A recent donation of artwork by Jewish artist Barbara Wolff to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York is doubly rare. With few exceptions, the Morgan’s collection stops at the year 1600, and its Hebrew illumination holdings are scarce. “A gift of this sort is highly unusual to the department of medieval and Renaissance…
The following is a translation of the Israeli Black Panthers Haggadah With a strong hand, two. And with an outstretched arm, two more. With great terror, two more. With protests, two more. With banners raised, two more. With hunger strikes, two more. These, then, are 10 plagues that the Black Panthers from Musrara brought upon…
“Who’s this year’s Cokie Roberts?” That’s what my partner asked, as I rifled through this year’s crop of new Haggadot. Each year, it seemed, brought a new edition written or edited by a celebrity: Cokie Roberts, Nathan Englander, Edgar Bronfman, Elie Wiesel. But not this year. And browsing Amazon’s best-sellers, I got a sense of…
(JTA) — In this rendition of the Passover story, the Children of Israel do not play ice hockey or drink kosher l’Pesach maple syrup. But the first-ever Canadian Haggadah does have a distinctly Canuck vibe. For one thing the Canadian Haggadah Canadienne is in three languages – English, French and Hebrew. And instead of the…
1. The world’s oldest illuminated Haggadah This 14th century Haggadah is the earliest known Ashkenazi attempt to artistically depict the story of Passover. It’s a pretty creative retelling of the story, mainly because the people depicted in the story have the heads of animals — hence the manuscript’s title, “The Bird’s Head Haggadah.” This is…
The “Ultimate Digital Haggadah” as viewed on an iPad. On my shelf I must have a dozen Haggadahs, some annotated, others illustrated and one even illuminated. I have thick hardcover tomes and soft Maxwell House prints — each one serves a different purpose. But the Haggadah that I use each year, the one that I…
Tens of thousands of copies of “The Szyk Haggadah” have been read at Passover Seders around the world; but the original pages of the book, hand-lettered and hand-painted in the 1930s, have not been shown in public for 60 years. Now all 48 watercolors and gouaches created by a brilliant Polish-born illustrator can be seen…
Remember 2011? Back then, I breathlessly wrote in these pages about a new Haggadah that was online. And then, last year, a Haggadah app for your ipad. Remember when that was new? This year, for the first time, the majority of new Passover Haggadot are no longer on paper. And yet, oddly enough, I found…
