Video: The 'Not So Nice' Passover Haggadah

May 17, 2021
The 'Not So Nice' Passover Haggadah
"The 'Not So Nice' Passover Haggadah" took place April 1, 2021.

Fifty years after Prime Minister Golda Meir referred to the Israeli Black Panthers as "not so nice," a new generation of Mizrahi Panthers republish the Passover Haggadah the early generation wrote to express their struggle, connect their marginalization to other struggles in Palestine/Israel and globally, and name the contemporary Pharaohs.

On April 1, 2021, a panel of scholars and activists asked, "How is this Haggadah different from others? What has changed? What has not changed? How to carry into the future the emancipatory narrative of the Passover story and connect it to multiple sites of struggles?"

Speakers:

Sapir Sluzker-Amran is a radical human rights lawyer, social and political activist, poverty campaigner and community organizer. Sluzker-Amran is the founder of “Archi-Parchi: The Activism Archive for Social Movements in Israel” and co-founder and CEO of "Breaking Walls," a new intersectional, feminist and grassroots movement. Sluzker-Amran is the 2020-2021 RCPI Practitioner Fellow in Conflict and Peace. In 2020 she was selected as one of the 50 most influential women in Israel by Forbes magazine and in 2021 as “Woman of the Year” by the “Keshet12” Israeli media channel.

Prof. Rabbi Shaul Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, and the Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He is also the rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue in Seaview, NY. He studied for his M.A. in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University and earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1994. His rabbinical ordination was from Jerusalem in 1984. He is the author of many books, and his latest "Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical' will be published by Princeton University Press in October 2021.

Rebecca Pierce is an African-American Jewish documentary filmmaker and journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on issues of racial justice, highlighting the impact of state violence on marginalized communities. She is also dditor of the racial justice blog "Unruly," a publication created by the Jews of Color and Sephardi/Mizrahi Caucus in Solidarity with Palestine. Her writing has been featured in +972, "The Jewish Daily Forward," "The Nation," "Jewish Currents," "Mondoweiss," and 'Electronic Intifada." Rebecca was the 2019-20 Topol Fellow on Just Peacemaking and Nonviolent Activism at Harvard Divinity School.

Moshe Behar holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from Columbia University and is Senior Lecturer in Israel/Palestine and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester. His work includes the anthology Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics and Culture, 1893-1958 (Brandeis University Press) and can be further explored on the University of Manchester website.

Moderated by RCPI Senior Fellow, Professor Atalia Omer.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

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ATALIA OMER: My name is Atalia Omer, and I'm a Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and a Senior Fellow with the Harvard Divinity School's Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. It is this initiative that hosts the event today.

Together with my magnificent colleagues, Professor Diane More and Hillary [INAUDIBLE] I've had the immense honor to help shape conversations, such as the one we are about to have here. Many thanks to [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] for a lot of logistics and hard work behind the scenes.

I want to start with a few brief words about the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative in order to help contextualize a bit what is about to unfold. A part of their new Religion and Public Life Program at Harvard University, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative centralizes an analysis of structural injustice, violence and power, and examines how a more capacious understanding of religion can yield fresh insights into contemporary challenges and opportunities for justice-oriented peace building.

The primary case study we've been focusing on is that of Palestine-Israel. Our aim is to stretch the scholarly discourse around religion and the practices of peace building, and examine the decolonial potentialities of art, religion, and identity transformation through rewriting social, political, and religious scripts.

Rewriting religious scripts was also the topic of our previous webinar just last week, which featured Rabbi Brent Rosen and Professor Suzanna Heschel. The session today, the Not So Nice Passover Haggadah, of course, happens during the week of Passover, offering us a moment in time, an opportune occasion to think with Judaism, Jewish histories, and multiple Jewish and Black and Black-Jewish or Jewish-Black experiences, about the meanings of liberation and the intersection of Jewish meanings with power, ideology, and violent structures.

Indeed, the story of the Israeli Black Panthers rhymes with the American Black Panthers, while illustrating that the meanings of whiteness and Blackness in each context are different, and analyzing such differences could be fruitful and clarifying. The topic of our conversation last week was on re-imagining American Jewishness and liturgy, including rewriting the Passover Seder through grappling with the realities of Jewish power, Palestine solidarity, and the sense of Jewish complicity with Palestinian suffering and white supremacy.

Conversely, the topic of today's session, the radical protest Haggadah of the Israeli Black Panthers then, 50 years ago, and now, offers a different kind of rewriting modern Jewish history and social political scripts. Focusing on the experiences of marginalized Israeli and non-Israeli Jews and their suffering within a Euro-Zionist hegemonic framework, gesture to how and why such communities in their specifics sociological and historical locations reimagine their own Jewish meanings intersectionality.

They are not only Jews appealing to a generic script, the Haggadah, but ethnicized, racialized, classed, and gendered Jews within a particular Jewish nationalist frame. The experiences of the Israeli Black Panthers and Mizrahim in Israel and more broadly also illumine moments of porousness, where the Israeli Black Panthers, at least some of them, saw with clarity, and some still do, their links with Palestinians and other struggles around the world.

The Israeli Black Panthers Haggadah half a century ago signified a moment of empowerment, of calling the pharaoh pharaoh, and the pharaoh had the shape and form of Golda Meir. So here we are 50 years after Prime Minister Golda Meir called the Israeli Black Panthers not so nice, [NON-ENGLISH]. We will hear of the meaning of this historical document then, and its meaning now.

We will ask if this Haggadah is a religious or political document, or both, and why does it matter to identify it as either. The panel of scholars and activists and artists here will consider how this Haggadah may be different or like other such efforts to concretize through the Exodus story emancipatory struggles.

I will be brief in introducing the panelist's bios, as they are available on the event's website and elsewhere. Our panelists today include Sapir Sluzker-Amran, who is a Mizrahi human rights lawyer, social and political activist, and a co-founder of Breaking Rules, a new, intersectional, feminist, and grassroots movement in Israel. Sapir is also a fellow with us here at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.

Next is Professor and Rabbi Shaul Magid, who is a Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. A public intellectual, he is a prolific author of many books and articles, with one forthcoming book with Princeton University Press, and which I want to highlight in particular because of its direct relevance to our conversation today.

It is titled Meir Kahane, The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. Next is Rebecca Pierce, who is an African-American Jewish documentary filmmaker and artist and journalist, focusing primarily on issues of racial justice, and documenting the impact of state violence on marginalized communities.

She's also the editor of the Racial Justice Blog and Movie, a publication created by the Jews of Color and Mizrahi-Sephardi Caucus in solidarity with Palestine. Rebecca is a former fellow with the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.

Finally, Dr. Moshe Behar is a Senior Lecturer in Israel, Palestine, and Middle Eastern Studies, and a program director of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Arts, Languages, and Cultures at the University of Manchester. He has thorough facility with the history of the Israeli Black Panther, and has written extensively about it.

Before we turn to the conversation, just a word of housekeeping. Participants may type in their questions in the Q&A feature at the bottom of the screen. Please don't use the chat, as that will be used only for any technical issues participants are experiencing.

Questions are not visible to other participants. If you prefer your question to be anonymous, and your name not mentioned, then please specify when you write it. We will try to ask as many of the questions posed as possible, and apologize in advance if we don't have time to get to your question.

Finally, this webinar is being recorded, and the video will be available on our website in a few days for viewing and sharing. Let us now proceed. But before we do, I wanted to acknowledge my presence here in South Bend, Indiana on the traditional homelands of Native peoples, particularly the [INAUDIBLE] and Potawatomi, who have been using this land for education for thousands of years, and continue to do so.

I now invite my fellow panelists to turn on their cameras and join the session. All right. So Sapir, let's start with you. Please tell us what a Radical Haggadah meant for the Israeli Black Panthers, then 50 years ago, and what does it mean for you as an Israeli Panther now. Ma nishtana? What has changed? Has anything changed? Who are, were the Israeli Black Panthers, and why is this Haggadah not so nice?

SAPIR SLUZKER-AMRAN: So I'm going to show a quick presentation, just for folks to get to know a bit more who are the Black Panthers, and to have some better connections about what happened in the last 50 years, I want to say, in the Mizrahi struggle, in just like seven minutes.

