(This takes 5⅔ minutes to read.)

Since Islam emerged centuries after Biblical times, it was uneasy for Christians to make sense of it. This was when anti-Judaism came in: Christian élitists tapped into this old source to familiarize their audiences with Islam, understanding it almost like a de facto Jewish sect, and Muslims as little different (if at all) from Jews; therefore it seemed just for Christians to oppose Islam.

David M. Freidenreich’s Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy is opulent with examples of this. The entire book is worth reading, but I’ll focus on some of my favorites to keep this topic at a manageable length. Note that in premodern times, outsiders seldom called anybody ‘Muslims’ and preferred terms like ‘Saracens’, ‘Arabs’, ‘Turks’, or even ‘pagans’. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt, judging from the contexts, that these outsiders were referring to Muslims.

Quoting pages 165–6:

The Muslim ruler Yazid II (r. 720–24) ordered the destruction of all Christian images in the Abbasid Empire—and Eastern Christians placed the blame on a Jew. According to an account delivered at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, “There lived a certain man in Tiberias, a ringleader of the lawless Jews, a magician and fortuneteller, an instrument of soul-destroying demons […] a bitter enemy of the Church of God. On learning of the frivolity of the ruler Yazid, this most-wicked Jew approached him […] saying, ‘You will remain thirty years in this your kingship if you follow my advice’”—namely, to destroy all representational paintings. Yazid eagerly acted on this guidance; “abominable Jews and wretched Arabs” carried out the order because Christians refused to destroy the sacred images themselves.¹

The most striking aspect of this narrative, found in both Greek and Latin accounts, is that it makes no reference to Islamic principles or even to Muslim hostility toward Christians.² Yazid acts for the sole purpose of securing a lengthy reign; his successor reportedly cancels the edict and kills the Jew simply because the prophecy failed. The Jew alone is “a bitter enemy of the Church of God,” and the tale never explains this enmity because Christian audiences presuppose that Jews are, by definition, anti-Christian.

The Muslim ruler is the willing agent of Jewish malevolence rather than an actor pursuing his own political or theological agenda. Put differently, the alleged motive behind this assault on Christian images is Jewish, while the Muslim ruler provides the means to enact it.

Page 174:

In the second Mâcon letter, the king of Tunis likewise urges the Jews to act quickly to poison the Christians without concern for cost. “You are our brethren in law,” he writes, expressing the notion that Muslims and Jews adhere to the same religion. The theme of brotherhood permeates this brief letter, in which the king of Tunis offers to care for the children of French Jews “like my own flesh.”

The portrayal of France’s Jews as allies and even brethren of foreign Muslim kings renders the Jews themselves as disloyal foreigners with both the means and the motive to pose a serious threat to the king and his subjects. A truly Christian king of France would not protect the Jews but rather expel them; some chroniclers suggest that Philip V did just that in the wake of these allegations.¹⁹

Pages 196–7:

According to Luther, Psalm 74 literally condemns the Jews who lived from the time of Jesus through the present day. At the same time, the psalm speaks allegorically of Turks and Christian heretics, “because that which the faithlessness of the Jews did and does to the people of the synagogue all heretics and, even more so, the Turks did and do to the people of the church.”⁸

Just as the leaders of the Jews willfully block their followers from recognizing and accepting Christ as God, so, too, heretics and Turks prevent Christians from following Christ properly: heretics through their allegedly false teachings and Turks through their alleged refusal to allow any sort of Christian teaching. Luther regards Muslims as political enemies of the church, but his association of Turks with Jews enables Luther to emphasize the theological dimensions of this enmity. Muslims, like the Jews of Jesus’s day, purportedly use their worldly power to stifle Christian faith.

Luther repeatedly associates Turks and heretics with Jews as he progresses verse by verse through Psalm 74. The psalmist, Luther explains, cries out against “that which is incorrigible, obstinate, and desperate, which fights even against the known truth […] a defense of one’s own righteousness and a stubborn vindication of one’s own thought, as in the case of the Jews, heretics, and Turks.”

Heretics and Turks, no less than the Jews, have torn down “faith in Christ and the works of faith” and instead “set up their own faith, their own belief, their own meaning, their own works.” The long-standing discourse of anti-Judaism shapes Luther’s understanding of the psalmist’s words and also provides the negative reference point with which, by analogy, Luther associates Muslims and heretics.⁹

In one respect, Luther declares, Muslims are even worse than Jews:

With every device, with every use of the tongue, [Jews] are active in persuading their people not to believe in Christ. This is what it means to cut down the gates of the soul with axes and hatchets [Luther refers here to verse 6]. The Turk, however, does this not only by means of the tongue and the word, but also through the sword and death he forbids the hearing of Christ’s Word. By this means, he utterly destroys the very gates of salvation.

This last one is my most favourite. Page 154–5:

In the climactic battle scene, the sultan’s own son and heir appears with “thirty thousand Turks descended from Judas,” the Jew who betrayed Jesus for thirty coins (laisse 347). The Franks who defeat these Judas-like forces do not engage in mere warfare, nor do they pursue the financial rewards that allegedly motivate Jews and Saracens. As true Christian heroes, these noblemen seek only to righteously avenge Christ’s death by slaughtering the contemporary equivalents of Christ’s killers.

The portrayal of Saracens as quasi‐Jewish killers of Christ enables Christians not only to glorify those who defeat them in battle but also to inspire new military campaigns. The Muslim chronicler Izz al‐Din Ibn al‐Athir provides a vivid example of such rhetoric when recounting what happened after Muslim forces retook Jerusalem in 1187.

Ibn al‐Athir, perhaps drawing on firsthand knowledge, reports that the city’s patriarch aroused fellow Franks to avenge this loss by making a picture of Jesus that “portrayed Christ (peace be upon him) along with an Arab, depicted as beating him. They put blood on the portrait of Christ and said to the people, ‘This is Christ with Muhammad, the prophet of the Muslims, beating him. [Muhammad] has wounded and slain him.’”

Ibn al‐Athir inserts the customary Islamic honorific for Jesus, whom Muslims revere as a messenger of God, but provides no further editorial commentary: he trusts that his Muslim audience will recognize the preposterous nature of the allegation that Muhammad killed Christ. Preposterous though it is, this propaganda builds on longstanding Frankish rhetoric associating Muslims with Christ’s persecutors, and it provides powerful religious motivation for Christian warriors to avenge the maltreatment of their God.

