Pop-cultural mashups with Jewish holidays are obviously far from new. In this Passover season alone we have the Unofficial Hogwarts Haggadah, and new song parodies added to last year’s hit the Hamilton Haggadah. But what makes this take on Pesach different from all others? Its source of inspiration is that most quintessential voice of modern wisdom: Queen Bey.

Yes, the Beyonceder reminds us that the wisdom of our ancient traditions jive really well with lyrics from the reigning queen of pop… or is it the other way around?

For example:

And this year is really special, because not only can you purchase merch (available in both “Classic” and “Lemonade”) that has these amazing images (and more), but you can have them special for your seder. The tote bags work as afikomen covers, and apparently the mugs are great for drinking wine.

The creator of the Beyonceder is Amy Schiller, a writer, grad student, and mashup meme creator who brought you the Ryan-Gosling infused, “Hey Girl, Happy Hannukah.” Back in 2014, the portmanteau of “Beyoncé” and “seder,” popped into her head, and she decided she had to follow through. And to top it all off, last year on the evening of the second seder, Lemonade dropped. Still, Schiller admits that Bey and Passover are “not necessarily congruent.”

“Though she’s a very empowering individualist, she’s an individualist, and Passover is all about collective liberation and collective experience,” says Schiller of Ms. Knowles-Carter. “That said, certainly there are narratives in her songs about emancipation.”

Regardless, you can get a T-Shirt that says “I don’t think you ready for this jelly” with pictures of Passover’s ubiquitous fruit slices. For that alone, let’s make this the new Chanukah sweaters.

If you order by Thursday (March 30th), you can still get your merch in time for the holiday, because obviously you want to recline on a pillow that says “Next Year in Jerusalem” over Beyoncé’s recent pregnancy photo (or maybe on a picture of Moses in Nile with the caption “Surfbordt.” It’s really hard to decide).

You can also follow the Beyonceder through future punny memes on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.

OK, just a couple more favorites:

Chag sameach, and next year at Coachella (…you know, since Beyoncé had to postpone her appearance there till 2018 due to her pregnancy).

The post It’s Beyonceder Time appeared first on Jewcy.

I’m not an observant Jew. Maybe if I’d grown up in Montreal or New York or another Western capital, where WASPs drop “oys” like ice in scotch, and where being openly Jewish is a non-issue—maybe then I’d attend Kol Nidre or give up beer for Passover.

But back in the USSR, I knew next to nothing about Judaism. Religious practice as a whole was marginalized, and if you happened to be Jewish, keeping it to yourself was a survival skill. The sum total of my knowledge of 5,775 years of Judaism was equal to the contents of the cardboard box that landed on top of my dresser every spring. The box contained the spoils from my father’s clandestine run to the city’s old shul, which operated unofficially on some holidays. There, on Passover, a handful of resolute Jews lined up for boxes of matzoh to take home to their families. The matzoh sheets were stacked inside the boxes underneath pink paper napkins. As soon as one of those boxes arrived at our apartment, it was stuffed on top of the dresser to be accessed with caution, away from gentile eyes. To my non-Jewish friends, who sometimes spotted a renegade piece of matzoh lying around, I would nonchalantly offer said piece as a cracker. Frankly, that’s what it was to me anyway: a Jewish cracker.

We fled the USSR in 1988, when I was 16—thousands of Soviet Jewish refugees leaving in a modern-day Exodus. On our way to the States we were stationed in Ladispoli, a sleepy coastal town outside of Rome, where we waited for our U.S. visas. There, on the Mediterranean shore,we learned for the first time about Jews as a people. A Chabad mission was set up in town, headed by Rabbi Hirsch, who worked morning, noon, and night reaching out to every lapsed Soviet Jew. That spring, we sat down to our first seder inside an Etruscan castle. Hundred-foot tables were filled with families like ours, and we finally heard the story behind the matzoh we used to hide under the pink napkins. For many Soviet Jews, that first seder marked the beginning of their return to their lost faith. For me, it marked the beginning of a life-long love affair with jarred gefilte fish.

That year, I also heard the sound of the shofar for the first time. My main memory of that Rosh Hashanah was the rabbi talking about praying to be sealed in the book of life for another year, and the obligation to purge one’s pockets of ‘sins’ into the nearby canal. I had 2,000 liras in my jeans, which I lifted from my dad’s wallet earlier that day with the intent to buy licorice. Despite the Rabbi’s passionate sermon, there would be no purging on my end. I was not giving up my stolen licorice money, High Holidays be damned.

