Pesach (Passover) this year conveys a stark message that is impossible to gloss over or ignore.

As Jews worldwide sit down to their Seder and recite the narrative of the exodus from slavery and bondage to freedom and sovereignty, the reality of current events will be foremost on their minds.

It still remains to be seen whether Israelis will be able to enjoy an uninterrupted evening or whether alerts and sirens will punctuate the evening’s proceedings.

The annual influx of pilgrims coming to Israel for the Festival of Freedom has been severely curtailed as flights are cancelled and Ben Gurion Airport operates on a restricted schedule.

Christian pilgrims intending to visit for Easter have also been affected.

As a consequence, hotels will be empty, although many are filled with evacuees from the north and displaced citizens whose homes have been destroyed or severely damaged by Iranian barrages.

Where will Israeli families celebrate Seder this year?

Large family gatherings will be problematic, especially if there is no reinforced room or shelter nearby. Travelling to and from destinations is fraught with uncertainty, as one never knows when the sirens will blast forth. Stopping your car at the side of the road has its own hazards because, apart from the danger of missile and interceptor debris hitting you, there is also the possibility that some lunatic driver might crash into your car. This has already happened several times.

Communal Seder gatherings also pose a challenge for elderly and physically impaired participants, as reaching a designated space in time can be difficult.

Pesach is traditionally a favourite time for many Israelis to make an exodus in reverse and flock to overseas venues in exotic places where communal celebrations are organised. This year it seems that option will be cancelled.

Numerous people are stuck overseas. They are stranded because airlines have ceased flying to Israel, and EL AL is having trouble repatriating them due to the uncertain situation. Those with families in foreign countries will at least be able to find accommodation, but many others are finding it a daunting task and an economic nightmare.

As reservists are recalled to their IDF units, they leave behind wives and children as well as other dependents. These family members now have to cope on their own and face the challenge of not only organising a Seder without their spouse and partner but also the uncertainty of when they will be able to see them again.

Chol Hamoed, the intermediate days of the Festival, are usually a perfect time for family excursions to nature reserves and other outdoor attractions. It is spring, and the prospect of better weather is a good opportunity to enjoy the great outdoors. School is out for a week, and children are looking forward to fun times.

With daily alerts and sirens, it is highly unlikely that barbecues and picnics will be on the agenda this year.

This year’s Pesach celebrations for Jewish communities in the Diaspora will also take place in the shadow of uncertainty and a certain amount of danger.

Since 7 October 2023, the rise of hate and incitement has accelerated beyond most people’s imagination. It has now returned as an endemic and chronic manifestation, infecting vast swathes of humanity worldwide.

This ancient plague, which has mutated into a frenzy of anti Zionist/Israel/ Jew hate, presents a growing and lethal danger to Jewish communities.

As Australian Jews have learnt to their bitter cost, communal celebrations of religious occasions attract the vile attention of those sections of society who have been infected by generations of perverted education and brainwashing.

How are Diaspora Jews going to cope this year?

Communal Seders are a standard feature of many Jewish communities.

Given the current threats lurking in most countries, will these gatherings be held this year? If so, what security arrangements will be in place to ensure safety? Will participants be too scared to gather together in large groups?

What security will be provided by Government agencies? Will they make the usual banal declarations or will they actually take concrete measures to protect Synagogues and communal gatherings?

More importantly, what worthwhile steps will Governmental and local authorities take to tackle the root cause of this rising tsunami of Jew hate and violence?

It is a waste of time to talk about “social cohesion” when those plotting social evil are not dealt with in any meaningful way.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

This question from the Haggadah has real relevance this year.

It focuses our minds on the experiences of our ancestors over the millennia. There have been occasions in almost every century when the commemoration of Pesach has had to be observed in the most trying of circumstances and in many cases at life-threatening moments.

Whether it was the Inquisition or hate-filled pogrom mobs, Nazi genocidal officials or Soviet secret police, the scenario was always the same. Today’s haters, inspired by jihadist agendas to eliminate the nation-state of the Jews, all follow a familiar script.

