was just the vulgar act that sealed the obscenity.

Under pressure from the American neo-totalitarian right, which has found that the charge of antisemitism, bequeathed them by the State of Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of merry Maximalists, is just the straw man they need to assault higher education, the Columbia administration did its work. I could not help but think of the ghetto judenrats and their compliant-complicit police forces rounding up the latest shipment to the east.

Columbia president Minouche Shafik is so eager to comply with the goosestepping redhats who would gladly set the Butler Library to the torch and fire anyone who ever used the words “structural racism” or “intersectionality” that she will do their bidding. The Baroness is so cowed by the far right, and so terrified of having to appear before the kind of congressional kangaroo court she dodged last winter, that she gladly gave in. She’s proven that she’s a tough guy, and that she can deploy the libel of antisemitism to stifle free, peaceful demonstrations just like any MAGA mouthpiece in Congress or on Fox News.

In that sense, she is a very modern university leader.

As a scholar and educator with at least a vestigial belief in the value of higher education and the mission of the liberal (in the Enlightenment sense) university, this saddens me deeply. As a human being who aspires to be a mensch in a troubled world, it makes me nauseous.

21 April 2024

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I have Pesach on my mind, as I prepare to vacuum the crevasses of all the furniture for little crumbs, so I hope my friends will indulge me in my ongoing Dvar Torah on the Exodus, our collective deliverance, and the incomplete project of universal liberation.

Liberation is work. Walking in the wilderness for 40 years with your wining relatives, eating nothing but manna (which gets tired after a few years) is no fun. I don’t think we give the trials and difficulties of the deliverance from Mizrim enough consideration. And, along the way to our liberation – indeed the liberation of all – are obstacles, traps that appear as shortcuts, and false gods.

“And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him: ‘Up, make us a god who shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what is become of him.’ And Aaron said unto them: ‘Break off the golden rings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.’ And all the people broke off the golden rings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received it at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made it a molten calf; and they said: ‘This is thy god, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.’”

Exodus 32:1-4

I can’t help but think of this as anything other than a warning. The work of deliverance is so difficult and taxing, that we are inclined to throw up new gods that promise a shortcut along the way that entice us from the project of liberation. Zionism tells us ‘This is thy god, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.’”

The State of Israel is our Golden Calf.

19 April 2024

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Pesach starts next week. It is one of may favorite holidays on the calendar. It is a week-long festival that begins with a feast, and asks us to be conscious every day, by abjuring khomets, of its meaning. I don’t find matzo itself to be a terrible hardship (being a vegetarian, I get enough fiber in my diet to avoid some of the complications associated with the “bread of affliction), but every time I prepare matzo brei for breakfast, or pack a cheese Hillel for lunch, I think about Pesach every moment.

This, I believe, is why food, eating, and not eating are so central to Jewish holiday observances. The latkes remind us of the oil, the hamantaschen remind us our deliverance from our tormenters, our hunger pangs remind us of why Yom Kippur is special, the cheese blintzes on Shavuos remind us that cheese blintzes are delicious. (I’m not quite sure where the Shavuos tradition of dairy foods come from, but I love cheese, and I am not inclined to question the tradition.)

There are, of course, many ways to read the story of Exodus, as related in the Haggadah that we use at the Seder table. There are many, many Haggadot to choose from, and each has a slightly different interpretation. But they all tell the story of deliverance from slavery, of liberation, and they all remind us that this is what God did for us, and not for some irrelevant distant ancestors.

I might expound more on this at some point, but I read this – in all versions of the story – to mean that liberation is not an event, but a process. Moreover, as Jewish thinkers from Abraham Heschel, to Mordecai Kaplan, to Moses Mendelssohn have noted, liberation cannot have meaning if it is a one-time divine gift to one people. For “freedom” to have any meaning, it must be universal. God did not merely liberate our ancestors, nor their descendants; in the deliverance from Mizrim, God set the process of universal liberation and deliverance in motion.

I refer to God here mostly because he is the protagonist to which our Haggadot (most of them refer), and one can understand it in metaphorical terms, as the universe or, as one Bundist Haggadah has it, the force of History. But it is worth noting, as we read the story at our seder tables that, while God creates the conditions for our deliverance, our ancestors must decide to seize the opportunity for themselves. The Exodus is not a simple matter of miraculously being transported into the Promised Land, it is an intentional project, beset with difficulties, doubts, and complaints, that leads the Israelites into decades of wandering in the Wilderness.

Liberation, the Torah, tells us, is hard work.

And that is why we eat the “bread of affliction:” to remind of this hard work, and to remind us that the project is incomplete, for us and, by necessity, for all. As the Haggadah that we read at my family Seder table in my youth said: “We remember our deliverance every year until we have achieved the deliverance of all.” So, I eat matzo for a week, struggle with work lunches, question what I will and will not consider kitiniyot (as a vegetarian, I have had to Sephardize my Pesach minhag, otherwise I would eat no protein for a week) and do all of those things. And doing so gives me great joy because it allows me to recommit myself to the project of liberation for all, which remains incomplete.

Next year in Jerusalem for all of us.

19 April 2024

***

I have to wonder if the State of Israel can survive the War on Gaza; not in the sense that it might be defeated in the battlefield, or that the end of the State of Israel as an ethnostate is a likely outcome of any peace settlement. Rather, I have to wonder what will happen to the State of Israel when the war is over and, as I suspect is inevitably the case, it is forced to withdraw from Gaza and account for its policies in the Occupied Territories to the world.

Whatever happens in the next few months, the State of Israel has lost its war. The “elimination of Hamas” is a pipe dream and there is no way that it will go back to the status quo ante bellum. The ICJ will, at some point rule on South Africa’s genocide case and, even as we wait for that, world opinion has turned so strongly against the State of Israel that it is truly becoming a pariah among nations – indeed a pariah among even some of its erstwhile allies, even if Russia might be making bedroom eyes at Benjamin Netanyahu.

I am a historian and no prophet, so I can’t say exactly what the postwar settlement will be, but I can venture a guess that it will involve some kind of accommodation for Palestinian statehood and autonomy and global censure of the State of Israel. After almost 35,000 deaths, and doubtless more by the time the killing stops, the State of Israel will certainly have lost all credibility with just about the whole world. Perhaps even the United States. Far from being, as its boosters declare, “the only democracy in the Middle East,” much of the global public will regard it as “the bloodiest imperialist power in the world.”

It might not be most of the world, but it will be enough of the world to ensure that the Israeli brand will be toxic for years to come – even in the United States. The support that the Biden administration might be able to justify as necessary to help an ally in a time of peril (he really does say this) will be gainsaid by future American leaders, from isolationist redhats to the next generations of Democrats and American Jews.

I suspect – though I can’t be sure – that, when the war ends, and the State of Israel has to account for the butcher’s bill, Israelis are going to have to accept peace, either as the only practical option, or a peace imposed by weary sponsors who are sick of all the complications. And that is what I don’t believe the State of Israel can survive: Peace.

This is a state whose founding and sustaining myths resound with war. Zionism justifies its very existence with myths of embattles vulnerability, and Israeli life is predicated on constant military readiness for “the next war.” But what if there is no “next war?” What if the ultimate consequence of this brutal conflict is not only that the State of Israel’s military justifications ring hollow beyond its borders, but that, by the fact of the postwar settlement – and there will be one – war becomes… impossible?

What happens to the State of Israel when war, its founding and organizing principal becomes obsolete? Will it just fade away?

16 April 2024

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