We finally made it to Chicago. No longer scared of being outed as Jews, we were now discovering what it meant to be Jewish. We settled in West Rogers Park, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood filled with synagogues and kosher pizza parlors. But there was so much more than Judaism for a curious a 17-year-old to explore: my daily existence was divided between running to painting classes at the School of the Art Institute in the morning, and running the cash register at Dog On It (a kosher wiener joint) in the afternoon. My classmates introduced me to their friends as “Inna, she’s from Russia.” There was no time to think about being Jewish: I was too busy trying to fit in as a Russian among non-Jewish, non-white, non-conformist art students.

I suppose the physical proximity to all things Jewish precipitated a gradual awakening of my Jewish identity. The Jewish holidays arrived in West Rogers Park with a bang; religious or not, you were greeted with a “Gut Yontif” at every turn. My first Yom Kippur in Chicago was appropriately bleak: my grandmother had just died in a Chicago hospital. She’d been ill for most of her life in the USSR, and arrived in the U.S. too late to benefit from Western medicine. Dog On It was closed for the holidays, so I spent my day shuffling around the neighborhood. I tried thinking about the meaning of Yom Kippur and my babushka being with God, but the concept felt as foreign to me as the rest of America did at the time. There was no God with her or me that day, just the bad weather and the reality of her death and—a combination that felt almost clichéd.

Then I went to Israel. In Ladispoli I’d met some Israelis who had come specifically to encourage the Soviet Jews to immigrate to the Holy Land. Some of those “ambassadors” were particularly good looking, and I decided that Israel was worth a visit. So, during my second year in Chicago, I saved my cashier money, enrolled in an overseas program at the Hebrew University, and flew to the land of milk and honey—and good-looking people.

In Israel, the divide between religious and secular Jews felt bigger than the divide between Jews and Arabs. A Jew like me would get frowned upon for wearing a sleeveless shirt on a bus full of religious Jews, while on her way to visit an Arab friend. Still, a measure of superstition infiltrated secular Israel on Yom Kippur: no one got behind the wheel that day, just in case there was a God, and He decided—God forbid—to punish you for driving. On the eve of Yom Kippur, crowds poured into the streets in every neighborhood and children skateboarded safely on car-free roads. People fasted because, you know, tradition. I fasted too, out of solidarity. God knows I didn’t do it out of faith.

I returned to Chicago a year later only to find that my family now kept kosher and went to shul on Friday nights. There was no picking up the phone or driving on the Sabbath. I didn’t get answers to how it happened—it just did. That’s when I first felt conflicted over competing definitions of Jewishness. I had just spent a year in Israel and felt more Jewish than ever; but I simply didn’t see how giving up the car on Saturdays would make me a better Jew. My parents eventually downgraded their religiousness and found a middle ground, which balanced their yearning for a Jewish identity with their modern-day needs. My brother continued on a religious path. Today he’s an Orthodox father of seven living a few blocks from our first home. He goes to the same shul, keeps kosher, and observes all Jewish holidays. As I write this, he’s probably saying selichot.

Perhaps the closest I came to the Jewish faith was during my return to the former USSR a few years ago. I came to Kiev to work as an advertising executive and went to shul on Yom Kippur to see for myself the state of post-Soviet Jews. They had come a long way from lining up for camouflaged matzoh; there was even jarred Manischewitz gefilte fish at break-fast. On that Yom Kippur, I felt thankful for their freedom and mine, though I still wasn’t sure who I was thanking.

On this Yom Kippur I’ll walk around my city as I often do, remembering past Yom Kippurs. I won’t be asking for forgiveness or praying to be sealed in the book of life. I will be thinking of that early Yom Kippur morning in Jerusalem, 20 years ago. I saw an old lady who seemed lost. She summoned me over and asked, “Is today Yom Kippur?” I said yes. “Oh good,” she said, “I’m glad I forgot to eat.”

I’d like to think God was good to her for another year.

Inna Gertsberg is an advertising writer. She lives in Toronto with her husband, two sons and a cat. You can follow her on Twitter at @twigstr.

(Main image: Yossi Gurvitz via Flickr)

The post Fasting Out of Solidarity, Not Faith appeared first on Jewcy.

But he would not take no for an answer. So there I sat, drinking chai and chatting with my new friend Peri, the Pakistani owner of one of my favorite Indian restaurants in Jakarta. Several sips into our conversation, I asked Peri if he knew of a print shop nearby as I still needed to print the Haggadahs, or Seder booklets, we’d be using that night. “How much do you have to print?” he queried. I explained that I had to print 30 copies of a 26-page packet. “Oh, that’s fine—you’ll just use my printer.” My protestations proved futile. He led me to his office in the back of the restaurant, sat me at his desk, and directed me to use his printer. I pleaded with him to let me pay since I’d be using so much paper and ink. “You’ve obviously never met a Pakistani if you think I’m going to let you pay,” he quipped. He never even asked what I was printing. I wish I had told him.