So the story of the Israeli Black Panthers began in '71, when the movement was established. When we're talking about different narratives or different stories, and why it's important to tell the story, so Israeli Black Panthers were young Mizrahis in their 20s mostly, that lived in Musrara, a neighborhood in Jerusalem, right next to the border with Jordan.

Some people can call them street criminals. And some people can refer to them as the most important activists in the grassroots struggles from the establishment of Israel, if I'm speaking about Mizrahi Israeli activism. But they were founded because they felt-- they didn't felt, they experienced discrimination, just because they came from Arab and, what do you call, [INAUDIBLE] or Mizrahi countries in a very short way.

So we decided to issue the Haggadah again, and I'm going to give some examples to what they were talking about in the Haggadah, where they're trying to talk about the discrimination and their struggle, why this Haggadah is not so nice. And I think that in this Haggadah, they are talking about, they are talking about how they decided to go against the machine, I want to say.

What we used to know is that the discrimination that Mizrahi exposed was just something that-- so I want to say, I think that this Haggadah is not so nice because we used to the same narrative, the same story. When people here that came to Israel, the Jews came to Israel, did this aliyah, we're supposed to be in a position of saying thank you.

Thank you so much for the regime, for the Ashkenazi hegemony that brought us to Israel, that brought us to the Holy Land. And as you see in the Haggadah, they're not saying thank you. They're not thanking. They're saying, we deserve better. We deserve a better life. We deserve not to fighting poverty all the time. We deserve not to suffer for discrimination.

So this is not nice, because they weren't supposed-- they tried not to be at the same position of being thankful all the time. But actually being in a position of saying we deserve better, and trying to organize. And I want to say, as the founder of newly, as you mentioned, Atalia, a newly grassroots organized called Breaking Words, we're doing a feminist intersectional work.

And I now understand how much is it important and extremely hard to organize people. And I think that what was unique in this Haggadah, if I may, is that they told another story. It wasn't only a story of resisting. It was also a story about organizing, where they asked people not to kind of deal with the despair.

They asked people to come and join them and be part of the struggle, by working together, and not just expecting that the activists, the Black Panther activists, or the regime, the Ashkenazi hegemony, would just give away the power. So this is why I think this piece was so unique for me.

And just in a quick way, I want to show us some photos to understand. So in the left photo, you can see this sign in one of the demonstrations in '71, where they said, "Golda, please teach me in Yiddish." So they had this way of kind of a joke.

And right now, if you're thinking about 2021, when the Mizrachim in the left kind of need to prove themselves, that they're against the regime now. So we don't even have the opportunity to left. It's just signs of Mizrachim against Bibi, that way.

And I want to show another thing. Again, in '71 and in 2021, when they said "A nation that is oppressing another nation will never be free," and this sign from 2021. "Democracy or occupation," in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.

So we know that if you're looking, again, on the story on the narrative, especially from a way of how we set the alternative narratives, the alternative story, I think we can see that the story that the Black Panthers from '71 till now, the 10th, and third, and now also the third generation of Mizrahim in Israel, where they're trying to tell a different story. They're trying to tell a story also of solidarity. Not everyone, of course.

But the role that I'm trying to do is tell a story of solidarity and expose the stories and the narrative that is not the very common Zionist hegemonic stories that we know and learn at school and in public now. And Atalia, when you were saying ma nishtana, I want to speak about what changed, what hasn't changed.

When you were reading the Haggadah, if you ordered the Haggadah, and please do order the Haggadah, you can see that some of the things hasn't changed at all. Like this is pretty terrible to find out when you're reading this text now 50 years after it was written.

And I don't know if you know, but the Black Panthers were sitting in Musrara, in a small house, a shack, I want to say. And they stored a typing machine, and wrote this Haggadah in the dark and distribute it. And they were in kind of a position of we need to recruit some more people.

And I think that now we've got a situation where we're thinking about ma nishtana? As I said, some of the things that they were talking about trying to change, trying to change so their sons, and their sons' sons wouldn't experience the same discrimination, and won't be in a position of living in poverty.

So they were kind of in a place of when I'm thinking about ma nishtana, I'm saying this we're seeing that in the photo on the left, that they were squatting. They were entering houses and saying, you won't give us public housing, we will take it, right? We have also the right for a roof on the top of our head.

But in the right photo, we can see the evacuation in Givat Amal neighborhood, based on gentrification, which is a neighborhood that used to be a village, a Palestinian village. [INAUDIBLE], in north of Tel Aviv. And now it's a Mizrahi neighborhood that's getting demolished, so they can build these fancy buildings that you can see behind the scene of this amazing woman from the neighborhood trying to fight for her home.

So I think that if you're thinking about what has changed and go over this text, we should all see themselves, right? We should in the Haggadah, we should all see ourself as free. Came out of Egypt. And I think that the Black Panthers, what we are trying to do now is kind of trying to encourage other people to be part of the conversation.

And also realize that the fight isn't over, OK? The things that the Black Panthers used to talk about, as described, they said yesterday in another event that we don't have the privilege even to learn about those issues in our history books. But when we do this whole amazing grassroots movement that they had, and the things that they demand are described in the history books that we learn at school, as discrimination based on feelings of ethnicity discrimination.

So they don't even acknowledge that those things existed. And now when we're trying to talk about those things, and say, you know what, those are still neighborhoods that people getting evacuated, people waiting for public housing, people are trying to kind of fight for a better life, we kind of get the answer and comments of if we are the whiners, and this is all in the best.

And I think that this is why it's so important to go over this. Why it was so important for me. And we issued this Haggadah two years ago in Hebrew only. It was so important to talk about those issues, to say, you know what, now if there was major discussion in Israel about the Israeli Black Panthers, we're kind of getting a heart that is like they're squeezing us too hard.

And that's a problem. It's a problem because now it seems like it was something that we need to celebrate something that was in the past. And it's not longer existing. But it's discrimination. It's still on. And I really invite us to speak, I want to think about this discussion. And I really invite us to speak and think some more about other narratives and other stories related to Mizrahi struggles, and other underprivileged communities in Israel Palestine that didn't have the chance to kind of share their stories and press the knowledge. And I want to say even push us to organize better in those issues.

ATALIA OMER: And this is one of the-- thank you, Sapir-- and this is one of the reasons why you've been kind of applying yourself in creating an archive of social justice activism. And maybe we'll have a chance to talk about it later. So my next question is for you, Moshe [INAUDIBLE]. Can you speak a little bit about the nature of the influence of the American Black Panthers on the Israeli Black Panthers of the early years?

What makes the Israeli Black Panthers Black? And also, can you speak about the relation between the Israeli Black Panthers and the radical anti-Zionist and anti-occupation left, and specifically, the Matzpen group?

MOSHE BEHAR: Yes. Thank you. I always tell my students now that the most typical movement in the pandemic is these people are just trying to unmute themselves. So here I am. First of all, thank you so much, Atalia and Harvard for hosting this. It is not taken for granted.

The voice of non-European Jews, or non-white Jews is hardly heard in the US. I'm speaking from the UK now. Sapir speaks from Tel Aviv. But I spend my time in Tel Aviv in here. Which is a big problem. It's a big problem. And even when our voice is heard, it is heard in frame from words that are completely irrelevant.

So when I told my colleagues, both in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, and at the Center of Jewish Studies in our universities, my two affiliation, I mean, both of them were quite surprised, because it doesn't happen much. So thank you so much for the.

I'm also very honored to speak after Sapir. Why? Because Sapir, from my perspective, she is the granddaughter of the Black Panther. And it's very important to bear this in mind in terms of the timeline. If the Black Panthers, most of them were born in the 1940s, they were all born outside mandatory Palestine. Morocco, Iraq, especially.

By the year 1971, most of them are in their early 20s. That's their ages. So [INAUDIBLE] was born in 1943. [INAUDIBLE] was born in 1944. Charlie [INAUDIBLE], 1947. [INAUDIBLE], 1950. So I am, in terms of my age, their child. And unfortunately for me, Sapir, I can be your father.

