An aging hippie reflects on student protests, in the 60s and now, and the lessons of Passover in wartime

What’s an aging hippie to do? Coverage of the student protests over US support of Israel’s conduct in Gaza brings back so many memories of the anti-war movement of the 1960s, it ought to come with a trigger warning. Most of the memories are good; some are frankly embarrassing; and all of them leave me entirely sympathetic with today’s student protesters.

Even the embarrassing ones.

When today’s protesters are branded as antisemitic, I remember the day I shouted a barnyard metaphor at President Nixon during a Billy Graham crusade. It was May 1970, about three weeks after Kent State and the US invasion of Cambodia, and Nixon was invited to speak at the crusade in the football stadium on the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus. Not exactly an opportune time for him to visit a university campus.

(I blogged about it HERE, in 2022, under the headline “The score when Nixon spoke at a Billy Graham crusade at UT-Knoxville: Lions 0; Christians 1; First Amendment -1. The headline reflects a quip I heard at the time, that we were badly outnumbered and they fed the lions to the Christians that night. Then as now, protesters were routinely vilified off-campus.)

Anyway, the plan was for a dignified silent vigil. Maybe 200 or 300 of us filed into the UT football stadium with signs reading “Thou Shalt Not Kill” rolled up under our shirts. All went as planned until Nixon began to speak.

Then somebody shouted a barnyard epithet that appropriately summed up the content of Nixon’s remarks, even if the venue wasn’t quite appropriate. Good intentions forgotten, we took up the chant. “Bullshit! Bullshit!” It lasted maybe a minute or two, then Knoxville city cops filtered up the aisles between seats and told us we could leave quietly now, but they couldn’t guarantee our safety if we mingled with the 75,000 worshipers leaving the stadium after the service. That seemed like a reasonable proposition, so we filed out to a chorus of boos and catcalls. The demonstration was followed by mass arrests and rallies to “Free the Knoxville 22,” who were charged with obstructing a religious service.

And the Vietnam war ground on for another five years.

So today, when I read about antisemitic slurs, or a much-photographed kid parading around campus with a sign reading “Al-Quds next target” (a reference to Hamas’ violent military wing), I remember that night in Knoxville. Yes, I’ll concede with 50 years’ hindsight we were acting like little jerks; but, no, we weren’t “godless commies,” and we weren’t anti-American or most of the other insults that were hurled at us.

Anyway, I identified immediately with a remark by documentary filmmaker Tom Hurwitz, a Columbia grad who took part in the antiwar demonstrations there in 1968. Writing in Forward, the daily newspaper for New York City’s Jewish community, he found same parallels as I did to this year’s anti-Gaza war protests.

“Now, as it was in our day, the campus is divided,” said Hurwitz. “Critics of our movement used buzzwords, like ‘communists,’ ‘anarchists’ and ‘hippies,’ to reduce us protesters to enemies to be feared and dismissed. […] Today, charges of “antisemitism” and students “feeling unsafe” are used in an attempt to cloud real issues and grievances.” He added:

Both now and in ’68, attacks of name-calling seek to stop the public from taking the protests seriously. The cries of antisemitism have been militarized by those speaking about them on national television. It is the old red-baiting pattern that uses a fear-producing buzz-word as a smokescreen to obscure real issues and justified protests. 

Also sounding a chord, and triggering a memory or two, was Jim Sleeper, an author and journalism prof (at Yale, now retired) who was quoted at length in the Guardian :

“We have this phenomenon of older people who are ginning this up, playing the antisemitism card,” Sleeper said, “and the same people who were in 2015 complaining about liberal colleges turning students into crybabies are now doing the same thing but about antisemitism.”

Students, he added, may be “romantically valorizing Palestine, but they’re not vicious antisemites”.

A resident undergraduate college is a civil society on training wheels, he pointed out, saying: “The kids are away from home for the first time, feeling adult, testing things out, combining idealism with the politics of moral posturing, and they do that in the safety of these quadrangles. And there are excesses, hurling words at each other, and there’s always an element of dramatization.”

