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This Passover, Let's Break Free from the Narrows of Christian Hegemony
As we gather tonight to celebrate the Passover Seder, we must confront a painful truth — the long history of Christian antisemitism has been repeatedly weaponized to subjugate the Jewish people, trapping us in a cycle of oppression.
From the Crusades to the modern era, Christian leaders have cast us as the “religious Other,” invoking antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories to justify our marginalization and persecution. This dynamic has created a bondage far more insidious than the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt — a “narrowing” of our identity and our agency, as Christian hegemony has sought to control and constrain us. And, coincidentally, the Crusades was also the beginning of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Europe while Christian antisemitism did not reach the Arab world until many centuries later. Until then, Jewish people were nowhere near as oppressed and vilified there as they were in Europe and its colonies.
Even before the emergence of political Zionism, Christian Zionist movements were already promoting the idea of “restoring” the Jewish people to the Holy Land, using biblical narratives like the Exodus to legitimize the dispossession of the Palestinian people. And in the wake of the Holocaust, when Jewish refugees sought sanctuary, they found the doors of the world closed to them, as…