So this is in terms of the generational timeline. So they are the parents. I am the son. Sapir is the granddaughter. And Sapir is one of the many granddaughters that actually takes in substantive terms what the Black Panther is. Because not everybody is doing. Many other people are doing something else.

Now, about the question about the Black. It is true that the Black Panthers, the Israeli Black Panthers grab the name from the American Black Panthers. This is the late '60s in the US. Simply because to provoke. And also because they shared solidarity with them. And also because they knew that everybody around them hates it.

But you need to bear in mind that the racial division, the Black white dynamic-- of course, we all construct-- but this is something that predates the Black Panthers. So Zionism, if you go all the way to the beginning of the 20th century, the race question, so to speak, the intra-Jewish race question is present already in Ottoman Palestine, and Ottoman Palestine before 1920.

So it is already there. So I mean, I'm not speaking Yiddish. But I'm just mentioning here, the famous sentence [INAUDIBLE], which basically means, [NON-ENGLISH] is Black. So the non-European Jew, Jewish male, is an animal. [NON-ENGLISH]. So here I am. The animal, right? And [NON-ENGLISH] is that the Black woman is a source of energy.

This is very sexual. She's a sexualized being. Now, this is a derogatory that is present in European Zionism from day one. It's not something that came with the Mizrahim after the 1950s when they moved from a team from the nine Arab countries surrounding old Palestine. So this epistemological setting is already there.

And this is there completely. It's not something that the Black Panthers aren't aware of, right? So it so happened that in the 1970s, or 1971, because of Malcolm X, and the Civil rights movement in the US, Martin Luther King, and because of all of the racial and class struggle in the US for rights, this barely kind of fit.

And they import the terminology. And they have some debate about the name. And that's what it is. But it's very important to bear in mind that the Black dimension, it is longer than that in relation to intra-Jewish ethnic divide, which is there. We need to put it there. We are not one united family.

I mean, we cannot think of ourselves as a single community where people simply sit on the heads of the others. That's not a horse. And the person on top of it are not a unity. There's a relation of power here, and that's what the Black Panthers address.

Now, the Black Panthers, and let me just-- I want to be mindful of the time. I have four more minutes, right? Yeah. I just don't want to exceed. Which men like me do a lot. So the Black Panthers, in terms of Israeli history, I subscribe to the view that for students to study Israel post-1940, there are two Israel, before the Panthers and after the Panther, OK?

That's how one needs to study Israeli society in general. That's not only about the Panthers. And of course, there's a debate about that among scholars. I am of the view, like some other people, that this is the before and after. There were other revolts. But the Black Panthers have there space. There were revolts also before.

The interesting thing about the Black Panther, you need to understand that the Black Panthers in many respects are the first Israeli. What does it mean first Israeli? There's Tom Segev, very known author has a book that is called 1949, The First Isaelis.

So of course he means why 1949? Because the state of Israel still declared itself as a state in 1948. So 1949, that's the first Israel. But that's not the issue. The first Israel is the generation that was socialized and raised in Israel. And this is the Black Panthers are the first Israelis.

And by the year 1971, they are in their 20s. So what happened here is that they are important because in terms of the short history of Israel, the Black Panthers represent the quintessential uprising that links class and race or ethnicity in Israel.

You hardly have an example to such an occurrence in terms of sociology. This is something that is not-- and also, the Black Panthers, if we talk about the non-Zionist or anti-Zionist left, people that they did support them, there's a big difference between the two, because the non and anti-Zionist Ashkenazi left, or European left in Israel, these are individuals that are very nice personally. They're great in terms of their ideas and their commitment.

But they are not a lot. It's like a total of dozens of people. And often as a social class, they don't represent a possibility for a complete transformation of Israeli society. And the Black Panthers do. That's why the government is so scared. The government didn't care that much about Matzpen or about the non-Zionist or anti-Zionist left.

On the contrary, speak, because it can demonstrate our democracy, that we allow you to talk. But when the Black Panthers are there, the entire apparatus of the state kicks in to try and diffuse this uprising. And why this is a paradigmatic mobilization? Because also, and we can get to it later on, the Black Panthers being young, Mizrahi Jews are able to articulate explicitly a link between their situation and the situation of the Palestinian Arabs that remained in the country, of course, after 1948, which is a minority, of course.

So this is something that is very unique to the Black Panthers. This demonstrates their wholeness and their radicalism, which now you can find in the 21st century, among some constituencies inside Israel. But not to such an extent. They exist. But not in the same level, or you can't compare it to the level of articulation that emerged in the early 1970s. That's the issue now. Atalia--

ATALIA OMER: Maybe we'll return to, we'll go a little deeper on this last point in the next round. So thank you, Shaul, the next question is for you. And this question relates to your analysis of the genre of the freedom fighters as challenging an ethnocentric read of the Passover story, and as another form of political theater.

Recently, I mean just last week, you wrote in [INAUDIBLE] about Arthur Waskaw's Freedom Seder in a Washington church in April 1969. 800 people attended this Freedom Seder that materialized as he arrived in the aftermath of a famous 1966 Black Power speech by Stokely Carmichael that underscored that, I'm quoting, "Black liberation was a movement for Blacks, by Blacks, thereby showing many of its white supporters, some of whom were Jews, the exit."

This, you argue, led Waskaw to kind of shift from being a Jewish radical to becoming a radical Jew. Can you talk a little bit more about the Freedom Seder, maybe further contextualize it, as one instance of a history of innovative social justice deployment of the Haggadah as kind of the genre? And the meaning of liberation is conveyed with respect to racial justice anti-imperialism, and so forth.

And to what degree do you identify links between this one Freedom Seder of the Israeli Black Panthers, the not so nice Haggadah, and the other seder of Waskaw at that moment of the consolidation of Black Power? Are they of the same genre? Why, why not?

SHAUL MAGID: Thank you. Thank you, Atalia. And thank you for inviting me to this. It's fabulous. And I've just had the opportunity to read the new revised Black Panther Haggadah, which is fabulous. And I hope it gets spread far and wide, because now it's also in English translation.

So I want to go back to the first part of your question, and that is to, first of all, to explain the Haggadah is an interesting document within kind of Jewish literary history, because in some sense it's somewhat distinctive, maybe even unique as being a kind of noncanonical liturgical document, meaning that it was never understood that the traditional Haggadah couldn't be changed.

It doesn't have the status of Scripture. It doesn't have the status of the Talmud. It doesn't have the status of the kind of classical liturgy. It was always seen as being a kind of working document. And it was always seen as being a tool to express this notion of Yetziat Mitzrayim, of the going out of Egypt, however that was understood.

So things like the Freedom Seder, Black Panther Haggadah, there are many predecessors that were Haggadot that were written by the bundists and the communist Eastern Europe. There were Haggadahs that were written by the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto. There were Haggadot that were-- in all kinds of situations.

It was always a document that was used to express creatively a kind of sense of what does liberation mean. So it's no surprise that there's a freedom seder. It's no surprise that there's a Black Panther Haggadah. But I wanted, to the first part of your question, I want to just point out three particular moments from June 1966 until September 1967 that really had a tremendous impact on this transition from radical Jew to Jewish radical, as Waskaw explains it.

The first one is June in 1966, which as you said, Stokely Carmichael, who was then one of the leaders of the SNCC Organization, gave a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, which was basically inaugurating the Black Power movement. And the Black Panthers come out in the wake of that.

Interestingly, a year after Malcolm X is assassinated in 1965. So Malcolm X's career is really pre-Black Panthers. The Black Panthers come about, in a way, as a response to that assassination. So you have Carmichael's speech. And really basically saying the Black liberation movement this is about Blacks, and for Blacks, and only by Blacks.

The second thing that happens is the Six Day War in June of '67, which of course is a watershed moment for American Jews in many, many ways, especially those that are part of the new left, part of the radical left that began with the Port Huron Statement in 1962.

But more importantly, in August and September of 1967, three months after the Six Day War, there is a new politics conference, which was a big conference in Chicago, which was supposed to be the kind of gathering of the new left. And in the protocols and the mandate of this new policy-- this conference was added in the stipulation of opposition to Zionism as colonial exploitation.