If I had to sum up this year’s Seder in a word, it would be substitutes. The papadum was just the beginning. Jakarta is not exactly a haven for facilitating Jewish ritual. There is no Chabad here, no synagogue, no kosher meat, and certainly no matzo. But there was no way I was going to pass over Passover. Parsnips filled in for maror (sprinkle a bit of chili and your parsnips will go from mild to mind-blowing), lamb chop for shank bone (my mother approved!), water crackers for matzo meal, and halal meat for kosher.

Though many Jewish rituals have fallen to the wayside this year, my resolve to hold a Seder was borne of an ever growing desire to give voice and credence to a tradition and religion that is virtually absent here. Two days prior to the Seder, a couple of friends and I embarked on an adventure we dubbed “Find the Jews of Indonesia.” We devoted a day to winding our way through mountains in North Sulawesi in a quest to discover some of the only physical symbols of Judaism in Indonesia, hoping to speak with at least one or two of the 20 or so Jews left in this country of 240 million people. We were successful on one front but not the other.

Two hours after giving our driver the very specific directions of, “help us find orang yahudi” which may as well have been translated as “help us find a needle in a haystack,” we pulled up to a small, fairly inconspicuous structure with a sign in Hebrew and English that read Beit Knesset Shaar Hashamayim. But the gate was locked and the building shuttered. There were no signs of life. After inquiring with a neighbor nearby, it turns out the synagogue is rarely used—the Jews have moved to the city, she said.

We then resolved to find the 62 foot menorah erected on a mountaintop back in 2009 and paid for by the government of the North Minahasa regency. Again, we found the menorah but no Jews. At first, I was exhilarated to discover such obvious Jewish symbols in a country where it often feels Judaism has little to no place (dancing around the menorah to Fiddler on the Roof songs may have also contributed to the initial exhilaration). And yet, the structures seemed to mean little without people. A synagogue is simply a shell for communal spiritual cohesion, for gathering together in spiritual unison. Families are meant to gather around a menorah on Hanukkah and light the candles together, to share in the tradition that emanates from the flames—to sing and eat together. In that way, it was heartbreaking to come across these symbols and see them absent of people.

The Seder remedied that absence, if only for a night. Packed into the apartment of two dear friends, 21 people from all walks of life sat cross-legged on the floor and for six hours shared together in the retelling of the Exodus. Amid the most nontraditional of circumstances, a tradition unfolded. We read the four questions, drank four cups of wine, dipped parsley in saltwater, munched on charoset, opened the door for Elijah, ransacked the apartment in search of the afikoman, sang dayenu. But most importantly, we challenged notions of slavery, historical and modern, and the role of God in the epic. We each dug into the recesses of our backgrounds and personal histories to relate to the “wicked” child and questioned the roles of the oppressor and the oppressed.

Before the Seder began, I skyped with my mom as I prepared to substitute my Jakarta family for my American family. “Just remember who you are, Sarah” she said as I stood chopping walnuts for the charoset. In many ways, being in Indonesia, in a place so devoid of Judaism, where it’s often so easy to forget, urges me to do just that.

The views expressed above are the author’s own and do not represent those of the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State.

The post Hosting a Passover Seder in Jakarta appeared first on Jewcy.

While many feel restricted during the leaven-free days of Passover, those of us on gluten-free diets find the holiday culinarily liberating. In fact, Passover is the Jewish holiday that keeps on gluten-free giving now that many companies have naturally gluten-free products or developed a gluten-free line alongside their traditional Passover line. Thanks to these products, we can fulfill the mitzvahs of the holiday while adhering to our dietary restriction—and making sure our palettes are satisfied.

Here are a few of my favorite kosher for Passover gluten-free things (to be sung to “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, naturally). I hope you find as much joy in them as I do. I also hope you have better self-control than I do with some of these products (see: macaroons).

Matzoh for the Seder Table: Traditional matzoh is off limits since it has gluten. To fulfill the mitzvah of saying the blessing and eating matzoh, those of us who are on gluten-free diets can turn to oat matzoh. Lakewood Matzoh Bakery offers wonderful gluten-free oat matzohs available in Oat Machine Square and Traditional Shmurah, which I found at Fairway. Challah was taken on the matzohs that are made with certified gluten-free oats—oats must be certified gluten-free—and have Gluten-Intolerance Group’s certification seal.

Matzoh for the Breakfast Table: For the breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the ‘I need a snack’ kind of matzoh, I like Yehuda’s Gluten-Free Matzoh-Style Squares. The Squares are not intended for use during a seder, but are perfect with a shmear of cream cheese or for matzoh pizza.

I also recommend the newest gluten-free matzoh on the block: Manischewitz’s Gluten Free Matzo-Style Squares. I almost couldn’t believe this product was real when I saw it on the shelf. Then again, the words gluten-free on a Manischewitz box just seem so perfect.

