JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

What rocks your Seder plate?

By Sue Fishkoff · April 11, 2011

Like matzoh best? Or are the Four Cups more to your taste?

Four items from the Seder plate duke it out in this Seder Plate Champion contest on chabad.org.

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Women take the lead in this Passover quiz

By Sue Fishkoff · April 11, 2011

Who in the Passover story has "two mommies?"

A)  Miriam

B)  Pharaoh 

C)  Moses

D)  Xena, Warrior Princess

To find the answer and for seven more questions that challege gender stereotypes, try this Passover Gender Quiz sponsored by Moving Traditions, an organization that helps teenagers engage more deeply in their Judaism.   

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Exodus from Egypt, in the Twitter era

By Uriel Heilman · April 11, 2011

What if the exodus from Egypt had happened in the Twitter era?

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The Best Seder Ever?

By Sue Fishkoff · April 7, 2011

The National Jewish Outreach Program’s “nice Jewish boy,” is a pile of nerves preparing to host his first Passover seder in this video parody of the Miley Cyrus hit “Party in the USA.”

Check out NJOP founder Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald rocking the beat at the Seder table, as well as  mashgichim inside the Manischewitz plant in Newark, N.J.

The NJOP offers a host of holiday help, including podcasts and webinars on hosting Seders. 

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Who knows One? Australians perform Passover seder song

By Adam Soclof · April 7, 2011

Who knows One? Aussies!

Someone down under conducted lots of sing-along interviews to create this composite of Passover seder song Echad Mi Yodea, Who Knows One. The lion logos on the school uniforms indicate that this was an effort by the students and faculty of Mount Scopus College, a Jewish Day School in Melbourne, Australia.

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Koshertopia’s guide to eating out during Passover

By Sue Fishkoff · April 6, 2011

As Jews we know too well the central role food plays in our lives.

Yet each time Pesach comes around, we are faced with a plethora of dilemmas in the kitchen.

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Evil Son? Jewish group declares, in song, “I Just Ate Chametz”

By Adam Soclof · April 6, 2011

The role of the evil son at this year's Seder has just been cast -- by The Maccabeats' evil twin.

Kol Ish, composed of Jewish male alumni of the University of Maryland (who normally sing a cappella), have posted "I Just Had Chametz" to YouTube. The song is a parody of The Lonely Island Boys' "I Just Had Sex" that premiered on Saturday Night Live in December 2010. The video offers a tongue-in-cheek ode to the leavened bread prohibited on Passover, at one point juxtaposing various chametz-laden items on a seder plate-- definitely not kosher for Passover.

Of note: The Jewish Week was selected as Kol Ish's bathroom reading to accompany Matzah-induced constipation.

If that wasn't scandalous enough , here's another group of kippah-wearing Terps parodying the same song, this time satirizing the halakhic principle of shomer negia (prohibition of extramarital physical contact between members of the opposite sex).

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Follow me, boys!

By Sue Fishkoff · April 5, 2011

Miriam isn’t mentioned by name in the Passover haggadah. But women have found ways to highlight her story at the Seder table, from including a “Miriam’s cup” to this video by Leah Berkenwald posted on “Jewesses with Attitude,” the Jewish Women’s Archive blog.

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What’s on Your Plate?

By Sue Fishkoff · April 5, 2011

The traditional Seder plate contains an egg, shank bone,  karpas, charoset and maror. Some also make room for the hazeret, another kind of bitter green. 

But recently other fruits and vegetables have showed up on the plate, representing a variety of causes from solidarity with oppressed Jewish communities to welcoming the intermarried.

First was the orange, which has come to symbolize the power of Jewish women -- female rabbis, the Jewish midwives in the Exodus story, gender-neutral language in prayerbooks, that sort of thing. 

But when Jewish Studies professor Susannah Heschel first plunked down a tangerine on her Seder plate in the early 1980s, it was in the name of gay and lesbian inclusion, as she explains in this essay on Miriam’s Cup .  

During the first part of the Seder, I asked everyone to take a segment of the orange, make the blessing over fruit, and eat it as a gesture of solidarity with Jewish lesbians and gay men, and others who are marginalized within the Jewish community…In addition, each orange segment had a few seeds that had to be spit out – a gesture of spitting out, repudiating the homophobia that poisons too many Jews.

A few years ago, olives started showing up as a call for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. 

This can take kumbaya form, as in the Shalom Center’s“Passover of Peace: A Seder for the children of Abraham, Hagar and Sarah." 

Or it can have a more activist bent.  In 2008, Jewish Voice for Peace promoted putting an olive on the Seder plate as part of its “Trees of Reconciliation” project to donate 3,000 olive saplings to Palestinian farmers.

The following spring, the Shalom Center raised JVP a fruit, suggesting folks include both an olive and an orange in its 2009 "Freedom Seder for the Earth."  

Why this olive? Because for millennia the olive branch has been the symbol of peace, and we seek to make peace where there has been war.Why this orange? Because in olden days there was no orange on the Seder Plate and it was said that outsiders—gay men and lesbians, transgendered people, converts, those who lack some important ability or skill, the unlearned—all these no more belonged in the community than an orange belongs upon the Seder plate. So we place an orange to say firmly, All these belong in our communities.

 How about an artichoke?  In an essay on interfaithfamily.com, Rabbi Geela Rayzel Raphael suggests this prickly vegetable with the soft heart for the interfaith-friendly Seder plate.

Like the artichoke, which has thistles protecting its heart, the Jewish people have been thorny about this question of interfaith marriage. Let this artichoke on the seder plate tonight stand for the wisdom of God's creation in making the Jewish people a population able to absorb many elements and cultures throughout the centuries--yet still remain Jewish.

Also on interfaithfamily.com, Jim Keen proposed a kiwi instead of an artichoke, but that doesn’t seem to have caught on.

There are always one-off experiments, such as Rabbi Paul Kipnes in southern California who four years ago put a football, a history book and a corkscrew on his Seder plate. You’ll have to check out this Daily News piece by Brad Greenberg for the full scoop.

Hard to top, however, is the Progressive Jewish Alliance, which last year put together a “Food Desert Seder Plate” that banished the original arrangement altogether, replacing it with items symbolizing the lack of access to fresh, healthy food in many low-income neighborhoods (see photo above).

A rotten piece of lettuce illustrates that inner-city grocery stores often carry only spoiled produce. A potato chip instead of the boiled potato in the “karpas” space indicates that high-fat potato chips are cheaper and easier to find than fresh potatoes.

On the food desert seder plate, there is no egg. Fresh eggs are one of the luxuries lacking in these neighborhoods.

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The Roadrunner’s Seder

By Sue Fishkoff · April 4, 2011

JewishBoston.com has posted what it describes as a 30-minute Passover Haggadah, of the mix-and-match variety.

Blogger David Wilensky, writing on The Reform Shuckle, gives it a thumbs-up:

For a 30-minute seder, it looks pretty great. It takes as a given the 14-part order to the seder and then prunes the whole thing back to the essentials of each part. And it does this without cheapening the message, I think. Unlike most liturgically innovative things I encounter, it doesn’t make me cringe reading through it.

Download for free, and have your way with it. 

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