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I used to live on 7th Avenue in Park Slope. I loved how close it was to Prospect Park. The main entrance was just around the corner at Grand Army Plaza. That’s where I started my morning runs and frequented the farmers’ market. I was shocked when it became a venue — an anti-Israel political tool — on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Yizkor, the service to remember those we’ve lost, was repurposed as a Gaza vigil. By any account, this was just another anti-Israel rally, this time bearing the trappings of an integral Yom Kippur ceremony.
The “service” was organized by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), Rabbis for Ceasefire, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Speakers addressed the crowd from a podium adorned with a sign — “for the sin of genocide we atone.” Behind them stood a mock-up of a synagogue ark reading “Refuse, Remember, Recommit.”
Yizkor asks us to remember our own dead, not to grieve strangers as a political statement. That’s why using this service to indict a foreign government is so disturbing. It has nothing to do with the holiday itself.
The headliner for the event was Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil, if you’ve forgotten, is the anti-Israel college activist actively contesting deportation over his role in Columbia’s campus protests.
Khalil went through a harrowing ordeal in federal custody, the result of an egregious First Amendment violation on the part of the Trump administration. That his virulently anti-Zionist ideas aren’t illegal doesn’t make them sound, and it certainly doesn’t make Khalil a legitimate moral guide on Judaism’s holiest day.
At the podium, Khalil, playing rabbi, said that God should “remember that Israel is committing genocide.” Repentance, he continued, is hard “when our tuition fees, our tax dollars, our votes are being used to kill, to maim, to displace Palestinians.”
In other venues, though, Khalil has been less restrained. He’s called for the “Zionist genocidal project and the ideology of supremacy that it’s built on” to “collapse completely.” Some peacenik!
Khalil’s presence alone was something. But the Yizkor for Gaza organizers had two helpings of chutzpah prepared on Monday.
Indeed, Khalil’s opener was none other than the anti-Israel movement’s favorite non-Zionist Zionist, Brad Lander (Macklemore was apparently busy despite a newly opened touring schedule).
Lander is the Jewish congressman-apparent who declared at his son’s bris that the newborn renounced the right of return.
In his Yizkor speech, Lander appealed to “my fellow liberal and progressive Zionists about the repentance that we must do today.”
Then: “As someone who feels a connection to Israel, who cares about it, I feel today so deeply that my vidui, my confession, must center on my, on our complicity in what I view as genocide in Gaza.”
He anticipated the obvious objection and waved it off. “I understand the hesitation of some to call it genocide,” he said, adding that he understood fears of rising antisemitism too. Then he asked the crowd how any Jew who feels connected to Israel could avoid putting “the wanton destruction of Gaza, the famine exacerbated by lack of aid, the land thefts and murders in the West Bank” at the center of their Yom Kippur confession.
Then he began with his confession: “Ashamnu,” he said. “We have been culpable. Bagadnu.” These are the opening words of the Al Chet, the alphabetical confession Jews recite together throughout Yom Kippur: we have sinned, we have betrayed. Lander wasn’t echoing the liturgy. He was reciting it, live, with Gaza standing in for the sins the prayer was written to name.
This isn’t new for Lander. It’s the same act he ran during the primary against Dan Goldman: call yourself a Zionist, keep company with people who treat the word as an insult, and drain it of any meaning.
Note that JFREJ, which co-organized Monday’s event, says outright that it’s rooted in “Diasporism,” not Zionism.
Last month, my friend Evan Gottesman called out a related pattern in The Middle Ground. After protesters at Madison Square Garden heckled Lander for his nominal Zionism, Evan pointed out that one of Lander’s political allies — a person whom he’d campaigned with — referred to Zionists as “functional Klansmen.”
Lander waved off the MSG protesters as “a few loud mouths,” but he didn’t address the oozing disdain and condescension his own political camp has for an ideology and a country he claims a connection to.
Lander did the same at Grand Army Plaza. He reiterated the genocide charge — the price of admission in far-left spaces these days. He gave everything to Mahmoud Khalil and the other anti-Zionists, and asked nothing in return.
No one repented beneath that soaring arch in Brooklyn. Teshuva asks you to look at your own conduct and change it. The introspection that’s so central to this act was absent at Grand Army Plaza. A Jewish crowd gathered on the most solemn day in our calendar to perform fealty to anti-Zionist ideology. The attendees may believe that giving Mahmoud Khalil the mic for the Dvar Torah was their highest moral duty. But in outsourcing Jewish spiritual leadership to someone beyond the tribe — with views like Khalil’s, no less — Lander and his fellow travelers abdicated their responsibility to Am Yisrael.
Eli, Brad Lander is entitled to his conscience, and as an American he's entitled to his views on American aid. What he isn't entitled to is Yizkor. That's the prayer we say for our own dead, and he lent it to a stage whose banner confessed to genocide. He confessed, on Israel's behalf, sins whose consequences he will never have to live with.
Peace isn't built by feeding hate into the mouth of terrorism and hoping it develops table manners. It comes when aggression fails, when Jewish sovereignty is understood as permanent rather than provisional, when classrooms teach mathematics instead of martyrdom, and when Hamas learns that murder buys nothing.
That is what Khalil and Lander should have been praying for.
Lander should be kicked out and put in herem. He is a moser and a rasha.