The Biden Administration’s Seder Makes a Mockery of Passover and the Jews

The Passover story is really about “protecting democracy.”

The Kamala Harris, Doug Emhoff Passover seder: brisket, gefilte fish, and the Maxwell House Haggadah

Emhoff spoke about celebrating Passover as a child, which he said often involved attending seder at his grandmother's home in Brooklyn.

Vice President Kamala Harris (R) and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff host a Passover seder in the Vice President's Residence, serving wine from the Psagot settlement winery, on April 16, 2022. (Doug Emhoff/Twitter)

Harris, Emhoff to hold first known Passover seder at VP’s residence

Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will be the first known second family to host a Passover seder at the vice president’s residence Friday after holding a virtual celebration last year. Harris confirmed her holiday plans on Twitter, posting a traditional Passover greeting. “Chag Sameach to all those celebrating Passover. The news was first reported by CNN, citing a White House official who revealed that Jewish members of Harris and Emhoff’s staff will attend the gathering at the Naval Observatory in Washington along with their loved ones. The vice president also reportedly informed Israeli President Isaac Herzog of her plans to host the seder during their Thursday call. Emhoff became the first Jewish spouse of a US president or vice president when Harris was sworn in last year. The couple were married in 2014. Just two months after the inauguration, the second gentleman led the first-ever virtual Passover seder at the Naval Observatory, saying at the time he hoped it would be the last virtual celebration. The couple will hold the seder at the Naval Observatory in Washington along with their loved ones. AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File In November of last year, the vice president’s family hung the first mezuzah on the front door of an executive residence in US history. The celebration comes as Washington, DC, is hit with a wave of positive COVID-19 cases — with both Harris and President Biden potentially being exposed several times. Multiple administration officials, including Harris’ communications director Jamal Simmons and Attorney General Merrick Garland, contracted the virus after attending the superspreader Gridiron dinner April 2. As of Monday, both the president and vice president had tested negative for the virus. Harris’ office did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

BY DANIEL GREENFIELD

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/biden-administrations-seder-makes-mockery-passover-daniel-greenfield/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

"Good evening to the thousands of you who are joining us from around the country," Doug Emhoff, the Hollywood lawyer serving as Kamala's husband, intoned. 

The sign language interpreter on the small box next to him spread her arms in what was either an attempt to 'sign' Passover or a gesture of disbelief and contempt.

The "People's Seder" was about to begin with its apostrophe in the right place and heart in the wrong place.

As the Biden White House rushes to enable Iran's nuclear program and the modern-day pharaonic mullahs plotting, like the original, to wipe out the Jews, it put on a "People's Seder" to distract American Jews from its complicity in the latest acts of terror from Iran to Israel.

The People's Seder sounds like a Berkeley commune. A day before the eve of Passover, the administration’s second virtual seder served no function except to give Emhoff something to do. Perhaps knowing that, Emhoff claimed, with a mostly straight face, that he had traveled the country hearing from people “how much last year’s virtual seder had meant to them”.

Emhoff made no mention of the over a dozen Israelis recently killed in terror attacks. Neither, seemingly, did so many of the speakers who rambled on about the importance of “empathy”.

Empathy applies to everyone except the Israeli Jews mourning their dead.

Passover, to Emhoff, proved to be about Ukraine, the pandemic, and “protecting democracy”. Maybe Emhoff can tell me which democratic process elected Moses. 

Then a particularly haggard Biden, looking awkwardly at things off-camera, boasted that this was the “first time in three years that families sit around the seder table.”

That might be true in Washington D.C., but it certainly isn’t true in America.

Biden then declared that during Passover, his hearts were “with the people of Ukraine”.

The camera cut to the White House's bewildered Jewish liaison.

Passover, so far, was about Ukraine. 

The previous seder, featuring an anti-Israel activist, was apparently so popular that Emhoff decided to recycle his shtick about “gelatinous gefilte fish” from last year. Then he declared that “ever since I was a kid, I have been inspired by the story of Exodus.”

