Over the weekend as the Passover holiday neared, the headlines blared. “Anti-Israel Protests RAGE At Columbia, Biden CONDEMNS Anti-Semitism on Campus” (The Hill), read one. “Columbia University campus security concerns ahead of Passover,” said another (ABC News), in more modulated tones. And a third, “Rabbi tells Columbia students to leave campus due to ‘extreme antisemitism’” (NewsNation). But the reality, as usual, was more nuanced.
In fact, while some Jewish students did fear for their safety due to antisemitic slurs, and a Jewish professor complained (to the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS, among others) of terrorism, adding “and I do not use the word lightly,” many of the students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza are Jewish. It didn’t get much play in the national media, but over the weekend they held the usual services that mark the Jewish sabbath. And Monday at sundown they held a makeshift seder, the ritual meal that begins Passover, stressing the ancient themes of hope, justice and liberation from bondage.
By all accounts, Monday’s seder at Columbia’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” was entirely peaceful. One visitor, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel of Jewish Currents magazine told Al Jazeera, the Arab TV network, she thought it was a “very beautiful expression” of solidarity with the people of Gaza, and added she believes that “accusations of antisemitism are being used to shut down student speech.”
Student journalists for the Columbia Daily Spectator reported the ceremony like this:
At around 6:30 p.m., the Columbia chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and CU Jews for Ceasefire helped organize a Passover seder in the encampment that a participant told Spectator was mostly prepared in the Jewish Theological Seminary kosher kitchens. Student demonstrators displayed a sign that read “Pesach [the Hebrew word for Passover] Means Solidarity and Liberation,” distributed handmade haggadah—a special book that sets the order of the Passover seder—and prayed in Hebrew atop blue tarps covering the lawn.
Clearly, not all of Columbia’s Jewish students feared for their safety.
Nor did Arielle Angel. Her magazine, Jewish Currents, is an avowedly left-wing quarterly published in New York City, and she is a 2012 graduate of Columbia (with an MFA in creative writing from NYU). After Monday’s visit to the encampment, she said on Twitter (now known as X): “These students truly embody the meaning of Passover in their provisional seder and their commitment to liberation.” The next day, she tweeted (a process presumably still known, even on X, as tweeting):
Love the confluence of these university encampments for Palestine & Pesach. My Torah scholar friends tell me that the 15 of Nisan [the first day of Passover] is a time of liberation that transcends even the Passover story itself—a tear in the fabric of time, of pure potential.
While the campus is largely closed to outside media, CNN had a camera crew present for the ceremony, which had the atmosphere I remember from church camps and other outdoor religious observances. One Columbia student interviewed for CNN’s seder story said, “to me Passover symbolizes perseverance and resilience.” Another put it like this: “Passover is the story of our escape from slavery in the land of Egypt. And I think we need to recognize that on Passover it’s important to stand up for oppressed people everywhere, whether they’re Jewish or not.”
Angel didn’t elaborate much on her visit to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment — Twitter (oops, sorry, X) doesn’t really allow for elaboration — but she did offer this assessment for Al Jazeera:
I went to the Passover seder yesterday at the Columbia solidarity encampment for Gaza, and what I saw there was a very beautiful expression of their commitment to liberation for Palestinian people. So there really is a way in which this narrative around Jewish students on campus is not taking into account the Jewish students who are supporting these protests and in fact are overrepresented in this protests. We have seen an effort to tie antisemitism on campus to the idea that the university is an illiberal space. And what we’ve seen is exactly the opposite, that accusations of antisemitism are being used to shut down student speech, to arrest students, to evict students.
In that, Angel echoed three members of New York’s city council who visited the encampment over the weekend and reported to City & State New York, a local government newsletter:
Far from a danger zone where Jews should fear to tread, the encampment hosted a large kabbalat shabbat service on Friday evening, followed the next night by an equally well-attended havdalah service. These, along with the many statements from Jewish students and faculty testifying to feeling safe on campus and condemning [university president Minouche] Shafik’s crackdown on the protests, should call into question the glib narrative peddled by those in power that the protesters are antisemites and Columbia and Barnard are hostile to their Jewish populations. [Links in the original.]