As we recite, “In every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us” the meaning couldn’t be clearer.

In Israel, this year, this declaration may very well be accompanied by the sounds of alerts and sirens heralding incoming missiles and drones. One cannot have a more dramatic Seder than when those trying to destroy us actually are doing so as we gather together.

Of course, there could be some unforeseen scenario that changes the situation at the last moment. There is talk of “deals” being concocted. One never knows which news might be fake and which might be true.

Whatever the situation might be, however, there is one overriding message at this time that remains constant.

The liberated Hebrew slaves left Egypt behind with one central aim in mind.

It would take forty years of trekking in a hostile wilderness, but that was the time required for them to be prepared to become sovereign in the Land promised to the Patriarchs generations previously.

In the process, they would receive their constitution at Mount Sinai and gradually transform from a collection of individuals into a nation of tribes ready, willing and able to defend themselves.

This lesson of Pesach is generally glossed over when politicians issue their usual quota of banal messages.

The Jewish People became sovereign in their land. They did not need the approval of the UN, EU or any other such group. They settled, built and developed Judea, Samaria, Hebron and Jerusalem well before either Islam or Christianity existed. This is the message which should be hammered home with emphatic clarity.

Chag Sameach. May “next year in rebuilt Jerusalem” be a reality rather than an annual pious recitation.

Robert Goldberg’s recent essay at the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism Substack, adapted from his book The Haggadah: Zionism’s Drama of Destiny, makes a powerful and timely argument: anti-Zionist Jews are not a modern phenomenon produced by Marxism or post-colonial theory, but an ancient archetype encoded in the Haggadah itself. Reading the Seder as political theology, Goldberg identifies Amalek — the tribe that attacked Israel in the wilderness, striking the weak and weary from the rear — as the transhistorical prototype of the Jew who uses intimate knowledge of the covenant to undermine Jewish national destiny. The Wicked Son, on this reading, is Amalek at the Seder table: the insider who withdraws from the collective with the word lachem — “to you,” not “to us” — and must be answered not with patience but with hakheh et shinav, blunting his teeth. Modern anti-Zionist Jews — Goldberg names Shaul Magid, Peter Beinart, and Judith Butler among others — are the latest incarnation of this archetype, providing the intellectual and moral cover that enables external enemies to assault Jewish legitimacy while claiming Jewish sanction.

Goldberg is right that the Haggadah anticipated these figures, and right that the proper response is exclusion rather than dialogue. But the archetype he chooses is the wrong one.

Two Tracks the Haggadah Never Conflates

The Haggadah carries two parallel and distinct theologies of threat, and it never mixes them.

The first is a theology of physical annihilation. It runs through the entire Seder as an unnamed but unmistakable thread. V’Hi She’amda — “and it is this that has stood by our fathers and us” — declares that in every generation enemies rise up l’chaloteinu, to destroy us utterly, and that God rescues us from their hand.

The Haggadah then identifies Laban as worse than Pharaoh: Pharaoh decreed death only for the males, but Laban sought l’akor et hakol — to uproot everything, to erase the Jewish people entirely.

And the Seder ends with Shfoch Chamatecha — “pour out Your wrath upon the nations that do not know You, who have devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitation.” We invoke divine fury against those who have consumed us physically.

This is the Amalek track: the recurring genocidal enemy, appearing in every generation under different names, always seeking the same thing.

The second is a theology of internal communal fracture. That is what the Wicked Son symbolizes. The Wicked Son is not trying to destroy anyone. He is trying to delegitimize Judaism as an insider, quoting the Torah. The Haggadah’s response to him is not a prayer for divine retribution. It is a sharp, deflating one-liner: “It is because of what God did for me when I left Egypt — for me, not for him.” Public mockery. A refusal to engage on his terms. The Wicked Son gets embarrassed, not cursed.