When it comes to matzoh in cracker form, both Yehuda and Manischewitz crackers do the job. If you are like my sister, you might like them with cream cheese and a half sour pick on top.

Gluten-Free Matzoh Balls—Need I Say More? Your soup will thank you (and then your gluten-free guests will also) for using Yehuda’s Gluten-Free Matzoh Meal for the matzoh balls. In other words, if you plan on having chicken soup like I do at seder, make sure to pick up a box or two or even three.

Chicken Cutlet Time: Gluten-free chicken cutlets are just a coating away thanks to Jeff Nathan Creations’ Gluten Free Panko Flakes. The flakes are brand new and are available in plain or seasoned. Any chicken cutlet lucky enough to be made with these flakes is going to be a hit, which mean my chicken cutlets are going to be quite popular this week.

Passover Pasta: Whether you need gluten-free noodles for your kugel or are looking for a bowl of pasta, Manischewitz and Gefen have you covered. I like Manischewitz Gluten-Free Fine Yolk Free Noodles for my kugel and enjoy their spiral and shell-shaped noodles for everyday pasta fun. For a wider noodle, I recommend Gefen’s Gluten Free Egg Free Wide, which are perfect in soup.

Dessert: I love Manischewitz Gluten Free Chocolate and Yellow Cake Mixes. They are a great gluten-free cake and the fact that they are kosher for Passover is just the cherry on top. But my favorite part of the Manischewitz cakes might just be that the pan is included.

Macaroons: Passover hasn’t even started and I have already gone through two containers of Streit’s chocolate chip macaroons. There is just something about these moist treats, whether coconut, chocolate, chocolate chip or toffee crunch. If you’re a red velvet lover like I am, Manischewitz Red Velvet Macaroons are a must, as is the Chocolate Macaroon Dough. I repeat: Chocolate Macaroon Dough. This dough is the mother of all Passover products. Pure genius. It comes in a tub—how fun—and makes 44 macaroons.

And what would Passover be without candy fruit slices? Original Sweet Shoppe offers gluten-free raspberry, orange & lemon fruit slices that are the perfect treat at your seder.

The post The Best Gluten-Free Passover Products appeared first on Jewcy.

Bubbes are magical, and luckily, not mythical, creatures. Long before J.K. Rowling created Bert Bott’s Every Flavor Beans or Butterbeer, bubbes were creating matzoh ball soup to fill your stomach and warm your soul. We might not have lightning bolt scars, but we have kneidlach.

Everyone has their own version of the dish. Some make it with noodles, others like their matzoh balls the size of bowling balls, and then there are those who prefer more vegetables then liquid. Let’s not forget the timeless debate over floaters and sinkers—the question of whether matzoh balls should be fluffy and float above the soup or dense and sink to the bottom of our bowls.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what side of the argument—there’s a reason why Jewish delis may not abide by the traditions of kashrut, but observe the tradition of matzoh balls with the utmost strictness. While it is often served on Passover, the cold winter days are prime matzoh ball soup season.

Growing up, my mom would ask my sister and me each week what we wanted featured on the Shabbat menu, and matzoh ball soup was always on the top of the list. During the winter months, we told our mom that we wanted soup to warm us up. During the summer months, we claimed it was hot outside so we wanted it to be hot inside too. That’s because matzoh ball soup is magic. When you eat it in the winter, it transfers you to a better place, like your bubbe’s kitchen perhaps. So why not become her favorite grandchild and take her and that soup on an exotic vacation—like the Caribbean!

That’s exactly what this recipe does. By adding some traditional Caribbean ingredients like coconut milk and cinnamon, you’ve boarded the plane. This recipe is a play on your bubbe’s traditional soup served Friday night and a pumpkin chicken soup served in Jamaica every Friday afternoon. It has matzoh balls much like the ones you remember eating at the Seder but the ginger and fresh coriander leaves help create a new memory. Instead of just having chicken in your pot, this recipe adds some fresh pumpkin, a handful of spices, and coconut milk in order to create a refreshing new chicken broth.

The flavors in this dish are much more powerful than the traditional bland chicken soup, and show just how much can be done with a timeless classic in the modern kitchen. Caribbean food is big on strong spices that can sometimes be a bit intense for some, the coconut milk not only helps cool down the soup but also provides an interesting flavor not often found in matzoh ball soup. The soup emits a powerful aroma that will fill your kitchen not only with its scent, but with hungry customers.

