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Photo by Medill DC

Wednesday, April 8, at 6 pm

Contact: Devin Seligsohn | 720.429.9074 | devin.dandelion@proton.me

GEO Detention Facility, 3130 Oakland St, Aurora, CO 80010

Instagram @denverboulderjvp

Roughly 100 local members of Denver/Boulder Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and allies plan to participate in a Passover Vigil to free the immigrants detained inside, linking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violence with Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. The organizers connect movements for immigrant rights, Palestinian and Jewish rights, and ultimately call for the collective liberation of all.

Aurora, CO (April 8, 2026) —Denver/Boulder JVP members to lead a Passover Grief Vigil outside the infamous GEO detention facility, remembering all those killed in ICE custody. Participants will rally to demand an end to inhumane treatment inside the facility and collective liberation for all people unjustly detained from Colorado to Palestine.

• What: Jewish faith leaders and community members will lead a Passover Yizkor ritual outside GEO Detention Center in Aurora, which is known for some of the most inhumane conditions of all ICE detention facilities across the country. People gathering will grieve together through Jewish ritual for all individuals killed by ICE and rally outside the detention center to demand better conditions and treatment for those in custody and freedom for all people unjustly detained due to fascist laws and imperialist institutions across the globe.
• Who: AFSC (American Friends Service Committee), CORNN (Colorado Rapid Response Network), Shut Down GEO, USPCN (US Palestinian Community Network), and members of Denver/Boulder JVP. Participants will include Jewish faith leaders and community members, human rights advocates, descendants of Holocaust survivors, students, elders, and immigrant rights activists.
• When: Wednesday, April 8, 2026, at 6 pm
• Where: 3130 Oakland St, Aurora, CO 80010, south side of the building
• Why: Local members of JVP and allies to grieve together as a community during the traditional Passover Yizkor ritual. While Yizkor is traditionally recited in a synagogue, JVP members will hold the prayer service publicly outside the detention facility to express support for local immigrant communities experiencing state violence and displacement — similar to Jewish communities that have faced state-sanctioned violence and antisemitism throughout history.

The organizers condemn the collaboration between U.S. federal law enforcement and Israeli military in training exchange programs, which utilize shared enforcement tactics and lawlessness. Trump and Netanyahu are present-day Pharaohs. Many Coloradan Jews honor this Passover by continuing to forge solidarity with all people committed to collective liberation and fight for a future of freedom & safety for all. “I’m here to say ICE OUT and Free Palestine. None of us is free until all of us are free. When they come for one, they face us all.” – Devin Seligsohn, Jewish Voice for Peace

Media welcome: Interviews will be available with Michael Kengmana and Al Cannington; visuals include banners that read, “Free them all,” “Melt ICE,” “Come for one, face us all,” handmade poppies tied to the fence to represent Palestine and all oppressed people, and singing during the vigil.

Background: Yizkor is a memorial prayer service honoring the deceased that is recited four times a year, including on the final night of Passover, a holiday dedicated to commemorating the Jewish people’s struggles against oppression. The Passover story teaches that in every generation there are Pharaohs who oppress the people. And, in every generation, there are people who stand firm in what is right and rise up for freedom.

U.S. law enforcement collaborates with the Israeli military and Israeli police through a range of actors that include private companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. This has encompassed exchange programs, training partnerships, and the purchase and use of Israeli spyware and surveillance technologies. Critics, including JVP, have denounced this collaboration as encouraging military and counterterror tactics by federal immigration officers and continuing imperialist violence in both the U.S. and occupied Palestine.

The Passover story teaches about having faith and that even in the darkest moments, freedom is still on the horizon. Although this is a time of genocide and fascism, attendees of the vigil will be there to show they are not giving up or ceding power to the authoritarian regimes ascending globally. This community remains steadfast in the fight for freedom for Palestinians and all people.

The Jewish Voice for Peace family of organizations organizes a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of U.S. Jews into solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle, guided by a vision of justice, equality, and dignity for all people. Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP Action), our 501(c)(4) organization, is now doing business as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), while our 501(c)(3) work continues through JVP Leadership and Culture Lab (JVP Lab). JVP is the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.

