You know what your seder plate needs this year? Uyghur salad.

Uighur Tiger salad from redhousespice.com Courtesy of redhousespice.com
What makes Passover different from all other holidays? On other holidays, we pray, then eat a festive meal. On Passover, the festive meal is the celebration, food itself is the prayer. We eat matzah to recall our enslavement and liberation, bitter herbs to recount our sorrow and haroset our hardship. We taste slavery and freedom, literally ingesting the meaning of the holiday.
That’s why, on this particular Passover, you should make a Uyghur Tiger salad.
Over the years, people have added new symbols to the seder plate to expand Passover’s message and relevance. For years now, some have included an orange to spark questions about women’s rights and inclusion.
This year, tens of thousands of Jews will raise awareness and, hopefully, spark action by including a traditional food of the Uyghur minority in China at the Passover table. An estimated one to two million Uyghurs have been forced into concentration camps by the Chinese government since 2017. The Chinese government has relentlessly persecuted and discriminated against the Muslim minority group in northwest China — they cannot pray, cannot grow beards, and are coerced into eating pork, particularly on Fridays, the Muslim Sabbath.
As part of a Uyghur Week of Action, several groups including Jewish World Watch and Jewish Movement for Uyghur Freedom, are distributing a Uyghur-themed haggadah, written by Justin Rudelson, who calls the Uyghur genocide, “one of the most severe human rights crises since the Holocaust.”
Whether you use the haggadah or not, use the salad. Uyghur food from China’s Xinjiang region shares spices, techniques and ingredients — as well as Muslim dietary restrictions — with near-ish countries like Pakistan and Turkmenistan: kebabs, cumin, chili and a lot of (sadly) goat. These are fused with Asian staples like soy sauce and rice vinegar – which make for delicious food but also make finding the right kosher-for-Passover dish a challenge.
Enter the Tiger Salad. It features fresh chili and raw onion, tempered by honey and some cool cilantro. It is as ubiquitous at Uyghur meals as cucumber and tomato salad is at Middle Eastern ones. Make a dish of it, center it on your Passover table, and select a passage from the Uyghur Freedom Haggadah to eat along with your food.
Uyghur Tiger salad
Unlike so many Uyghur dishes, this one, by Wei Guo at redhousespice.com, doesn’t use soy sauce. The only substitution needed to make it kosher for Passover is, if you like, to replace black rice vinegar with apple cider vinegar.
Ingredients
1 red onion
2 tomatoes
3 green chili, or to taste
1 small bunch fresh coriander (cilantro)
2 tsp black rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar
1 pinch sugar, or 1 drop honey
Salt, to taste
Instructions Slice up red onion, tomato and chili. Chop coriander. Put them into a salad bowl. Mix vinegar, sugar (or honey) and salt. Pour over the vegetables. Gently toss around then serve.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion The dangerous Nazi legend behind Trump’s ruthless grab for power
- 2
Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
- 3
Culture Did this Jewish literary titan have the right idea about Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling after all?
- 4
Opinion I first met Netanyahu in 1988. Here’s how he became the most destructive leader in Israel’s history.
In Case You Missed It
-
Culture Trump wants to honor Hannah Arendt in a ‘Garden of American Heroes.’ Is this a joke?
-
Opinion Gaza and Trump have left the Jewish community at war with itself — and me with a bad case of alienation
-
Fast Forward Trump administration restores student visas, but impact on pro-Palestinian protesters is unclear
-
Fast Forward Deborah Lipstadt says Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown has ‘gone way too far’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.