Goys Tell Jews How To Fix Passover

When I first started reading this story about a "Passover Against Apartheid" event at Canada's Concordia University, I figured it was about an anti-Zionist Jewish group doing an alternative seder that emphasized various left/liberatory themes and de-emphasizes/degrades Jewish connections to Israel (my understanding is that Jewish Voice for Peace publishes a haggadah for precisely this purpose). And while I'm obviously no fan of such activity on the substance, procedurally speaking I'd have no objection. Jews-not-me are allowed to practice Jewishness in ways I don't like or approve of; the fact that they take a message from Passover that I find distasteful is their prerogative.

But it turns out that the folks reinterpreting Passover as a critique of "Israel's apartheid state" and suggesting alternatives to "Next Year in Jerusalem" were not exactly who I thought:

“Passover Against Apartheid” - put together by the Concordia Student Union, the Fine Arts Student Alliance and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights groups - included sponsorship from no Jewish organizations.

So basically, this was a bunch of non-Jews coming in to explain Jews how to do Passover right. Indeed, the manner in which the flyers were distributed suggests that they wanted to avoid substantive Jewish presence at all.  And that I think I am justified in finding extra-special gross.

The term that's being used in a lot of the stuff I'm reading on this is "cultural appropriation", and while for me that concept has quite a bit of baggage (see here for a bit on why) I wouldn't necessarily object to its deployment here. That said, I'd rather just talk of it as part of a perceived entitlement by non-Jews to dictate to Jews the contours of our identity, culture, practices and beliefs. We saw similar behavior out of the Church of Scotland a few years ago, and from the UK's Methodist Church a few years before that. It is among the most central elements of what might be called global antisemitic patrimony: the authority, indeed the right, held by non-Jews to define the Jew. This entitlement, borne initially out of Christian and Muslim domination of Jewish bodies, is deeply embedded into modernity -- hence why it is seen as an entitlement, something non-Jews are simply owed, something that counts as an outrageous loss when it is challenged or stripped.

For thousands of years, for much of the world, part of the cultural patrimony enjoyed by all non-Jews—spiritual and secular, Church and Mosque, enlightenment and romantic, European and Middle Eastern—was the unquestionable right to stand superior over Jews. It was that right which the Holocaust took away, or at least called into question: the unthinking faith of knowing you were the more enlightened one, the spiritually purer one, the more rational one, the dispenser of morality rather than the object of it. To be sure, some people were better positioned to enjoy this right than others. And some people arrived onto the scene late in the game, only to discover that part of the bounty they were promised may no longer be on the table. Of course they’re aggrieved! The European immigrant who never owned a slave but was at least promised racial superiority is quite resentful when the wages of Whiteness stop being what they once were. Similarly, persons who lived far from the centers of Christian or Muslim power where Jewish subordination was forged are nonetheless well aware of what was supposed to be included in modernity’s gift basket. They recognize what they’ve “lost” as acutely as anyone else.

“The Germans,” the old saying goes, “will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” And not just the Germans. Many people deeply resent the Jews for what Auschwitz took away from them—the easy knowledge that their vantage point was elevated over and superior to that of the Jews, the entitlement to be able to talk about Jews without having to listen to Jews.

This is what is happening at Concordia. It is yet another manifestation of  the "willful refusal on the part of the global left to adopt any other position other than teacher/master to Jewish servant/children. To borrow from George Yancy, they 'admit[] of no ignorance vis-à-vis the [Jew]. Hence, there is no need for ... silence, a moment of quietude that encourages listening to the [Jew].'" It is a practice and behavior that is pervasive, is systemic, and is antisemitic root-to-branch. It needs to be rooted out.