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The post Colorado Jews Hold Passover Grief Vigil Outside GEO Detention Center in Aurora appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

The post Letter to the Editor: Reckoning With the Real ‘Unspeakable’ Violence Against Jews appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Nathan Schneider (assistant professor, Media Studies) works at the intersections of technology, religion, and social change. He is the author of several books, most recently Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy. His articles have appeared in publications such as Harper’s, The Nation, The Guardian, Vice and The Catholic Worker. Find more information at nathanschneider.info.

Originally appeared at Flaming Hydra.  Nathan Schneider appears here as a guest contributor for Yellow Scene Magazine.

On September 12, 2001, Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder (where I now teach) published an essay about the terrorist attack that had taken place in New York the day before. With the subtitle “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” Churchill compared the 9/11 catastrophe to Malcolm X’s remark about the assassination of John F. Kennedy having been a matter of “chickens coming home to roost.” As Malcolm had, Churchill suggested that when calamity comes to the United States, the country may not be so entirely innocent as prevailing narratives suggest. The Nation of Islam removed Malcolm from his leadership role after he made that statement; my university investigated and ultimately fired Churchill.

Churchill’s case is a reminder that academic freedom has limits. Most recently, I’ve been thinking of his story because of the inferno on Pearl Street, the horrific June 1st attack on my neighbors as they demonstrated in support of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. I am traveling, an ocean away, and it has been devastating to see scenes of my hometown on the news clips that cycle by on the trains. I have tried to follow what our community leaders are saying, and what they are not saying, and what some of us are saying only in private group chats.

The line that Churchill and Malcolm X crossed, and the line I notice my town shuffling around, is the line that surrounds what the monk Thomas Merton called “the unspeakable.” The unspeakable is the truth that lies beyond what a social order can tolerate hearing.

Merton described it this way: “It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.”

The Catholic Worker James W. Douglass later extended the idea to the famous assassinations of the 1960s: the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Each was slain, Douglass argued, as he crossed the line of the unspeakable. The Kennedys had begun to confront the Cold War military establishment, and to call for disarmament. King had expanded his vision from domestic civil rights to criticism of the war in Vietnam; he was murdered a year to the day after first speaking out. Malcolm X had traveled to Africa to internationalize the struggle for Black liberation. Each crossed these lines at the price of their blood. Douglass’s research linked the metaphysics of the unspeakable with the circumstances of each man’s death.

The statements coming from Boulder’s institutions and leaders, from news editors and politicians I have known for years, keep repeating the word “antisemitism” to explain why someone would attack peaceful Jewish demonstrators. But it is a word that draws a line, beyond which lies the unspeakable.

This word has morphed from naming the persecution of a diasporic civilization into justifying the policies of a nation-state backed by the most powerful military in the world; from a cry against genocide into a way to excuse it. The U.S. government, under both major political parties, has used “antisemitism” to carry out assaults on human and constitutional rights—on political protest, on academic freedom, and on immigrants and asylum seekers.

The change that has come over the word is itself unspeakable. One must pretend that the word has not changed or risk accusations of antisemitism. But changed it has. As someone who lost Jewish relatives in the Holocaust, I now fear the exploitation of “antisemitism” to silence and deport political opponents more than I fear actual antisemites.

Locally, the explanation of antisemitism doesn’t compute. When I hear it, I think of a retired Jewish professor in Boulder whom I last saw from a distance, with a sign calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The professor’s ceasefire group was not attacked, although it also demonstrates regularly in downtown Boulder. Both groups include Jews. Why was one group and not the other a target? “Antisemitism” makes this question unspeakable.

It is unspeakable that terrorism might have a cause—that however categorically wrong terrorism is, the chances of it rise when our government enables atrocities elsewhere. It is unspeakable that the eventual attacker may have been stewing in helplessness and rage, watching day after day the scenes of families and homes annihilated in Gaza, while hearing again and again in this country that the real problem is “antisemitism.” Every day the flows of media and the speeches of politicians ignore simple evidence.

