Here is one possibility, the one taken up by this haggadah: our Jewishness can be a particular, concrete, socially embodied expression of the idea of abolishing social class which, for convenience, we call communism.

From the 2026 Red Haggadah

This Pesach, I wrote a new haggadah that I thought would be more adequate to the moment. Its sage rabbis are Badiou, Marx, Che, Luxemburg.

It is structured around several novel read-aloud sections: the first is on Jewishness, an analysis of its relation to the genocide of the Palestinians, and the possibility of making it mean participation in the class struggle instead.

As a response to the impossibility of imagining ourselves in 2026 as liberated, the seder also switched up the typical temporal vantage point:

The usual seder is in the past tense (“when I came forth out of Egypt,” etc.) We are looking backward at an already completed liberation, presumed to have taken place in a society which is in the actual past of our actual present world.

But our actual present world is not a liberated world. Therefore we will leave the purely backward gaze of the usual seder behind. However, all the ritual of Passover is based on the narrative device of looking backwards at a completed liberation, as well as a joyful atmosphere, and we can’t just throw all of that away.

We will conduct our seder from the point of view of an imagined future, looking back at our present world. We see ourselves as the inhabitants of this liberated future world, who took part in the process that produced it.

The usual plague narrative is augmented (not replaced!) with an interwoven narrative about how the centuries-long revolutionary process went.

The after-meal grace is a powerful excerpt from Rosa Luxemburg’s final letter to Klara Zetkin with a clear, simple message: steadfast commitment to communist practice is the way forward.

It closes with a new “hallel”, a meditation on historical contingency, the possibility of failure, and the necessity of persevering in spite of it.

We used this at the 2026 Red Seder, which brought together a few dozen lefty Jews in the bay and did as advertised have 2 accordions.

Check it out here, feel free to use it in your seder next year.

Notes on design

I created a few novel design elements for this haggadah. The first was the random tick marks to indicate block quotes (see p. 4 or 6 e.g.) These create a sense of dynamism when printed in the alternate color.

The second was randomized zigzags to bracket portions in the Egypt narrative. The lines to me feel ancient, evocative of straight-line writing in stone tablets like Paleo-Hebrew, although this I was not conscious of this when I designed it.

Alternate color Hebrew section headings in line with the English I think was also a nice element.

Images

The image of paths opposite the “hallel” illustrate the different paths history could have taken, and of course the ultimately successful “red” path which we walked, itself full of reversals.

The opening image of flowers represents springtime.

The closing image of the Pacific Ocean represents the oneness of all things, the illusory nature of divisions, of which fact communism is the socially embodied recognition.

seder