Ibn al‐Athir credits this propaganda with raising “more men and money than there would be any way of counting” toward what academic historians call the Third Crusade; “even the women,” he emphasized, “answered the call in great numbers.” If Ibn al‐Athir is reliable, he provides valuable evidence regarding the broad impact of religious rhetoric designed to appeal to a specific subset of Christian society, namely fighting men.¹²

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Although some Christian readers may cringe reading this — as if watching an old and unpleasant home video of oneself — my overall intention here is not to induce guilt but to reduce the quiet assumption that we have that Jews were always alone in suffering oppression. On the contrary, there was times and places — Iberia, the Levant, Tsarist Russia, & alibi — where Jews and Muslims suffered side-by-side at the hands of xenophobes. Indeed, I would argue that we cannot fully understand anti-Judaism unless we have at least some grasp of Islamomisia as well.

See also: Interview with David M. Freidenreich.

Lots of good listener/ reader questions.

(Source. More here.)

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(This takes 7¾ minutes to read.)

The recitation of the Ten Plagues is one of the signature moments of the Passover seder — and for many, one the most morally problematic. At the apex of the Magid section — the telling of the Exodus story — seder participants read aloud the series of plagues that G-d inflicts on the Egyptians to coerce Pharaoh into liberating the Israelites. The tenth and final plague is the most terrifying of them all: the death of all Egyptian first-born. In the seder ritual, we act out this moment by taking ten drops out of our cups of wine, one for each of the plagues.

While this story is integral to the narrative of the Israelites’ liberation, there’s no getting around it: this episode portrays G-d inflicting collective punishment on a population that results in the deaths of innocents, including children and even the Egyptians first born animals. If there could be any doubt about the abject vengeance behind G-d’s intentions, they were made plain earlier in the book of Exodus when G-d tells Moses:

“You shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says G-d: Israel is My first-born son. I have said to you, “Let My son go, that he may worship Me,” yet you refuse to let him go. Now I will slay your first-born son.’” (Exodus 4:23)

There are different pedagogical approaches for dealing with this troubling story during the seder. In family settings, adults typically make light of this section by playfully acting out the different plagues with props and singing whimsical songs about “frogs jumping everywhere.” Although most children sense full well the moral problems at the heart of the plague narrative, I’m not sure this sort of friviolity effectively shields them from the more terrifying dimensions of the story.

It’s also common to comment that taking drops from our wine symbolizes the “lessening of our joy” at the fall of our adversaries. Many haggadot include a famous midrash that quotes G-d rebuking the angels for rejoicing at the fall of the Egyptians: “How can you sing songs of praise while my children are drowning?”

Although the midrash is not part of the traditional seder service, it has become ubiquitous in most contemporary haggadot — so much so that it has become virtually canonical. In the end however, this commentary amounts to a kind of liberal hand wringing over G-d’s collateral damage: an apologetic that expresses regret, but stops short of outright condemnation.

This moral problem posed by the Ten Plagues, of course, is not unique to the seder — it’s inherent to the source material itself. Yes, the G-d of the Torah is a G-d that demands liberation of the oppressed, but the text also portrays G-d at times as vengeful, destructive, misogynistic and xenophobic, if not downright genocidal. In the case of the Exodus story, G-d is not merely motivated by the liberation of the Israelites; G-d’s display of wonders and miracles (i.e., plagues) are also intended to serve as a display of superior divine power, which G-d repeatedly makes clear:

“Then the Egyptians shall know that I am G-d, when I stretch out My hand over Egypt and bring out the Israelites from their midst.” (Exodus 7:5)

When we consider the moral issues with the Ten Plagues, then, we must directly confront the essential issues with Biblical theology itself: a theology rooted in a mythic world view dating back centuries that is light years away from our own. As I often comment to my Torah study students, when we read these difficult stories about G-d’s bad behavior we are not reading about G-d — we are reading what the Biblical writers living in the ancient Near East wrote about G-d.

We might say that these narratives teach us less about the nature of the divine than they do the human attributes the writers have projected onto G-d. Still, whatever the Torah may lack in relatable theology, it does present us with a quintessential challenge: it invites us to engage in a sacred struggle with these texts — much the way that Jacob struggled with the divine night stranger in that famous story from Genesis. In other words, the time-honored Jewish pedagogy is not to simply read the Torah, but to wrestle with it.

And we are not the first to wrestle with the problems inherent with the plague narrative. The Talmud, in fact, records a famous rabbinic debate about the evening of the first Passover, when the Israelites were instructed to sacrifice a lamb and daub their doorposts with blood to protect themselves and their households as the tenth plague unfolded. As described in the Torah:

G-d, when going through to smite the Egyptians, will see the blood on the lintel and the two doorposts, and G-d will pass over the door and not let the Destroyer enter and smite your home. (Exodus 12:23)

During a very complex consideration of this verse, the question is raised why the Israelites had to mark their doors and stay inside. Didn’t G-d know the difference between Israelite and Egyptian households? The answer lies with the figure of the “Destroyer” (in Hebrew, “Hamashchit,” sometimes rendered as the “Angel of Death.”) G-d apparently doesn’t slay the Egyptian first-born personally but relies on the Destroyer as a kind of hired assassin. But of course, this raises another, even more chilling problem.

At one point in the debate, Rav Yosef offers this comment to explain why the Israelites needed to remain in their homes on that fateful evening:

“Once the Destroyer is given permission to destroy, it does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked.” (BT Baba Kamma 60a)

Even for those of us who cannot countenance the view of a G-d utilizing the services of an amoral hit man over the people of Egypt, the power of Rav Yosef’s comment is still unbearably potent: when collective violence is unleashed upon a population, it does not discriminate between combatants and civilians, young and old, medical workers or first responders, reporters or press personnel. Moreover, once the Destroyer is let loose on its murderous rampage, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to hold it back.

This Passover, we are all feeling this truth particularly keenly. As we sit down to seder, the Pharaohs of our world have given the Destroyer the permission to destroy — and we are witnessing the tragic results on the daily. In the U.S. and around the world, authoritarian rule is sending armed militias into the streets to abduct and incarcerate residents and kill those who protest or resist.

Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza continues; the U.S. and Israel has unleashed a senseless, murderous rampage on Iran that is rapidly turning into a regional war that threatens to upend the entire world economy. The violence symbolized by the plague narrative has become all too terrifyingly real.

This Passover, let us remember that the struggle for liberation we commemorate is unfolding outside the doors of our homes even as we gather for seder. As we take the ten drops out of our cups, let us understand them for what they truly are: the blood of innocents. As we count them off one by one, let them serve as signifiers of our solidarity with the slain and our resolve that when our seders are over, we will not huddle in fear behind our doorposts. Let us show up for all who are being cut down by the Destroyer — and commit to dismantling the systems that enable its violence once and for all.

Toward the end of the panel, Khalil said he “almost got up and left” because he felt that there was not enough time devoted to talking directly about the devastation in Gaza.

The exchange rankled Berman, who hours later brought it back up in his address to the general session.

The rabbi, who famously led a megillah reading in jail after he was arrested in 1965 marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, expressed disappointment in the morning panelists, diverging from his assigned topic of the struggle over ICE immigration raids in Minneapolis.

“I did not appreciate the assertion that somehow the Jewish passion for Israel need not be heard,” Berman said. “I didn’t appreciate the sense that the theological root of Zionism is the source of horror and enmity and evil.”

Berman added his view that the “theological position within Islam is fundamentally at the root of the incapacity of the Islamic world to recognize the rights of Israel to exist as a Jewish state,” and that idea is “taught actively by imams all over the world, including here in the United States.”

During Berman’s comments, several attendees walked out of the sanctuary. One audience member held up a “BOOO” sign, scrawled on a piece of paper.

One of the conference organizers took to the mic to publicly push back on the esteemed speaker.

“We invited you to speak about immigration and you expressed other views. We appreciate hearing them. As organizers of Smol Emuni, we want to say that we respectfully disagree, but we’re very glad to have you here with us,” Rachel Landsberg, Smol Emuni’s program director, said to applause.

Berman, a graduate of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, had represented the Orthodox mainstream in a lineup that also featured Conservative rabbis and ex-Hasidic Jews, and had top billing on conference promotional materials.

Yet he had been an imperfect fit from the outset. In an interview after the conference, Smol Emuni executive director Esther Sperber said Berman had expressed prior to accepting an invitation to speak that he disagreed with the organization’s approach to Israel.

Sperber said [that] she was honored that the rabbi — whom she described as “one of the luminaries of the Modern Orthodox world” — attended the whole day. But she took offense at his comments, which she felt painted all of Islam with a broad brush.

“Our intention was for the conference to focus on what we as Orthodox and observant Jews can do better,” Sperber said. “And I think our sense was that Rabbi Berman’s comments were more focused on what Palestinians can do better.”

Sperber added that the Smol Emuni movement is “not looking to include everyone in the Jewish world” but welcomes anyone who identifies with the religious left and supports universal human rights for Palestinians.

Over 1,100 Jewish clergy from across the United States have signed onto a letter affirming their support for immigrant rights and calling on leaders not to “wrong or oppress the stranger.”

The letter published by the Jewish refugee aid group HIAS comes as Jewish communities across the country are grappling with the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies.

“To be a Jew is to advocate for law to be just, compassionate, and fair, and cry out when power is wielded with cruelty,” the letter reads. “In every generation, the Jewish soul is marked by the memory of migration. In this moment, that memory calls us to courage: To reclaim and recenter our moral compass. […] To declare to our leaders: Do not wrong or oppress the stranger.”

The letter follows one in January from Jewish organizations and synagogues in Minnesota opposing the “volatile” status of immigration enforcement operations in the area, writing, “There are too many stories of lives upended by what the government itself refers to as the ICE surge.”

Citing biblical passages and calling on leaders not to “wrong or oppress the stranger,” the new letter was signed by Jewish clergy from 45 states and released Wednesday in advance of HIAS’ annual “Refugee Shabbat.” The group has contracted some of its operations because of the Trump administration’s efforts to end refugee admissions to the United States.

The letter’s signatories included Amy Eilberg, the first woman to be ordained by the Conservative movement; Irving Greenberg, the […] prominent Modern Orthodox rabbi, and David Wolpe, the rabbi emeritus of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. It also includes a host of rabbis working inside and beyond traditional congregations across the country.

“Jewish text and tradition could not be clearer about our obligation to welcome the sojourner. In the U.S. today, that should look like a just immigration system that treats individuals with dignity and care,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, in a statement. “As this government tramples on immigrants’ rights, it is inspiring to see rabbis and cantors courageously using their moral voices to stand up for what’s right.”

Fueled by an awareness of their roots as perpetual refugees and recent immigrants and by Jewish scripture, American Jews have long been at the forefront of immigration advocacy in the United States and have tended not to support draconian immigration policies, even from candidates they may otherwise support.

(This extract takes nearly one minute to read but the article itself can take up to fifteen minutes.)

The final step for the creation of the Megillah was connecting the combined story to the (preexisting) festival of Purim. The name “Purim” is based on the Akkadian word for “lots” (pūrū). Many scholars believe that the holiday originated as a Persian new year celebration, which included the casting of lots as one of the rituals.[16]

The Megillah, however, uses these festival lots in a different way, imagining the lots as having been cast by Haman to determine the most auspicious time to kill the Jews. It was at this stage that verses like 3:7,[17] which explain how the 13th of Adar was chosen as the fateful day, and much of chapters 8-9 were written.

This recast the story of Mordechai and Esther vs. Haman into a story that undergirds the festival calendar. It justified the Persian Jewish community’s celebration of a new year festival by turning it into a Jewish festival. Thus the same process that we can see having occurred for Pesach and Sukkot in the Torah,[18] and Shavuot in Second Temple and Rabbinic literature,[19] occurred for Purim as well.

(This takes five minutes to read.)

For those of us unaware, the Book of Esther is a Biblical story about a Jewish triumph over xenophobia, and is the basis for the Jewish festival of Purim. Scholars estimate that somebody composed the book in or around 475 B.C.E., and it may be the oldest evidence that we have (even if the tale itself was likely fictional) that Jews were aware of a phenomenon that we now call anti-Judaism: the antagonist, a politician by the name of Haman (not to be confused with the no less loathsome Adolf Hamann or Joachim Hamann), plotted to exterminate all of Persia’s Jews as revenge for the Benjaminite, Mordecai, refusing to bow down to him.

