The concluding words of the Haggadah, “Next year in Jerusalem,” mean different things to different people. Illustration by Louis Keene

By Louis Keene April 11, 2025

The debate crops up on social media each spring: Is the Passover Seder Zionist? Or is it, in fact, the exact opposite?

Like most Jewish questions, it depends on who you ask.

“It is impossible to have an anti-Zionist Passover,” pro-Israel advocacy group Stop Antisemitism posted Tuesday on X. “The Exodus from slavery in Egypt was a journey toward Zion—the land promised by G-d.”

“It is impossible to have a Zionist Seder,” Zachary Foster, a pro-Palestinian writer, quipped in response. “You cannot celebrate freedom while supporting the enslavement of millions of Palestinians.”

The Passover Seder, despite being some 2,000 years old, might just be the ultimate Rorschach test for contemporary Israel discourse. Yet behind today’s argument around Zionism and the Seder is an age-old tension at the heart of Jewish philosophy.

It’s easy to understand why the Passover Haggadah, which tells the story of the Jews’ miraculous redemption from slavery in Egypt, sounds like a Zionist story to many Sedergoers. A yearning for the Jews’ ancestral homeland courses through the story: The telling of the original exile from Canaan, the lines about repatriation in “Dayenu” and the Hallel prayer and, famously, the parting line of the Seder: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

*checks the end of the Haggadah written 1000 years ago and sees this* https://t.co/RGqxoNNTBu pic.twitter.com/58oYqdGF9q

— Eli Lebowicz (@EliLebowicz) April 10, 2025

And yet, looked at another way, the holiday’s themes can also speak to a Palestinian narrative. The Haggadah emphasizes the brutality of subjugation, and introduces the Ten Plagues as a violent, morally acceptable form of pressure to escape it. And the Seder’s central theme of liberation evokes Palestinian dreams of self-determination. (You’ve probably heard the chants.)

Even the phrase “next year in Jerusalem” could have Palestinian connotations; they’ve lived there for a long time, too. So when — and how — did that line about Jerusalem become the kicker of the Seder?

Rabbi Vanessa Ochs, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and the author of The Passover Haggadah: A Biography, told me that the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” appears in the earliest known Seder guide, a 900-year-old manuscript known as the Birds’ Head Haggadah. The phrase — in Hebrew, L’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim — appears in even older liturgical texts for Yom Kippur.

Back then, Ochs said in an email, the saying referenced a Messianic yearning for the rebuilding of the Holy Temple in that city and a return to worship there. That’s not the same thing as Zionism, a political movement that’s only about as old as the light bulb. (Palestinian nationalism could hardly be said to be older.) So while Ochs said she didn’t think the Seder was a Zionist celebration — that would be Yom Ha’atzmaut — it’s probably not inherently anti-Zionist either.

Undergirding this Zionist/anti-Zionist Seder debate is whether the Passover Seder is about liberation generally, or Jewish liberation specifically. This question reflects a broader tension between universalism and particularism in Jewish tradition, according to Rabbi Mel Gottlieb, President Emeritus of the Academy of Jewish Religion–California.

Pay attention, and you’ll find these aspects in combination all over Judaism: Yom Kippur is about both the universal practice of seeking or extending forgiveness, and the particularist urgency of atoning for Jewish transgressions; the Holocaust teaches lessons about both the specific threat of antisemitism and the broader danger of hate toward all minority groups.

In Gottlieb’s view, the Passover story has room for particularism and universalism, and thus, both Zionists and anti-Zionists belong at the Seder table. But they shouldn’t start a food fight.

“When one side gets too extreme, it throws off the balance,” Gottlieb said. “But we grow through this tension. If people would listen to each other, we can expand our consciousness.”

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