A heartfelt thanks to everyone who ordered our Haggadah and sent us feedback, after putting it into action at seders across the country! We’ve been collecting photos of the Haggadot in the wild, and wanted to share a few of them here.

The Lutwick family seder in New York – check out the amazing plague masks!

Back in Washington, DC, the table is set for the original Urban Family Passover Seder.

Urban family in action!

Two of the 50+ guests at the Pines family seder in Berkeley, California.

The Flamholz family seder in Baltimore.

The Phillips crew represents for San Diego.

The Wacks / Gallagher family seder in Eugene, Oregon.

Los Angeles, hipstomatic style.

More love for the Haggadah on Strong Island!

Thanks to everyone who cheered for us, who welcomed our Haggadah into their homes, and who sent us love! Until next year….

I have vivid childhood memories of my mom staying up until all hours of the night, packing. It was always a challenge to cram the presents she had stockpiled for our family in Israel into our luggage. And of course they reciprocated whenever they visited, bringing us snacks like Bisli and Bamba, or candy bars like Pesek Zman. But every now and then it was something even better.

About 8 years ago, one of the gems schlepped across the ocean for us was this irreverent Haggadah, illustrated by Zeev Engelmayer, a comic artist living and working in Tel Aviv. He regularly publishes comics in Israeli newspapers and magazines, and his Haggadah shows him at his twisted best.

The four sons:

Chad gadya and rachtza / motzi matzah / maror / korech / shulchan orech:

Chametz! Chametz!

All images above courtesy of Mitzraim Publishers – check out more of Engelmayer’s awesome spreads on Flickr. For those who will be in Israel this spring / summer, there will be an exhibit of Engelmayer’s work in Holon. I, for one, would love to see what he does with the Song of Songs.

The set up of the main room. Notice the glorious mish mash of Haggadot.

I’m always shocked when I attend a seder that’s actually orderly, as the name would suggest. The average Pines family seder is more akin to a decentralized terrorist cell, and I mean that in the best possible way. My aunt and uncle take pride in squeezing at least 50 people into their living room in Berkeley every year, a space that the fire marshall would consider suitable for about half as many. Things often get way out of hand. One year, the entire heating system was dismantled in search of the afikomen, just to give you an idea.

Uncle Alex at the head of the table, trying to herd cats in the adjoining room.

My uncle Alex can barely be made out in the distance as he waves the shank bone around. Since we use 15 different editions of the Haggadah, most of us have only a vague idea of where we’re supposed to be in the proceedings. It’s a matter of course for three different people to yell out three different page numbers as a new reader fumbles around, trying to find the right passage. That’s the whole fun of it.

This is a totally misleading picture – it would suggest rapt attention, which is rarely the state of affairs.

Though everyone gets a turn at reading (in no particular order, as you’ve probably guessed by now), over the years we’ve identified the fastest readers, who are then assigned the heftiest passages so that we can get to the matzah ball soup as expediently as possible. And, oh, the matzah ball soup! The most perfectly fluffy specimens open the festival meal, courtesy of Arela, a family friend who’s also the life of the party on piano. Somehow, osso buco has also become a Passover must. And the meal isn’t over until my mom’s bavarian cream brings down the house.

Matzah ball soup signals the dissolution of what little order there is to begin with.

We generally don’t get much further than the festival meal, leaving the rest of the Haggadah untouched. However, we do sing “Who Knows One?” over coffee, while the herculean clean-up effort gets underway in the kitchen. Passover brings together the regulars and the strays, the young and the old, everyone under one roof, if not at a single table. It’s raucous and warm, and disorderly in the best possible way.

Arela has been accompanying songs on piano since the early 80′s.

No, this isn’t matzah. Colorful food from a year in Phnom Penh. Left: traditional desserts. Right: street food.

It was the spring of 2005 and I was living in Cambodia, working on a research project at Institut Pasteur du Cambodge. The closest Jewish organization was Chabad in Bangkok, and they didn’t know of anyone holding a seder in Phnom Penh. They did, however, promise to send me matzah. I stopped by the Cambodia Daily and wrote a short ad that would run 2 days before the first night of Pesach, looking for other folks who wanted to celebrate the holiday.

My first response was a jackpot: a guy named Peter said that he and friends were in the process of organizing a seder, and that I would be welcome to join. Fabulous! I was told to bring wine, charoset, and the infamous Chabad of Bangkok matzah, if it arrived on time. I received 2 more emails in response to my ad. A British man who was in town for a short visit wanted to join our seder, and an Israeli tourist and some other Israelis she had met were also looking for a place to break matzah. I forwarded their emails to Peter, who responded, “The more, the merrier!”