This is literally three months after the Six Day War in 1967. And that particular stipulation was put into the document by the Black nationalist movement, who very, very quickly after 1967 began to see their own struggle as a struggle with the non-white population in Israel. In particular, the Palestinians, which of course, was just beginning.

So within the course of really literally about a year and two months, you have this transition where many of these Jews who were part of the new left felt that they were being pushed out. Not that a lot of the new left Jews were particularly Zionists, but simply the idea of putting into the mandate of the new left as being opposed to Zionism was something that many of them may push them away.

And they began to move back towards a Jewish identity, or Jewish roots, or some other expression of Jewishness. But interestingly, they didn't do so by repudiating their radicalness. Rather, they tried to import their radical beliefs, much of which was focused at that point on racial justice into their expression of Jewishness.

And in a certain sense, the Freedom Seder comes out as an expression of that, it was the anniversary of the assassination-- the first anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968. This was in April 1969. Of the 800 people who came to that church in DC for that Freedom Seder, a large portion-- I don't know if it was a majority-- but certainly a large portion were African-American Black nationalist and militants, who were in a sense participating in a Seder which-- and a Haggadah which included with figures like Rabbi Akiva, people like Eldridge Cleaver.

So there was a sense of bringing together the Black Panther and the Black Panther movement within the context of this kind of Jewish, this Jewish document of a Seder. Now, the interesting thing, and this is maybe worth talking about more, is that the radical Jews of that time didn't really seem to understand the intra-racial wars in Israel.

In other words, they understood Israelis Palestinians. And they were really, in a certain sense, supporters of the Palestinian cause. But they didn't really have on their radar the issue of the Mizrachi Jews and the history of the Mizrachi Jews. That really comes about much later.

So in a sense, they become politicized to fight against what was termed officially by the Israeli media as the liberation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, from a radical perspective, siding with the Black nationalists.

But they also were not anti-Zionist, meaning they also had their own kind of strange relationship with Israel that did not enable them to go the distance in terms of where the Black Panthers in America were going. So in a certain sense, what I'm trying to suggest is by the late 1960s, that many of these radical Jews were really in a difficult situation.

Because on the one hand, they felt like they supported Israel. And on the other hand, they felt like they were opposed to the occupation that was taking place in the Six Day War. What they didn't actually know about was things that were going on among the Mizrahi communities. And that became only apparent to many of them with the emergence of the Israeli Black Panthers in the early 1970s.

I wanted to also suggest that when we talk about the Haggadah as a document of protest, that the Jews for Urban Justice, which was founded in 1966, which is one of the first Jewish movements in America that was a kind of radical Jewish movement, weren't only engaged in kind of a creative rewriting of the Haggadah.

For example, they had a protest in Kol Nidre the Eve of Yom Kippur at a large conservative synagogue in Washington DC, protesting against one of the members who refused to rent apartments to African-Americans. And they had a protest on Tisha B'Av, the fast day in the summer at the US Capitol, protesting against thermonuclear warfare.

So in a sense, what you see happening within the radicalization of that movement is that Jewish ritual becomes a tool of fighting against universal issues of injustice. And in that sense, I think it fits kind of nicely within the Black Panther, the Israeli Black Sabbath phenomenon. And just cut me off when I'm done, because I didn't look at the time.

But I just want to make one more comment. And that is that one of the interesting things I found out about-- I've learned about the Black Panthers, the Israeli Black Panthers, is-- and this I'll talk about more in terms of the relationship between the Black Panthers and the Jewish Defense League in Kahane, because that's an interesting story in and of itself, is the way in which the Black nationalist movement in America also didn't understand the plight of the Mizrachi Jews.

Interestingly enough, in a certain sense, the way Zionism in Israel was presented to an American population, and not only Jews, but non-Jews also, was Israelis are white. The Arabs are non-white. And therefore, what's going on post-1967 is a battle of justice between Black and white, the way it was going on with the Black Panthers in America.

And so, I think part of the important educational tool here is to show that there's another population-- here I'm talking about the Mizrahi Jews-- who were experiencing injustice and discrimination, that was largely unknown to the Black nationalists on one side, and also to the radical Jews on the other side. So I'll stop here. We can talk about the Kahane thing on the [INAUDIBLE].

ATALIA OMER: Yeah. No, no, actually I think that it connects so well. So let's stay with you for a few more minutes, and really bring in some of the findings and reflections and analysis that you articulate in your forthcoming work that I mentioned on the life and work of Meir Kahane, who was once ostracized within Israeli society, and now decades later, of course, is literally in the Knesset by way of his ideological inheritance, and people like political actors such as Ben Kfir.

So can you walk us through a little bit more this problematic importation by Kahane of US specific racial categories to the Israeli context? I think it kind of echoes some of what you just said about the blinders that the location of the radical Jews in the American context impose.

So you say you can say a few words also what was the source of Kahane's own fascination with the Israeli Black Panthers, and why did they, from your understanding, why did they reject him.

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah, that's really a fascinating story. But just to get-- I think this speaks to something that Moshe had mentioned. I think there is an interesting link between the Jewish Defense League of Kahane and the American Black Panthers and the Israeli Black Panthers.

And that is, it's an interesting example in all three cases of generational shift. Many of the American Black Panthers are children of African-Americans who are part of the great migration north in the 1930s in the 1940s. And they become, in a certain sense, the generation of protest against in some way their parents, who were much more, as Southern African-Americans, much more quiescent, much more much less willing to exercise a certain sense of protest.

With the Jewish Defense League, most of the members of the Jewish Defense League, I don't know if it's most numerically, but many of the members of the Jewish Defense League were children of Holocaust survivors. So again, it's a protest against the quiescence of their parents, who were unwilling to kind of protest against anti-Semitism, or protest against the issues of inequality for Jews.

And among the Israeli Black Panthers, many of them, and you talked about Charlie [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE], and that generation. They were children of immigrants from Arab lands. And those parents also were really unwilling, in a certain, sense grateful to be able to leave their homes and come to Israel from wherever they came, but were unwilling to actually confront the Ashkenazi-centric discrimination.

So it's all an interesting case of the JDL and the Israeli Black Panthers and the American Black Panthers. These are all first generation in their particular countries, who don't have the same kind of history and experience of trauma that their parents had, which made it difficult for them to engage in this kind of resistance.

So the Kahane story is a fascinating one. Because Kahane comes in 1971 to Israel. The first thing that he does, the first thing that Kahane does when he comes to Israel is he tries to create or promote legislation against the Black Hebrews of Dimona. Now, the Black Hebrews of Dimona were really a group of African-Americans from Chicago who had this whole notion of being descended from the ancient Hebrew, you know, the ancient Hebrew tribes.

Who come to Israel. They make Aliyah. They're placed in a development town in Dimona. And they're kind of really living their lives. And the Israeli government really didn't care a whole lot about them. Kahane comes with his kind of racialized sense that he brought from America. And he says, we have to get rid of the Black Hebrews of Dimona.

Now, of course, the Israeli government didn't care about the Black Hebrews of Dimona. And they still don't care about the Black Hebrews of Dimona. And they still continue to live there, and many of them second and third generation.

So the next thing that he does, he then turns his animus against the Arab population. So again, it's really, he's really kind of trying to transpose the racial wars of America to Israel. And then he discovers the Black Panthers, the Israeli Black Panthers. And he says that, oh, the Black Panthers really could be advocates for my cause because, they're against the Ashkeno-centric elite. I'm also against the secular Zionist elite.

And they will be my base. The Mizrachi will be my base. Now, we know that actually there is a base of Mizrachim in Israeli society of the Kahane movement. But what Kahane didn't know was that many of the Israeli Black Panthers actually also felt solidarity with Israeli Arabs, right?

So in America, you have white Americans. And then you have African-Americans. In Israel, it gets triangulated. You have the white Ashkenazi elite. You have the Arab non-white. And then you have the Mizrachi non-whites. And in a certain sense, Kahane got caught, because he didn't realize that the Israeli Black Panthers were actually, in many cases saw themselves closer to the Israeli-Arab non-white population, than they did to some of this the Ashkenazi Zionist population.