The Haggadah does not respond to the Wicked Son by asking God to pour out His wrath on him.

Jews have two types of enemies, external and internal. Both of them are dangerous. But each has its own methods and each requires different responses. Goldberg gets this wrong.

Amalek is Hamas. Amalek is Haman. Amalek is Hitler. The Wicked Son is something else entirely — and the right name for him, and for the organizations that have multiplied him into a faction, is Korach.

Korach: The Insider Who Weaponizes His Judaism

Korach (Numbers chapters 16-18) is the archetype Goldberg is actually describing. He is Jewish — unambiguously, consequentially Jewish. He is a Levite of distinguished lineage. And his entire attack on Moses derives its force from that standing. “You take too much upon yourselves, for all the congregation are holy” is not an external attack on Jewish leadership. It is a Jewish insider using Jewish language to claim that Jewish particular authority is illegitimate — that the community is better off without it.

This is the structure of “as a Jew, I oppose Zionism.” The phrase has no meaning without the insider credential. It exists to perform exactly what Korach performed: to use membership in the covenant community as the weapon against the covenant community’s legitimate governance. The Jewishness of Peter Beinart, Judith Butler, and the signatories of every Jewish Voice for Peace petition is not incidental to their argument. It is their argument.

Amalek needs no such credential. Amalek attacks from outside.

The Wicked Son Is a Korach, Not an Amalekite

The Wicked Son’s transgression is in his grammar: lachem, to you — a deliberate withdrawal from collective identity using the community’s own language and ritual occasion. He doesn’t crash the Seder as an outsider. He sits at the table and tries to destroy it s a Jew who has the right to be there.

That is Korach’s method, not Amalek’s.

But JVP and IfNotNow go further than the Wicked Son, and here the Korach parallel tightens further still. The Wicked Son at least tips his hand — his separation is legible. JVP still calls itself “Jewish.”. They are a Korach faction: people who manufacture the appearance of a legitimate communal plurality to give outside powers Jewish cover for anti-Jewish positions.

What “Blunt His Teeth” Actually Means

The Haggadah’s instruction to respond to the Wicked Son is “hakheh et shinav”, usually translated as “blunt his teeth” and treated as a metaphor for firm pedagogical correction. But the actual response to the Wicked Son in the text is not a correction — it is a rebuke laced with mockery: “You call yourself one of us, but had you been in Egypt, you would have perished.” This is public embarrassment. The Haggadah recognizes that the Wicked Son’s question is not really a question at all. It is a gotcha — a performance of cynicism designed to destabilize, not to inquire. The correct response to a gotcha is not engagement on its terms but to expose the performance for what it is, hold it up to ridicule, and deny it the dignity of a serious reply.

Applied to the individual anti-Zionist Jew, this means meeting his challenge with the dismissiveness it deserves. The most effective response to “as a Jew, I oppose Israel’s right to exist” is not a careful rebuttal of his historical claims. It is the observation that he has separated himself from the community at every single level – religious, national, political. It is publicizing that his “criticism” of Israel is nothing of the sort, but just wordplay to destroy the Jewish community from within. Movie critics don’t demand that all prints be destroyed, book critics don’t insist that books they don’t like be burned, critics of a nation do not say it should replaced with different people, a different religion and a different political system.

The parallel that should come to mind — and should trigger the same visceral communal response — is Jews for Jesus. Every Jew understands instinctively why Jews for Jesus is not a Jewish organization despite its name, its partial Jewish membership, and its insistence that it represents an authentic form of Jewish identity. Centuries of forced conversion and of Christian persecution carried out under the sign of the cross have taught us what it means when someone deploys Jewish identity in the service of a movement that targets Jewish continuity. We do not debate Jews for Jesus on their terms. We do not grant them space in Hillel or a table at the Jewish community fair. We recognize them immediately as people who weaponize Jewish identity against Jewish survival, and we reject them accordingly. Anti-Zionist Jewish organizations deserve exactly the same response, for exactly the same reason. The weapon is identical in structure: take the credential, hollow out its content, and turn it against the community that issued it.

