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When President Biden announced his candidacy in 2019, he began with a sober reflection [ [link removed] ] on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that had taken place a year and a half earlier, invoking in particular the antisemitism on display there. One of the slogans chanted by the demonstrators was, “Jews will not replace us,” something that few of us at the time recognized as a reference to the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory, already popular in white nationalist circles.
The first few months of that year I remember only as a miasma of emotion: pain, anger, anxiety, grief, confusion. My neighborhood was still nursing its wounds in the wake of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the deadliest antisemitic attack [ [link removed] ] in the United States. Pittsburgh’s Jewish community is small compared with that of some metro areas, but we are tight and vibrant, and we all knew somebody who had been murdered that day. I knew three, and one of them had lived right across the street from me.
One of the survivors, who had been leading the Sabbath morning service when the murderer entered the building, was my administrative assistant. It was about six months before things seemed somewhat normal in our neighborhood. Then, a few days after Biden’s announcement, another gunman opened fire in a synagogue in California, and suddenly we in Pittsburgh were once again reliving the events of October 27, 2018.
Growing up in the idyllic Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts in the ’70s and ’80s, I was completely unaware of antisemitism in my midst. It seemed that this most ancient hatred had been confined to the most extreme corners of America—to the people who wore white sheets—and as far as I knew, there weren’t any near me. My parents’ generation remembered the bad old days, but now we had nothing to fear. So it has been all the more jarring to see neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and Jewish-space-laser-type conspiracy fans find each other online and spread their message to untapped markets, to the point where the events of Charlottesville could be coordinated, and the Pittsburgh shooter could tweet his evil intentions to eager admirers all over the world before murdering 11 Jews.
American soil was well-seeded with anti-Jewish sentiment well before Hamas launched its surprise attack more than six months ago. But what we could not have predicted was that after an unimaginable number of Jews were killed, raped, tortured and burned halfway around the world, antisemitism here would spike dramatically [ [link removed] ].
The great wave of pain and anguish in Israel and the greater Jewish world was followed quickly by shock and disappointment as people who we had considered political allies started marching and shouting and disrupting for the Palestinian cause. Social media, as well as many mainstream outlets, seemed to vote for Hamas. Our most prestigious universities became hubs of antisemitic activity. Democratic politicians donned kaffiyehs. And as the body count in Gaza rose, the drumbeat of criticism against Israel—and even more against its most obvious target, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—likewise increased dramatically.
In my role as a congregational rabbi, I have tried my darndest in recent years to inspire, rather than to get bogged down in the misery of the entire situation, even as I have found myself despairing for the Jewish future. Since the events of October 7, the prevailing narrative has been turning more and more against Israel. And, of course, with every humanitarian tragedy, as with what happened three weeks ago to the World Central Kitchen [ [link removed] ] employees, Israel’s critics simply get louder.
When I visited Israel during the first week of November with a delegation of about 30 Masorti (Conservative) rabbis from around the world, we could still smell the odor of death at Kibbutz Kfar Azza. Today, the scent that hangs over Israel is one of abandonment. But we, the Jews, are accustomed to that—or at least we were, throughout much of our history. And we thought we had beaten it. We thought America was different—that after the Holocaust, when our people had the most sympathy, America would somehow vanquish the world’s oldest hatred.
Things did not quite work out that way, as we in Pittsburgh especially know. Franklin Foer’s recent cover story [ [link removed] ] in The Atlantic suggests that, post-World War II, the Jews had a good run of a few decades, when antisemitism was submerged and Jews were welcomed in polite society. But the doors have now closed. Welcome back to the bad old days.
Of all the Jewish holidays, Passover is the one that speaks the most to the current moment. It is of course a tale of liberation, of being set free from the shackles of slavery, which can also be read as the foundational moment of Jewish peoplehood: The Israelites went down into Egypt as a family, the children of Jacob, but emerged a couple of hundred years later as a nation, conceived in bondage but coming of age in freedom.
It is this constant reminder of our humble roots that has marked Jewish life throughout the last 3,000-plus years of our history. Unlike some other cultures, our national myths do not tell us that we descended from kings or gods. Rather, we came from affliction. Matzah, unleavened bread, is the Jewish staple during these eight days; it is hardly a celebratory food. It is, rather, described in a key moment of the Passover Seder as lechem oni, the bread of poverty. And yet, in the dramatic opener to the central activity of the Seder, telling the story of the Exodus, we invite all who are hungry to come and dine on this poor bread with us. The message is, join us in our humility; come and sit with us in our affliction.
The Zionist idea, deeply placed in the yearnings of Jewish Diaspora tradition of the last 2,000 years, was a radical innovation in Jewish life when it emerged as a modern movement in the mid-19th century. It challenged the traditional Jewish posture of allowing non-Jewish forces to act on us. Instead of being exiled from Spain or England or Austria and accepting our fate as the will of God, the Jews could now take matters into their own hands. The movement actualized the potential of the downtrodden in ghettos and shtetls, turning ancient longings into a democratic state through the new tool of political agency.
And for the vast majority of the Jewish world, it was as if a new line had been written into the classic liturgical poem “Dayenu,” a litany of the Exodus from Egypt that features an ascending staircase of satisfaction. “How many degrees of goodness did the Holy One bestow upon us?” asks the anonymous medieval poet joyfully, and then goes on to list the individual stages, from the liberation from slavery until the building of the First Temple in Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE. “Dayenu,” meaning “it would have been enough!” we chant after every step: Each individual Divine gift would have been enough for us.
But the poem doesn’t account for the 2,900 years of subsequent loss—destruction, dispersion, persecution, genocide. It is not until 1948 that the next, theoretical line could have been written: Had God built us the Temple, but not allowed for the establishment of the State of Israel, dayenu. It would have been enough. And then He did.
The past six months have felt like Dayenu in reverse. Some supporters of Israel have taken to writing the current number of days of captivity for the hostages on a piece of masking tape and wearing it, to remind us all that the days grind on unbearably. As the number grows, the weight of our misery increases. The pre-October 7 fractures in the Israeli political landscape re-emerge. The U.N. votes for ceasefire, abetted by the United States, while the International Court of Justice mulls the “genocide” charge. American politicians, among them some former darlings of Jewish voters, turn their backs on Israel one by one. Had Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders not raised their voices in dissent, dayenu. Had Iran not succeeded in funneling more arms [ [link removed] ] into the West Bank, dayenu. It’s enough already.
And yet, as we gather around our Seder tables on the evenings of April 22 and 23, we will try to muster some gratitude for still being here, still upholding our rituals with pride, still leaning into our old-new dream of “being a free people in our land,” as described in the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah.” We will conclude each evening’s traditional order of storytelling and dining as Jews have done for many centuries by saying, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Even in Israel they say that, because Jewish history has taught us that we never really know where we will be next year.
This year, many of us who make it to the traditional end of the Seder will stumble over that last line. After four cups of wine and many courses of symbolic foods and discussion, our hearts will linger momentarily, surveying the last three millennia of Jewish history, and we will wonder.

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