April 19, 2019 “Pour out your wrath upon the nations that do not acknowledge you” (Haggadah)

Hearing Rep. Ilhan Omar invoke historically anti-semitic tropes summons memory of fear, hostility, and disgust directed at Jews in the early years of the last century by popular commentators, politicians and academics. This organized dehumanization and demonization of our vulnerable minority (as well as Asians and Italians) culminated in the 1924 Immigration Act the goal of which was to preserve America’s “ethnic homogeneity” and consequently permitted the Nazi liquidation of countless Jews prohibited from immigration to the U.S. Whatever ones’ immigration politics, for Jews, dehumanization of central American emigrants desperate for a better life invokes the worst aspects of anti-semitic xenophobia. Similarly, when our legitimate concern for Israeli security provokes us to dehumanize Palestinians, to justify their cantonization, and to contemn their national and communal aspirations, it recalls our own historic humiliations. On Pesach, we are reminded that once we, too, were strangers in the land of Egypt. Chag Sameach!