Sorry, I’m Still Working On My Op-Ed Arguing Selling Chametz To Non-Jews Is Exploitative

By Peter Beinart

Credit: New America Foundation via Wikipedia

To: Dean Baquet, Executive Editor, NY times

I must offer my apologies, Dean. I know that a week or two ago we agreed that I would supply an opinion article for the Times exploring the myriad ways in which the Jewish practice of arranging for someone outside the faith to purchase leavened-grain products before Passover – to avoid adherents from violating a Biblical injunction against possessing such products during the festival – places the purchaser – and by extent anyone outside Judaism – in a vulnerable economic or social position, and likely constitutes hate speech or violence or even settler-colonialism. But development of the article has defied my predictions, and I fear it will remain unfinished even after Passover ends this weekend and the valence of the issue fades.

My original pitch, I readily acknowledge, offered what I considered at the time a robust conceptual basis for the assertion. The ensuing days, however, have demonstrated my premature assumption that I could offer an analysis for Times readers that makes a sufficiently-compelling case devoid of blatant use of so-called “tropes” that feature in too many antisemitic instances to allow for intellectual honesty when I put them to what I could defend as good-faith use.

For example, I had to get more creative and more dishonest than my usual rhetorical practice – I know that says quite a bit – in order to tie the sale of chametz practice to the worst possible interpretations of Zionism without overt reference to Jews in general as rapacious, predatory capitalists. Under normal circumstances one can often restrict the use of such epithets to Zionists qua Zionists and still claim no animus toward Jews, but the parameters of the pre-Passover chametz sale to a non-Jew, with its history bearing no discernible connection to Zionism, made that too high a bar to reach.

Second, the reversible nature of the “sale” as specified in the contract – if not completed with full payment, the transaction is undone after Passover – undermines most of the “capitalist” side of things. Try as I might, I have not found a case in which the sale took place under duress, making a coherent link with exploitative landlord practices that much less available.

Also, I have yet to arrive at what I consider a discreet, or at least not-blatant, method to shoehorn the blood-in-the-matza, or its contemporary analog, Israel-kills-Palestinian-children, into the argument. I welcome suggestions from you or other members of the Editorial Board, but as it stands, I suspect I will be unable to provide the article I had pitched. I apologize.

I hope this error does not dissuade you from soliciting or accepting my contributions going forward. But you do have my permission to use this instance as an example of what happens when you trust a Jew.

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