A notorious anti-Zionist is invited to Passover.
This week, the Jewish comedian Modi showed a level of self-respect and clarity that Jews can no longer afford to live without.
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This is a guest essay by Mitch Schneider, who writes from Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The difference between someone who shows up for you and someone who shows up for the photo matters more now than it ever has.
The Jewish People have spent over two years watching institutions perform solidarity while communities bleed. Monday night, a comedian drew the line that most institutions haven’t.
Modi Rosenfeld has been making Jewish audiences laugh for 30 years — not for an audience that needs to see him, but for an audience that needs what he gives them: joy held together in a dark room, what he calls “Moshiach energy,” what keeps a people alive.
He and his husband Leo Veiga were in Israel in October 2023, midway through a tour. They got on one of the last flights out of Ben Gurion Airport. Leo, who grew up Catholic in Atlanta, met Modi on the New York City subway in 2015, keeps a kosher home, attends shul, and knows more about Jewish life than many people born into it. He built Modi’s career. He directed his comedy special. He is, as Modi has said, “an angel that came from heaven.” He is Modi’s manager.
Modi had a show in Paris three days after October 7th. He went.
“Here we are on the Monday after the war breaks out,” Modi said afterward, “and all you see in the audience before the show starts are people doom scrolling. And then the lights go out. And everybody just laughed for an hour.”
He’s ended every show since with Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem — performing for communities that lost people, toured Warsaw and Germany on what he calls his Reparations Tour, and shown up night after night for Jewish audiences who needed it. “Here we are some 75 years later,” he said of performing in formerly Nazi territory, “and there are no Nazis, but the Jews are having a comedy night.”
This past Monday night, at the 33rd Annual Downtown Seder at City Winery in Lower Manhattan, Leo read a Jewish Insider report and saw that New York City’s new mayor, the proudly anti-Zionist Zohran Mamdani, was also on the program. They’d been booked months ago. Nobody had told them.
Modi wasn’t the only Israeli watching.
Shai Davidai, an Israeli professor who spent nearly two years at Columbia University watching his university look the other way while Jewish students were targeted, harassed, and told their experience wasn’t real, posted five words: “This is why we’re losing.”
Davidai was suspended from parts of campus for confronting his university’s leadership over its indifference to antisemitism. The investigation was closed without finding wrongdoing and he left Columbia voluntarily in July 2025. He knows exactly what it looks like when institutions use Jewish presence as cover for their own indifference.
Modi reposted it. Then he added his own statement: “Modi will no longer be attending.” He didn’t need to say more than that. He already had.
Modi understood exactly what he was quoting. Because what the organizers arranged at City Winery isn’t complicated once you see it. You take Modi Rosenfeld, someone whose 30 years of showing up for Jewish communities in dark rooms mean something real, and you put him on a program with a man whose record the Jewish community has every reason to fear. You don’t tell him until the day of the show. Then you let the photo happen. “Mamdani attends Passover seder alongside Israeli comedian and Israeli musicians.” The cover works. The credibility transfers. And the man whose whole career is built on showing up for his people becomes the face of a performance that has nothing to do with them.
Modi is a comedian, and the minute he walked into that room, his 30 years, his Moshiach energy, his Hatikvah would’ve become part of Mamdani’s image management — his joy, his people, borrowed for a photo.
Zohran Mamdani has a record. He manages it with optics. Days before the Seder, he helped load Passover food for Orthodox families in Brooklyn. He met an Orthodox businessman and was shown a Civil War-era Haggadah. He shows up. He smiles. He manages.
The record doesn’t go away because of the photos.
In 2017, before politics, Mamdani released a rap track under the name Mr. Cardamom. In it he rapped: “My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ‘em up.” The Holy Land Five are the five leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, convicted by a federal jury in 2008 on 108 counts of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. A 2004 federal civil trial found them liable for the murder of a Jewish boy from New York City, killed outside Jerusalem. When he ran for mayor, Mamdani said the song was about growing up Muslim in New York.
On January 1, 2026, hour one of his inauguration, Mamdani’s administration revoked the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism and the law restricting city officials from participating in BDS boycotts. Not week two, hour one, before a single meeting — that was a priority for New York City, apparently.
Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, liked Instagram posts on October 7, 2023 captioned “breaking the walls of apartheid” that showed Hamas terrorists breaching the Israel-Gaza fence. She liked a post calling sexual violence at the Nova Music Festival a fabricated hoax. The Free Press and Jewish Insider confirmed over 70 radical anti-Israel posts in total that Duwaji liked. When asked at a press conference, Mamdani said his wife is a “private person.” He condemned nothing.
It was also revealed recently that his wife contributed an illustration to a book featuring Susan Abulhawa, who has called Jewish people “parasites,” “demons,” and “Jewish supremacist vampires.” Mamdani called the comments reprehensible. Abulhawa responded by urging her followers to focus on, in her own words, “Jewish supremacist zionist ghouls.” Mamdani moved on.
