Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the Jewish holiday of Passover, also called Pesach.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the Jewish holiday of Passover, also called Pesach.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the Jewish holiday of Passover, also called Pesach.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the Jewish holiday of Passover, also called Pesach.
Editor’s note: Lou Reed would have turned 79 on March 2, 2021. In honor of him and the upcoming holiday we have republished this piece, which first appeared in March of 2013, about the singer-songwriter’s historic “Downtown Seder.” Lou Reed is standing in front of a room full of Jews on Varick Street on a…
Just before the doors of the Old Family Dining Room swing open to welcome Elijah to the White House Seder, Dr. Eric Whitaker, a friend of President Obama, reads aloud the Emancipation Proclamation. Last week, as I researched the Obama Seder (the only Seder hosted by a sitting President), I was struck by several things,…
As we celebrate the Passover Seder, we sing, Dayenu, perhaps the most recognized of Passover songs. We sing “It would have been enough” to take us of Egypt, and “it would have been enough” to split the sea, and “it would have been enough” to give us the Torah and Shabbat. But as we sit…
I wasn’t going to host a seder this year. No way, no how. I just came off a year during which I moved three times while pregnant and had my first child in the middle of a hurricane. Then there were the problems breastfeeding and my foolish resistance to getting any help during my baby’s…
When I was very young, my father told me bedtime stories that, looking back, may have helped me overcome my feeling that I couldn?t be both Jewish and a Westerner. Growing up in Utah, where Mormons tend to treat Jews as living Bible characters instead of real friends and neighbors, I often doubted the authenticity…
Every Seder has its own story. There was Passover circa 1960, when Uncle Buddy stood in for Elijah. Or the Passover of 1985, when we started the Seder as we got up from sitting shiva for my father. I will never forget the Passover Seders when each of our children recited the Four Questions for…
If you’ve been to a Seder in the United States some time in the last 80 years, you’ve probably come across the Maxwell House Haggadah. The iconic blue cover and dual-column Hebrew and English translations have arguably become almost as emblematic of the holiday as the Seder plate and Elijah’s cup among Jews of the…
Is a question profound if it has no answer? I reflected on this banality the morning after another draining Passover Seder while shuffling — fashionably late and slightly hung over — to a synagogue I found hopeful in the past. In my usual house of worship I would be recruited to lead the service in…
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