Not Your Bubbe’s Caribbean Matzoh Ball Soup
Serves about 8

Ingredients:
Spiced Matzoh Ball
1\2 tsp ginger
1\2 cup unpacked cilantro, diced
4 large eggs
1\4 cup seltzer
1 1\2 tsp salt
1\4 tsp black pepper
1 cup matzoh meal

Caribbean Chicken Soup Broth
1\2 tbsp allspice
1\2 tbsp turmeric
1\2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ginger
4 shallots, thinly sliced
5 garlic cloves, chopped
2 cinnamon sticks
2 bay leaves
1 1\2 lb pumpkin, cut into bite sized pieces
3 cups coconut milk
5 cups of chicken bouillon
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1. To make your matzoh balls, whip all your ingredients, except your matzoh meal, together in a medium bowl.

2. Once the ingredients are combined well, add the matzoh meal. Be careful to mix your batter evenly in order to prevent clumps of matzoh meal sticking to the sides.

3. Refrigerate your batter for at least 1 1/2 hours.

4. Once you are ready, boil a medium pot of salted water. After it reaches a soft boil, continue by creating balls out of the batter in the palm of your hand.

I recommend wetting your hands in order to prevent the batter from sticking. The balls should be no bigger than a ping pong ball in order to prevent you from serving your guests beach balls with their soup.

5. Let your matzoh balls cook in the boiling water for about 40 minutes or until they have nearly doubled in size and are floating above the water’s surface.

6. While you wait for the matzoh balls to cook, start preparing your soup. Set a large pot over a medium heat and toast your spices until they become fragrant.

7. Add the shallots and garlic to the pot. Cover the pot and cook them covered until they begin to soften.

8. Add the rest of the soup’s ingredients to the pot and allow your soup to reach a soft simmer.

9. Add your spiced matzoh balls to the pot in order for them to absorb some of the soup’s flavors.

10. Cook your Caribbean chicken soup broth for about 40 minutes, until the pumpkin has softened.

Also try:

Not Your Bubbe’s Tu B’Shevat Seder

Not Your Bubbe’s Downton Abbey Viewing Party

Not Your Bubbe’s Recipe: Almond Olive Oil Cake

The post Not Your Bubbe’s Recipe: Blizzard-Friendly Caribbean Matzoh Ball Soup appeared first on Jewcy.

Kadesh. U’rchatz. Karpas. Scratch that. Wrong seder. While the Passover seder is my favorite ritualized meal, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Tu B’Shevat seder. Tu B’Shevat, which is coming up this Friday, not only provides a space to celebrate our inner Jewish tree-hugger, but it also has good food and no matzah. Unlike Passover’s seder, this one does not have a set rabbinic text, so over the centuries, people have come up with a number of innovative ways to commemorate the holiday. From eating significant fruits to reading passages about Jewish environmentalism to trying out Jewish meditation, there is a wide range of ways to celebrate the birthday of the trees. Personally, I’m all for everyone standing on their chairs and yelling, “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees!”

The 15th day of the month Shevat, or Tu B’Shevat, was initially a place marker used to remind farmers to bring crops from their fruit trees to the Temple. It shows up in the mishnah in tractate Rosh Hashannah during a discussion of the four Jewish new year celebrations—did you know that there were four? Me neither. There is a new year for kings and a new year for animal tithes in addition to the one that comes 10 days before Yom Kippur and Tu B’Shevat, which was considered the new year for planting and tithing.

After the Temple’s destruction, the holiday was revived by Kabbalists in Tzfat, who tapped into the mystical essence of nature using fruit to symbolize our relationship with God. They created a structure for the Tu B’Shevat seder, including four glasses of wine and 10 different fruits, believing proper observance would bring the world closer to tikkun. Stemming from their use of fruit, it became customary in some parts of Europe to eat 15 different fruits on Tu B’Shevat, and other communities celebrated the day by eating a fruit for the first time in the last year. The Talmud also uses Tu B’Shevat as the literal birthday of the trees, counting a tree’s lifespan by the number of Tu B’Shevat’s it has witnessed.

A long-standing tradition of Tu B’Shevat entails eating Israel’s seven species, which include wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives (often consumed in the form of oil), and dates. I have clear memories of Tu B’Shevat when I was a student in Jewish day school. The whole school would file into the “festively” decorated cafeteria toward the end of the school day. There would inevitably be a dramatization of Honi and the carob tree, an interpretive scarf dance about the life of a tree, and an eagerly shrieked rendition of Eretz Zavat Chalav U’Devash.

After some supplemental readings on the land of milk and honey and a poem about the New Year of the Trees, we would (finally) turn to the partitioned Styrofoam plates before us and, after reciting a plethora of blessings, gingerly taste the figs and dry crackers, wishing we were actually eating the honey we’d spent the last hour talking about.

