If ever there was proof positive that a once-marginal feminist Jewish ritual is now mainstream, this is it: The latest Pottery Barn catalog touts a new seder plate — holding an orange. The modern, leaf-themed Passover tabletop accouterment has seven compartments. In addition to spaces for the ritual re-telling’s traditional symbols, there’s a leaf meant…
Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-selling, star-studded New American Haggadah failed to credit original Hebrew text lifted from another prominent Haggadah, the novelist has acknowledged to the Forward. Future printings of the New American Haggadah will credit the older text, Foer said. The lifted Hebrew text came from “The Feast of Freedom,” a Passover Haggadah published in…
At our Seder, before we tackle the Haggadah itself, there are words — they change each year — that are intended to frame the proceedings. Here were some of this year’s introductory words: Any serious consideration of the freedom we celebrate at the Seder table is inherently political (as, obviously, was our rebellion against Pharaoh)….
What does the path to freedom look like? In the Haggadah it says: “Once we were slaves, now we are free.” That transition is recounted and celebrated in a “Seder” — literally an “order” of fifteen sequential steps. Freedom means different things to different people. My great journey to freedom was wresting myself out of…
This past weekend, the New York Times wrote about a group of Jewish Bruce Springsteen fans who rented out a room at a Madison Square Garden restaurant this past Friday night so they could participate in a Seder and still make it down to “the pit” (the general admission area) in time for their rock-and-roll…
The act of eating in the Jewish tradition is never simply the consumption of food. Food is respected as fuel for sure, but food as a source of physical nourishment cannot be stripped from its other central roles as symbol, ritual object and identity builder. From Eve’s first bite in the Garden of Eden, food…
Why was the night of April 4 different from all other nights in Tel Aviv? Because the illegal immigrants who ordinarily collect the city’s trash, wash dishes in its restaurants, and clean floors in its hotels, sat as Israelis served them dinner. For Africans who have come to Israel — some 50,000 since 2005 —…
President Obama is looking forward to “a good bowl of matzo ball soup,” at the fourth annual White House Seder on Friday. Obama sent out his Passover greeting on Thursday, in which he speaks not only about his love for Passover dishes, but also on the meaning of the exodus story and the search for…
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