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A Little Context for this Haggadah
Contributed by Serena Jake

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

(No need to read this page out loud! This is straight background.)

Last year the task fell to me to arrange a new haggadah for our Seder from the plentiful resources on Haggadot.com. As the most goyishe of our cadre of Jewish Artists, I was overwhelmed with options. Either the material was painfully dense, or swung entirely in the opposite direction: too many College Liberal Reframings! Too many memes! Where were all the beautiful oral and textual investigations -- and jokes! -- I knew were the birthright (ha ha) of my Jewish community? So: instead of hunting them down, I avoided doing any more scholarly work than was necessary and my partner and I gathered our talented friends -- outstanding and celebrated Jewish artists, all -- to write some new ones instead. Here they are, and we are lucky and grateful to have them. I hope they bring you as much joy as they did me.

--Jake

Jake Beckhard is a director who was just Jewish enough to make it into Birthright. He was a 2018 Drama League Fellow and the founder of Artilliers Theater Company.

So here's how we went about it: we gathered a cohort of our favorite Jewish artists to contribute to our service, with very few guidelines. They were asked to choose a part of the seder that interested them and write whatever they wanted. Solemn, funny, personal, abstract, traditional, meaningful, cheeky. It was a pretty open prompt, but we hope that we have curated a varied and interested seder. Some sections are rather long, and we've bolded the sections we plan to read aloud in our seder. We also reached out to artist Sharone Halevy (also a fabulous director - all of our friends are multi-talented!), who has provided art that we used for the cover and througout the book.

Though Jake first had this idea in 2019 (about three days before our seder...sadly, not enough time to make it happen), it didn't actualize until 2020 aka Big Time Virus. We are all of us weeks into quarantine, and many of these writings contend with that reality. We hope this haggadah will prove useful in years to come, so perhaps we’ll update some of its contents, or else look to the Pandemic Passover as a springboard for broader truths.

This haggadah was curated with love for our artistic community and our Jewish community. Enjoy, and chag semeach. 

--Serena

Serena Berman is a playwright, actress, singer, and producer. She is a resident artist at Ars Nova and is frequently type-cast as a Jewish teenager.

haggadah Section: Introduction
Source: Jake and Serena

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