And the Israeli Black Panthers saw Kahane as just another white guy. Because even though he was trying to use them for his own political purposes, they saw very clearly that they were being used. And as a result of that, you had cases in the mid 1970s of the JDL and the Israeli Black Panthers literally on Zion Square in Jerusalem having riots against each other.

And that was something that they ended up they ended up making-- they ended up making peace. But it was something that was very shocking for Kahane, because he realized that the racial issue in Israel is a much more complicated story. Because you can't have one non-white population that's the enemy, and another one non-white population that aligns with the enemy that you want as your supporters.

And so eventually, he ends up abandoning any kind of connection with the Black Panthers. We know people like Charlie [INAUDIBLE] and others end up becoming Knesset members of the left wing parties. And there's one great scene which is video of Charlie [INAUDIBLE] and Kahane having a screaming match in the Knesset.

So it's a fascinating story about the way in which Kahane didn't really understand the complexity of race in Israel, such that it ended up kind of blowing up in his face, so to speak.

ATALIA OMER: Yes. Great. Thank you. So Rebecca, you directed the documentary on [INAUDIBLE]. Moshe mentioned him before. He is a founding member of the Israeli Black Panthers, and one of the key authors of the Haggadah, he Not So Nice Haggadah. And in fact, your Unruly Blog was one of the first platforms to publish the Haggadah, the Not So Nice Haggadah in English a few years back.

So I wanted to invite you to speak a little bit about what propelled your interest in the story and struggle of the Israeli Black Panthers, specifically, and Mizrahim more broadly. And also, I would like to invite you to maybe, if you want, to react to anything that has already been said.

REBECCA PIERCE: So I mean, I'll get more into this, but to be clear, documentary filmmaking and running things like the Unruly Blog are always collective efforts. And so I think a lot of times in our society, we want to assign like the creative credit to the director. And I certainly was a big part of it.

But it's actually Mizrachi activists in the US who really helped lead a lot of that, and I'll get into that. But for me, my sort of relationship with Reuven began from a position of Black internationalism, actually, which is something that informs a lot of my politics.

The first time I ever met Reuven Abergel was on all Black delegation to Israel and Palestine through an organization called Eyewitness Palestine. And he led our group on a tour through Musrara neighborhood.

And it was very important for him to meet with us, in part because our delegation contained some people who were in the former Oakland Black Panther Party leadership, although some of those people actually weren't able to come and make it into the country on that trip. But it was very important for him to meet with Black Americans because of the influence of the Black Panther Party on his struggle.

And it was also a very important experience for us to learn about the Israeli Black Panthers. We were doing this in the context of a trip where we were meeting with Afro-Palestinian communities. We also took a trip to Holot Detention Center, and we were also the first all Black group to visit Holot, according to the refugees we met with there.

And that was really the beginning of me of a journey of starting to explore the ways that many different communities in Israel and Palestine experience racialization, experience incarceration. And Reuven has always been a very clear voice in terms of exposing the connections between these communities.

And I was actually telling Atalia earlier, I'm working on a documentary now about African refugee protest movements in Israel. And Reuven is a big part of this, unintentionally, because he was always there at the protests speaking out in support of these groups.

So when I'm talking about a relevance of the Israeli Black Panther Party, a lot of that is coming from my perspective as a Black person from the US, who's finding resonance between these different struggles.

And this is a very-- in the process of making the documentary with Reuven, I learned a lot about how the Israeli Black Panthers developed this 10-point platform that is very similar and directly based on the Black American Black Panther Party platform. And this was a way that our communities have had to articulate very similar issues that we're having, whether it's with issues of employment, education, interactions with the police, access to resources.

There's a lot of common experiences that we share. And that's reflected in the organizing that Reuven and the Black Panthers, more generally, were engaging in. In terms of my own organizing with Unruly, the blog, that was a product of sort of a US Jews of Color movement that came about-- a lot of it actually came about after the Ferguson uprising in the US.

Because the US Jewish community was feeling pressure to speak out on this issue of like Black Lives Matter, but also running into, again, this issue of how Israel is discussed in Black movements. And there was a lot of trepidation from especially white Jewish community leaders in the US about this issue. And it put pressure on Black Jewish folks like me to say, well, you can't actually draw a line at we're not going to support Black Lives Matter because they're pro-Palestinian, because these are like relationships that go back for decades in these movements, in the same way that Black Jewish relationships go back for decades.

And this is a personal thing for me, because my family's from St. Louis. I was in the Ferguson area when Michael Brown was killed. And I saw the ways that Palestine solidarity was first of all being invoked in this organizing, and it was because of already existing relationships, and direct solidarity, like Palestinians offering advice on how to handle tear gas.

When I was feeling frustration with the white Jewish community at the way that they responded to this, which in some ways for me was very alienating. Like the idea that Black Lives Matter is opposed to Jewish people is really harmful if you're a Black Jewish person, right?

I found community with other Black Jews. But also, there were some very experienced Mizrachi, sometimes Israeli American organizers in these left wing Jewish movements who were there to support, and understood this experience that I was having. Because their histories as Jewish people from places like Egypt and Turkey and Iraq and Morocco and other places were also being sort of papered over in the US Jewish discussion of race.

So this led to a really strong political education for me from people like Elise Cohen, who is an organizer in Atlanta, Sydney Levy, who's an organizer here in the Bay Area, where I was learning to understand my own struggle by reading people like Ella Shohat, by learning about Reuven Abergel.

And so for me, you know, obviously I'm coming from a different experience. I'm Black Ashkenazi. There's a lot of loaded things about that. But there was so much in the Mizrahi experience that actually really connected with my own experiences. I just want to say, in my experience in the US education system was one where I was told my freshman year of high school that I would never go to a four-year college.

And so for me talking with people like Reuven, who also had similar, like even worse than me, being totally forced out of the educational system, but having these of experiences, and organizing becoming his own sort of self-made intellectual in the face of that has been very inspiring. And also helped give me sort of a basis for my work now, which is again like, I interview Afghan asylum seekers about their experiences of incarceration. I interview Palestinian children about their experiences of incarceration.

One thing that's amazing to me is the Palestinian kids I interviewed were held in the same prison that Reuven was held in as a child, in the Russian compound in Jerusalem. So he's very much-- and the Black Panther history that I learned about in Israel is very much a way into learning about the broader systems of racial inequality, and the extension of segregation and discrimination into Israeli society that I think, as other speakers have mentioned, was really missing from the US analysis of how Israel and Palestine is discussed.

So for me, just to sum it all up, this is sort of one way in to looking at a more intersectional lens on what's happening in Israel and Palestine.

ATALIA OMER: Great. Wonderful thank you, Rebecca. So Moshe, let's go back to you, and just invite you to maybe connect to, or kind of provide your perspective, basically to the same dimension of the question I posed to Shaul with respect to why did the Israeli Black Panthers initially reject Kahanine Kanism, and to what degree their vision and aspiration, which the Haggadah they brought capturers defines it as a potentially kind of intersectional political document, with links also to Palestinians within the green line and outside the green line?

And also, I invite you to speak a little bit about something that you've mentioned to me before, about it's kind of a version of the question to Sapir earlier, about what it was then, what it meant then, and how things are right now. And you kind of have an argument about the fact that the Mizrahi struggle has been depoliticized and domesticated. So if you want to kind of connect those dots for us.

MOSHE BEHAR: Well, I mean, nobody-- it's a failure built in. So [INAUDIBLE] going to start with the, actually, Rebecca. Because first of all, it's really-- I mean, it's really touching to hear what you say. I mean, it's to reverse the lesson, so to speak.

Because it's always as if activists in Asia and Africa receive wisdom, including from non-hegemonic group there, which we know that it's not the case. But a lot of information comes the other way around, from Asia to Africa to the US, and maybe sometimes even being appropriate. So that's one.

The second thing is the phrase that you used, you said Black internationally. Sorry to say, this the 70s phrase. You don't hear the word internationally. And I am, again, a generational white. I'm stuck in between. So here I am. It is as if what language am I going to use?

Am I going to say intersectionality, which is the 21st century creation? So join the youngsters. Or I'm going to stick into the internationalism. Marxist internationalism. Liberal internationalism. Feminist internationalism. So in doing so, I actually have to go back.

