Pogrom season

Was yesterday the most difficult day in all of modern Jewish history, or is it just me? As I prepared for Seder last night, I thought to myself: are we just waiting for Jewish kids to die – to be killed for sport in front of crowds on American university campuses? I know I am not alone in that. Far from it. Non-Jews will have you believe that we’re hysterical. We know our past better than them. We sit down and learn it every single year. That’s why and how we know.

Right now is a time for us, for Jews. Right now is the most painful, demoralizing, soul-chilling, heartbreaking moment in our collective lives. And it’s our collective lives. Yet that doesn’t make it less of a personal, isolated journey. As we sit at our Seder tables for Passover, the most significant of all of our festivals in my opinion, we are taught and we read that we all must treat the night as though we all personally went out of Egypt. Why is this night so different from all other nights, we ask? It’s different because we go in a time machine backwards to reorient ourselves in the here and now. What an opportunity this is on this week, of all weeks. And I think all of us understand today what a personal exodus means more clearly than we ever have.

Last night the seder followed days of a pogrom in New York City; a pogrom on Jews; a pogrom against Jewish freedom in the city that hosts five millions Jews - the biggest Jewish population outside of Israel; a pogrom against humanity itself that declared in true puritan style that it was for humanity. As so many of our detractors of yore have insisted, the morally clean must rid society of our filth. Those puritanical goons are now taking over America’s most elite institutions, and they are winning. They are winning because the powers that be are terrified of dispruting them. They are winning because they have made it so that it’s no longer safe for Jewish students and faculty members to go anywhere near campus. A personal exodus is necessary as we must all ask ourselves personally what lengths we’re prepared to go right now in order to survive, because we have no other option. Where do we go from here? It’s our choice.

Let’s start with yesterday’s pogroms. Columbia university predominantly, with Yale, and NYU too vying for equal amounts of attention. Last week, an encampment began at Columbia University, now declared “The People’s University of Palestine”. For days, the scenes there are dystopian, and they are horribly reminiscent of previous pogroms against Jews. Those taking over the streets outside campus and within are wearing keffiyeh, covering their faces, chanting violently, and screaming at Jewish students to “Go back to Poland”. These are not peaceful displays. There have been reported stand-offs with NYPD. I saw one video, in which a female protester taunted a police officer, while pushing against the barricade: "How is this going to stop me? What are you gonna do? Arrest me? Ha!"

Lines of “pro Palestinian” students holding hands to form human barricades have been chasing Jews off campus, encircling lone Jewish students to taunt them and physically assaulting them. Here is a photograph of one man who was wearing a kippah.

At Yale, journalist Sahar Tartak, was assaulted with a Palestinian flag, in the eye.

This video below is of a terrorist at Columbia within the encampment a few nights ago. I don’t use that word lightly. She is a leader for a group called Within Our Lifetime, one of the biggest organizing groups that openly supports Hamas and the October 7 attacks in New York City.

In this video you will hear the hum of Alahu Akbar, the same words Hamas screamed for hours on October 7, over and over and over again. Praise be Allah for these murderous barbaric acts of genodice.

Shai Davidai, a professor at Columbia, who has garnered much attention since October 7 following an impassioned speech he made about antisemitism and his experience on campus as a Jewish Israeli, has led the charge to expose what’s going on at his school. Please follow his reports, as he documents more than I have room to share.

It grew so dangerous to be on campus for Jewish people that the Rabbi at Columbia and Barnard sent this message to his students over the weekend.

Yet it did not get better on campus. It got worse. This push notification appeared on my phone yesterday.

It has been reported that the Jewish students at Columbia have been told they will have to complete their semester on Zoom. Yesterday when Shai Davidai showed up to campus, his key didn’t work. Professor Davidai, a Jewish professor, has been denied access to his own place of work.

We are not going to try and appease people. We have to fight them. There's no negotiating with this kind of terrorism, and terrorism it is. Domestic terrorism. Universities have prioritized “safe spaces” over intellectual curiosity and reasonable debate for far too long. It’s fascist, it’s not liberal. And now it’s no longer safe for Jewish people as a result of decades worth of mainstreaming antisemitic ideas and bastardised history. These universities are training grounds for extremism. Did anyone have any success negotiating with the Hitler Youth? Are we just waiting for Jewish kids to die?

Yesterday I did not mince my words. I said that Charlottesville was child’s play in comparison to what’s going on at Columbia. By the way, I’ve muttered this quietly for years, and when the Jewish lawyers who worked on bringing justice to the victims of Charlottesville behaved as though this was a victory for Jews, while further politicizing Jews and drawing attention away from what was happening on their own side of the aisle, I knew this day would come. I tweeted this yesterday and was met with bile, but one response stood out and sent a shiver down my spine:

I mean every word I say. This is no disrespect to the travesty of what happened at Charlottesville, but Charlottesville’s neo Nazism wasn’t about Jews, it was about neo Nazi thugs. Columbia is about Jews, and the Nazis are weaponizing Charlottesville to protect leftist fascism. Lefist fascism protected by institutional power in the most elite universities in the country.