The message of Passover has been very much on Angel’s mind, anyway. Only five days after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack that triggered Israeli’s military campaign in Gaza, she touched on the subject in a “letter from the editor” titled “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other.”
It was a shattering experience for staff at Jewish Currents who have long opposed Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories acquired in the 1967 war, which they see as a neo-colonial project. “Staff members are periodically bursting into tears, fighting with their families or with their friends, running on fitful sleep,” Angel said. “A contributor’s son is a hostage. A contributor in Gaza texts: ‘Still alive. They are bombing everywhere. Nowhere is safe’.” It was in that context that Passover came up, as she wrote:
As I watched people online debate the models of anti-colonial struggle, raising comparisons to Algeria and North America and South Africa, I found myself returning to the foundational Jewish liberation myth: the Exodus. It was hard not to think about the moment in the Passover seder when we lessen the wine in our full cups with our pinkies as we recite the plagues. This ritual has materialized as an indispensable touchstone, insisting that to hold onto our humanity we must grieve all violence, even against the oppressor.
The ritual that Angel refers to is to remove a drop of wine from each cup, by flicking it away with one’s finger, while the plagues visited upon Egypt are recited. Citing a 14th-century sage, Wikipedia says, “Although this night is one of salvation, Don Isaac Abravanel explains that one cannot be completely joyous when some of God’s creatures had to suffer.” Including the Egyptians. Angel continues:
But I also thought of the plagues themselves, particularly the final one, the slaying of the firstborn—children, adults, the elderly. It seems that hiding in our liberation myth is a recognition that violence will visit the oppressor society indiscriminately. I know that I have many friends, and that Currents has many readers, who are asking themselves how they can be part of a left that seems to treat Israeli deaths as a necessary, if not desirable, part of Palestinian liberation. But what Exodus reminds us is that the dehumanization that is required to oppress and occupy another people always dehumanizes the oppressor in turn. For people who feel like their pain is being devalued, it’s because it is; and that devaluation is itself a hallmark of the cycle of the diminishing value of human life.
The sense of grief and loss in Angel’s Oct. 12 letter is palpable. So are the difficult moral issues that arise when you believe your people have oppressed others. Does the Israeli government stand now in the place of Pharaoh and Pharaoh’s army? Are Palestinian civilians as worthy in the eyes of God as the ancient Israelites? The questions are arguable, but they must be argued. Angel continued.
We are seeing the ways that Jews as the agents of apartheid will not be spared—even those of us who have devoted our lives to the work of ending it. (I am thinking of Hayim Katsman, zichrono l’vracha [Hebrew for may his memory be a blessing], killed by Hamas, an activist against the expulsion of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta, and Vivian Silver, a hostage in Gaza, who is known to many of its residents as the person they meet at the Erez Crossing [from Gaza into Israel proper] who advocates for and facilitates their transfers to Israeli hospitals for treatment.)
Katsman and Silver were murdered Oct. 7 when Hamas fighters stormed kibbutzim along the Gaza border. (Silver’s body was found later at the kibbutz.) But reading Angel’s essay, I couldn’t help but feel she was grieving for her movement, too, as she wrote:
Our Jewish movements for Palestine were not powerful enough to stop other Jews from gunning down Palestinians in peaceful marches at the Gazan border fence, or to keep Palestinians from being fired, harassed, and sued for speaking the truth about their experience or—God forbid—advocating the nonviolent tactic of boycott. And now, we do not have a shared struggle able to credibly respond to these massacres of Israelis and Palestinians. With all of the work that many Jews and Palestinians have done to reach toward each other over the years, I believe at heart it is this failure that is now driving us apart.