If this sounds familiar to you, you are not the first to notice the similarities. Already in the spring of 1933, Jewish adults were drawing parallels between Haman and the Third Reich’s head of state. Quoting Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s ‘Who Was “Hitler” Before Hitler? Historical Analogies and the Struggle to Understand Nazism, 1930–1945’, pg. 264:

Around the same time, Jews also drew analogies between Hitler and Haman.⁹² References to “Haman Hitler” and “Hitler, the modern Haman,” appeared already in 1933 in the American Jewish press.⁹³ Jews in Germany made similar comparisons, with the Frankfurt Jewish press declaring that “today, Haman is […] educated, has studied anthropology, and determined that the Jews are a foreign race.”⁹⁴

By the time of Hanukkah in December 1933, Jews compared Hitler to Antiochus, who, according to one rabbi, had tried but failed to “persuade the Hebrews to exchange the […] principles of Judaism for […] idolatry.”⁹⁵ This hopeful sentiment was encapsulated in Philip M. Raskin’s 1933 poem, “A Jew to Hitler,” which included the following stanzas:

Hitler, we shall outlive you
As we outlived the Hamans before you;
Hordes of slaves may crown you chief
Throngs of fools—adore you …

Hitler, we shall outlive you
However our flesh you harrow;
Our wondrous epic shall only add
The tale of Another Pharaoh.⁹⁶

Haman’s plot to annihilate Persia’s Jews was doomed before it began. Queen Esther revealed her Jewish heritage to King Xerxes, who, in turned, had Haman hanged, ironically in the very gallows that Haman had originally intended for Mordechai. This tale (along with other Biblical stories) was a good source of comfort for Jews, sustaining their morale and giving them hope that they would have the last laugh in the face of an increasingly difficult situation. The Fascists did not fail to take notice of this:

In 1935, Aufbau opined that “today there is once again a Haman who reminds us that we are Jews.” See “Zur Feier am Heinedenkmal,” Aufbau, Feb. 1, 1935. According to The Sentinel, [Fascist] newspapers cited Jewish analogies between Haman and Hitler as evidence that Jews were “planning to murder Hitler in the same way.” See “Two Jews Brutally Murdered in German Provinces,” Sentinel, April 21, 1933.

In any event, whether he anticipated it or not, Jews celebrated Purim by taking their anger out on effigies of Adolf Schicklgruber and actors impersonating him, rôles that were traditionally reserved for Haman. Quoting Jo Carruthers’s ‘Esther and Hitler: A Second Triumphant Purim’, pgs. 2–3:

Towards the end of the war, the Jews of Casablanca instituted ‘Purim Hitler’ (a ‘Little Purim’ or Purim Katan in Jewish tradition, a local festival that imitates Purim in its celebration of a specific and local reprieve from threat or slaughter).

Purim Hitler was celebrated on the second day of Kislev to commemorate the Allied forces landing on that date in Morocco in 1943, saving the Jewish community. They celebrate by reading Megillat Hitler (now held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.), a scroll modelled on Esther that functions as a palimpsest, the biblical story overwritten with new historical significance as the story of threat and reprieve becomes specific to the Casablanca experience of celebration.

[…]

Toby Blum‐Dobkin describes a celebration of Purim at the Displaced Persons Centre in Landsberg, Germany, in [1946]. Having collected the testimonies of survivors, including her father Boris Blum (inmate 114520, Mojdanek), Blum‐Dobkin explains that the inmates at the camp organized traditional celebrations: a reading of the Megillah (scroll of Esther), school performances, banquets, literary parodies, and a carnival.

Her father explains that ‘I saw in my imagination a Jewish carnival for the defeat of Hitler: the hanging of Hitler instead of Haman’ (Blum‐Dobkin 1979: 53). The camp is filled with images of hanging Hitlers and, in the tradition of dressing‐up common to Purim, one inmate dressed as Hitler himself.

Yehuda Fogel adds this:

And […] it all culminated with a public burning of Mein Kampf. The Lansberger Lager-Cajtung exuberantly reported:

At seven o’clock in the evening, at the sports field, there took place the public symbolic burning of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The flames, which licked at the black night sky, carried far, far, over mountains and seas, this tiding: Am Yisrael Chai! Jews live on, will live! Hitler, may his name and memory be blotted out, has lost his “kampf,” his battle, and we Jews, although we have paid dearly, have won the battle. So Haman ended, so Hitler ended, so will end all the enemies of the Jews.

(It may strike some as a little hypocritical that Jews would burn the books of somebody who endorsed burning ‘enemy’ literature, but keep in mind that the German Fascists were privileged oppressors who burned books in an ambitious attempt to erase cultures and ideas from existence. Some Jews burned a Fascist book as a crude means of coping with their trauma, knowing full well that it would not be the beginning of the end for antisemitism.)

For many Jews, Haman is not merely an individual, but a symbol for anti-Judaism and antisemitism. His probable ahistoricity is trivial; he personifies phenomena that their victims would physically destroy, were it that easy. Hence, the substitution of Haman with Adolf Schicklgruber was a logical one.

Of course, there were also important differences between Haman and Adolf Schicklgruber, and as Jo Carruthers showed, a few Jewish writers even discouraged the equivalences, if only because they were too misleading: Haman was far less successful in his plot to massacre Jews. Nevertheless, the similarities were irresistibly noticeable and they helped give the Book of Esther a modern-day relevance.

As seen in my excerpt, Haman was not the only Biblical antagonist in whom Jews saw protofascist tendencies: they also likened Adolf Schicklgruber to Pharaoh (from the Book of Exodus) and Antiochus IV, who were both less exterminatory than Haman but still very troublesome for Jews. Still, other Jews turned to scripture to cope with the situation in general or its aftermath. The Book of Job, for example, would not necessarily answer their suffering, but it gave them much to think about over the decades.

May your Purim this week be joyous.

On the morning of Purim after I pray and hear the Scroll of Esther read aloud, I put a wad of $20 bills in my pocket and get on my bike. Not singles. Not the $5 I might hand someone at a stoplight. Twenties. Enough that when I see someone sitting on the sidewalk with a sleeping bag or cardboard sign, I pull a couple of bills from my pocket and hand them over. It feels like real money. It feels like too much.

