As we enter the eight days of Passover, we’ve got you covered with eight broad-ranging New Voices articles from the past decade. In the following pieces, you’ll find hot takes on seder plate additions, resources and art to add to your haggadah, ideas for incorporating grief into yom tov celebrations, poetic reflections on queerness and liberation, campus reporting on freedom seders, thoughts on Israel/Palestine at the seder table, a scathing review of our least favorite haggadah, and even an investigation of diet culture’s impact on Passover. Make sure to click on the links below to read the full pieces.
Whether you’re pulling together a makeshift campus seder, going home to your family, or struggling to figure out what to do for Pesach, there’s something here for you. From the quippy blog-post days of 2010s New Voices, to today’s longer-form pieces, we hope you will join us on this blast from the past, and find something inspiring or new to add to your Pesach practice… even if it’s just a tomato.
2012: “Editorial: The Expanding Seder Plate”
“If you follow the suggestion of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America (a branch of the Israel-based organization that is exactly what it sounds like) by adding a tomato to your Passover shopping list, your tomato will be ‘a symbol of the farmworker who picked it.’ And perhaps it will join the already relatively venerable Miriam’s Cup or some of these other foods that have been suggested over the years.”
2013: “Take Back the Seder”
“Following a universal trend toward self-publishing, and of course incorporating that Internet phenomenon of crowd-sourcing, Haggadot.com combines the two in a site that allows you to write up your own perspectives on the text, search for other perspectives from other users, and fuse them all into your very own, PDF, printable haggadah. No two haggadot from the site are alike, and all perspectives are given equal opportunity. Do you connect through a feminist approach? Throw some of that in there! Is Jewish history your Achilles’ heel? There’s plenty of that out there, too.”
2014: “Ghosts of Passovers Past”
“It’s easy to correlate memory and grief, and therefore, to think that celebrating and remembering are opposites. But memory need not contain grief. Sometimes the memory of the people we’ve lost can be celebrated too. Yahrzeit and Yom Tov don’t have to be opposites. Perhaps instead we can see them as different parts of the same emotional experience, perhaps flickering indistinguishably from each other, just as the flames we use to represent them.”
2018: “A Queer Reflection on Passover”
“God knows that we do not leave mitzrayim only once. Every day we must wake up and continue to choose to leave mitzrayim.
The trauma of captivity sometimes clings to our spirits. It clutches at our heels. It shakes our resolve. It makes us doubt our resilience. It makes us question our ability to survive.
It takes time to learn how to live as free people. God knows this. God knows that it is our time in the wilderness that transforms us from a brutalized people to free people.”
2021: “Campus Freedom Seders: Freedom For Who, Exactly?”
“Rabbi Waskow reminds us that there are no shortage of Pharoahs in our time. In attempting to revive the Freedom Seder on NU’s campus this year, it has become ever more clear to me that we cannot shy away from conversations about Israel and Palestine when we discuss freedom and liberation. Instead of removing support from an event that seeks to bring student activists together, Jewish organizations should support young Jews’ desire to have conversations in the face of our seemingly-insurmountable political differences.”
2021: “On This Very Day, One Pesach Later: A Passover Reader”
“After a year of pandemic, one Pesach later, four Jewish students and thinkers have assembled a Passover Seder companion, filled with reflections on a year of plague and visions of redemption. Raffi Levi, Benji Zoller, Lavi Teitelbaum, and current New Voices Resilient Writing Fellow Sofia Freudenstein have curated a collection containing readings, poetry, and art from young Jewish artists across the pandemic diaspora (including a comic from New Voices Editor in Chief Rena Yehuda Newman). You can view this printable reader, ‘On This Very Day: One Pesach Later’ here.”
2022: “Review: The Rational Passover Haggadah’ by Dennis Prager”
“It should not be surprising then that the target audience for Prager’s commentary here is not really Jewish, but philosemitic. Between the liturgical elements, the author’s interspersed commentary uses Jewish tradition as an example which American nationalists might follow, and the implied American nation Prager constructs is of course white. The “Judeo-Christian” idea called on throughout the text is both an attempt at assimilating into whiteness and islamophobic at a minimum. While I would hope the Christian audience who spend $29.99 on a copy does not use this haggadah for a seder of their own, I would additionally hope that this haggadah is not used by a Jewish seder host, given that proposed dinner conversations like ‘Why didn’t God save the Jews from the Holocaust?’ will put many off their appetite.”
2023: “Jewish Food Rituals in the Age of Diet Culture”
“I’ve felt these feelings too. In 2021, I wrote an article questioning whether it is possible to disentangle fasting from the connotations of weight loss and dieting, and maintain its religious value. Years later, I wanted to better understand how religious food rituals and restrictions impact those with – or in recovery from – eating disorders. On Instagram and Facebook, I asked people to share their experiences. Sadly, I found that I was far from alone.
“I used to relapse in my eating disorder almost every Passover,” someone said. “People would call Passover the ‘weight loss holiday,’” another wrote.
When cutting out food groups is the norm in our society, how does this affect our relationship to food rituals? For those whose minds have been enslaved by thoughts of food and bodies, how could food restriction remind us of liberation?”
From the New Voices team, we wish you a meaningful, beautiful Passover.