Ouch! I remember some of my early columns in the UT Daily Beacon, and, yes, there was a distinct element of drama in them.

Also obscured by the name-calling in off-campus news media is the very real religious motivation of many of this year’s protesters. In addition to the usual Passover seders on campus, protesters held one in their Gaza Solidarity Encampment; Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the event’s organizers, composed a haggadah, which is like a liturgy or script for the seder ceremony, emphasizing the values they find in the traditional Passover story:

Your child will ask
were we set free from the land of Egypt
that we might hold tightly
to the pain of our enslavement
with a mighty hand?

And you will answer
we were set free from Egypt
that we might release our pain
by reaching with an outstretched arm
to all who struggle for freedom.

Reading the JVP haggadah, I was unexpectedly moved, and I was reminded how very much of my own Christian heritage is Jewish.

As far as I’m concerned, the mainstream media that frame the demonstrations as a fight between “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israeli” students are utterly clueless. Nor does it come as a surprise that the student papers more nearly get it right (since I got my start in newspapering at the UT Daily Beacon right after Kent State and the Billy Graham brouhaha). Another memory triggered.

One student paper that got it right was the Bernard Bulletin at Columbia’s college for women. While the national media were running clickbait headlines like “Anti-Israel Protests RAGE At Columbia, Biden CONDEMNS Anti-Semitism on Campus” (I blogged about it HERE), the kids at Barnard noted that both Chabad and Hillel held Passover services as usual, albeit with extra security, in addition to the seder at the Gaza solidarity encampment. They quoted a student who attended an on-campus seder the second night of Passover:

“After a seder at Chabad, a security guard asked if he wanted to walk us home but I was in a group so it was fine,” Margot Levy (BC ‘24) said. “I get if you were alone you would want to walk with someone.”

Levy left Columbia’s campus after her afternoon class on Thursday, April 18th, and returned to Barnard on Tuesday for work. She was already planning on going home for Passover, yet chose to spend additional time downtown and off-campus as much as she could.

“It seems pretty chill at Barnard,” Levy said on returning to campus. “The antisemitic incidents have been mostly outside of campus whereas the [protests] inside have been mostly peaceful. I’ve been walking outside with my Star of David necklace and I haven’t been fearing for my physical safety.” 

Columbia’s seder wasn’t the only one combined with an antiwar demonstration. On the second day of Passover in Brooklyn, a Seder in the Streets was organized by JVP and IfNotNow, another left-leaning organization that opposes Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. (Its name is an allusion to Rabbi Hillel, who famously said, “If I am not for myself, who is for me? When I am for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”)

A crowd estimated in the thousands packed Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza (several hundred were arrested for blocking nearby streets), according to Reuters. It was modeled after a Freedom Seder in 1969, and it brought together a varied group:

The event saw young activists encouraged by elders, some of whom sat on lawn chairs and with canes. It also featured Syrian and Moroccan Jewish speakers who reflected on memories of sharing traditions with their Muslim neighbors during seders past.

Among them was JVP’s executive director Stefanie Fox, who flew in from Seattle to make the event at including “Passover is our story of liberation, and we are commanded to tell it every year,” she told Reuters. “We take our prayer and our ritual and our communal heart to the streets.

The street seder incorporated the ritual of the traditional haggadah, adapted by Rabbi Arthur Waskow for the occasion. Fiona André of Religion News Service reported:

Syrian Rabbi Esther Azar took the stage to perform traditional Syrian Passover rites. As she proceeded to accomplish the fourth step of the Syrian Seder, the yachatz, the breaking of the middle matzo bread, Azar explained to the audience that her bread had already been broken in pieces to echo the rubbles of Gaza and the “brokenness” of the war victims.

Also speaking was author and social activist Naomi Klein. (Her remarks were recorded by Democracy Now!, in the video embedded above, and printed in the Guardian.) “I’ve been thinking about Moses,” she began, “and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf.” Today, she said,

What I want to say to you tonight at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. Drunk on it. Profaned by it.