That is the point.

I am not a perfect giver. My wife and I are not hitting the $10% ideal that Jewish law commands. In truth, we give far less than we once imagined we would at this stage of our lives. Day school tuition and debt have a way of narrowing even the most generous of intentions. On Purim, I try to push against that narrowing.

Purim has the reputation of being Judaism’s carnival — costumes, drinking, irreverence, and near debauchery. But its core is surprisingly structured. The rabbis derive four commandments from the Scroll of Esther: hear the story, share a festive meal, send portions of food to friends and give gifts to the poor.

Of those, only one is directed beyond our own circle.

The Talmud (Jerusalem Talmud Megillah 1:4) teaches that on Purim, “Anyone who stretches out a hand, we give.” The language is strikingly open. No scrutiny. No investigation into the recipient’s worthiness. The commandment may have emerged in a Jewish community ensuring its own poor could share in the feast, but Purim itself is a story about the contingency of fate — what feels set in stone can suddenly prove unstable, about categories that refuse to stay fixed.

Haman casts lots to determine the day of the Jewish people’s annihilation. Fate looks sealed. A decree is written. The categories seem fixed: insider and outsider, safe and doomed. And then, everything turns.

Purim teaches that what looks permanent is often fragile. This is no less true about poverty and wealth; one’s fortunes can change instantaneously. By giving tzedakah on Purim, we adopt a posture that recognizes the contingency of fate. Indeed, if fate itself can reverse so suddenly, then perhaps my own position is less secure than I like to imagine. I may be the one giving today. That does not mean I am permanently the giver. The practice serves as a reminder about the ephemerality of our seemingly permanent roles.

This runs against the model of tzedakah heralded by Maimonides and ubiquitous in American Jewish life. In Maimonides’ ladder of tzedakah, the highest forms of giving are strategic, structured and even anonymous. For many Jews, that ladder has come to define Jewish philanthropy itself.

The Maimonidean model assumes stability: that the giver can stand outside the need, that charity can be organized and optimized. Most of the year, that assumption is necessary. It protects dignity and builds sustainable systems.

Purim offers a different model.

On Purim, the instruction is simpler: If a hand reaches out, you answer. The emphasis is not on optimization, but immediacy.

Nel Noddings, one of the founders of Care Ethics, put it beautifully in ”Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War”: “A great attraction of care ethics… is its refusal to encode or construct a catalog of principles and rules. One who cares must meet the cared-for just as he or she is, as a whole human being with individual needs and interests. […] At most, it directs us to attend, to listen, and to respond as positively as possible.”

Giving what feels ordinary would leave the instinct to abide by a “catalog of principles” intact. But when I peel a couple of twenties from the stack and press them into someone’s hand, there is no system — neither structure nor the distance that tends to goes with it. Just me and the person in front of me. By contrast, giving what feels like too much interrupts my reflex to calculate and strategize. This is not to criticize the typical model of philanthropic giving — we need structure to be maximally impactful. Rather, both models have something to teach us: The Maimonidean makes giving maximally effective and this “Purim model” creates solidarity through presence.

Connectedness is not abstract; it happens face to face. I often take off my helmet so my kippah is visible. It matters to me that my act is recognizably Jewish. There’s always a moment when I consider explaining — sharing that it’s a Jewish holiday about how anything can change in an instant. Part of me wonders whether naming it might make the moment feel more connected. But I don’t. To make it explicit would feel too self-serving. I simply say, “God bless,” and ride on.

In contemporary American public life, we have grown accustomed to classifying one another. We label people legal and illegal, citizen and alien. We reduce human beings to productivity metrics and returns on investment. We divide ourselves into camps — enlightened and backward, with us and against us. The categories begin to stand in for the individuals.

Purim asks us to suspend that reflex, if only for a day.

My roll of bills goes quickly. It’s not more than an hour before my pocket is empty. The need is endless. I have not changed the city. At best, I’ve helped someone get a room for the night.

But I have practiced something.

On the day we wear masks, we are commanded not to look away. On the holiday famous for excess, we are given a disciplined obligation to ensure that no one is left outside of the feast. It is only one day. That is precisely why it matters. For a few hours, we live as if no one is outside the feast.

This Purim, when a hand reaches out, give. Start with something that feels like too much.

This painting, however, does not depict the story of the Book of Esther. Rather, it comes from a popular book written in 1333 called the Ardashirnama (the Book of Ardashir—an Iranian King), which recounts and embellishes the story of the Book of Esther to emphasize its Jewish owners' identities as both Iranian and Jewish.

The Ardashirnama was written for the Jewish community living in Iran during the time of the Safavid Empire, and the text is not written in Hebrew, but in Judeo-Persian (Persian written in Hebrew characters). This essay explores how the late 17th- and early 18th-century Jewish community celebrated their Jewish–Iranian identity through art and poetry in one illuminated manuscript of the Ardashirnama.

[…]

The Ardashirnama that is the focus of this essay is one of only two illuminated Ardashirnama manuscripts that survive, and it is currently in the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). [1] While the scribes (who copied the texts) were Jewish, the identity of the artists who painted the illuminations are entirely unknown. It is possible that they were painted by Jewish artists; but it is more likely that they were created by Muslim artists who adapted familiar Safavid styles to suit commissions from Jewish patrons.

[…]

One image from the manuscript depicts the hanging of Haman, the King’s minister, who plotted to murder the Jews. As in the painting at the opening of the essay, his face is entirely rubbed out. The erasure of the figure by the book's owners follows the traditional custom to use groggers, or noisemakers, when Haman’s name is mentioned during the annual recitation of the Book of Esther on the holiday of Purim. [2] With each swing of the Purim noisemakers, the name of Haman is blotted out.

As tensions eased, in the ensuing decades, the Ardashirnama and other Judeo-Persian manuscripts continued to be copied and produced within the Jewish communities of Iran. Through the story and paintings of Esther and Ardashir, the Ardashirnama redefined Jewish identity as inseparable from that of the Iranian people. The survival of this rare illuminated manuscript gives visible expression to the Jewish community’s deeply felt Iranian identity, as they adapted Safavid painting to recast Jewish history as intrinsically Iranian history.

(Source.)

