Every year at the Seder table, Jews across the world fulfill one of the most powerful commandments in the entire Bible: Telling the story of the Exodus, of God, by His own mighty hand, bringing the Children of Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. The holiday and the story create a generational link that marks the beginning of the nation that is today, the modern state of Israel. This story, perhaps the most famous story of all mankind, has remained unchanged and unchallenged since it was first told on the eve of the exodus.
But that is changing, and some people are rewriting this section of the Bible and turning it into a “woke” antisemitic manifesto.
This Pesach, two separate events, one a 68-page anti-Zionist manifesto masquerading as a Haggadah, the other a “postmodern” Manhattan dinner party attended by New York City’s antisemitic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, made clear that a coordinated effort is underway to strip Pesach of its God, its land, and its people.
Not Quite the Jewish Voice They Claim
While the Anti-Defamation League describes Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) as “the largest and most influential Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the United States,” JVP describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.” That claim deserves scrutiny. Its stated strategy is to create “a wedge” within the American Jewish community, while working toward the goal of eliminating U.S. economic, military, and political aid to Israel. With 35 chapters across the United States, more than 32,000 “active dues-paying members, millions of dollars in donations, nearly half a million followers on Facebook, and 75,000 followers on Twitter, JVP is a leader in antisemitic/anti-Israel Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaigns. JVP supports and promotes the Palestinian narrative of “Nakba” (referring to the establishment of the State of Israel as a “catastrophe”), as well as a Palestinian “right of return,” which, if implemented, would mean the elimination of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. The group has embraced and advocated on behalf of Palestinian terrorists such as Ahmed Sa’adat and Rasmea Odeh. Similarly, JVP regularly justifies and excuses Palestinian violence.
JVP is part of a network of NGOs that promote artificial and manufactured definitions of apartheid to extend the ongoing campaigns that seek to delegitimize and demonize Israel. JVP has routinely accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza while lobbying to end Holocaust education in some states.
In May 2023, Dr. Hatem Bazian, a Muslim Palestinian-American professor and a prominent anti-Zionist activist, accidentally exposed himself as one of the people writing content for JVP’s social media. During Israel’s “Shield and Arrow” military operation, Bazian meant to post a condemnation of CNN anchor Jake Tapper from the JVP Twitter account. Instead, he posted it from his own personal account. The tweet read: “Jake Tapper, your reporting on Rashida Tlaib’s Nakba 75 event was racist and anti-Palestinian. As Jews who believe in human rights and justice, we demand you do better.” The phrase “as Jews”, written by a Muslim who is not Jewish by any standard, encapsulates JVP’s entire operation. The post was deleted the next day, but not before it was screenshotted and circulated widely. Several other JVP tweets with nearly identical messaging were found to have come from Palestinian activists around the same time.
This was not the first crack in the facade. In 2019, Facebook’s transparency feature revealed that the administrator of JVP’s Facebook page was based in Lebanon, a country with approximately 20 elderly Jews remaining, making it effectively impossible that the page was being managed by a Jewish community member. JVP subsequently attempted to obscure this information.
JVP sends email action alerts encouraging followers, Jewish or not, to post “as Jews” on social media. Bazian claimed he had simply clicked on one of JVP’s automated action alert tools that generated the tweet. If that is the case, the question becomes: why is JVP not vetting that those who post “as Jews” are actually Jews? The organization’s own FAQ carefully states only that “the vast majority” of its members and staff are Jewish, a formulation that implicitly acknowledges the rest are not.
The Talmud teaches davar she’b’minyan tzarich minyan, a ruling that was established by a count requires a count to undo it. JVP established its entire authority on the claim of Jewish identity. That identity turns out to be, at least in part, a performance, written by non-Jews, administered from Lebanon, and tweeted by a Muslim professor who forgot to switch accounts.
The Haggadah That Replaced God with Gaza
JVP’s 2026 “Anti-Zionist Multi-Tendency Haggadah” includes contributions from 24 members of the JVP community — ritual leaders, cultural workers, secular Jews, and members of JVP’s Rabbinical Council and Havurah Network. The group has shown instances of open support for terrorism, including the publication of a poster featuring Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled alongside the slogan “L’chaim Intifada!”
The document’s introduction frames the entire Seder as a political fight targeting Israel. JVP frames the evening as a fight “for the freedom of Palestinians and all people in a time of genocide and fascism,” declaring that “opposing Pharaohs is a Jewish tradition.” God is conspicuously absent from this framing. The stated goal, repeated in both the 2025 and 2026 editions, is unambiguous: “To reclaim our holiday of liberation is to reclaim Judaism from and build it beyond Zionism.” That sentence is not a policy critique. It is a theological declaration that Judaism and Zionism are incompatible, and that Pesach must be used to prove it.
The perversion of Pesach begins at the Seder plate itself. The traditional ke’ara holds items whose meaning is fixed and ancient: maror (bitter herbs) for the bitterness of slavery, charoset for the mortar the Israelites made in Egypt, the shank bone recalling the Passover sacrifice. JVP’s Haggadah adds new items stripped of their Jewish meaning entirely. According to informational materials distributed at JVP events, strawberries on the Seder plate represent Gaza, and olives represent destroyed Palestinian olive groves. The ke’ara — the most visible symbol of Jewish memory — is turned into a Palestinian political statement.
The irony of the strawberry symbol cuts deep. Strawberry cultivation in Gaza began in 1967, the very year Israeli administration of the territory began. It was Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture that introduced the cultivation of strawberries into Gaza farms, many of which were, in fact, owned and operated by Israeli farmers and not by Palestinians. JVP’s revolutionaries apparently did not check the origins of their own symbol.