At a Ramadan event, he was introduced by a man who reportedly called for Hamas to bomb Tel Aviv. He stood there.
When protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue chanting “Globalize the intifada!” and screaming antisemitic slurs at Jewish counter-protesters, his office put out a statement that mentioned neither Jews nor antisemitism and said the synagogue shouldn’t be used to promote “activities in violation of international law.” The mob was outside. The synagogue got the rebuke.
When a second mob gathered outside Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills chanting “We support Hamas here!” and “Death to the IDF!” two yeshivot sent children home and the synagogue canceled prayer services. Mamdani said nothing.
When the City Council passed a bill to protect houses of worship from exactly these protests, 44 to 5, Mamdani refused to say if he’d sign it. His City Hall counsel explained the mayor “does not view protest as a security concern.” Schoolchildren were sent home from yeshiva because a mob was chanting for Hamas outside. No security concern.
Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City rose 182 percent in his first month in office, this past January, according to New York Police Department figures. He changed the subject and loaded Passover food in Brooklyn.
That’s the record. Modi saw it in 30 seconds. Some of the Jewish institutional world has been looking at it for three months and is still inviting him to the table.
Michael Dorf has run the Annual Downtown Seder since 1993. He hosted Mamdani for Yom Kippur last year. He knows exactly who Mamdani is, and who Modi is. He put them on the same program. He said nothing to Modi.
That’s not a scheduling oversight; it’s a calculation. Tell Modi in advance and he says no. Don’t tell him and his presence does the work. All of it, the 30 years, Hatikvah, the Warsaw shows, the grieving communities, lending weight to a man whose wife believes the well-documented sexual violence at the Nova Music Festival is a hoax and who rapped his love for convicted Hamas funders.
Dorf described the seder as being about “asking urgent questions, about freedom, responsibility, and how we care for one another.” Fair enough. Modi asked the urgent question. The answer was two sentences.
What’s left at the table is TV host Don Lemon, who has claimed Israel is guilty of war crimes, and a liberal rabbi beamed in via livestream from Israel. People who already agree with Mamdani, performing Passover for a sold-out crowd who came for exactly that. That’s not Jewish outreach; it’s a controlled environment dressed up as courage.
Passover isn’t a dinner for famous people. It’s the story of the Jewish People leaving slavery in Egypt on their way to Israel. Every cup poured, every piece of matzah broken, every “Next year in Jerusalem” are ancient and not remotely a metaphor. You can’t celebrate that story while advancing politics that target the Jewish state. You can’t honor Jewish indigeneity while working to deny it.
Sitting at the Passover table while calling Israel genocidal isn’t bridge-building; it’s a contradiction so fundamental that Modi saw it the moment Leo read the report.
There’s a class of Jewish institutional professionals, communal leaders with constituencies to protect, organizations with boards to answer to, who keep walking into rooms where their presence is the whole point.
They keep lending the community’s face to people whose record doesn’t support what that presence implies.
They keep telling themselves that “staying in the conversation” is always better than stepping out of it, that the photo op is less dangerous than the absence, that there’s always a “path to influence” by remaining at the table.
What happens in New York doesn’t stay in New York. The largest Jewish population outside Israel is governed by a man who rapped his love for convicted Hamas funders and then showed up to a Passover seder. When Jewish institutions keep showing up alongside him, it sends a signal to every room that’s watching what the Jewish community will and won’t accept.
Modi didn’t calculate any of that. He saw the name, understood immediately what had been arranged, and removed himself — not because he’s a strategist, but because he’s a comedian who has spent 30 years showing up for his people and knows the difference between authenticity and being used as cover at his own people’s expense.
Shai Davidai named the pattern after nearly two years of watching it up close at Columbia University. Modi recognized it the same day. The Jews and Jewish institutions still at Michael Dorf’s table should ask themselves why it took a comedian to say no.
We think we know the answer. The Jewish People have spent too long at tables where their presence is the price of admission and their silence is the expectation. Modi didn’t pay that price. He walked out before the first cup of wine. And Leo, a man who chose the Jewish People, who keeps Shabbat and has learned the prayers and has spent a decade building a career that brings joy to their communities, read the report and told Modi what he’d found.
That’s not a protest, but it is what self-respect looks like, even when it costs something.
WOW!!! Love Modi even more now.
Modi, Leo and Shai are heroes of the Jewish people 🩵 It’s really important to be clear that Mamdani is an Antizionist (one word). Antizionism is a hate movement against Jews just as antisemitism is a hate movement against Jews. Anti-Zionism was the debate between Jews on whether it was safer to live in their own country or to continue to live in other countries and the Holocaust proved the latter wrong. Just as antisemitism is not a debate about Semitism, antizionism is not a debate about Zionism. Both are hate movements against Jews.