Yet if Passover and the story in Exodus in the Hebrew Bible have any meaning today — if Torah and what we sometimes refer to as the Judeo-Christian ethic offer us any guidance — part of that guidance is about hope. A hope that people held in bondage can cross the Red Sea (or a reedy marsh, as modern biblical scholars suggest) to freedom in a promised land. A hope of eventual justice for the oppressed. (It’s also worthy of notice that the story appears in the Quran, and Muslims fast every year in its commemoration of the crossing.) As devastated as she was by the events of Oct. 7, Angel turned to that hope at the end of her essay:
[…] it was Palestinians who opened my thinking to multiple visions of sharing the land. On the left, I hope we do not mistake the inevitability of the violence for an inescapable limit on our work or the quality of our thought. Even if our dreams for better have failed, they must accompany us through this moment to the other side. We need to imagine a movement for liberation better even than the Exodus—an exodus where neither people has to leave. Where people stay to pick up the pieces, rearranging themselves not just as Jews or Palestinians but as antifascists and workers and artists.
Again, there’s much here that is debatable, and Angel’s openly left-wing critique of geopolitics will not be shared by everyone. Also debatable are the issues raised by Hamas’ atrocities on Oct, 7, Israel’s indiscriminate assault on civilians in Gaza and US complicity in what well might turn out to be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. But the moral issues and principles celebrated by anti-war students at Monday’s Passover seder are real, and they must be debated.
An update (and sort of footnote), April 25. Since I began this post, the news cycle has moved on relentlessly. And so have the scary headlines. Case in point: “House Republicans back [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu in comparing anti-Israel college protests to 1930s Germany,” in the conservative Washington Examiner. And this: “Useless Biden Can’t Help but Botch His Response to Campus Antisemitism” (National Review). In both instances, I can’t help but suspect an element of political motivation.
In the same news cycle, Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky of the podcast Breaking Points, interviewed Safia Southey, a first-year law student who took part in Monday’s Passover seder at Columbia. She described it like this:
It was one of the most inspiring experiences I’ve had, and not a seder like anything else. We had dozens and dozens of students gathered around […]. It was my first outdoor seder, and it was really beautiful. Mostly led by Jewish Voices for Peace here on campus. We had a special haggadah, talking about the concept of liberation, and it was just a very wonderful multicultural moment. Nearly everybody on campus, or everybody at the camp, was there and shared in that, and [I’m] very grateful to have that.
Southey, who met Grim and agreed to appear on the show when she was off-campus buying supplies for the seder, was asked about the reports of antisemitism in the news media, including a widely shared picture of a counter demonstrator with a placard reading “Al-Qassam’s next targets.” (The Al-Qassam brigades are the military wing of Hamas.) Her answer was nothing if not lawyerly. She said the incidents she’s aware of took place on city sidewalks outside the gates:
It’s hard to crack down on people when they are physically outside the bounds of the school. The idea of going outside and policing people for messages is, firstly, impossible. And, second of all, […] the organizing groups have actively tried to go against this idea antisemitism, asking groups outside to stop using this kind of rhetoric. The girl with the al Qassam sign was not a Columbia student. We have no idea how she got here. I have not known of a single Columbia student, or person in the encampment, using such language.
Overall, Southey said, the media coverage has been “disheartening […] a complete distraction from why we are here and the actual message of divestment and transparency and support for Palestinian people that this camp stands for.”
Also visiting campus Wednesday were US House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and a House Republican delegation who met briefly with Columbia’s president Shafik before a photo op, on the other side of campus from the encampment, calling on her to resign “if she cannot immediately bring order to this chaos.”
The politicos got the immediate reaction they must have expected.
A crowd of perhaps a hundred that gathered to watch the photo op booed and chanted “we can’t hear you,” “Mike you suck” and “get the f— out of here.” And they got more scary headlines. “Speaker Johnson: It was ‘chaos’ on Columbia’s campus” (Fox News); “Johnson: ‘There is an appropriate time’ for National Guard if student protesters don’t disperse” (The Hill) “GOP lawmakers demand Biden admin prosecute ‘pro-terrorist mobs,’ hold schools accountable” (Fox News). It was all good political theater, and the news cycle churns on.
