During Passover, Let Us Reflect on Our Own Indecent Betrayals

Passover has always been a favorite Jewish holiday of mine. A seder is the time to remember the lash of oppression and the joys of deliverance. It is a time when the youngest are encouraged to question their elders, a time to celebrate the fall of pharaohs and false gods, and a time to be replenished by talking with family and friends about how Jewish values apply today.

With the approach of this year’s Pesach, I feel neither fortified nor replenished. I am, instead, trembling with contempt for those in my Jewish community ignoring the core lessons of the seder: the pain of subjugation, the joys of freedom, and the questioning of why we do what we do, at the table and in life.

Jewish Trump supporters are bereft of morality, propping up a set of principles at odds with what has sustained us. Israel, not Judaism, is their religion and false god. They rally around the state as if it’s a golden calf. They act as if those who question do not deserve to be heard, only punished. And Donald Trump is their pharaoh.

Where is the dignity in being Bari Weiss and making excuses for Elon Musk and Steve Bannon’s Nazi salutes? She has no honor, as she essentially worships an apartheid state. Where is the dignity in being Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that has become a PR machine for right-wing antisemites?The people he now defends from “defamation” are certainly not Jews. The acceptance by my pro-Israel Jewish brethren of having Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist, as US ambassador to Israel is a choice to forgo self-respect and to be treated like a schmatte. Many of my fellow Jews are now saying that Israel’s interests are best served by someone who believes in a version of Christianity that says belong in hell when the rapture comes. They are saying that Israel’s importance does not lie in “protecting Jews,” as Weiss insists, but in creating an end-of-the-world Disneyland for radical right-wing evangelicals. By making this choice, Trump is doing what he does to everyone who capitulates to him. He is humiliating Jewish supporters of Israel because their acceptance of humiliation only breaks them more.

But nothing is as broken in our collective religious community as the acceptance and even embrace of the idea that this administration packed with antisemites must shred our civil liberties in the name of fighting antisemitism. A recent headline in The Guardian read, “Leo Terrell, Trump’s antisemitism chief, shares post by prominent neo-Nazi.” How many headlines like this must we see? In his first term, Trump offered a hand of friendship to street thugs chanting “Jews will not replace us” and those who trashed the Capitol on January 6. In his second term, they are making policy.

We are seeing Jewish organizations align with ICE in their quest to abduct and indefinitely imprison international students who protest, sign op-eds, or have the temerity to marry someone objectionable in their eyes. That these organizations are not only silent in the face of this but supplying names and doxing people for the purpose of armed abduction is a betrayal of previous generations. It’s an erasure of our own history at Passover: our own bitter tears, represented on the seder plate by horseradish and salt water. Jewish supporters of the Israeli state are in the thrall of seeing their golden calf spread from “the river to the sea.”

The desecration of debate and acceptance of having a thought police is not in our interests as a people; it marks the negation of our spiritual selves. Whatever ICE has been since it was launched in March 2003 as George W. Bush’s scaffolding for the current moment, a graphic it posted yesterday shows clearly what it has become, reading, “If it crosses the U.S. border illegally, it’s our job to stop it.” The graphic then lists what its mandate is to stop: “people, money, products, ideas.” It is ICE’s job to stop “ideas” from crossing the border. We have already seen this take place, including people being stopped for criticizing Pharoah Trump on their social media.

Then there are this week’s reports of Trump’s intention to essentially take over Columbia University, effectively destroying the institution in order to, Trump says, make Jewish students “feel safe.” Jews supporting a governmental seizure of higher learning? My grandfather, the first person in our family to go to college, would die a second death if he was here to see such a thing. And not only because the university that delivered him from poverty was a school he barely was able to attend because of quotas on Jewish students. That school was Columbia University—and it wasn’t Palestinians making those quotas.

These threats, as Jewish Columbia professor James Schamus wrote, are actually about bringing what has always been a hub of Jewish debate to heel: “They are coming after Columbia precisely because the University is, to the (not-) ‘populist’ base in front of whom they perform their Hitler salutes and at whom they hose their antisemitic memes, an emblem precisely of Jewishness: it’s ‘globalist,” ‘cosmopolitan,’ New York-based, ‘liberal,’ etc.”

Proof of Schamus’s point is seen in the number of Jews who were central to the Columbia encampments. Proof are the Jews standing up for Mahmoud Khalil, the student leader who was abducted from the streets of New York by masked gunmen without badges calling themselves ICE. According to documents submitted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Khalil has committed no crimes. He is innocent of everything but a belief in a free Palestine. The Trump administration’s only claim is that Rubio can deport Khalil if he determines that Khalil’s “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful” will compromise US foreign-policy interests. What the hell is a deportable “expected belief” if not a thought crime?

To have Jewish organizations celebrate such a thing shows such contempt for who we are as a people and what we have endured. Expect Canary Mission to compile a list of the youngest people at every seder for daring to ask the four questions and feed those names to Rubio who at the pharaoh’s bidding will have them abducted from ICE’s new favorite hunting ground: elementary schools. No shred of decency exists, only a humiliating hypocrisy in calling oneself a Jew and supporting this administration of Christian Zionists, fascism enthusiasts, and enemies of debate. A place at the seder table this year, however, is quite appropriate. Jewish Trump supporters represent a darkness, a bloodshed, and an attack on the young. They have become an 11th plague.