http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-one-Forgetting-freedom-at-Passover-348232
It is my holiday prayer that on the night of the seder US Jewish leaders will remember that Passover is not about eating matza. It is about the price of freedom, and why that price is worth paying.
Passover, which begins on Monday night, is the festival of freedom.
The holiday reminds us of the brutal enslavement of the Jews by Pharaoh and the Egyptians. We recall their midnight flight from Egypt, pursued by the mighty Egyptian army, and God’s miraculous rescue of the Jews at the shores of the Red Sea. We remember how Moses led them for 40 years in the desert, and taught them what it means to be a nation, and what it means to be free.
We repeat the story of enslavement, flight, redemption and freedom each year at Passover, because our sages wanted to ensure that we never forget the value of freedom, and remain vigilant in our fight for it. In Israel, where our freedom is physically threatened, most Jews understand and live by the lessons of Passover.
But something is happening to the Jews in America.
More and more, every day we see American Jews embracing intellectual bondage. We see American Jewish leaders embracing the intolerant, who seek to constrain freedom, and shunning those who fight for freedom and the rights of Jews and other threatened peoples and groups.
To a large degree, this rejection of the lessons of the Exodus among the American Jewish community reflects the growing intolerance and tyranny of the political Left, to which most American Jews pledge their allegiance.
With increasing frequency, leftist groups and leaders in the US are openly acting to deny freedom of expression to their political and ideological foes, and to destroy the lives of people who oppose their dogma.
For instance, last week we saw the growing tyranny of gay activists. Under assault from homosexual thought police, the Mozilla Corporation of Firefox browser fame fired its CEO Brendan Eich because he once contributed $1,000 to a campaign to block the legalization of homosexual marriage in California.
Eich’s firing was only the latest assault by gay rights bullies on private citizens who oppose their goals.
The aim of these assaults is to silence all opposition to their agenda using the tools of social ostracism and intellectual terror.
Young Americans now embrace intellectual and social tyranny in the name of “liberal” values. In an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson, undergraduate Sandra Korn celebrated the eclipse of academic freedom in favor of what she called “justice.” Korn called for censoring conservative voices for their “offensive” views.
She also embraced the anti-Jewish hate movement popularly known as BDS (boycotts, divestments and sanctions of the Jewish state) as a good way to promote “justice” at the expense of freedom.
In Korn’s conflation of conservative voices with Zionist voices and insistence on delegitimizing and silencing both due to the “offense” they cause to “right thinking” thought enforcers like herself we see the central role that Jew hatred and the denial of Jewish freedom plays in the new wave of mass rejection of reason in favor of passions and hatred.
Sadly, many parts of the organized American Jewish community have embraced leftist tyranny and discrimination.
In 2008, the New York UJA-Federation teamed up with the Jewish Council on Public Affairs and forced the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations to disinvite then-US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin from addressing a rally opposing then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while he addressed the UN General Assembly.
To ensure that Palin would be denied the right to speak, the New York UJA-Federation and the JCPA threatened that her appearance would jeopardize the tax exempt status of the Conference of Presidents and other major Jewish organizations.
It may very well be that this threat was the first instance of leftists threatening prejudicial IRS investigations against their political foes as a means of ensuring obedience to their agenda.
The Palin affair was a rarity in the community. This isn’t because voices of staunch Zionists are usually accepted. Rather it is because such voices are ignored and shunned as a general practice by the major American Jewish organizations, in New York and elsewhere.
Palin’s invitation was an oversight.
While fervent Zionists are silenced, post-Zionists and anti-Zionists are legitimized and staunchly defended.
Six years after Palin was brutally disinvited, in the name of cultivating a “wide tent,” the same New York UJA-Federation and JCPA invited anti-Israel organizations that support the boycott of Jewish Israeli businesses to take part in the annual pro-Israel parade.