Links and Citations
Arielle Angel, “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other,” Jewish Currents, Oct. 12, 2023 https://jewishcurrents.org/we-cannot-cross-until-we-carry-each-other.
__________, “We cannot ignore Jewish students supporting the Columbia encampment,” Quotable@Al Jazeera, April 23, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_xsC2UPkjtM.
“Anti-Israel Protests RAGE At Columbia, Biden CONDEMNS Anti-Semitism on Campus,” The Hill, April 22, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyIg2MA9jsY.
Tiffany Cabán, Sandy Nurse and Alexa Avilés, “We visited the solidarity encampment at Columbia University. Here’s what it’s really like,” City & State New York, April 23, 2024 https://www.cityandstateny.com/opinion/2024/04/opinion-we-visited-solidarity-encampment-columbia-university-heres-what-its-really/395989/.
“Columbia University campus security concerns ahead of Passover,” ABC News, April 22, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vyRKHEXEv8.
Tim Geraghty, “Useless Biden Can’t Help but Botch His Response to Campus Antisemitism,” National Review, April 23, 2024 https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/useless-biden-cant-help-but-botch-his-response-to-campus-antisemitism/.
Beth Harpaz, “He was a peace activist with a PhD. In dying, Hayim Katsman saved 3 other lives,” Forward, Oct. 12, 2023 https://forward.com/fast-forward/564468/hayim-katsman-university-washington-kibbutz-hamas/.
“Inside the Seder dinner on Columbia’s Gaza protest encampment,” CNN, [April 22, 2025] https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/us/video/seder-passover-columbia-university-protests-ny-digvid. Also on TikTok at https://www.tiktok.com/@cnn/video/7361196772401696043.
“Jewish students report rampant Antisemitism at Columbia,” i24NEWS English, Tel Aviv, April 21, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGTrntXQ2oE.
Julia Johnson, “GOP lawmakers demand Biden admin prosecute ‘pro-terrorist mobs,’ hold schools accountable,” Fox News, April 25, 2024 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-lawmakers-demand-biden-admin-prosecute-pro-terrorist-mobs-hold-schools-accountable.
Brady Knox, “House Republicans back Netanyahu in comparing anti-Israel college protests to 1930s Germany,” Washington Examiner, April 24, 2024 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/education/2978331/house-republicans-back-netanyahu-anti-israel-college-protests/.
Maya Levin, “Mourners gather in Israel to honor memory of longtime peace activist Vivian Silver,” NPR, Nov. 17, 2023 https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2023/11/17/1213523321/israel-gaza-peace-activist-vivian-silver-funeral-service.
“LIVE From Encampment: Jewish Columbia Student NOT Afraid,” Counterpoints with Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky, Breaking Points, April 24, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM1SPHTsdyY.
Amira McKee and Sarah Huddleston, “‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ approaches one-week mark on South Lawn,” Columbia Spectator, April 23, 2024 https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/04/23/gaza-solidarity-encampment-approaches-one-week-mark-on-south-lawn/.
“Rabbi tells Columbia students to leave campus due to ‘extreme antisemitism’” NewsNation, April 22, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WummJzE28Ik.
Mychael Schnell, “Johnson: ‘There is an appropriate time’ for National Guard if student protesters don’t disperse,” The Hill, April 24, 2024 https://www.yahoo.com/news/johnson-appropriate-time-national-guard-234222247.html.
“Speaker Johnson: It was ‘chaos’ on Columbia’s campus,” Fox News, April 24, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr4t2PZ4CuA.
Michael Starr, “‘Burn Tel Aviv to the ground:’ Calls for violence continue at Columbia,” Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2024 https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-798160.
Wikipedia: Don Isaac Abravanel, Breaking Points, Crossing the Red Sea, Jewish Currents, Judeo-Christian ethics, kibbutz and Passover Seder.
[Uplinked April 25, 2024]
Ordinary Time 