For this year’s Tu B’Shevat celebration, I wanted to use all of the species, but I actually wanted it to feel a little more grown up and make the food taste good, so instead of nibbling at each ingredient on its own, I’ve put together three recipes that combine them in a way that showcases the wonderful flavors in each and form a cohesive meal. Start the meal with a hearty winter salad and warm hunks of grape focaccia dipped in rich Israeli olive oil. Not totally sold on putting grapes on your focaccia? Fulfill your grape requirement with a nice glass of Israeli wine.

Then enjoy flavorful, juicy roasted chicken with figs and olives. If you want to keep your meal vegetarian, use the focaccia as a vehicle for homemade hummus and fig and olive tapenade. The barley and date recipe below is inspired by Turkish cuisine and uses pomegranate molasses to bring a tangy flavor to this grain salad that can be served warm or room temperature. If you’re not feeling the pomegranate molasses, throw some pomegranate seeds in with the dates instead. Be aware that non-pearled barley takes a very long time to cook. You can, of course, substitute another whole grain for the barley, but then you would be down one of the seven species! Incidentally, barley is the grain of the month for February, so you would be getting a jump-start on that celebration if you go with this recipe.

Don’t forget to add a new fruit to your meal—ideally something grown in Israel that you haven’t eaten in the last year—so you can say the shehechyanu.

Not Your Bubbe’s Grape Focaccia

Ingredients:

1 ⅔ cups lukewarm water
1 (¼ ounce) package active dry yeast
5 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus additional for kneading
¼ cup plus 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
1 tablespoon coarse sea salt
1 ½ cups halved grapes, seeded
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary, roughly chopped
1 ½ tablespoons coarse sugar
2 teaspoons coarse sea salt

Directions:

1. In a large bowl, gently combine the water and yeast until the water becomes murky and let it stand for 5-10 minutes. Add 5 cups flour, ¼ cup olive oil, and 1 tablespoon salt and mix vigorously with a wooden spoon until the ingredients form a dough.

2. Lightly flour the counter and turn out the dough to begin kneading by hand, until the dough is soft and smooth, but still sticky. Add flour as you go to prevent the dough from sticking to the counter, but remember that it should be a sticky dough. This should not take more than ten minutes.

3. Clean out your large bowl with warm water, dry, and lightly oil it. Transfer the dough to the bowl, and let it rise, covered with plastic wrap, at warm room temperature, until dough has doubled, about 1 to 1 ½ hours.

4. Generously oil a large (13″x17″) rimmed baking sheet or lightly oil a baking sheet lined with a silpat mat. Turn dough onto the baking sheet, and use your fingers (you may want to dip them in olive oil first) to spread the dough evenly to fill the sheet, letting the dough rest periodically. The dough will be dimpled from your fingertips–this is the rustic look we’re going for! Once the dough fills most of the whole baking sheet, let it rise again, covered with kitchen towels, until it doubles, about 1 hour.

5. Preheat the oven to 450°. Brush the top of the dough with the remaining olive oil and sprinkle grapes, rosemary, coarse sugar and coarse sea salt evenly over the dough. Bake in the middle of the oven for 25-30 minutes, until the bread is golden and and the grapes are bubbling. Immediately slide the focaccia from the baking sheet onto a cooling rack. Cool slightly and serve warm or at room temperature.

Not Your Bubbe’s Roasted Chicken with Figs and Olives

Ingredients:

8 ounces dried mission figs, stems removed
1 cup green pimento-stuffed olives
½ cup balsamic vinegar
¼ cup olive oil
1 chicken, cut in eight
1 lemon, zested
Cracked black pepper, to taste

Special equipment:

Food processor

Directions:

1. In the food processor, combine figs and olives and pulse until thoroughly minced. Add ¼ cup of the balsamic vinegar and run the food processor for 15 more seconds.

2. Drizzle some of the olive oil (reserve the rest) into the bottom of a baking pan and arrange the chicken, skin side up. Spread the fig and olive mixture over the chicken, tucking some under the skin so that it is nestled against the meat. Pour remaining olive oil over the chicken and allow it to marinate, covered, in the refrigerator for at least one hour and up to four.

3. When you are ready to cook the chicken, heat the oven to 350° Fahrenheit.

4. Pour the remaining oil and lemon zest over the chicken. Add the cracked pepper. Roast chicken in the oven for about 40 minutes, or until the skin has browned and the meat has cooked through.

Not Your Bubbe’s Barley with Dates and Pomegranate Molasses

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 cup pearled barley, rinsed
2 cups water, salted
⅓ cups dates, chopped
⅓ cup scallions, thinly sliced
¼ cup parsley, chopped
¼ cup mint, chopped
2 teaspoons harissa, optional
½ cup pomegranate juice or 3 tablespoons pomegranate molasses
Juice of ½ lemon
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1. In a large saucepan, heat the olive oil. Add the pearled barley and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until lightly toasted and fragrant, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the water and bring to a boil. Cover and cook over very low heat until the water is absorbed and the grains are tender, about 30 minutes. Fluff the grains with a fork.