Why? Because just as the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers are not intersectional. They are internationalists. That's very simple. So I now stuck in between, I have to make a choice. And my choice is internationalism.

I have the democratic right to choose. So that's my choice. And why this is my choice? Because I think that this is-- the concept of internationalism is more global than the concept of intersectionality.

It is because nationalism is the organizing principle of the First World War, right? National self-determination. So in a way, I think that the internationalism subverts this even more, and has more power vis a vis other places than the US or the West, so to speak.

And I think that the Black Panthers were of this school and of this mind. They were of this school because they could see that the Palestinian people are oppressed. Of course, until 1966, they are under military rule. So I mean, Israel in a way was a democracy seven months, between the uplifting of the military rule over Palestinian citizens of Israel. And the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And then you have another non-democracy.

So this is exactly why also in here I'm taking Shaul, because he knows more about it than me. But that's the other thing, is what is the project of Meir Kahane.

The project of Meir Kahane is a very simple. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That's his logic, political. What does it mean? It means, OK, so because [INAUDIBLE] are the enemy of labor Zionism-- labor Zionism, not a right wing Zionist. Left Zionist. Because they are enemies of that, and because I'm a right wing white Jewish supremacist and nationalist from the US, I'm coming here, I'm going to say, the enemy of the liberal or left Zionist is going to be my friend.

And it many times it works. It does work sometimes. Brexit, it worked. Donald Trump, it works. In the sense that, for example, working class white, instead of having solidarity with immigrants from Mexico, allied themselves with their oppressors.

But with the Black Panthers, it didn't work, because then no, no, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. So Meir Kahane is not my friend. He is the enemy. Why? Because the Black Panthers are able to say that Meir Kahane represents the highest form of colonialism, more than labor Zionism.

It's exactly like, for them, if you go to Egypt, to the masses Jews in Egypt in the 1940s, when people around them say anti-colonialist, or say, why don't we cooperate a little bit with Germany because it is going to undermine Britain in Egypt, right?

Enemy of my enemy can be my friend. The German enemy of the British can help me. So what do the Marxist, Egyptian Marxist Jews say to their fellow anti-colonial activists? No. You can't do it. Why? Because Nazism is the highest form of colonialism.

It's worse than British colonialism. We can't cooperate with them. So this dynamic, the Black Panthers are smart enough to escape this logic. And now I'm going back, if I have a now if we now fast forward to the 21st century, right? Sorry, Sapir, your generation. The generation of Sapir, Sapir belongs to the minority residing Mizrahim in Israel today that are able to resist the logic of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

This is the issue here. So this is how you can differentiate nowadays between left Mizrahim and right Mizrahim. What does it mean? Right Mizrahim are Mizrahim that are going to cooperate with their oppressors because it can pay a little bit in terms of their position vis a vis the more oppressed by the Palestinian, right?

And left Mizrahim are those that they're going to say, no, we are Mizrahi internationalists, and as such, we cannot collaborate with oppression of women, gay, other people that are not us. That's exactly the issue here.

And again, I'm going back to Sapir, because Sapir for me, and her organization, represents the manifestation, the 21st manifestation in Israel-- I'm not talking about the US-- that for me that's the only hope. It's the only way out.

The way out, by the way, is for everybody. It's not just a way out for Mizrahim. It's the way out for also she is going or save the Ashkenazim from themselves. That's the issue here. It's the [INAUDIBLE]. And then later on there was some question for the Q&A that it touches upon some of the issues I addressed. Maybe we can return to that later.

ATALIA OMER: Great. And this is a perfect segue to go back to Sapir, especially since there is a whole like kind of genealogy of feminist intersectional and internationalist scholarship, and kind of activist framework. And I want to invite you to speak about the feminist dimensions of the contemporary moment, contemporary Mizrahi activism that you are a part of, and a leader within. And also speak about your influences from the global South.

SAPIR SLUZKER-AMRAN: Thank you. So first of all, I want to mention, we were talking about globalization. I think in this whole project, my attempt, we're still building it, but the attempt of doing, creating the [INAUDIBLE], which is an archive of social and political struggles in Israel.

It is because we don't know enough. We don't have enough sources of inspiration and knowledge about social struggles that took place in Israel from the middle Mizrahi's perspective and other leftist perspective, which are not right wing, or very left Ashkenazis.

That said, also if you're speaking about and thinking about a feminist perspective, I want to say that last year, we did a conference, and it was kind of a celebration of 24 years after the first conference of Mizrahi feminism.

And in that conference, I think when we were thinking about Black Panthers, it always goes to the inspiration was from Blacks in the US. But this is not entirely true. A lot of the inspiration that we have now, and the inspiration that has before, and they were talking about it. At that conference the women, the amazing activists that organized that conference in '96, was that some of the inspiration and connections came from Arab feminism, and Muslim and traditional, and [INAUDIBLE] feminism.

And as they mentioned Angela Davis, they also mentioned [INAUDIBLE], that recently passed away. And I think that if-- I want to say, what does change? Ma nishtana? In that what changed, that the Black Panthers in the '70s, it's not like they didn't have women involved in the movement. They had women. They had Louise Cohen, and some other women.

They also had the wives and the sisters and the moms that were involved in the movement. And we don't always see them as the liberal perspective of feminist activists, but they were all very involved in the movement. But we can't ignore that this was a very organization that led by men.

And the men showed themselves. And it was very manly also in that way, right? Where they disagree, they fought. Where they disagreed with Canada, they fought. Where they disagreed with the police, they fought. And I think that what has changed in the last 50 years, I want to say maybe in the last 20 years, that we can see now that there are much more women that's leading the fight in the Mizrahi's struggle, and also insisting of doing it solidarity between struggles with other women, with other community organizations.

We can see that these women, me among them, we're not only feminist and Mizrahim. We're also queer. A lot of us are also a first generation in the academy, but we have this knowledge also. And we are trying to combine it as now working with [INAUDIBLE] and fieldwork all together, and grass work all together.

And my intent in this archive, and also the work that I'm planning to do as CPI fellow next year, is to build these modular frameworks, and give people the chance to organize as communities, to see themselves as community organizers, as leaders, as feminist leaders, Mizrahiot and other women here that we have in this area of Israel Palestine.

And give them all the tools and the inspiration to say, you know what, you can have this inspiration of Angela Davis and Nawal El Saadawi, and a whole bunch of women that you can find out about in Wikipedia.

But also know that your neighbor or, I don't know, the woman that founded the grocery store who also led a movement and that occupied the public housing in the '80s, or in the '90s, or in the '70s, she can also be your inspiration.

So for me, the inspiration that I'm getting is from, I want to say, the history books, and learning from other movements in all over the world that doing that grassroots work that we are doing now, and from other work that we see as solidarity work.

But at the same time, this is very important to me to expose these alternative narratives, and learn from them. Because in fact, we don't have-- I know Atalia also wanted to ask about why does Ashkenazim seem that they are more involved in the peace process, and activism related to Israel Palestine.

In fact, this is not true. But we don't know it, because we don't even have the chance to do learn about it, since there isn't any information accessible. And if there's information accessible, there's too many resources. There's this academic research, that in a lot of the years no one researched about.

A lot of the papers that were published were not allowed or not encouraged to be published in Hebrew. So they're in English. If something is in English, for me it's not accessible for common people, for activists in Israel. And also, there's resources that we can learn from in the National Archives.

But this is not the narrative that I want to learn from. This is not the story that I want people to get familiar with. So I do think that what has changed is relating, kind of trying to insist on a very feminist and queer involvement in the movement that we're reading now.

And another thing is we're very insisting of acknowledging that we are now in a time that, and I want to feel very freely to say it, that in the last 50 years, the Ashkenazim, the leftist Ashkenazim, most of them are Zionist that were involved in the peace process, it was profiting from him.

While if we're digging the history, now and in the last 50 years, the Mizrahim that were involved in those movements that trying to achieve, trying to do the work on ground and change policies, they weren't profiting from it. They were losing support. If in the academia, or activist, it doesn't matter, the same.