George W. Bush told us that the perpetrators of 9/11 attacked us for “our freedoms”—and not, as the perpetrators themselves said, because of U.S. military interventions and bases across the Muslim-majority world. Because of what could not be spoken, this country packed up its innocence and set off into almost two decades of entirely avoidable, disastrous wars.

Only one member of the Boulder city council, Taishya Adams, declined to sign the statement declaring the tragedy on Pearl Street to be the result of antisemitism. Instead, she issued her own statement pointing out that, in addition to antisemitism, “anti-Zionism” also seems to have been involved. She has since become the target of backlash in the national news and beyond, and there is a petition circulating to remove her from office.

Adams’s small amendment was what Merton called a “raid” on the unspeakable. She invites us to remember that there is a difference between being Jewish and supporting the project of an expansionist Jewish state on land that non-Jews also inhabit; she suggests that something other than racist hatred might have been involved. Her statement enables a way of processing the horror that can connect the 32 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers at an aid distribution site in Gaza with the firebombing of demonstrators on that same day in Boulder.

Merton wrote that true hope—for him, “Christian hope”—“begins where every other hope stands frozen stiff before the face of the Unspeakable.”

The post Antisemitism and the Unspeakable appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

It is often useful to step back from the trees and take a gander at the forest.

In April, the latest inquisition by the Republican House featured the cowering performance of Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik. She and her companions gave new life to the Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion — Roar-ee the Lion being the official Columbia mascot. In addition to her secular grovel, she cheerily agreed with Republican Representative Rick Allen, who was flabbergasted that she would invite God’s wrath onto campus by not adequately disciplining all the antisemites who dare criticize Israel’s near-genocide in Gaza.

Shafik, having smilingly groveled before the McCarthyesque proceedings, got her roar back when returning to campus and summoning the NYPD to break up a merely hours-long pro-Palestine encampment on the campus lawn. So brave, lioness!

Last fall, Dartmouth College’s president similarly called the local police to arrest two students who occupied tents on the front lawn of her huge campus mansion. Maybe it’s an Ivy League aversion to tents.

I vividly recall the anti-war protests of the ‘60s and ‘70s. In early ‘66, I ignored, with amusement, the several Vietnam War protestors on my college quad, clad in camouflage, sitting by a small campfire. I was a privileged preppy — albeit a liberal one — who had not paid much attention to the war. Six months later I was marching through the “campus” of Fort Benning, GA wearing a real Army uniform in basic training. The Selective Service had selected me, and it was not an honor.

By 1970, I had served as an Army officer without distinction and returned to college to resume my academic career by actually attending classes. The slaughter of students on May 4 at nearby Kent State sparked particularly vehement protests, including on my new campus quad. This time I paid attention.

The shackling of more than 100 Columbia students in April drew surprising commentary from the usually reliably liberal-ish New York Times readership. The vast majority applauded the university for standing up to the rule breakers. Many comments came from parents who deeply resented the protestors’ interruption of their children’s inexorable march toward MBAs, especially after they had committed some of the proceeds of their own MBAs to the perpetuation of their privilege. It generally went without mention that the encampment inhibited nothing, although fairness requires that I acknowledge that a few pro-Palestinian protesters said some ugly stuff.

Those are a few of the trees. Here’s a glimpse of the forest from my corner.

Colleges and universities — and society — have become nearly unrecognizably corporatized since the ‘70s. Boards are comprised of donors, occasionally limousine liberals, with deep commitments to capitalism and the protection of their own capital. They hire leaders, like Minouche Shafik, who won’t rock the boat — or their yachts.

Humanities are shrinking toward extinction, and business majors have proliferated. Schools are assessed as “superb” based on the exorbitant earnings of graduates. In my later days as head of a Manhattan school, the quality of “elite” preschools was judged by the earnings of their grads!