One of the four cups of wine for the Passover Seder is dedicated to the BDS movement.
The traditional Maggid, the heart of the Seder, the retelling of the Exodus, is where the hijacking is most brazen. Where the traditional Haggadah tells the story of God bringing the Jewish people toward the Promised Land, JVP’s text turns that destination into a crime. As the 2025 edition states: “The Israelites would go on to wander for forty years in the desert before killing and displacing people in pursuit of the Promised Land. Tonight we acknowledge that the Jewish tradition contains both freedom stories and conquest stories, narratives of supremacy and narratives that teach us about the sacredness of all life.” The land God swore to give Israel as an everlasting inheritance, Eretz Yisrael, is rebranded as the original act of colonial violence.
The Urchatz, the traditional handwashing that opens the Seder, is dedicated in JVP’s text to “the Palestinian People, Land and Waters,” drawing explicit parallels between the establishment of Israel and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Yachatz, the ritual breaking of the matzah, is repurposed as a call to shatter “the systems of empire and domination,” paired with a BDS petition targeting Israel Bonds. The Maggid section instructs participants to lift the Seder plate over an empty space symbolizing Gaza, to dip their food repeatedly “until Palestine is free,” and to link the four traditional questions to “genocide,” “horrors,” and “crimes” of Israel.
The traditional Eser Makot, the Ten Plagues, are the miraculous acts by which God forced Pharaoh to free the Jewish people. JVP replaces them with what it calls the “Ten Plagues of Genocidal Zionism,” accusing Israel of destroying humanity, empathy, soul, perspective, allies, and truth. The Hallel, the Psalms of praise Jews have sung to God in gratitude for the Exodus for thousands of years, is replaced with political essays. One passage asks: “Can this be a holiday of liberation when it rests upon the fantasy of a divine land grant and colonial project?”
That phrase “fantasy of a divine land grant” is the document’s theological core. It is not a critique of Israeli policy. It is a rejection of the Bible and the covenant between God and the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, andJacob. And it is being written, at least in part, by people who are not Jewish.
The Mayor Who Removed the Destination
On Monday, March 30, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared at what one publication described as “half postmodern religious ritual and half cabaret,” Michael Dorf’s 33rd annual Downtown Seder at City Winery in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Observant Jewish comedian Modi Rosenfeld pulled out after learning Mamdani would appear, with his team stating: “We were not told Mamdani was participating in this event until today.” It is worth noting that JVP Action actively endorsed and campaigned for Mamdani, who was elected mayor of New York City in November 2025.
Mamdani delivered his version of the Exodus story. “Liberation was not realized when Moses demanded, ‘Let my people go,’ nor was it delivered when God intervened with the plagues,” he said. “Liberation was attained when the Jewish people came together to escape their enslavement in Egypt, neighbor helping neighbor, protecting one another, and sharing what little they had.”
In one paragraph, Mamdani erased God from the Exodus entirely. More tellingly, he erased the destination. In his version of the Biblical Exodus, liberation was achieved the moment the Jews left Egypt, full stop. There is no Sinai. There is no covenant. There is no Promised Land. The story simply ends at the moment of departure, which is precisely where JVP’s Haggadah also tries to end it.
Mamdani then invoked Abraham Joshua Heschel’s march in Selma and Henry Moskowitz’s co-founding of the NAACP, tying the Passover story to American progressive politics and, by extension, his own opposition to immigration enforcement. He did not mention God once. He did not mention Israel once.
Several attendees said at the evening’s conclusion that they had not known the mayor was slated to appear and questioned his understanding of the holiday’s core narrative. One attendee put it plainly: “It feels inauthentic to have him speak about matzah or Judaism, when the whole holiday is about Jews who were enslaved by Pharaoh and then went back to the homeland of Israel.”
What Is Being Stolen
Robert Goldberg, author of The Haggadah: Zionism’s Drama of Destiny, identifies the strategy with precision. “Their aim is straightforward,” he writes: “Sever the Exodus from its promised destination. Transform Passover from a narrative of national rebirth into a moral indictment of Jewish power. Substitute Jerusalem with vague universalism. Replace sovereignty with contrition.” Both JVP and Mamdani executed that strategy this week — one in print, one on a stage — and the Seder plate strawberry, meant to mourn Gaza, inadvertently tells you everything you need to know about the accuracy of the narrative they’re selling.
Goldberg is right that the anti-Zionists “grasp a truth that eludes many mainstream Jewish institutions: politics flow downstream from liturgy.” The Haggadah has transmitted Jewish identity across millennia of exile precisely because it plants the Land of Israel at the center of Jewish memory and Jewish hope. Drain that out, replace the Land with Gaza, replace God with solidarity, replace L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim (Next year in Jerusalem) with “until Palestine is free,” and you have not created a more universal Judaism. You have created a Judaism whose children will have no reason to remain Jewish at all.
The traditional Haggadah describes the rasha, the wicked child, not by his cruelty, but by a single word: “you.” He asks, “What does this service mean to you?” By saying “you” instead of “us,” he excludes himself from the Jewish people. The Sages instruct us to blunt his teeth: tell him, “It is because of what God did for me when I came out of Egypt. For me, and not for him. Had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.”
JVP published the rasha‘s question and bound it in a cover. Mamdani read it from a stage at City Winery. A Muslim professor tweeted it under the byline “as Jews.” And they put a strawberry on the Seder plate, a fruit that exists in Gaza precisely because of Israeli agricultural ingenuity and administration, and called it resistance.
As Goldberg concludes, the battle over Zionism “is no longer confined to campuses, protests, or faculty lounges. It has moved to the Seder table. Which is exactly where it belongs. Because the real battle was never only about territory; it was about memory.”
