I am Jewish because all of my fathers and mothers before me were Jewish.

I am Jewish because I grew up on the south side of Chicago where even my public school was Jewish.

I am Jewish because my grandfather was oh so Jewish and I felt it then and feel it now.

I am Jewish because of the angry Irish boys who could feel my Jewish nose at the end of their Catholic fist.

I am Jewish because we are commanded to remember when we were slaves in the land of Egypt and I do.

I am Jewish because we are commanded to seek justice and because I believed my teachers who said we must do so.

I am Jewish because I have never felt any other way.

I am Jewish because dissent is my faith.

I am Jewish because I learned Hebrew and then forgot nearly every word of it.

I am Jewish because in my grandmother's kitchen nothing would rise, but of everything there was plenty.

I am Jewish because the South Shore Country Club was founded by people who wouldn't let us in.

I am Jewish because my Dad once slugged a guy at Comiskey Park who cussed a Jewish pitcher for the White Sox.

I am Jewish because the Jewish god is not diminished by my disbelief.

I am Jewish because Rabbi Teller bar mitzvah'd my Dad and, although retired by then, bar mitzvah'd me, too.

I am Jewish because I wouldn't have it any other way.

I am Jewish because Emma Goldman was Jewish, and so was Karl Marx and so was Groucho Marx and Jesus, too, for that matter.

I am Jewish because of the Maccabees and Masada and crusader violence and Spanish inquisitors and Cossack pogroms and the Warsaw ghetto and the Shoah and the Land of Milk and Honey and because I also planted trees in Israel.

I am Jewish because Jews have paid for their disbelief in the Christian god.

I am Jewish because Jews fought in labor struggles and because Jews joined the Freedom Riders and because a preferential option for the poor is a mandate, not a choice.

I am Jewish because being Jewish means never using violence against another except when life, itself, is directly threatened, and because being Jewish means that principle must never be compromised.

I am Jewish because what else would I be?

But how much longer can I remain Jewish when to be Jewish now means no quarter for Palestinians, no justice for Palestinians?

How much longer can I remain Jewish when to be Jewish means Jewish rage, means total military victory, means a final solution to the Palestinian problem?

In the final act I find, for the first time in my life, that being Jewish may also mean agony and shame and others deciding what being Jewish means.

And so to be Jewish must finally mean, I cannot let that happen.

If next year, the seder is to be in Jerusalem, I will share the Passover meal with my Palestinian brothers and sisters. If not, then I choose exile.

I am Jewish because if you come for the Palestinians, you must come for me, also.