ON YOM HASHOAH EVE, THEY CHOSE THE STREET

While survivors lit candles for six million murdered Jews, JVP blocked traffic and called it "Never Again"

Tonight, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Holocaust survivors lit six memorial candles — one for each million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime. The State Opening Ceremony for Yom HaShoah 2026 was held Monday, April 13, at 20:00, opening Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day. Yad Vashem In New York, hundreds gathered at Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side for the Museum of Jewish Heritage's annual remembrance event, where Holocaust survivor Fred Schoenfeld told the audience: "I speak because memory matters." Cleveland Jewish News

Meanwhile, on Third Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, a coalition including Jewish Voice for Peace, Linda Sarsour's network, and the Palestinian Youth Movement blocked traffic, got themselves arrested, and invoked the Holocaust as a prop.

The timing was not accidental. It never is.

JVP and its coalition partners chose Yom HaShoah eve to stage a mass civil disobedience action targeting the offices of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand over an upcoming Senate vote on weapons sales to Israel. They showed up with their "Never Again For Anyone" banners — a slogan that deliberately strips Holocaust remembrance of its Jewish specificity, universalizes the genocide into a generic framework, and then points it like a weapon at the Jewish state. It is ideological grave-robbing. And they do it on the one day of the year designed specifically to honor the dead.

The DSA politicians who showed up — the same elected officials from the progressive machine that put Zohran Mamdani in Gracie Mansion — were not there out of moral conviction. They were there to perform. The arrest photo is the deliverable. It goes to the donor list, the endorsement pipeline, the DSA cartel that trades in this currency. The NYPD is a prop. The zip ties are a campaign asset. Yom HaShoah is just a useful backdrop.

The "Senior Citizens" Were Professional Operatives

When JVP and sympathetic press frame today's arrests as "senior citizens peacefully protesting," they are counting on the image overwhelming the record. The gray hair is the point — it's designed to produce exactly the outrage they're manufacturing.

But the protest-as-production model has a documented architect. Her name is Lisa Fithian. Described by Mother Jones as "the nation's best-known protest consultant," Fithian has been arrested between 80 and 100 times and charges over $300 a day to run demonstrations and teach unions and activist groups the tactics of taking over streets. Yahoo! The NYPD officially labeled her a "professional agitator." At Columbia in 2024, she was caught on video directing masked protesters on how to barricade Hamilton Hall, instructing them where to place furniture and ordering cameras back while the operation unfolded. NBC News

This is what professional disruption looks like. It is choreographed, it is funded, and it is designed to produce a specific media narrative — preferably one featuring elderly women being led away in zip ties while chanting about genocide. The cameras are not capturing spontaneous outrage. They are capturing produced content. Fithian earns her day rate precisely because she knows how to direct scenes like this. Ynetnews

The people who get arrested know what they signed up for. Many are veterans of the circuit — the same faces at Grand Central, at Schumer's offices last August, at the NYSE, at the bridges. Civil disobedience has become a professional sport, and JVP is the team that makes it look Jewish.

The "Jewish" Cover on Yom HaShoah

This is the most important thing to understand about today's action, and the most deliberately offensive: JVP chose Holocaust Remembrance Day to weaponize Jewish identity against Jewish survival.

JVP has previously argued that Holocaust Remembrance Day — Yom HaShoah — is a tool of "harmful Zionist narratives," asserting that Israel "intentionally designed the sequence of these fabricated, secular holidays" to promote its political agenda. The Jerusalem Post They dismiss the framing of Yom HaShoah as propaganda — and then show up on Yom HaShoah eve to invoke "Never Again" as cover for a protest against the Jewish state's right to defend itself.

They cannot have it both ways. Either the Holocaust has specific meaning for the Jewish people — meaning that "Never Again" is a commitment to Jewish safety and survival — or it is raw material to be repurposed for any political campaign. JVP has chosen the latter. And they chose tonight to prove it.

Meanwhile, at Temple Emanu-El, a Holocaust survivor told the assembled crowd: "The Holocaust did not begin with camps. It began with words, with small acts of exclusion, with people looking away." Cleveland Jewish News

The people looking away today are the ones framing Linda Sarsour as a Jewish ally.

Why Sarsour Was There

The question isn't why Sarsour showed up to a JVP event. The question is why anyone is still pretending to be confused by it. Sarsour has worked extensively with Jewish Voice for Peace across campaigns for years. Wikipedia She is not an ally in these operations. She is a principal. JVP is, as we have documented in these pages, functionally a front group for the same Islamist-adjacent political network that Hatem Bazian — founder of Students for Justice in Palestine — ran from the organization's own social media accounts until he accidentally tweeted from the wrong profile.

Before October 7, Sarsour was already on record telling audiences that Muslims should never "humanize" Israelis, describing them wholesale as "oppressors." The Jewish Voice On Yom HaShoah eve, she was at a rally chanting "Never Again For Anyone" outside the offices of Chuck Schumer — the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history, who last night attended a Holocaust remembrance ceremony at Temple Emanu-El.

That is not coalition politics. That is a targeting operation dressed in the language of justice.

The Death Penalty Law and the Real Debate

To be clear about the stated trigger for today's protest: the Knesset on March 30 passed a law mandating death by hanging as the default punishment for West Bank Palestinians convicted of deadly terrorist attacks in military courts, passing 62–47. The Times of Israel This law is genuinely controversial. Senior Shin Bet officials, IDF leadership, and Israeli legal bodies raised substantive objections — including that mandatory execution would undermine future hostage negotiations by eliminating the government's leverage over prisoner releases. There is a legitimate argument to be had about Israeli counterterrorism policy and capital punishment.

But JVP is not making that argument. They are not interested in Israeli security policy. They are interested in the delegitimization of Israel as a concept — a position they hold on every policy, in every circumstance, regardless of the specifics. The death penalty law is today's news peg. Tomorrow it will be something else. The protest never stops. The target never changes.

What "Never Again" Actually Means

On this Yom HaShoah, the JTA's Menachem Rosensaft wrote that the day's central purpose is to ensure the six million murdered Jews will not fade into oblivion — and that the slogan "Never Again" remains valid only if it is not turned into a chauvinistically hollow imperative stripped of its meaning. Jewish Telegraphic Agency

JVP has done precisely that. They took "Never Again" — born in the ash of Auschwitz, paid for with six million lives — and turned it into a protest chant aimed at the nation those survivors built.

The survivors lighting candles tonight at Yad Vashem know exactly what Never Again means. It means them. It means their families. It means the Jewish people and their right to exist without being hunted.

JVP can chant the words. They don't get to own the meaning.