How one Black and Jewish family keeps rewriting the Haggadah to reflect their history — and dreams
‘Next year in Jerusalem’ feels more fraught than ever this season
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Yiddish World When did the redemption from Egypt really begin?
Just about 78 years ago, my grandmother, of blessed memory, was taken from her family’s Passover Seder by the Nazis. She lived in the Carpathian mountain region in what is today known as Western Ukraine. She certainly didn’t think of herself as a Ukrainian, but rather as a Jew. And yet, it is hard, as…
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Culture This Passover, honor 5 women who made the Exodus possible
This Passover we can honor the tenacity of Miriam, the agency and pain of Yocheved and the commitment of Batya — women whose efforts helped lead us out of Egypt. After all, we owe them. Though they were pivotal to Moses in his efforts to shepherd our people out of bondage, these figures are given…
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Culture Why is this Haggadah different from all others? Hitler.
This particular Haggadah, different from all others, was bound to raise eyebrows — if not create a furor. We don’t know much about its origins, but here’s what we do: It was written by a Jew in Rabat, Morocco, sometime after the start of Operation Torch, the 1942 Allied invasion that spelled victory against the…
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Community A Juneteenth Haggadah for a new ritual meal
As Black Lives Matter demonstrations are being held across the globe with unusually large numbers of participants of different colors and ages, we are also witnessing an increasing awareness of the continuing impact of our shared histories of slavery and colonialism and their aftermaths. Ignited by the police brutality against persons of color, many people…
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Culture How to choose a haggadah in the time of coronavirus
One must reach to the darkest chapters of Jewish history to think of a Passover as dark as this one. Across the world, families are in lockdown, living in fear or grief, and coping with profound uncertainty about how long this plague will last. In such a moment, the Passover Seder may or may not…
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Culture My Journey With The Szyk Haggadah
I first met Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) and discovered his Haggadah in 1975. In search of a gift for each member of my wedding party, I wandered into Bloch’s Judaica bookstore on Manhattan’s West Side and purchased several copies of the blue velvet-covered 1956 first Israeli edition of the Szyk Haggadah. Thus was kindled my intimate…
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The Schmooze For The Wise Child, A New Graphic Novel Haggadah
If there’s any story from Jewish history that deserves to be made into a graphic novel, it’s the Exodus story. Plagues? A magic staff-wielding superhero-figure? The splitting of the Red Sea? It’s practically begging for it. And lucky for us, someone has found a way to do that – just in time for Passover. Cartoonist…
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