I was looking around to see if somebody had photographs of a synagogue in a forest. Although I saw a couple of congregations, I was unable to find any photographs of a synagogue standing in the middle of a forest like a cabin (which makes sense logistically, but is disappointing aesthetically). This country synagogue was the closest that I could find. Isn’t it humbling?

(This takes three minutes to read.)

Another element raised by the informants is the general lack of knowledge about Jews and Judaism, even among religion teachers. All informants tell stories of teachers who are ignorant of central aspects of Judaism, such as rituals or concepts. As a result, the pupils need to step in to correct the teachers, provide a “key” for the classmates, or at times even take over the teaching — they stop being “pupils like the rest of the class” (John, 19 years old), and feel exotified and excluded.

The informants also protest the lack of knowledge about what it means to live Jewish in Sweden today. The teachers’ ignorance results in the pupils having to take responsibility for filling the knowledge gap.

In class, it is well known that I am Jewish. When we have talked about Judaism in the class, everyone asks me about everything, including the teacher. I constantly added to what he said and developed it, and it ended up with him looking at me when he taught, as [if] to ask me if he was right. And all the classmates asked me and wanted me to help them. I didn’t really like it but I did it anyway so they would stop bothering me.

It has always felt that way — when we learn about Judaism, I stop being a pupil who is there to learn, but instead become like a kind of answer. It felt so strange — they talked about it in terms of ‘them’, as something separate from us in the class, but I was one of ‘them’! Sara, 14 years old

(Emphasis added.)

I feel like clarifying that merely asking Jews about Judaism is generally not a problem. However, many people (especially children) would feel overwhelmed needing to answer so many questions in one day. If I had umpteen things to ask then I would prefer to let somebody know beforehand, and I would let them know that they can stop me if I am overwhelming them.

Of course, the real eye-catcher here is the educators’ embarrassing incompetence regarding a subject wherein they should have some expertise, almost outsourcing their jobs to a few pupils.

Even though the schools that my informants go or have gone to are non-denominational, in many schools only the Protestant holidays are celebrated, while some schools try to pay attention to other religious holidays that might be relevant to their pupils. The informants say that they usually go to church at school graduations.

In a conversation with a small group of elementary school pupils, they told me that they think it is unfair to anyone who is not a Christian that the Christian holidays, traditions, and places of worship get attention while their own traditions and religious places remain unknown.

[…]

The young pupils describe that when they were younger, they even found it hard to understand that they were Jewish, since everything around them in school was based on Christian traditions. The pupils also experience that they may end up in a vulnerable position in the school canteen when they tell others that they do not eat pork. They were also not certain of being able to get time off from school to celebrate Jewish holidays (the Swedish calendar and school year are built around Protestant holidays).

[…]

Generally, the pupils do not recognise themselves in the image of the orthodox Jew, as their own experience of being Jewish is not very religious. Instead, they feel alienated by the images of Jews, who are also often portrayed as old-fashioned and with conservative gender rôles.

Ruth, 18 years old; Ella, 20 years old; and Julia, 19 years old, tell me that in connection with teaching about Judaism, they have been questioned based on the traditional gender rôles that are portrayed as linked to Orthodox Judaism but do not resemble the Judaism that they live by. The informants also tell me that they have not encountered different orientations of Judaism in their religion education. Ruth laughs when I ask if she thinks she can identify with the images of Jews that she encountered in school.

I am sad to say that this reminds me of the predominantly Ashkenazi schools that fail to accommodate their non-Ashkenazi students, particularly the Sephardim. To be fair, such schools are slowly making progress accommodating their minority students, but in any case I think that non-Ashkenazi Jews who grew up in predominantly Ashkenazi environments can easily understand how frustrating the situation is here.

A group of Jews, some looked orthodox, marched down the street with very loud music just now. They had a sort of tent they carried and someone was holding what looked like a large silver trophy under that tent. They looked genuinely so hyped, lots of dancing. Never seen anything like this. What is this? It was genuinely so loud I thought my upstairs neighbor was blasting edm lmao. My walls shook and my partner woke up from their nap.

A megillah is the common name for the biblical book of Esther written in scroll format. Publicly read during the celebration of the Jewish festival of Purim, the work commemorates the triumph of the Jews of the Persian Empire over their archenemy, Haman, in the 5th century BCE.

Flanking each section of three text columns are full-length figures of the story's main characters, while below each section, text illustrations set within elaborately framed panels depict salient features of the plot. A series of distinct cityscapes, likely alluding to the vastness of the Persian Empire, embellish the areas above the text sections. The entire scroll is generously decorated throughout with images of animals and floral motifs interspersed with dozens of animated cherubs.

(Source. See here or here for more. Spotted here.)

(This takes approx. one minute to read.)

Quoting Bernard S. Bachrach’s and David S. Bachrach’s Warfare in Medieval Europe, c.400–c.1453, pg. 46:

In a manner very similar to their contemporaries in the provinces of Gaul and Germany, the Visigothic kings in what had been the Roman provinces of Hispania governed their realm from the fortress cities that they inherited from their imperial predecessors, including the Visigothic capital at Toledo, which was also the chief episcopal see of the Visigothic kingdom. These fortress cities, therefore, were the initial focus of the Muslim armies that crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 711 under the command of Tariq ibn Ziyad.

Both Christian and Muslim accounts of the rapid and successful campaign by Tariq to overthrow Visigothic rule and install largely Berber garrisons in the cities of Spain point to the pivotal military rôle played by Jewish communities living in these fortifed urban centres.

For more than a century, the Visigothic kings had followed an inconsistent policy towards the Jews. As kings and would-be kings fought to control the royal throne, those who were supported by the Jews favoured them, and those who were opposed by the Jews persecuted them, including initiating efforts to confscate their property, and convert them to Christianity by force. This anti-Jewish policy was in force at the time of the Muslim conquest in 711.

As a result, the Jews, who were armed residents of the various fortress cities, as they also were in key cities east of the Pyrenees such as Arles and Narbonne, sided with the invaders. The Jews are depicted in the Arabic language sources as useful to the Muslim conquest and were regarded by later Christian writers, who also were opposed to the Jews in Spain, as the key element in making possible the Muslim conquest by giving them control over the fortress cities that served as the bases to establish control over almost the entire Visigothic kingdom.