That false idol is called Zionism.

It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Klein said Zionism, as practiced by the current government of Israel, “equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children”; it has “betrayed every Jewish value” and dehumanized the people of the land:

From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons.

In contrast, Klein held out the hope of a different kind of Judaism, one that seeks freedom and dignity for all people and one that returns to the principles she sees embodied in the seder and the Passover story:

Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations.

Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in that chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.

Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder: the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike, the ritual that is inherently portable, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but each other: no walls, no temple, no rabbi, a role for everyone, even – especially – the smallest child. The Seder is a diaspora technology if ever there was one, made for collective grieving, contemplation, questioning, remembering and reviving the revolutionary spirit.

So look around. This, here, is our Judaism. […]

The Seder in the Streets was a couple of blocks from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s home. For Schumer, who is also Jewish, Klein had a Passover message:

And to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say: “Let our people go.”

We say: “We have already gone. And your kids? They’re with us now.

And so is this 81-year-old hippie.

Links and Citations

Fiona André, “At ‘Seder in the Streets,’ protesters in Brooklyn denounce US support to Israel,” Religion News Service, April 26, 2024 https://religionnews.com/2024/04/24/jewish-voice-for-peaces-passover-seder-denounces-u-s-support-to-israel/.

Aurora Ellis, “Passover protest in Brooklyn harkens back to 1969 Freedom Seder,” Reuters, April 24, 2024 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/stop-arming-israel-passover-protest-brooklyn-harkens-back-1969-freedom-seder-2024-04-24/.

Edward Helmore, “Echoes of Vietnam era as pro-Palestinian student protests roil US campuses,” Guardian, April 28, 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/28/us-student-protests-gaza-israel.

Tom Hurwitz, “I was arrested protesting at Columbia in ’68. Today’s student encampments carry on a proud, brave tradition,” Forward, April 26, 2024 https://forward.com/opinion/607021/columbia-1968-protests-vietnam-gaza-war/.

Jewish Voice for Peace, Passover Haggadah, ed. Brant Rosen https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/JVP-Haggadah-8.5×11.pdf.

Naomi Klein, “We need an exodus from Zionism,” Guardian, April 24, 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/24/zionism-seder-protest-new-york-gaza-israel.

Nina Lakhani, “‘Not like other Passovers’: hundreds of Jewish demonstrators arrested after New York protest seder,” Guardian, April 24, 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/24/not-like-other-passovers-hundreds-of-jewish-demonstrators-arrested-after-new-york-protest-seder.

Rabbi Nealv Loevinger, “If Not Now, When?” My Jewish Learning, 70 Faces Media, New York https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/if-not-now-when/.

Michael Ruiz, “Columbia student describes campus fear, anti-Israel signs supporting terrorists who ‘put babies in an oven’,” Fox News, April 25, 2024 https://www.foxnews.com/us/columbia-student-describes-campus-fear-anti-israel-signs-supporting-terrorists-who-put-babies-in-an-oven. 

Elisabeth Siegel, “‘We’re Not Going Anywhere’: Jewish Chabad Students Celebrate Passover with Increased Security Measures,” Bernard Bulletin, April 26, 2024 https://thebarnardbulletin.com/2024/04/26/were-not-going-anywhere-jewish-chabad-students-celebrate-passover-with-increased-security-measures/

Wikipedia: Democracy_Now!, Grand Army Plaza, Haggadah. IfNotNow, Naomi Klein, Passover seder, Arthur Waskow. Also my blog posts “The score when Nixon spoke at a Billy Graham crusade at UT-Knoxville: Lions 0; Christians 1; First Amendment -1,” Ordinary Time, Sept. 10, 2022 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2022/09/10/nixon-ut-church-and-state/; and “Scary headlines distract from student protesters’ Passover service, message of support for Gaza,” April 23, 2024 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/04/23/seder/.

[Uplinked April 29, 2024]