Indeed, who could forget the time Moses went back to Egypt, married Pharaoh’s sister, and settled down to the business of assisting in the genocide of the Jews. 

Emhoff’s presentation was followed by a long list of speakers eager to delve into Passover as a metaphor and uninterested in it as a substantial reality. 

There was Andrew Rehfeld, the first "non-rabbinic" head of the Reform Movement's Hebrew Union College seminary, who had defended BDS supporters against claims of antisemitism.

"Some students have been attracted to the BDS movement because of their love of Israel, and their repugnance of what they see as its unjust treatment of Palestinians," Rehfeld had argued. "BDS is not the answer.  But that does not mean that their concerns are without merit."  

Rehfeld appeared with a large placard behind him declaring, "Another Jew for LGBTQ Equality".

The non-rabbinic head of a movement that denies the existence of the G-d of the Torah made no mention of the Creator of the Universe but spoke about “bullying” and “civil society”.

That was followed by J Street’s Deborah Lipstadt, who talked about Ukraine, and Jeopardy host Mayim Bialik who… also talked about Ukraine. An ignorant viewer might have concluded that in the Bible, the Jews had left Ukraine, rather than Egypt. After a brief interjection by an Orthodox Rabbi who actually had a seder plate on display, next up was Afroculinaria's Michael W. Twitty, a black gay social justice chef who had previously accused Israel of racism, and who explained that in his seder molasses "represented the transatlantic slave trade."

Dayenu!

The People’s Seder was dedicated to philosophical abstractions that erased Jews and negated the fundamental truths of the Passover story. Attaching the "People's" to something is a negation. That's why the various democratic people's republics were anything but and why the People's Seder isn't a seder, or at least not a Jewish one, but a People’s Republic of Seder.

Less than two minutes into his virtual farce, Emhoff had declared that "even though the Exodus tells the story of a particular people, its message is universal." Everything about Judaism to secularists is universal, and nothing is particular or relevant to the actual Jews.

It would be dangerous to focus on the particular people currently being killed once again in their own country because Emhoff’s wife’s boss chooses to stand with Islamic terrorism.

After the People’s Seder was done, Ambassador Tom Nides, who had been caught praising a BDS group and boasting of trying to keep Jews out of Jerusalem, issued a press release in English, Arabic, and Hebrew (in that order) which urged “Jews, Muslims, and Christians” (also in that order) to avoid "actions that further escalate tensions" during "this sacred holiday period".

That would include concluding the seder with the traditional call, “Next Year in Jerusalem”, signifying a return to a city that Biden and Nides deny is Jewish and want to keep Jews out of.

Nides, Emhoff, and other administration enablers of Jewish descent erase Jews from Passover and Jerusalem and replace the real people and their history with social justice abstractions. 

Part of the problem is that Emhoff, like your average leftist of Jewish ancestry, knows as much about Judaism as I do about dating Kamala. And cares just as little. Stripping Judaism of its particularism appears liberating to someone like Emhoff because it also frees him of what he and his family see as a limitation on their identities and their potential social aspirations.

The People’s Seder is not a Jewish people’s seder because that’s the last thing Emhoff wants.

Liberation to lefties of Jewish descent means the ability to be less Jewish. That is at odds with the message of Passover and of Judaism which is that liberation comes from being more Jewish. The Jews who had tried to fit into Pharaoh’s tyranny had become slaves, while the slaves who defied an empire by conducting a seder that mocked Egyptian beliefs were set free.

Universalism is enslaving while particularism is liberating.

The Passover seder’s message, with its careful recreation of the particular experiences, sensory, emotional, and intellectual, of Egyptian slavery and liberation, is a painstaking exercise in particularism. The People’s Seder, like virtually all lefty religious practices, is an equally painstaking exercise in rejecting the particular for the universal by turning the events into metaphors that can be glibly made to mean anything as long as it’s unrelated to the Jews. 