Politics are equally skewed. Today’s “progressives” are essentially Eisenhower Republicans. Today’s Republicans are essentially to the right of John Birch. It seems nearly everyone, including too damn many Democrats, rail against the “radical left.” There is no “radical left” except perhaps in the fevered imaginary world of Truth Social.

Protestors then and now do not always comport with Emily Post’s rules of etiquette. But is something not deeply amiss when students are locked up for camping while yahoos with AR-15s parade through America’s streets with impunity? I guess some Amendments are more important than others.

Lip service is paid to the right to protest. One such lip server suggested that the protesters be removed to a place where others wouldn’t have to hear them. In cities large and small, protests are confined to cordoned-off corrals where spectators can view them, and a few AR-15 toters can taunt them from the perimeter.

Protests are meant to disrupt. In a culture that has grown more conservative and complacent, protest is demanded. I may not always agree, as is the case with some of the pro-Palestinian rhetoric, but thank goodness there are young — and older — folks who care deeply enough to take a stand for justice. And while I abhor violence, sometimes violence is all that will get the Establishment’s attention.

Yes, I abhor violence, but I’ll reserve my abhorrence for 34,000 dead in Gaza — mostly children and women; 43,000 gun deaths in the U.S. last year; violence against women by men and legislation; law enforcement killing of Black boys and men; the violence of child poverty; and the violent, right-wing assault on kindness and decency in our culture.

The post Nelson’s Corner | May 2024 appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Given Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netenyahu’s right-wing, war-hawk platform, it’s a given that the Israeli response would be thunderous. Indeed, Israel was only a week away from a transformative agreement with Saudi Arabia, and it’s clear Hamas — backed by the despotic regime of Iran — timed the attack in order to derail those fruitful negotiations that would have only further solidified peace around the Middle East.

And to that end, the Hamas political objective was successful as talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel have stalled. Sadly, Hamas cares not a whit for the population they were elected in 2006 to govern following the complete withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza strip — the Palestinian population of more than 2 million people in that region.

Shortly after the election in 2006 — which saw a number of Fatah leaders also elected (Fatah is the governing body of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank) — Hamas staged a bloody coup to depose their local competition in a civil war in 2007 and seized complete control over Gaza. And since then, despite billions of dollars in assistance funneling into Gaza yearly from around the globe — Hamas has focused only on their war machine, sacrificing any intentions of nation building at the altar of hate for their neighbors to the north and east (despite the fact that Egypt also blockades Gaza to the south).

But regardless of the contemporary political history in Gaza, what’s far more sobering is the unabashed anti-Semitic run-amok on our own shores. Since Oct. 7, the Anti-Defamation League is tracking a nearly 400% surge of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States as compared to the same time frame in 2022. Physical assaults on people simply for wearing a yarmulke and walking on the sidewalk. People beaten for wearing a star of David around their neck. Calls to “kill all the Jews!.” Within the last 26 hours of writing this column, Jewish students were locked in a library on campus at Cooper Union college for their own protection from a “pro-Palestinian” rally occuring on the grounds. Threats deemed credible enough to shut down the Kosher dining hall at Cornell, driving Jewish students to hide in their dorm rooms.

Abroad, a synagogue in Berlin was firebombed with molotov cocktails. A crowd of hundreds of Muslim aggressors stormed the Dagestan airport in Russia, looking to lynch any Israeli Jews onboard a plane landing that had taken off from Tel Aviv airport in Israel. In France — with the third largest population of Jews in the world after the U.S. and Israel, entire neighborhoods are all but shut-off completely as reports of vandalism, harassment and physical assaults targeting Jews are up more than 500%.

So much of this can be directly attributed to the incredibly egregious and performative escalation of rhetoric online where hatred for Jews has become a daily trending topic on all platforms. Where the progressive left once banged a steady drumbeat of “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism!” mantras, they’ve all but completely abandoned that stance, sinking into a gross display of base hatred for Jews regardless of where they live or any connection they may have to Israel.

This is how a pogrom starts.

This is how a Holocaust starts.

The post This Is How a Pogrom Starts | Duly Noted appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.