Seeing Hagar, and seeing Gaza, this Passover

JVL Introduction

Peter Beinart listened to the US Congress antisemitism hearings with the president of Columbia University.

In the long stretches of the hearings he watched, there was not a single reference to Palestinians being killed in Gaza…

Yet one of the heads of the Board of Trustees could say that the phrase Ashkenormativity (the idea that that people tend to assume that the culture of Ashkenazi Jews is the culture of all Jews) which had been used in a pamphlet on campus, was “shockingly offensive”.

What pervaded, and for Beinart defiled, that conversation about antisemitism –making it “shockingly offensive” – was the assumption that Palestinian lives don’t matter at all, that Palestinian lives are worthless.

And as Passover begins, as we hold our seders, he stresses that it’s not only Jewish oppression, that matters:

“There is a voice in our tradition, a very, very powerful voice, which says that G-d hears, that G-d sees the oppression of all people.”

RK

This article was originally published by the Beinart Notebook on Mon 22 Apr 2024. Read the original here.