The Washington Uprising, 1968

The Washington Uprising, 1968

Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections

2015

Moshe Kornfield, Scott Meyer, Elias Sacks, Stephanie Yuhas, Andrew Violet, Jane Thaler

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In an interview, Waskow compared the soldiers he saw on the streets of Washington with the soldiers of the Pharaoh, the king who enslaved the ancient Jews in the Bible: “I walked home, to get ready for the seder, and that meant walking past the army, with a machine gun pointed at the block I lived on, and my kishkes, my guts, began to say, this is pharaoh’s army!” (NPR interview, April 4, 2015) Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The brutal killing of a champion of nonviolence was followed by riots in over 100 cities across the United States. The national uprising was particularly intense in Washington, D.C., where large portions of the city were destroyed and crowds nearly reached the White House. When the Jewish holiday of Passover arrived one week later, the U.S. military —which had been called in to Washington, D.C. in the wake of these events— remained entrenched in the city. Arthur Waskow began to connect the story of the Exodus with the city in flames. These associations ultimately led Waskow to create the Freedom Seder. The Washington Uprising