As Jews are pushed, pulled, and misread across the political spectrum, the Seder restored the story that refuses to break

This Passover many American Jews are experiencing what can be called a near narrative collapse. By narrative collapse, I mean the loss of a shared story that gives meaning and coherence to our lives, replaced instead by a sense of chaos. By story, I do not mean something fictional or optional. I mean the deep structure that orders a life. Story is memory carried forward, the telling of where we come from in a way that binds us to one another. It is obligation, the sense that the past places a claim on us in the present. It is identity, not as a label but as a lived continuity between generations. And it is hope, the belief that the future is not random, that it can still be shaped by what we inherit and how we respond.

A story does not just describe reality, it often organizes it. It tells us what matters and what does not. It can teach us how to interpret suffering, how to recognize injustice, and how to respond to both. It gives us a language for responsibility, for solidarity, and for restraint. Without it, experience can become fragmented. Events no longer add up in the same way. We can lose not only direction but proportion. Many things can feel immediate, overwhelming, and unmoored.

This kind of collapse is not unique to this moment. It can happen in marriages, families, friendships, romantic relationships, workplaces, in moments of loss, and in the face of death. It is what occurs when the frameworks that once held our sense of self and our understanding of the world begin to break apart. That is what this moment feels like for many American Jews.

Left and Right wing Jew-hatred

With rising antisemitism, many Jews feel rejected in spaces on the left that once felt like home, where Jews are sometimes treated as embodiments of power or privilege, spoken over in conversations about oppression, or excluded from coalitions unless they bracket parts of their identity. In some cases, this exclusion becomes explicit, as when Jewish student groups on American campuses have been told they must renounce or hide aspects of their Jewish identity to remain in progressive coalitions, or when student governments have debated excluding Jewish organizations from diversity spaces on the grounds that Jews are too powerful to qualify. In activist circles, one can hear echoes of older tropes in new language, claims that Jews control systems of power or that Jewish voices are inherently suspect, even when those claims are framed as structural critique, for example when Jewish students are told they benefit from Jewish proximity to power, when syllabi or teach ins gesture toward Jewish overrepresentation in finance or media as evidence of systemic dominance, or when the language of privilege is used in ways that can erase Jewish vulnerability while quietly reintroducing the idea that Jews sit behind the levers of influence.

At the same time, maga right wing antisemitism persists and mutates, sometimes overt, sometimes coded. It can appear in conspiracy driven rhetoric about Jewish control of media, finance, or universities, rhetoric that now surfaces in mainstream discourse in more palatable forms through figures such as Tucker Carlson, while being amplified and made explicit in the openly antisemitic rhetoric of Nick Fuentes, and echoed in the framing of figures like Candace Owens, where longstanding tropes about Jewish influence and dual loyalty are repackaged for contemporary audiences. These narratives often take concrete and familiar form, in claims that George Soros is orchestrating immigration flows or funding protest movements from behind the scenes, in insinuations that Hollywood or major news networks operate as coordinated Jewish power centers, or in the recycling of language about globalists as a thinly veiled stand in for Jews. They can also appear in the circulation of new lists possibly targeting Jewish faculty or institutions, and in viral claims about who really runs universities or financial systems.

It also appears in acts of vandalism and harassment, including swastikas drawn on synagogues and dorm rooms, bomb threats against Jewish community centers, and public harassment of visibly Jewish individuals in places like New York and Los Angeles. And the scale of this is not merely anecdotal. The Anti Defamation League has reported record highs in antisemitic incidents in the United States in recent years, numbering in the thousands annually, while the Southern Poverty Law Center continues to document hundreds of active hate groups, many of which traffic explicitly in antisemitic ideology. And even as parts of the political right present themselves as defenders of Jews, their support is often entangled with falsehood and misleading instrumental uses of Jewish identity in broader attacks on higher education and democratic institutions.

At the same time, some, if not many, are struggling with a growing sense of distance from Israel, as it appears to move in an increasingly theocratic direction. I find myself holding a deep desire for a two state solution, not as a slogan, but as a fragile hope for breaking the horrific ongoing cycle of violence.

Passover reminds us that we are still here, doing Jewish things while looking over our shoulder, still practicing the rhythms of American Jewish life under conditions we did not choose. But more than that, Passover gives us back a story when ours feels like it is slipping away. I saw this firsthand at the Gettysburg College Jewish student Seder, where students gathered around round tables and brought the Haggadah to life, turning its stories into a living play for everyone in the room. Voices shifted, bodies moved, roles were taken up and passed along. It was not simply read, it was enacted. Some came unsure of where they fit, some carrying tension from the world outside the room, but many of them stayed in the ritual. In that space, the story held.

In a moment when many feel misread, pressured, or pushed to the margins, they did not resolve the chaos around them, but they refused to let it define them. They told a story that refuses to collapse. It tells us that we were once strangers and slaves, that liberation did not arrive all at once, and that freedom is something we learn how to carry together.It suggests that memory is not passive, that we are commanded to see ourselves as if we personally came out of Egypt. In doing so, it resists collapse. It rebuilds coherence through ritual, through telling, through shared time at the table.

Passover finds us as we are, but it does not leave us there. It binds us to a people, to a past that still speaks, and to a future that is not yet finished. Even when our narratives fracture, it reminds us that we are part of a story that has endured worse, and that still asks something of us now, to remember, to take responsibility, and to resist the ease of despair. The question is whether we will carry that story forward, or let others tell it for us.

The answer is we will. Jewish students at Gettysburg College and at many institutions of higher learning  are carrying it forward.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)