Crossposted from https://altmedia.house/post/189096

Alex Pretti was killed Saturday. Within hours, a Jewish community gathered to mark the end of Shabbat — and to reckon with his death.

The shock of his killing rippled quickly through Temple Israel of Minneapolis. As night fell, they joined online with Jews throughout the region to acknowledge the loss during Havdalah, the brief ritual that separates sacred time from the workweek, folding an act of communal mourning into the moment when Shabbat slips away.

The service, typically meditative and transitional, took on added weight. Alongside the familiar blessings, congregants spoke of Pretti — of the violence that ended his life and of the unease that followed them into a new week.

Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse and Minnesota resident who confronted immigration enforcement, was fatally shot by federal agents on Saturday. Several videos capturing the incident show agents wrestling him to the ground before firing multiple shots. Pretti, whose religion has not been revealed, has been the subject of numerous religious observances including a Mass by the Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.

On Friday, there had been no sign of the tragedy to come. At least 100 rabbis and other Jewish leaders arrived in Minneapolis to participate in protests. Temple Israel hosted an interfaith service with clergy from around the city and the country, joined by other dignitaries including both of Minnesota’s U.S. senators. The service opened with a Muslim call to prayer and the blowing of a shofar, and included a candle lit in remembrance of slain Minneapolis protester Renée Good and those detained by ICE.

On Saturday evening, Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman opened the online-only Havdalah service by recounting the emotional whiplash of the previous 24 hours, moving from Friday’s sense of hope and collective purpose to the shock of Saturday’s events.

“Not more than a few hours into Shabbat overnight, we were met with more violence and the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti,” she said at the service, which drew more than 700 people logging in via Zoom. “This tension is overwhelming and exhausting and terrifying. Havdalah asks us to hold the tension between light and darkness, between what is and what should be.”

She turned to the ritual objects to frame the moment. “The braided candle reminds us we do not cross the sea alone,” Zimmerman said. “We are part of a community, the candle with its many wicks intertwined. Even on Zoom, even shaken and grieving, we stand together, carrying each other forward.”

That sense of closeness, despite physical distance, was echoed by Rabbi Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg of Shir Tikvah Congregation, who asked participants to lean toward their screens.

“We are 24 pages worth of people arrayed,” she said of Zoom’s gallery view. “So I’m going to invite us to move our faces a little bit closer to the camera.” She added: “We are in community together to feel this sense of closeness across our Twin Cities — Twin Cities that are in such need of care and love.”

Lekach-Rosenberg invoked the names of three people killed in connection with federal immigration enforcement: Victor Manuel Diaz, while in ICE custody in Texas, along with Good and Pretti. “We call for justice, and we pray that their memories will be an inspiration and a blessing,” she said.

Other clergy also reflected on how Shabbat’s promise of rest had been broken by unfolding news events. Like Zimmerman, Rabbi Jen Hartmann, also of Temple Israel, noted a Shabbat that had begun with the inspiration of the massive march gave way to grief. She urged her fellow Minnesotans to remain strong, citing an out-of-state comment she had seen online: “I want to move to Minneapolis because those folks — they know how to neighbor.”

The service made room for wordless mourning as well. Rabbi Jason Rodich, also of Temple Israel, called for a moment of silence, asking participants to refrain from even responding with emojis — so that “we can simply be in grief and memory” for Pretti, Good, Diaz, and others who died.

Zimmerman ended with the Oseh Shalom prayer for peace, reminding participants that while every human being is created in God’s image, “This is not a God problem; it’s a people problem.”

At least one local rabbi was arrested Friday in Minneapolis as hundreds of faith leaders from around the country gathered to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the Twin Cities.

Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman, the Jewish and interfaith chaplain at Macalester College in St. Paul, was briefly detained by police alongside leaders of other faiths while staging a protest at the airport.

In photos and video from the protest just before the arrest, Kipley-Ogman can be seen delivering brief remarks while wearing a rainbow tallit and standing in a line at the airport’s arrivals gate with several other faith leaders who hold hands and pray. Kipley-Ogman did not immediately return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.

Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, was also demonstrating at the airport and witnessed Kippley-Ogman’s arrest. He said the rabbi “was in the lineup of clergy being prepared to get arrested.”

“The goal was to disrupt operations because [the airport] is being used to deport folks, like three flights a day,” Weininger told JTA. He described the overall mood of the protest as “very peaceful.” In photos from the event, he is wearing a tallit and holding a sign reading “ICE Out of Minneapolis.”

He continued, “The clergy brought out the best of what faith does, which is lifting people up, building community and speaking up for justice. There was song, there was prayer, a lot of relationship-building. The crowd was calm but also very clear, calling to the end of the atrocities that ICE is committing.”

In an Instagram video from the airport, Rabbi Daniel Kirzane of the Reform KAM Isaiah Israel in Chicago, wearing a beanie from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said he had come to the protest because “the Torah teaches us that society and government are meant to protect people, not to scare them and not to brutalize them.”

The three were among an estimated 100 rabbis and Jewish leaders on the ground for “ICE Out” events across the Twin Cities Friday, after local clergy issued a broader call for a show of strength to combat the region’s intensified ICE activity over the past few weeks. Many local Jewish institutions, including the federation, the JCC, Jewish day schools and Jewish social services groups, have condemned ICE’s presence.

While mainstream Jewish groups say they are not opposed to responsible immigration enforcement, a steady stream of distressing incidents in Minnesota — including including the shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent, the detention of a 5-year-old child, and agents reportedly forcing open the door of a U.S. citizen — have galvanized a faith-based response in starkly moral terms.

“What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist,” one visiting rabbi, Diane Tracht of Reform-affiliated Temple Israel near Gary, Indiana, told Religion News Service while patrolling a heavily Hispanic and Somali region looking for ICE activity. “If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.”

The Hebrews’ flight from Egypt is on a lot of Jewish minds right now, as the annual cycle of Torah readings has reached the Book of Exodus.

But for many Jewish leaders in Minnesota, the ancient story has particular resonance.

With Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descending on the Twin Cities in search of undocumented immigrants and stirring chaos and pushback, the story of Exodus — about a king who tries to thwart the growing number of “foreigners” in his midst, and the leader who seeks to protect them — is inspiring local Jews as they respond to ICE despite the risks of doing so.