2. To make the pomegranate molasses, pour ½ cup of pomegranate juice in a small pot and bring to a low boil over medium-high heat. Allow the juice to simmer until reduced by at least half and has become a thick syrup, about 6-8 minutes. Remove from the stove and allow the syrup to cool. The molasses can be refrigerated in a sealed container for up to one month.

3. When the barley has cooled, add the dates, scallions, parsley, mint, harissa (if using), pomegranate molasses, and lemon to the bowl and toss to combine. Add salt and pepper to taste and pomegranate molasses or lemon juice as needed.

Also try:

Not Your Bubbe’s Downton Abbey Viewing Party

Not Your Bubbe’s Almond Olive Oil Cake

Not Your Bubbe’s Indian Spiced Latkes With Apple Chutney

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• This Russian billionaire is reenacting the Passover march through the desert this week.

• Rookie editor Tavi Gevinson does not like the green variety of fruit slice candy.

• There’s a South Park Passover episode.

• “If Lucky Charms were a Jewish cereal, would the box have a picture of Rahm Emanuel?”

• We highly recommend skipping the second seder and heading to BAM to see Lena Dunham’s excellently curated ‘Hey, Girlfriend! Lena Dunham Selects’—Clueless and Vamp screen Saturday evening, and Dunham leads a Q&A with Amy Heckerling & Alicia Silverstone after both.

• Happy Passover, from General Ulysses S. Grant.

• Sausage! Get your kosher for Passover sausage!

• No bugs at the seder table, please.

• Why are these seders different? They’re held by Messianic Jews.

• Introducing the Bloody Maror, the ultimate Passover cocktail.

• Kim Ima’s recipe for Passover Apple cake, which she sells year-round from her Treats Truck.

• From the Jewcy archives, Deleon frontman Dan Saks shares his grandmother’s Passover recipes, Emily Goldsher-Diamond explains the joys of Kiglin, and HAVE WE MENTIONED OUR CAT HAGGADAH?

We’ll leave you with Les Matzarables, courtesy of Shalom Sesame. Dayenu!

The post The Only Exodus Round-Up You’ll Need appeared first on Jewcy.

The evening began with Durschlag introducing his collection, and explaining his impetus for and interest in collecting. The Haggadot “speak rather deeply to my heart and to my mind,” Durschlag said. His interest stems from the Jewish peoples’ transformation from servitude to redemption, and the fact that the Haggadah encompasses the full scope of the Jewish tradition: people from often vastly different cultures throughout time have used the same text in different contexts and communities, some of which have been decimated, all in order to make sense of the oppression, persecution and ultimately the freedom of the Jewish people. The Haggadah, for Durschlag, was like a hand reaching from the past to remind us of where we came from, to remember our ancestors and to keep the memory alive, with all of its complexity and diversity.

The Haggadah-as-cultural-object presents several axes on which to interpret it: we learn about the varied communities that produced it through time and space, we see a spectrum of Jewish expressions (reform, Orthodox, feminist, vegetarian, Zionist, gay rights, etc.), and encourages an inner-meditation that stems from the wide range of voices that comprise the Jewish people.

(Illustration of the Four Sons from a 1695 Haggadah printed in Amsterdam. From the collection of Stephen P. Durchslag.)

Collaborating with Durschlag, Alice Schreyer, Assistant University Librarian for Humanities, Social Sciences, and Special Collections, and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Professor of Modern Jewish Thought in the Divinity School, Pesach Weinstein, doctoral candidate in the Divinity School at University of Chicago, within the History of Religions Department, curated the exhibition. Weinstein chose Haggadot from Durschlag’s collection that stood out, with original and high-quality illustrations: “The Geismer 1928 and the Steinhardt 1923 have particularly striking illustrations and they were two of the pieces that I was most excited to show. Another way that certain Haggadot stood out from the thousands of others in the collection was their age and scarcity. I wanted to display pieces that represented the earliest examples of printed Haggadot, and that were also copiously illustrated. The Mantua 1568 and Venice 1599 fall into this category,” Weinstein explained. Certain Haggadot, such as the Munich 1946 produced for Holocaust survivors, convey a particularly strong emotional impact. I also chose contemporary political Haggadot which are unique in terms of their very specific intended audience.”

The first in a series of four lectures led by four distinguished scholars followed Durschlag’s opening remarks. David Stern, Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, started off the series with his lecture entitled The Haggadah and the Jewish Imagination. Stern introduced a “Haggadorama”—images of illustrations within early Haggadot, which depict Seders replete with Haggadot. The self-reflexivity of these images, that is, the Haggadah reflecting upon itself, furthers the idea that the Haggadah moves through history and yet remains the same. It is a static object in a dynamic world. It mediates between the fragmentary nature of identity and the fixed traditions that compose that very identity.