It’s all very well to turn the story of Passover into a metaphor, but Moses didn’t arrive to talk to Pharaoh about abstractions like empathy and emotional growth, but with a simple message.

“Let My People Go.”

The People’s Seder claims to be about liberation but actually enslaves. It rejects “the four languages of liberation” whose four steps "I will take you out", "I will save you", "I will redeem you" and "I will take you" develop it as a relationship between G-d and the Jewish people, to universalize it into hollow self-help empowerment in which there is no relationship with G-d.

Instead, there is a relationship with the leftist deity of government all too familiar to Pharaoh.

Worship government isn’t liberation, it’s slavery.

 

 

Transitional Kindergarten Is Not Ok

California politicians just can't seem to avoid hucksterism.

BY LARRY SAND

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/transitional-kindergarten-not-ok-larry-sand/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

In California, parents are abandoning the k-12 system, college enrollment is down, and now the state is trying to lure 4-year-olds to transitional kindergarten.

According to just-released data from the California Department of Education, the state has lost 110,000 students this school year and has fewer than 6 million students for the first time this century. Additionally, on the college level, California’s fall 2021 undergraduate enrollment dropped by nearly a quarter-million students since pre-pandemic fall 2019, according to a survey released in January. The report from the National Student Clearinghouse shows that California saw an overall decline of more than 99,000 (4.3%) in undergraduate enrollment from fall 2020 to fall 2021, driven mostly by a 9.9% drop in the community colleges.

So now the government is doing what it can to expand the system by adding bodies – specifically 4-year-old bodies – by implementing universal free transitional kindergarten. A massive undertaking, the state is scrambling to find enough teachers for all the kiddos. It will take somewhere between 11,000 and 25,000 teachers and teaching assistants to work with the massive influx of children. Currently, TK serves about 100,000 children, primarily those who turn 5 between Sept. 2 and Dec. 2. These are the students who narrowly miss the cutoff for traditional kindergarten. The new $2.7 billion universal TK program, however, will be made available for free to every 4-year-old in California, regardless of income, potentially serving nearly 400,000 students by the 2025-2026 school year.

Not surprisingly, teacher union honchos are salivating over the vision of thousands of new dues-paying teachers. Accordingly, the National Education Association extols the virtues of TK on its website, claiming that children in early childhood education programs are less likely to repeat a grade, less likely to be identified as having special needs, more prepared academically for later grades, more likely to graduate from high school and be higher earners in the workforce.

But then, there is reality. In fact, studies invariably show that pre-K school doesn’t help, and can even damage young kids. The results of a study done in Tennessee were released in January 2022, revealing “that children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.” It is worth noting that the Tennessee study was of the highest quality because the program was oversubscribed, so applicants were selected to participate by random lottery. As researcher Greg Forster reports, “That allowed the study to use the top-quality method used in medical trials, comparing outcomes for a “treatment” group (those who won the lottery and attended pre-K) and a “control” group (those who lost the lottery and did not attend pre-K).”

The Tennessee analysis is hardly an outlier. Study after study has shown that TK is an extraordinary waste of money. In fact, the U.S. has a nearly 60-year history of funding early-childhood programs in the form of Head Start. The federal government released the last of a three-part longitudinal study of the $8 billion-a-year program in 2012, and its results were grim. According to the report’s executive summary: “…there was little evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group.” The 2012 report reinforced some disappointing findings from the study’s second phase, which showed that any gains “had faded considerably by the end of 1st grade, with Head Start children showing an edge only in learning vocabulary over their peers in the control group who had not participated in Head Start.”

Other studies purporting to show preschool’s benefits also have failed to prove that spending billions on TK would be money well spent. Two often-cited studies by TK touters, the Abecedarian and Perry Preschool projects, for example, are now two generations in the rearview and involved no more than 60 children. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray wrote in 2013, both studies “were overseen by the same committed, well-intentioned people who conducted the demonstration projects. Evaluations of social programs are built around lots of judgment calls—from deciding how the research is designed to figuring out how to analyze the data. People with a vested interest in the results shouldn’t be put in the position of making those judgments.”

