Oh, so now they care about Judaism and Jewish practice?
Members of BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now slept in their Gaza solidarity sukkah on Oct. 20 to celebrate the Jewish holiday and respond to Brown University’s vote to reject divestment.
Simon Aron, a freshman at Brown University, participating in the sleep-in, said, “We are commanded to put up a tent structure that we spend as much time as possible that we are also supposed to sleep in, according to Jewish tradition and Jewish law.”
Since Oct. 16, students at the university built a Gaza-solidarity sukkah, which is a temporary structure built celebrating the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot.
“Last night, 18 of us decided that we would not be bullied by the administration’s threats. We decided we would sleep in the sukkah. We sang songs, we prayed,” Aron said.
Brown University informed ABC 6 News that students were given permission to set up the structure on the green, but the request did not indicate plans for sleeping in the structure.
“There could be consequences,” Aron said. “But the 18 of us that slept here last night understand that what we are doing is important.”
The university responded with a statement:
A group of students, with permission from the University, erected a sukkah — a temporary structure built for use during the weeklong celebration of the Jewish festival of Sukkot — on Brown’s Quiet Green. (A different campus organization erected a second sukkah on Wriston Quad). The request to reserve space on the University’s green spaces indicated no plans for sleeping in the structures. The approval provided was for the short-term use of space on the green for the sukkah, provided the students did so within the guidelines of Brown policies. Sleeping in the sukkah (or elsewhere on University green spaces) is prohibited per long-standing University policy. University leaders reached out directly to the student leaders to reiterate this, on Thursday, Oct. 17, after comments from students in a student newspaper indicated plans for sleeping in the sukkah. Brown’s green space usage policy is more than a decade old and prohibits any kind of encampment on Brown’s historical greens or residential quadrangles. Students have erected a sukkah in many other years, but the University has provided no exceptions to its policies. Students may have constructed a sukkah on off-campus grounds for the purpose of sleeping, but Brown’s policy applies only on its own campus.
Let’s be very clear. These “as-a-Jews” – assuming they are even that and not “pretending-to-be-Jews” – care very little about Judaism, because Zionism and Israel are central to our religion. And the Jewish festival of Sukkot, the very one they are co-opting for their anti-Jewish cause – is a great example of this. It celebrates the gathering of the harvest in Israel and commemorates the miraculous protection G‑d provided for the children of Israel when they left Egypt on their way to Israel, which G-d gave to them. As a harvest festival, it is inextricably tied to the land of Israel In Israel; it occurs in the early fall after the crops grew in the Winter, are ready for harvest in the late spring, and some remain out in the field to dry for a few months and are only ready for harvest now.
Mind you, every time these folk co-opt a Jewish festival, they are undermining their own message. Like those so-called “liberation seders” around the time of Passover.
Furthermore, judging by the below photo as well as images in the video here, it looks like the Sukkah is under a tree.
If I am correct, then this renders the entire Sukkah invalid. Not that these “as-a-Jews” care about Jewish law.
And later on in the report, they admit to the true purpose:
According to JFCN, students slept in the sukkah to protest Brown University’s crackdown on students organizing around Palestinian liberation and divestment.
By the way, the “As-a-Jew” interviewed in the report, Simon Aron, has volunteered for the Sunrise Movement, according to his LinkedIn:
I have documented in the past a disturbing connection between the Sunrise Movement and the “As-a-Jew” anti-Israel IfNotNow, which puts the latter’s mockery of Judaism in a disturbing light.
