Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on March 31, 2015

Haggadah Denounced Ashkenazi Injustice But Not God

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Say You Wanna Revolution? Israeli Black Panthers demonstrate for social justice in 1971.

Published March 31, 2015.

Tel Aviv It was the spring of 1971, and the 1960s spirit of revolution still throbbed in the streets of America and Europe. On the streets of Jerusalem, knots of young Sephardi Jews could be seen protesting, too calling for the overthrow of Prime Minister Golda Meir and for their own liberation in Israel as an oppressed people.

They called themselves the Black Panthers of Israel. Inspired by film reels about revolutionary movements from around the world then, they strongly identified with the black American radical group of that same name.

The Black Panthers turned out to be a short-lived phenomenon in the end. But their sudden surge onto Israels political scene hit the countrys Labor Party establishment hard where it was most sensitive on its claim to embody egalitarian redemption for Jews returning to what they viewed as their historic land. They were young Sephardim demanding freedom after decades of quiet desperation among the hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Arab world who had been settled and more or less forgotten in low-income caravans and dusty towns on the geographic and social margins of the country.

And it turns out they even produced a Passover Haggadah that year to make their point. Rediscovered now, some 44 years later, the Black Panther Haggadah decontextualizes the struggle for liberation as a tale of their own struggle in Israel, with Golda as pharaoh and the Panthers as Moses. Reading it today is like taking a time machine back to the heart of those times.

The afflictions in this Passover tale are the overcrowded Sephardi ghettos, the discrimination against non-Ashenazim at the employment lines and the lack of secondary school education in many places where they had been settled. The song Dayenu describes the modern exodus from Egypt (and other Arab countries) to Israel as a story of alienation and disillusionment.

Inspired by secular leftist ideology, the Black Panthers left God out of their quest for redress. Instead, this Haggadah confronts the oppression of Sephardim by inflicting 10 plagues of protests, hunger strikes, and solidarity rallies upon the government, until it is compelled to change policies that favor Ashkenazi Jews. Redemption is the moment when the socioeconomic gap between the two communities is finally closed.

Continue reading here:

When Israel's Mizrachi Black Panthers Used Passover To Decry Jewish 'Racism'

Category: Ashkenazi
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