Also, at the time when President Obama’s Preschool for All proposal was under consideration in 2013, the Brookings Institution’s Grover J. Whitehurst wrote about the Tennessee Voluntary State Pre-K Program, a full-day program for 4‐year‐olds from low-income families. He said that this cohort “performed somewhat less well on cognitive tasks at the end of first grade than the control group, even though of the children in the control group had no experience as 4-year-olds in a center-based early childhood program.” Whitehurst concludes, “Until the field of early education becomes evidence-based, it will be doomed to cycles of fad and fancy.”

Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist James Heckman, a highly regarded expert on early child development, when asked about universal pre-K in a recent interview, said, “I have never supported universal pre-school. ... No public preschool program can provide the environments and the parental love and care of a functioning family and the lifetime benefits that ensue.”

Tara Ann Thieke, a former social services assistant and preschool teacher, adds that separating children from their homes at a very young age can have detrimental effects. “I observed that even the highest quality care could elicit sustained traumatic responses…The most entertaining preschool with a room full of friends and nearly every need met on cue could not erase a longing for home in the best circumstances. In more troubling situations, the child would struggle to separate the roles of paid versus familial caregivers. Separation from the staff with whom they spent most of their time became as traumatic as separation from parents. Stressful transitions and confusion flooded the child’s body: as repeated studies have shown, the levels of the stress-hormone cortisol remain elevated for children in institutionalized care compared to children in a home setting.”

It’s important to note that the studies haven’t concluded that all kids are harmed by pre-K. They simply find that in aggregate they don’t work and that some do harm. But if a parent has a compelling reason to enroll their kid, they should be free to do so, without the state’s overbearing sales pitch.

But California’s governor and a majority of its state legislators just can’t seem to avoid hucksterism. Instead of “following the science,” California’s politicos indulge in what Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby refers to as the cardiac test. “We just know in our heart that this is right.”

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

TWITTER’S POISON PILL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast

In this episode, Dinesh discusses how Twitter's board is using a "poison pill" strategy to stop Elon Musk and continue its censorship policies.  Dinesh asks who's going to blink first in the Ukraine war, the Russians, or the US? Dinesh discusses the future of the pro-life movement in a post-Roe America.  Dinesh examines the implications of China becoming the global defender of traditional values. Dinesh explores the remarkable meeting between Dante the pilgrim and a Roman poet named Statius.

 

MIDDLE OF THE ROAD NEWSMAX INTERVIEWS RINO Dr. Oz-SAYS Fauci should be fired; touts HIMSELF AS TRUSTWORTHY, WANTING TO PAY BACK WHAT AMERICA HAS DONE FOR HIM & TRUMP’S WORDS OF SUPPORT

WAKE UP AMERICA: BOTH SHOULD BE FIRED BEFORE THEY DO ANY MORE DAMAGE

President Trump calls Dr. Mehmet Oz:

“Smart, Tough, and Someone Who Will Never Let Us Down.” (?)

DIDN'T YOU HEAR THAT TRUMP WAS IDENTIFYING & CALLING OUT "RINOS" (REPUBLICANS IN NAME ONLY, BUT NOT OZ)?

SEE OUR PREVIOUS POSTS ABOUT DR. OZ: https://ratherexposethem.org/?s=MEHMET+OZ

Pope Francis’ “MEA CULPA” (FOR YOU, NOT HIM): ‘Through My Racism, Through My Most Grievous Racism’

On a day of spiritual unity, the pontiff chose political division. Remember that well the next time Pope Francis starts making political prescriptions.