But the Wicked Son is never alone. The Seder table also holds the Simple Son, who accepts things at face value, and the one who does not yet know how to ask — the young, the unmoored, the Jewishly undereducated who lack the framework to evaluate what they are hearing. For them, the performance of the Wicked Son is genuinely dangerous. They cannot see the gotcha for what it is. They cannot identify the selective deployment of Jewish identity as a weapon. To them, “as a Jew, I oppose this” sounds like evidence that serious, committed Jews have concluded Zionism is indefensible.

This is why the institutional response must be different in kind from the individual one. When Hillel or any Jewish communal organization faces a JVP chapter demanding equal representation as Jews, the question is not whether their arguments deserve refutation. The question is what message recognition itself sends to the Simple Sons in the room. Granting them a platform, treating their demands as legitimate communal discourse, engaging them in debate as though they were a genuine Jewish voice with genuine Jewish concerns, all teaches the uninformed observer that the community is genuinely divided, that the question of Jewish sovereignty is open, and that reasonable, Jewish-identified people have concluded Israel is a moral catastrophe.

None of that is true. All of it is the intended effect.

Hillels should reject JVP outright — not reluctantly, not with lengthy explanations that imply a close call, but clearly and with a reason stated plainly: this organization uses a Jewish name and Jewish membership to campaign for the elimination of the Jewish state, while its members’ Judaism exists in no other context. That is not a Jewish organization with whom we disagree. That is a Korach faction, and the communal response should be as unambiguous as what happened to Korach.

The Method: Pseudo-Argument for the Uninformed

Goldberg credits anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals with a sophistication they mostly don’t deserve. Korach’s arguments were not philosophically rigorous — they were designed to sound devastating to people without the background to answer them. The all-blue garment question (does it require the blue thread fringes?) isn’t a serious challenge to the laws of tzitzit. It’s a gotcha aimed at the unlearned, engineered to produce the reaction: this whole system is arbitrary nonsense. It works on the Simple Son. It fails immediately against anyone who actually knows something about the subject matter.

“Israel is an apartheid state” operates identically. It sounds authoritative to a college sophomore with no knowledge of Israeli law, South African history, or international legal definitions. It is not meant to persuade rabbis or historians. It is meant to produce, in the unformed Jewish mind, the reaction: wait, Zionism is just racism? The target is always the Simple Son — or the one who does not yet know how to ask. Korach didn’t need to win the argument. He needed to create enough doubt that Moses’s authority seemed contestable.

The Prescription Follows the Diagnosis

Amalek must be physically destroyed: the response is military. Korach must be communally rejected: the response is institutional. The earth swallowed Korach not as a metaphor for argument, but as a demonstration that the rebellion was completely illegitimate. The proper response to JVP is not refutation. It is defunding, deplatforming, and institutional exclusion, because a Korach faction is not owed a seat at the communal table it is working to dismantle. Answering their criticism is easy, and there is a way to do it, but not by platforming them as if their arguments have merit.

The Haggadah’s instruction about the Wicked Son is not answer him — it is blunt his teeth. Deny him the authority to define what the table means. Goldberg reaches this conclusion correctly. But the path there runs through Korach, not Amalek. Getting the archetype right is necessary for knowing what kind of war you are in — and knowing what kind of response wins it.

Look up Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, and you see his picture and his letterhead. But it’s not his handle.

As a result of that handle, the congressman has been criticized for postings that he didn’t make and opinions that he didn’t express—all while being stymied in his efforts to find out the identity of the person behind the phony handle.

“It’s all about deception, and I have a right to know who is doing this,” Smith told JNS. “I wanted to take it down, but I have a right to know at least who is smearing my name.”

“Somebody in that business over at X knows,” the congressman said. “Why could they know, and I can’t know?”