The illustrations in the Haggadot often reflect this imaginative property—they begin with Creation, or with the birth of Moses, and end in the moment the Haggadah was created in order to make it real and present for the community that would use it (Moses crosses the Nile in a gondola in a Venetian Haggadah from 1601).

A highlight of the lecture was Stern’s contention that throughout the history of Jewish culture, Jews always ate the way their host cultures ate. Seders in first century Roman Palestine, therefore, were modeled after the Roman Banquet—specifically the Symposium. Jews today recline at the Seder because Romans reclined, and drink wine at every course following the Roman model. For Romans, the Symposium was a place to drink, to praise the gods, discuss arcane topics and ancient history. The Seder evolved out of this tradition, but came to focus on redemption. Rabbis invented the Seder as a substitute for a sacrifice which could no longer be offered. A text was developed, somewhere in the 8th or 9th century, as a way to contextualize and order the symbolism imbued in the foods eaten at the Seder.

(Illustration of a Seder dinner from an 1867 Haggadah printed in Livorno, Italy. From the collection of Stephen P. Durchslag.)

There is no other Jewish ritual so connected visually with a book. Why then is the redemption of the Jewish people ritualized and reified? Why is the story played out through food, and not some other medium? Why is it important that the book changes after the various exiles? How does it concern the imaginative redemption—and why does it remain relevant in imagining and reimagining the exodus from Egypt, enslavement, the ten plagues, and sacrifice?

One major aspect of the Seder (or, “order”), and a function of the Haggadah (or, “the telling”), is for the Jew to look upon him or herself as though he or she had actually been freed from Egyptian slavery. The Haggadah has been adapted by cultures and subcultures to fit into modern terms. Therefore, Egypt can be the patriarchy, it can be Auschwitz, it can be addiction (there have been several Alcoholics Anonymous Haggadot printed). A Haggadah can be adapted for every identity in order to symbolically interpret various forms of oppression.

The notion of adaptation can be extended from a culture borrowing the Exodus to suit its own purposes. As was seen with the Jews using the Roman symposium for the Seder, is also a major factor in deeply rooted religious traditions. For example, the four sons in the Seder are equated with the four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic), which were integral to understanding human behavior in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and elsewhere. As such, the Wicked Son, for example, is equated with Mars, the God of War, and the choleric temperament. This borrowing from Greco-Roman culture, polytheistic societies in which the Jews lived (Egypt, too, was of course polytheistic) is in keeping with the idea that traditions are often adapted to fit another culture. Perhaps it would be meaningful to think about this adaptation in terms of The Last Supper, which is believed to have been a Seder, though Christians have adapted this to fit into their own tradition.

The Haggadah has become integral in re-imagining oppression, in helping Jews to understand their respective places in history—not only seeing oneself in symbolic terms, but, as Stern concluded, collapsing the past and present into a single moment. The Haggadah reminds us that we aren’t breaking free from the past, but instead are using our imaginations to connect to our pasts.

(Detail from a woodcut illustration from a Haggadah illustrated by Jacob Steinhardt, 1923. From the collection of Stephen P. Durchslag.)

Upcoming Lectures:

Sunday, April 22

Marc Michael Epstein (Vassar College), “Birds Head Revisited: Identity, Politics and Polemics the Birds’ Head Haggadah”

Sunday, May 6

Vanessa Ochs (University of Virginia), “The Coconut on the Seder Plate: A biography of the contemporary Haggadah.”

Sunday, May 13

Katrin Kogman-Appel (Ben-Gurion University), “Popularizing Books in a Manuscript Culture: The Visual Language of the Late Medieval Haggadah.”

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• Is this Brooklyn College provost anti-Semitic?

• Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wants to open a healthy restaurant in Miami.

• The best interview you’ll ever read with the associate director of Duke’s Canadian Studies Center.

• The trailer for Woody Allen’s new film, To Rome With Love:

The post Daily Jewce: The Ultimate Jewish Joke, Woody’s New Film, and more appeared first on Jewcy.

Passover is back, and this year its going glam. From fancy new haggadot to Jonathan Adler-designed seder plates, Passover might just be the new Hanukkah. Over at Tablet Magazine, Jewcy editor Stephanie Butnick gets in the holiday spirit with a list of seder-friendly designer items.

We don’t want to spoil the slideshow, but our favorite is this Paschal mezuzah designed by Tamara Connolly for her Kli Judaica line, inspired by the blood smeared on the doorposts of Jewish homes the night before the final plague. It’s creative, smart, and kind of dark, and we do like our mezuzot seasonal.

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