People who swore they wouldn’t be silent during the Holocaust are silent now. They’re silent and they’re perverting the memory of the Holocaust by using it to justify their antisemitic violence. They’re silent and they’re loud as hell, in the Nazi direction. This is a picture from the University of Vienna, 1938, where Jews were blocked from entering:

And this is Yale 2024:

Now onto the seder night. Throughout history, Jews have gathered among ourselves in the sacred, intimate, special moment of Pesach. It’s for us and only us, and if you’re ever invited to one in such a moment of hell you will learn everything you need to know about who we are as the most resilient surviving people that walked this earth. You will drink wine with us, sing songs and poems with us, hear stories with us, philsophise about the deepest questions of history and time with us, you will argue with us, you will feast with us, you will cry, laugh and forget the rest of the world with us, however briefly, before something ancient in the text will remind you exactly where you are sitting in the continuum of the world as it stands. You will hear that the Jews emancipated themselves in Israel long before the rest of the world was established. Long before Christianity. Long before Islam. You will understand that today’s debate is not one about land, but about changing the truth, and wiping out history. We were there before any of it, and we are still here.

We survived. We survived Egypt, we survived the Bar Kokhba revolt, we survived Constantine I, we survived book burnings in Persia in the third century, we survived forced conversion in the fourth century, we survived the burning of our synagogues in Italy in the sixth century, we survived the seventh century massacres of Jews in the Byzantine era and the beheading of Jews by Muslims in the battle of Khaybar… Eleventh century pogroms against Jews in Cordoba, Granada and Morocco, the destruction of the Jewish quarter of Kiev in the twelfth century and the expulsion of Jews from Bologna for no reason. In the thirteenth century, King John of England imprisoned most of the Jewish population until they paid 66,000 marks, while the Archbishop of Canterbury banned Jews from building synagogues. In the fourteenth century, Jews were expelled from France. I’m just scratching the surface here and I could go on, but that’s a whole other Substack/book/university course.

The Jewish people are a treasure upon earth. The greatest treasure. There is none like us, and there never will be again. In the Haggadah, the book of story, that we all read on the Seder table, we read about a people of endless hope despite never-ending exile and hardships. We read about a people who are not victims, but victors. Victorious in defeating every generational enemy by holding fast to one another like a rock. We are a rock of a people that endures millennia of rain and fire and hailstorm. We are as unchanging as a rock. When we sit to take in these rituals, we can no longer stray from ourselves.

We talk about the examples of the Four Sons at the table, and we should teach them to every Jew and non-Jew alike, by using real time examples of who is Wise, who is Wicked, who is Simple, and who Does Not Know How To Ask. Which one are you? Are you the wise leader of truth, or are you the wicked Jew who lets themselves be chosen by the goyim as one of the “righteous”? This is the cornerstone of what we currently face. A dispersion of our people, who are weaponized by our enemies. A timeless lesson. May we grow more Wise sons to weaken the Wicked.

Last night, I set a place at the table for a hostage. Tonight I will do the same.

Let my people go.

Next year in Jerusalem.

Dayenu - it would have been enough.

The ten plagues.

What is it about us Jews, and these rituals, these words that have this spooky tendency to root us in the worst reality while reminding us that - yes - even this too we have endured? We are a nostalgic people; dwellers of past, present and future all at once; emotional hoarders of memory; incapable of living in the now without contemplating what was then. As bittersweet as that is, with a horseradish in one hand and a sweet dip of charoseth in the other, this is our very essence. With the salty tears of affliction on our palettes, we sing our yiddish songs of joy in our own tongue.

We are in Egypt. We are in a bad place as old as Egypt. In Kfar Aza, after October 7, the houses of the murdered were marked with red by IDF soldiers, and I stood there, staring at the burned down homes of Jews, and it reminded me of Hashem passing over the bloodstained houses in a miraculous plague to strike our enemies down in Canaan. It was an inversion of what had been before. Right here, in that same land. Hamas have enslaved our people in Gaza, not far from Egypt at all, with Pharoah Sinwar the cruellest of modern taskmasters at the helm. And around the world, their cult of hatred has inspired so many more.

And speaking of the many more, I would like to take this moment to address the human rights advocates in the room, the literati, the intelligentsia, the same lawyers and journalists and publicists and entertainment folk that I’ve been calling out to no avail for months, who remain highly praised and loved among my own friends, who are thought to be useful people in society, who are ignorant at best and evil personified at worst. Listen to me.

It makes me ill to see all of you grifters posting your Hamas propaganda virtue-signalling venom every day. You’re not progressives, you’re regressives. You’re as old as the Egyptians themselves. And the Jewish people are never going to allow you it. You will not drive us out of your societies. Never. I’m ashamed of all of you. All of you. I’ve messaged you all privately to try to show you something about antisemitism, and shame on you. This is on you. This is on all of you. Yes you too. With your human rights. Fuck you. And fuck everyone who protects and excuses you.

We were once slaves in Egypt. One day again, we will be free. They don’t change, and neither do we.