"REFUGEES" “Forced like Jesus Christ to flee”

(IN A WORLD OF COMMUNISM & SOCIALISM, WITHOUT BORDERS OR NATIONALISM)

OMITS THOSE WHO HAVE EVIL, JIHADIST INTENTIONS

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/04/16/pope-francis-through-my-racism-through-my-racism-through-my-most-grievous-racism-n1590358;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now the pope’s advisor on immigration? “It is true,” said Pope Francis Friday, “refugees are subdivided. There’s first-class, second class, skin color, [if] they come from a developed country [or] one that is not developed. We are racists, we are racists. And this is bad.” The claim that Western countries are racist in their approach to immigration is not original to the pontiff: AOC said it back in early March. But the key question, both then and now, is largely overlooked yet quite simple: is it true?

Interviewer Lorena Bianchetti asked the pope, “At this time, Your Holiness, I think of those fleeing: there are these images that show the flight of Ukrainian people who are forced to leave their land, their homes, their loved ones. It is one of the latest exoduses that we are probably, alas, becoming accustomed to. But in this case, there has been a real concrete response. Does this response, I ask you, do you think it means there are cracks in the walls of indifference, of prejudice toward those who flee from other parts of the world wounded by war, or will refugees continue to be subdivided into the category of being an annoyance?” It’s hard to fathom what indifference she could possibly have meant. Europe has welcomed refugees and migrants to the extent that one in four people in Germany now has a migrant background. Those are some mighty porous “walls of indifference.”

Instead of trying to talk some sense to Bianchetti, however, the pope demonstrated that he fully subscribed to the idea that the West’s response to mass migration has been colored, as it were, by prejudice. “It is true. Refugees are subdivided,” he replied. “There’s first class, second class, skin color, [if] they come from a developed country [or] one that is not developed. We are racists, we are racists. And this is bad.” Yeah, sure. But really, can the pope name a single country in Europe or North America that has refused any migrants because of skin color? This is pure Leftist fantasy and propaganda, and it’s incredibly irresponsible for the pope to be retailing it.

Nor did Francis stop there. He went on to frame the refugees as Christ-like, so as to shame Christians into thinking that opposition to unvetted mass migration is somehow sinful. “The problem of the refugees,” the pope asserted, “is a problem that Jesus suffered, too, because he was a migrant and a refugee in Egypt when he was a child, to escape death. How many of them are suffering to escape death?” Good question. Other good questions are: How many of them are economic migrants? What is our obligation in such cases? And how many of them are people who are hoping to take advantage of the West’s generous welfare system (Germany acknowledged as far back as 2017 that 75% of its migrants would be collecting benefits for years to come)? How many are criminals or terrorists?

Related: Pope: ‘There is No Such Thing As a Just War: They Do Not Exist!’

The pope has never shown any sign of considering such questions. He has repeatedly branded those who oppose mass Muslim migration into Europe as un-Christian. He seems to be completely unconcerned about facts, such as the fact that all of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees. In February 2015, the Islamic State boasted it would soon flood Europe with as many as 500,000 refugees. The Lebanese Education Minister said in September 2015 that there were 20,000 jihadis among the refugees in camps in his country. On May 10, 2016, Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s DGSI internal intelligence agency, said that the Islamic State was using migrant routes through the Balkans to get jihadis into Europe. In light of all that, it is not “racist” in the slightest degree to be concerned about those who have come in, and about the possibility that there may be jihadis among them.

Instead, back in December, the pope visited the Greek island of Lesbos, a hotspot for migrant landings in Europe, and claimed that the migrants were neglected to the extent that it constituted a veritable “shipwreck of civilization.” Europe, he claimed, was “torn by nationalist egoism.” He added that “in Europe, there are those who persist in treating the problem as a matter that does not concern them.”

The pope’s imagined Europe, which is callously indifferent to the plight of migrants desperately fleeing certain death and chooses among those migrants on the basis of race, simply does not exist and has never existed. Nor will it likely ever exist. And the more the pope spreads these vicious untruths, the more the forces that are calling for some responsible restraints on mass migration for economic and security reasons will be drowned out. We are racists, and racists bad. That’s the depth of this man’s analysis.