“As we’re currently reading in the Torah, Moses confronts Pharoah knowing it won’t be easy, and feeling his own doubts about such an act,” Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in the suburb of Minnetonka, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And in doing so, the Israelites enslaved in Egypt are able to get unstuck. They’re able to taste freedom.”

Inspired by such teachings, and frequently invoked Jewish injunctions like “welcoming the stranger,” Jewish groups are signing on to open letters, and synagogues are actively involved in pro‑immigrant actions and advocacy. The Jewish presence at an interfaith anti-ICE rally this week is expected to be substantial, including about 100 rabbis and Jewish leaders who are flying in from out of state.

“Our community members and staff live and work in every corner of society. There are too many stories of lives upended by what the government itself refers to as the ICE surge,” reads an open letter, issued Monday, spearheaded by the Jewish federation and signed by around two dozen Jewish groups.

Jewish groups “are deeply concerned by the current volatile situation throughout the Twin Cities and Minnesota,” according to the letter. Its signatories as of Wednesday afternoon include 13 area congregations, ranging from Reform to Modern Orthodox; two Jewish day schools; Minnesota Hillel; the Minnesota JCC; the progressive group Jewish Community Action, and Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota.

ICE’s presence — which includes masked, heavily armed officers conducting aggressive traffic stops, neighborhood raids and street patrols — has wreaked havoc in the region, with mounting reports of legal immigrants, asylum seekers and even U.S. citizens being snatched off the street and from their homes as the agents, empowered by the White House, hunt for migrants.

The local school system has allowed students to attend virtually as many immigrants in the city are staying home to avoid becoming a target. One result has been a dearth of caregivers tending to local Jewish seniors, according to the letter from the Jewish groups.

The letter followed an earlier missive from 49 Minnesota Jewish clergy, distributed on Friday, that describes “grief” and “horror” over ICE “wreaking havoc across our state.”

Quoting Deuteronomy — “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” — the rabbis and cantors spotlight the “tragic death” of driver Renee Good at the hands of an ICE officer Jan. 7 and include a prayer to “spread a canopy of peace and protection over all those wrongfully targeted by ICE at this moment.”

Both of those letters precipitated what is turning into a larger institutional Jewish pushback to ICE. On Wednesday, leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements issued a joint statement to “condemn, in the strongest terms, the violence with which the Department of Homeland Security is enforcing American immigration law — above all, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as in cities and towns across the nation.”

“Our sages taught that the Book of Deuteronomy’s directive, ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (16:20), implies that the law must be enforced through a fair process, and that one should pursue justice whether it would be to one’s advantage or to one’s loss,” the statement reads, with the Jewish leaders further calling on the Justice Department to investigate Good’s death.

Rabbi Jill Avrin, campus lead at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said it was “unprecedented” for such a wide variety of local Jewish groups to sign onto such messages.

“We have a really diverse Jewish community here, and we felt that this is a moment that is impacting all of us,” Avrin, who helped draft the letters, told JTA.

The multiple open letters are trying to appeal to shared spiritual values as the standoffs between protesters and ICE agents become increasingly fraught. A number of prominent figures — most recently Bruce Springsteen — have compared ICE’s tactics to the Gestapo; at the same time, an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service over the weekend has prompted concern and controversy across the interfaith community and led at least one Republican to compare the protesters to Hamas.

Local Jewish leaders say they are not dissuaded from what they view as a Jewish imperative to respond.

“Judaism isn’t about skipping the hard parts,” Weininger said. “It’s about noticing the struggles for centuries that have led us to this point: slavery, persecution, destruction, exile, coming home.”

Being reared in US Christianity, Sodom and Gommorah is taught as a lesson against anything other than cisgender man and cisgender woman being involved in a sexual relationship, and even that, outside of a marriage certificate.

But Ezekiel talks about the sin of Sodom as being too materially comfortable and not helping the poor. I've done searches on a couple of sites about Judaism and one is vague about the actual sin, the other which I'm afraid is a hasbara opp addresses it as Ezekiel addresses it. Yet another doesn't mention it at all, but to stop short of the account. According to Judaism, is the sin greed or miserliness or of a sexual nature? Thanks in advance.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/15903

Jewish advocacy for a one-state solution represents a form of Zionism that centers Jews in Palestine's future. Instead, anti-Zionist Jews must aim to accelerate the dismantling of Zionism both in Palestine and worldwide.

The clarity and questions raised by Lara Kilani’s astute piece, “Liberation Is Not Integration: On liberal Zionism, one-state fantasies, and what Palestinians actually want” and Rima Najjar’s incisive response, “The Settlers Are Not Leaving: Decolonization, not coexistence,” place the discussion of the future Palestine where it belongs – among Palestinians. The questions both pieces raise affirm a long-standing opinion of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, of which I am a co-founder, that Jews do not and should not play a role in envisioning, directing, or participating in the designs of a liberated Palestine. Instead, as anti-Zionist Jews, our role lies in expediting the dismantling of Zionism – both its genocidal, colonial expression and expansion in Palestine and its fortification through organizations and institutions across the globe. As Najjar argues, such de-Zionization is a precondition of sorts for Palestinians to have the space and possibility to determine what liberation looks like and the society they want to build in its aftermath.

It is and has always been Palestinians who must determine the nature of “the state” and the society they want to live in once colonialism is dismantled. “Greater Israel” is closer to being secured than ever before – through collaboration and shared interests of the ruling elite in the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar and Turkey. As Najjar notes, calls for one state without a clear plan for decolonization and de-Zionization risk replicating rather than dismantling Zionism. Furthermore, discussions of a one-state solution that fails to assert the centrality of Palestinian self-determination – particularly the right to not be forced to integrate with those who have not only committed but celebrated genocide against you – is not only abstract, but damaging.

When Jewish academics, activists and organizations call for and lift up their vision of a one-state in Palestine, it is Zionism. One way or another, it is based on an investment in Palestine remaining a place in which Jews are central to the vision of the state and society. It is, therefore, our mandate to be unwavering in our support for the decolonization and de-Zionization of Palestine and the means necessary to shift the structural conditions in this direction.

At minimum, this includes engaging in the divestment and dismantling of all Zionist institutions and structures and BDS, and reinforcing, without hesitation, the Palestinian right to resist, right to return, and right to rebuild, as well as broader anti-imperial, anti-monarchy, anti-capitalist struggles in the region.

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