The account is listed as a “parody” on X, but that hasn’t stopped groups that support the long-term congressman from using that parody’s ChrisSmithNJCD4 handle when thanking him for his efforts in posts on X. (JNS sought comment from X.)

What galls Smith most of all, he said, is that the person behind the handle has used it to spread antisemitic and anti-Israel messages, even though the veteran lawmaker authored the law that made the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism and gave the special envoy ambassadorial rank.

He co-chairs the House Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism, and he’s used his chairmanship of a House Foreign Relations subcommittee to hold hearings on the issue.

“It’s been a lifetime of concern and work on behalf of it,” Smith told JNS.

The congressman still tells the story of his family’s sporting goods wholesale business, which was adjacent to a luncheonette where a Holocaust survivor, his tattooed number visible to all, dined regularly.

Smith said that his father wanted his children to talk to him, to ask questions of his experiences.

“My father made sure that my brother and I both had lunch with him,” Smith told JNS. “That’s why Holocaust remembrance is so important, because if you don’t remember it, you repeat the mistakes.”

“Those who forget the past are condemned to relive it,” he said.

Under Smith’s name on social media, however, are tweets such as, “I just spoke to my handler at AIPAC. We need to get American soldiers on the ground in Iran,” invoking the antisemitic trope of Jews controlling the world.

Another antisemitic trope says that “we in Congress are owned by Zionist Israel, and I’m ok with that.”

Some of the posts quote other articles and then comment on them. One quoting Pope Leo XIV criticizing violence against Palestinians calls the pope “an antisemite and a moron.”

Another has an article blaming former President George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq War on Israel, adding that “I know thousands of American soldiers died for Israel in Iraq, and will gladly do it again in Iran.”

Smith said he got an earlier phony account taken down, but X is refusing to budge on this one. Even though the page expressly says “parody” in two places, people apparently think that’s his official page, he said.

Anti-abortion groups, supporters of Smith’s efforts to highlight China’s efforts against the Muslim ethnic group the Uyghurs, opponents of wind energy off the Jersey shore and even the New Jersey Bankers Association have identified Smith by the phony handle as they praised his work, according to screenshots that Smith’s office shared with JNS.

“I think a lot of people are not aware as to what parody means,” Smith told JNS.

“If this thing is growing, this inauthentic account is going to deceive more people,” he said. “Especially overseas, where there’s a language barrier or something.”

The handle is “posting all these terrible things,” he said.

Smith is not on the social media site, so the phony page is the only one with his name.

He shut down his page on the site, then known as Twitter, in January 2021 citing “security concerns” two weeks after the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol.

Smith was one of the House Republicans who refused to overturn the certified election results that showed Joe Biden becoming president. “Divisive and hate-filled tweets have become far too frequent and impede the healing so needed today,” he said at the time.

Smith told JNS that he left the social media site for another reason. He was a leader of congressional efforts to oppose China’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s freedoms.

At one point, China declared that “any contact with a foreigner constitutes a violation,” Smith said. He took a look at his 15,000 followers from Hong Kong and said, “Oh God, they’re going to use that. It’s a hit list for them.”

“So I got off for that reason as well,” he told JNS.

But X won’t do anything to quiet this fake account, Smith said.

He said that he even went up to the site’s owner, Elon Musk, at a House Republican gathering to ask him to take action. Musk told him to contact one of his top officials. Nothing happened.

“That’s why I’ve been profoundly disappointed in Twitter, or X,” Smith told JNS. “We sent letters. We did everything by the book to say, ‘This is an impersonation. It’s malevolent. It is deceptive, and your own policy suggests at least that you want none of that, and it’s absolutely designed to mislead people.’”

At the very least, Smith said, X should let him know who’s behind the site.

“They owe me to tell me who it is,” he said. “There’s no right to secrecy when you’re engaging in such a very nefarious enterprise.”

“This is their word: ‘You may not impersonate other identities or individuals, groups or organizations to deceive them,’” he said. “This is all about deception. It’s all it is. I can’t believe they can’t see that.”