So I do think that, one, I think that something that we do need to change is kind of realize how we learn from them, and how we kind of learned from those lessons, while at the same time we are not afraid kind of to look back, learn from the, I want to say not for the mistakes, but also insisting on talking about those issues, when they didn't had a chance to talk about.

And this event is so rare. But this is crazy, right? That this is so rare that we don't have enough chances to talk about those issues. And when we have those chances, there are a few people that are constantly getting invited, instead of hearing a variety of voices. And also, when we're talking about Mizrahi struggle, it's a lot of the time refers to the Palestinian struggle.

And we don't have enough chances to say, you know why there are people here in Israel that the third and fourth generation of poverty, or fighting for public housing, fighting against house demolitions. They really want to be involved in the peace process. They really want to be involved in all kinds of struggles, and in solidarity between struggles.

But they are too busy to survive. So I really hope that we can go over those issues and those archives, and really figure out what we can learn from each other, so in the last 50 years we're not going to do event of-- we're not going to be the ones to do it, but there is going to be, I guess, is how would we still be exist, and we do this whole event of 100 years to do Black Panthers Haggadah, and talk about those issues like it's today and 50 years ago.

ATALIA OMER: Yeah. Thank you so much, Sapir, for articulating those important points. And I want to turn to Rebecca a little bit from a different lens. And going back to the earlier point about the importation of racial categories from the US context.

And that whole label of Jews of color that does not quite fit the Israeli social tapestry. So I want to invite you to speak about how you navigated that kind of linguistic barrier, and also speak a bit more about what you mentioned already earlier, that internationalist lens that you bring into your work.

REBECCA PIERCE: Yes. I think when we use the term Jews of color, I want to be very clear about what that means in the US context. Jews of color as an organizing term that was developed in part by Black Jewish women, feminist organizers who are organizing with other Jewish people across the US, and in some cases, internationally, who experience racialization under systemic white supremacy. And that is basically like being excluded from whiteness.

So whether that's Black Jewish people-- like the original umbrella of it in the US was meant to include Black Jewish people. Many Jewish people from the Middle East and North Africa, Mizrahi, or Sephardi background who are excluded from whiteness. Of course, in the US there's a big complexity around this, because you can be Sephardi and white in the US.

That doesn't mean you're not discriminated against or not facing issues within the Jewish community. But that's part of our history here, and it goes back to before the Civil War. But also, Asian, Polynesian, Indigenous, like Native American Jewish people were included in this.

This is a group of people who are trying to-- who originally coined this term were trying to wrestle with our experiences of being a racial other within the Jewish community in the US. And it's not-- I don't necessarily identify personally, like every day I get up and think, oh, I'm a Jew of color.

My day to day is I'm a Black Jewish person. I become a Jew of color sort of in relationship to white Jewish people, and also in relationship to other Jewish people who are non-white and are excluded from that. So that's what that means when we're organizing under this term in the US. It's about a particular relationships, like European hegemony and the Jewish community.

Obviously, this is a US specific term. It doesn't really apply in Israel. Or it's not used in the same way. When I was first, for example, trying to contact Reuven, I was getting help from the two people I mentioned, Sidney Levy and Elise Cohen, who are Hebrew speakers much better than me.

We had to do a lot of work to sort of even translate the concept of who I am, who is the organization I'm working with, and what are we doing, what does it have to do with you. And he remembered me, I think, from having met me before. But the term we settled on in our Hebrew WhatsApp was Yehudim [INAUDIBLE].

And I think that that became-- we weren't sure that-- it's still a clumsy term in a lot of ways, and I don't know the extent to which that's even used. But it became very relevant later on. Because when I was filming with Reuven, he said something at the end of our conversation that made it into the film that was very important.

He said, we're always struggling against the white rule. And for me, what that-- and this is in Hebrew. This is how we translated it into English. And for me, what that speaks to is this experience of white supremacy. And this is a very controversial thing to talk about in the Jewish community right now. You'll notice there's a lot of pushback in the US to even mentioning white supremacy, because of the fact that, historically, white supremacy has excluded European Jewry for a long time, and there's a changing status in US white supremacy that involves assimilation.

But for Jewish people of color in the US, people who are organizing this way, this is a very important analysis, and I think it's one that very clearly exists outside of just our context, because the discrimination on the basis of not being white is like the thing that's uniting sort of-- or giving us something to organize together about.

And these issues of translation have really been a big and complex thing. And I think Sapir spoke to the issue of a lot of things not being available in Hebrew. And I think we also have the reverse issue of like some people-- in the US, it's hard for us to access voices like Sapir's, or voices like some of the people on our panel, or voices who are even deeper in these communities who are not being represented in academic sphere because of the language barrier.

The first time we published the Black Panther Haggadah, we found a totally wrong translation that was just going around on Facebook. And we thought this was the real translation. Or it was just like an early one that was not very well translated. It had some issues.

And that was what we originally tried to publish. And then we got in touch with Itamar to get the permission. And he's like, actually, that's the wrong version. Here's a better one. So even there, this issue of translation is always present.

When working on the documentary with Reuven, one of the sort of creative things of translation that came around was I had a Palestinian interpreter who was working with me. She's actually my landlord when I was living in Jerusalem. Dareen Jubeh, who was a Palestinian journalist.

And her conversation with Reuven, as she's translating to me, was so interesting, and it brought out all these really different conversations. And I think part of the victory of the film was even them getting to meet and talk, because I think they both needed to hear what the other person had to say.

On the other end, what I'm translating on the US and trying to subtitle the film, I had a close friend of mine, Amira, who is from the Bay Area, who grew up in South Tel Aviv, who's doing a lot of the translations.

And I remember getting some pushback from an Ashkenazi journalist friend of mine, because he didn't like the way that she was translating. But for her-- like for me, hearing her perspective of the poetic language was really expressing was a gift to the film.

So these issues of language, which is something that fascinates me as a filmmaker-- we're working in cinematic language, right-- are really deep. But I think that it's also an opportunity when we do find people who are able, who are in our community who can translate, or who can help sort of bring these concepts that are more abstract into our understanding across these barriers of language, that's such a gift, and we really need to value those people.

So again, I'm just going to shout out Sidney and Elise, who are why so much of the work we did was possible. I'm trying to think. I'm always doing translation. And even across English, right? So me speaking from the Black community about certain things, I have to translate that sometimes to speak to white Jewish people about it, and vice versa.

And I think once you can acknowledge that issue is in the room, that we don't describe ourselves in the same way, but where do we find the commonality, or where do you find the places where our experiences do intersect, that's actually a point of strength, if we can learn to lean into that, and give the space needed to provide the translation. I think having Reuven on an event like this would be great, but we need to have a translator to do that. Providing the resources and valuing that is very important.

One last thing I'll say about language, is just to go back to what Moshe said earlier, and a question we've got in the comments is this idea of intersectionality versus internationalism. These two concepts are like-- I mean, I think intersectionality in particular, the way it's discussed in the US is really involves a lot of translation and mistranslation of that term.

Because when the-- let's say like Israel advocates in the US Jewish community respond to intersectionality, they treat it as this thing that's a hierarchy of oppression. That's how Ben Shapiro will translate that word. That's not what that word means.

Intersectionality was coined by Black feminists to describe the experience of you experience, a Black women experiencing misogyny and patriarchy, alongside issues of racism. So it's not just about, oh, we have more than one identity. Although that can lead to a intersectional analysis.

Like me being Black and Jewish, I have an intersectional analysis of racism and anti-Semitism. But really what it's about is the meeting points of systems of oppression. Whereas internationalism is a term that does bump up to intersectionality, but it also speaks to a much different scale.

Intersectionality was really about where these places meet in a particular person's life. These systems meet in a particular person's life. Internationalism for me-- I believe in both of these things-- but internationalism, for me, is about finding a shared struggle. Which intersectionality is also used to refer to, but that's not actually the original meaning of the term.

And even I can be sloppy in my use of this. So I'll apologize if I did that. But all of this is a lot to say that our choices of language are very political. But if we can spend the time to sort of unpack what we mean when we say them, we can expose all kinds of similarities and differences that we can learn from with each other.

