Inside the Seder dinner on Columbia’s Gaza protest encampment

I have some masa, come have some matzo ball soup. We’re having a great time. We got plenty, plenty to go for everyone and we’ll be out here having a really lovely holiday. Columbia University has been at the centre of pro Palestinian protests for more than a week. Safety concerns have been raised by Jewish students on campus, but as Passover week begins, a group of Jewish and non Jewish protesters have gathered at the university to celebrate. There’s nowhere else I should be for Passover besides here on campus. 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, if our gathering does not motivate us to do everything in our power to end the genocidal violence Israel is unleashing upon Gaza. We will not have fulfilled the requirements of the Passover Seder. I am Jewish and to me Passover symbolizes perseverance and resilience, and I think this encampment encompasses those two ideals because we have seen the university take countless measures to to try to suppress our student activism. And here is us persevering through that. I had seen so much, so many statements online about how Jews weren’t safe, about how Colombia had turned into a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Each of those statements further galvanized me to use my voice and my privilege as a Jewish person to come here and have a seder with all of all of these lovely people. I’m part of a really proud legacy of progressive Jewish activists who have participated in things like the civil rights movement or the anti apartheid movement in the 80s where it’s so important to us to transcend the barriers of race, class, ethnicity, religion. And that’s what’s happening here today. And there’s a lot of joy here. I think really for the first time on campus in months. There are also many non Jewish students who joined the seder and we’re trying to, we’re a little bit hesitant about whether they should eat matzo or not. We told him it was OK, you can try some matzo. It was really a beautiful thing to see in the middle of the pro Palestinian encampment.