In recent decades, the use of Passover as a metaphor to bolster all sorts of issues that are unrelated to the specifically Jewish subject matter of the seder has become commonplace. Since Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a political activist who came out of the far-left Jewish Renewal movement wrote his “Freedom Seder” in 1969, the holiday has been routinely hijacked to promote a variety of causes, good and bad—from the struggle for civil rights in the United States and feminism to radical environmentalism, open-borders policies on immigration and even, courtesy of the antisemitic Jewish Voice for Peace group, anti-Zionism.
So, the appearance of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at a “post-modern” seder held at Gotham’s City Winery was hardly groundbreaking. Though not intended as an actual Passover seder, but rather, as its promoters claimed, a “supplemental event,” its purpose was an attempt to use a sacred day on the Jewish calendar to pursue a different agenda.

We shouldn’t waste too much time complaining that Mamdani, whose celebrations of Muslim holidays at his Gracie Mansion official residence are rigorously orthodox, would likely regard similar parodies of his faith’s rituals and traditions as Islamophobic and might provoke violence from his supporters. But since, for good reason, neither American Jews nor Israelis think it sensible to mock and twist Islam in this manner, that’s not something likely to happen.

A parody seder
Those who attended and participated—like former CNN host turned left-wing political activist Don Lemon (who read a version of “The Four Questions”); Terence Floyd, the brother of Black Lives Matter icon George Floyd; and Israeli Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, better known as the “drag queen rebel” who challenges “patriarchy and supremacy” while playing a character called Hannah Gross—were not there to honor Jewish tradition.