Alas, it is so hard to be an Approved Jew™ these days, meaning, of course, approved by the ‘progressive’ left. A ‘good’ Jew. Not long ago, all you needed to do to was denounce the Israeli government, rant about the ‘illegal’ settlements and the treatment of the Palestinian people, and support their right to a state. But that’s not enough anymore.

To really distinguish yourself and establish your Approved Jew™ credentials, you must publicly denounce the very existence of Israel and the Jews who support it, distancing yourself from those icky people as much as possible. If you express anguish over 7 October or the hostages, or say anything untoward about Hamas, you risk losing your Approved Jew™ status, as gender goddess Judith Butler found to her shock.

Ideally, your proclamation of allegiance to the Temple of Approved Jews™ should involve a performative perversion of Jewish canon, practices or history (of which you may be ignorant, but your Jewish identity is ‘your truth’ and unassailable under the Prevailing orthodoxy). For example, you could attend a sham Jewish service wearing a keffiyeh like a tallis (Jewish prayer shawl). Or, like Naomi Klein, you could appropriate a Jewish festival and invert its meaning, while demonising those who adopt a more traditional approach.

A transcript of Klein’s speech delivered at the ‘Emergency Seder in the Streets of New York City’ has just been published in the Guardian under the heading, ‘We need an exodus from Zionism’. It was a speech as half-baked as the Israelites’ bread on fleeing Egypt. While Jews sat at the Seder table telling the story of our liberation, freighted with extra meaning as we looked upon the empty seat symbolising the 133 hostages still unliberated by Hamas, and declaimed ‘Next Year in Jerusalem!’ as we do every Passover, Klein scolded Jews who worship the ‘false idol of Zionism’. It has ‘…led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that has them justifying the shredding of core commandments,’ she said.

Klein’s Seder was evidently more in the tradition of the Israelites who, according to various scholars, chose not to leave Egypt, preferring the certainty of subjugation to the vagaries of self-determination.

Another famous person who fits my definition of the Approved Jew™ is actress Miriam Margoyles – the one who talks lots about farts and vaginas yet admonishes adult Harry Potter fans to ‘grow up’. In early April, in a video shared by the Jewish Council of Australia, she pontificated that, ‘To me, it seems as if Hitler has won. He’s changed us Jews from being compassionate and caring into this vicious, genocidal, nationalist nation, pursuing and killing women and children.’ She urged Jews to voice their ‘detestation of the Israeli actions’ and start ‘behaving in accordance with Jewish tradition’.

And we must acknowledge Jonathan Glazer. On accepting the Oscar for a movie that people thought was a drama about a historical event but was apparently instead a morality play to ‘reflect and confront us in the present’, he declared, ‘We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.’ Many people have inconclusively parsed that syntax – so tortured that it surely reflects the nature of his soul – but we can still give Glazer his Approved Jew™ dues.

Dissent is not what distinguishes Approved Jews™. Like all communities, Jewish people, who are famously disputatious, have disagreements. Rather, what distinguishes them is the ruthless zeal with which they throw other Jews (the immoral ones, the vicious genocidal ones, the hijacking ones) under the bombed-out bus, emboldening others to do the same. The price of admission to the Temple of Approved Jews™ is a sanctimonious sacrifice.

Take Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg for inspiration, a professional anti-racist who identifies as a ‘queer, multi-racial, Jewish and Chinese woman of colour’. She led the recent infamous doxxing campaign that targeted the WhatsApp group of 600 Australian Jewish creatives, at significant personal cost to many of them.

The long history of antisemitism is littered with Jews who kosherise, partake in and incite Jew-hatred – Menelaus in the Seleucid Empire, Nicholas Donin and Johannes Pfefferkorn of medieval Europe, and Stella Goldschlag and Vital Hasson under the Nazis. By allowing their Jewishness to be hijacked, to borrow a phrase, Approved Jews™ provide a shield and a sword for Jew-haters.

I don’t hate Jews, they now say. I like the anti-Zionist ones (all 5 per cent or so of them). I don’t hold antisemitic beliefs, they say. Other Jews agree with me. And you too could be an Approved Jew™, they say, if you just changed your ways.

But Jewish history is perpetuated not by Approved Jews™, but by Steadfast Jews – those who resisted redemption by Christianity or Islam, under the Spanish Inquisition and in the Soviet Union, who refused to pay the price for approval and act as pawns and pimps for tyrants and illiberal forces. Instead they maintained their unacceptable beliefs or practices, sometimes on pain of death, expulsion, or loss of livelihood.

Today, if Jews refuse redemption through renouncing what for the vast majority of us is an integral part of our identity – the right of Israel to continue to exist as the homeland for the Jewish people – we are told we are not entitled to live safely as equal members of society, or manifest our Jewishness in whatever form that takes, or have our concerns acknowledged and acted upon, or organise and advocate for ourselves.

The trap is set so that Jews are now presumed guilty of the charge of supporting genocide/apartheid/ethnic cleansing/colonisation, and our acceptance in society is increasingly conditioned on proving our innocence. But to do so we must submit to a humiliating show trial that requires allowing a double standard to prevail and accepting that the antisemite has jurisdiction over us. As the saying goes: the antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence.

Since 7 October, more and more Jews are being told to turn out their pockets and are refusing to do so. Passover, as with Jewish continuity itself, is the story of Jews who embraced hope, freedom and self-determination, not those who chose to remain enslaved.