ATALIA OMER: Thank you so much, Rebecca, for this profound articulation of those concepts and terms, and the need to be so precise. And so, actually, I want to stay with you for just a moment and invite you to speak-- I mean, a lot of your work is about documenting through the camera lens this state oppression, political violence, and all the different issues regarding oppression that we just discussed.

And I want to ask you what does the Passover story mean to you? And even kind of the legacy of the Freedom Seders in your own understanding of not only the analysis of violence, but also the vision for emancipation and freedom.

REBECCA PIERCE: I know that I'm very annoying to some of my Israeli and Palestinian friends, because I'm so utopian in kind of like my ideals of where I want to go. But I think, for me, a lot of that is rooted actually in this experience of growing up Black and Jewish in the United States.

And it's interesting to hear the story of the original Freedom Seder, because I grew up with a different form of Freedom Seders that are much less radical. And it's very mainstream Jewish community meeting. Or we'll have an event with the Black community, assuming, of course, that these two things are separate. That celebrates Passover. And the event that I would go to up also celebrated Juneteenth and emancipation.

And for me, as an adult I'm much more critical of this. But growing up, I think it was actually kind of an amazing thing, because my great grandfather was born a slave. The idea of leaving slavery is not an abstract thing for me. It's never been. It's a very concrete thing.

And my grandfather after him was born a sharecropper. That's not that different from being a slave. So this idea of moving from bondage to freedom is something that has physically happened in not quite living memory of my family, but just outside of it.

And so for me, forming a Black Jewish identity was very natural, and it happened around the Passover table. And it's also, I think it is actually a very good thing that the Passover story continues to inspire Jewish activism and radicalism in these ways.

I think that we need to be mindful of how is Blackness invoked, whether it be in an event like this, or in a Freedom Seder. We have to think about that, and make sure that those relationships are really there. And I think that's-- but that is something people are working on.

And there was a big debate yesterday on Twitter, that I tried to stay out of, because I think it's kind of silly. But whether or not white Jewish people can sing Go Down Moses. I would never tell a white Jewish person not to sing that personally, because my memories of growing up with my grandfather are us singing that song together. His love of Louis Armstrong is part of our relationship, and I don't necessarily want to hold that against people.

But there is in the US like a lot of debate right now about what is the actual relationship between Black and Jewish people. And I think part of learning how to navigate that is also to start to understand the fact that these aren't two necessarily-- these aren't always necessarily two different groups.

And when we talk about Blackness, in the US that's a very different thing than Blackness as the racial category in colonialism, which applied to much more than just sub-Saharan African people. That's why you hear it getting used by the Zionist movement in this way against Mizrahi people. That's why you hear it being used against Polynesian people, or Aboriginal people in Australia in these systems, where they were also subjected to forms of slavery.

But the Passover story, as in terms-- sorry to go back to that, because I realized I kind of veered off of that conversation. But I think the use of Passover in this sort of more expansive way, beyond just ritual, to build solidarity, is the-- sorry, I'm like totally lost my train of thought.

But I think it's an important and healthy thing for us to be doing. And in terms of framing who Jewish people are in relationship to other people, and in relationship to ourselves. And yeah.

ATALIA OMER: Yeah, and great. Thank you. And so this leads me to a final question for Shaul, and also reflecting on what Rebecca has said, and other threads that are in the conversation. To what degree this document, the Not So Nice Haggadah is a religious document, a political document. Does it tell a story about Jews and modernity? What is the story? And to what degree this historical document is significant to Jewish studies, from the perspective of Jewish studies?

SHAUL MAGID: Well, that's a great question. I mean, I think that it could be it could be both a religious document and a secular document. I don't think that it necessarily has to be either one exclusively.

I mean, in terms of it being a religious document, there's really only one thing that besides eating certain foods, there's only one thing people sitting around a Seder are obligated to do, and that's telling the story of yetziat Mitzrayim, where they're going out of Egypt, or they're going out of the narrows.

However you want to understand that term, whether you want to understand that in historically specific terms, that it's the story of the ancient Israelites in Egypt. Whether you want to tell it as a story of oppression. Whether you want to tell it as a story of using the Israelite Egypt story as a motif to tell a larger story. I mean, all of those basically fulfill that so-called commandment.

But I think it's broader than that. I think it is-- I think the Haggadah and the Seder is an act of political theater. By definition, it's an act of political theater. And that the great Seder itself is a theatrical performative event that happens among family members, among friends.

And the Haggadah is simply just the text that's used together in almost the script of the performance. And so however that thing becomes manifest and articulated that it speaks to. It speaks to the people around the table.

I think that makes it, that makes it a religious document in some sense. But it also needn't be religious in the sense that it necessarily has a relationship between individuals and God. I don't think that-- I don't think that God really necessarily is a part of the story.

The story is about oppression. The story is about liberation. The story is about freedom. The story is about the pharaohs of the world and how to confront them, and how to contest them. And the Haggadah is one particular articulation of that.

I mean, if I could, I just want to go back to something that Moshe said. Because I think it's very interesting on the racial question. And I'll talk about Jewish studies.

The story of the Black Panthers and their relationship to Israeli Arabs is a complicated one. I mean, I think that you're right, I mean, that Sapir's right, Moshe is right, that there certainly was a sense of solidarity.

But I just wonder, if I can, one quote from Kochavi Shemesh, from 1972. Kochavi Shemesh was one of the Black Panthers. And you have to listen to the language of the quote.

So this was a talk that he gave in Beit She'an, near Tiberius. And he says as follows. "We must reach a situation in which we will fight together with the fucking Arabs against the establishment." In that sentence, you see the tension that exists on the one hand between the sense of solidarity, and then on the other hand, that sense of kind of difference and irreconcilable.

So I think what's so interesting about the Israeli Black Panthers, at least in the '70s. I'm not sure what's going on now. But at least in the '70s, there was still that sense of, well, we're with the Arabs because they are Black like us, but yet they're still fucking Arabs. And I think that's a kind of just an important thing, and I'm sure Moshe will have something to say about that in a moment.

I just wanted to finish off, to answer the last part of your question, which is that I think that Jewish studies in America is going through a number of different transitions. And one of the transitions has to do with the question of the untold story of Mizrachi Jews. And the way in which they have been erased, in part because Jewish studies as an academic discipline is inherited by, Moshe was talking about parents and grandparents and parents and children and grandparents, inherited by a kind of Germanic [INAUDIBLE].

Which really had no use for Mizrachi Jews. In some sense, they romanticized the Golden Age of Spain. But not the Jews that were living in the Maghreb in the Levant, closer to their time. So I think that this story of where Mizrachi Jewry, its history fits into the study of Judaism, we're just on the cusp of beginning to really grapple with that.

And I think that in certain ways, questions of JFREJ, and Jews of Color organizations on the ground level, on the activist level are really pushing scholars in productive ways to be able to recognize a certain kind of a ratio that they need to reconcile. So that's what I would say about that.

ATALIA OMER: Thank you so much. I'm aware that we are three minutes past the time. But I think it's absolutely wonderful that so many things kind of came to the surface, both in the Q&A-- there are so many questions. Some of them were touched on. Some of them are not. And I apologize for that.

But this, especially some of the final words that Shaul articulated really bring to the surface the fact that there are so many issues to talk about. For instance, you talked about this concept of human agency. You talked about the erasure. You talked about an understanding of what happened in the '70s.

But also, a desire to learn what is happening right now. So kind of an invitation to hear more from the kind of work that Sapir does, and in a different context and through a different lens, Rebecca. And how it pushes us in that intersection of scholarship and thinking about questions of social justice and political violence, and all these related questions.

So thank you so much for this really profound and stimulating conversation. And the panelists had access to your questions. And so I'm sure that they are kind of grappling with them. And this is a conversation that will be continued. So thank you, everybody. And hag sameach.

SAPIR SLUZKER-AMRAN: Thank you, Atalia, for organizing.

MOSHE BEHAR: And thank you, Atalia, for--

SAPIR SLUZKER-AMRAN: Hag sameach.

MOSHE BEHAR: Moderating this [INAUDIBLE].

SHAUL MAGID: Thank you so much.

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