Thanks to the miracle of Fedex International Priority mail, a package of matzah arrived the day before the seder. The box contained both familiar, square machine made matzah, as well as special, round shmurah matzah, which is made in Israel by hand.

The dinner was hosted at a local Russian restaurant, and was part potluck, part restaurant catered. While children ran around and adults introduced themselves and mingled, the seder plates were assembled. One person had brought eggs, another karpas, another lamb shank. I contributed the charoset and matzah. Wine bottles accumulated. The person who was supposed to bring the bitter herbs (wasabi, because horseradish is not easily found in Phnom Penh) had forgotten, so we asked the restaurant if they had a substitute; they came up with ginger root. On the table was an assortment of Haggadahs, incuding the time-honored Maxwell House edition. One of our esteemed leaders, Uriel, had put together a Phnom Penh edition of the Haggadah made from photocopies of other editions.

The crowd was eclectic: American Jews and honorary Jews were highly represented. The British man who had contacted me was in attendance, as was the young Israeli woman, who brought a group of Israelis she had met in Phnom Penh over the previous few days. She said, “I can just tell an Israeli when I see one on the street,” and had picked up about 6 or 7 Israeli tourists with no seders of their own. Most of the other guests knew one another, and had participated in seders together during previous years.

The ceremonial reading part of the seder was great: abbreviated, but with all the right spirit and mood. I got to read my favorite part aloud, “Lo, this is the bread of affliction.” The afikomen was hidden for the children. The Israelis were happy to provide the Hebrew versions of prayers, as well as sing all the songs. We discussed the meaning of the 4 questions. The shmurah matzah was a big hit. We made Hillel sandwiches with matzah, ginger, and charoset: a good combination, but I still like horseradish better. And then we ate.

True to tradition, the food was abundant. One of the guests had convinced her mother to mail her matzah ball mix from the States several weeks before, and she made the most delicious, traditional matzah ball soup, with enough matzah balls for all 30 of us to each have one. This was followed by the restaurant’s tasty Russian fare: their version of gefilte fish, stuffed cabbage leaves, dolmades, latkas, beet salad, garden salad, and steamed fish in a cream sauce. I ate until I could eat no more. Like many seders, the ceremony deteriorated after dinner. The children searched for the afikomen, and we said, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Ben Shahn is best known for his social realist paintings in the 1930′s and 40′s, but he also produced some of the most exciting contemporary Judaica in the United States.

In the 1950′s, he illustrated a book called The Alphabet of Creation, pictured above. (You can still buy a later edition of the book.) His lettering for the cover influenced my classic Hebrew alphabet poster (along with Lawrence Kushner’s Book of Letters); it also became his signature. A stamp of the miniature alphabet appears in the corner of many of his works after 1960. You can see it in red on the lower right corner of this ketubah he designed, which is now in the permanent collection of the New York Jewish Museum:

In the 60′s, he published Love and Joy About Letters, a book which features more of his hand lettering. His training in lithography and graphic design really shines through in his later works.

Interestingly, Shahn made many of the illustrations that would later appear in his Haggadah in the 1930′s. His watercolors were finally published in the 60′s, along with loads of gorgeous hand lettering and 10 drawings for the song Chad Gadya. His Haggadah is a personal volume, evoking his memories of Passover with his father.

Again, you can see his signature red chop on the lower right of the opening spread, below which he has the shehechiyanu:

Shahn’s hand lettered Hebrew contrasts nicely with the clean English typography:

The Hebrew titling gets a healthy amount of breathing room:

The 2 languages are set helpfully on opposing pages:

Chad Gadya gets generous real estate at the end of the Haggadah – 5 spreads for a short song. Here’s the first of them:

Shahn had so much lefty street cred that he was named checked by Woody Allen in Annie Hall (see the :45 mark). But his body of work is multi-dimensional, irreducible. He straddled commercial and fine art, and tackled a broad range of secular and religious subjects. It’s always interesting to see what an artist with such breadth creates as personal work.

The first few photos I took of the thread were pulled back:

They were also poorly metered, as you can see. For the final artwork, I ended up using close-ups and blending them together:

Here’s a fun shot from the messy side:

It’s thrilling to have the finished book in hand! Everyone who has put in an order already will get their copies next week. Arielle and I would love to hear what you think of it when you get yours. Do you know anyone who might also want one? Send them over before we sell out!

I’ll leave you with a desktop calendar marking Erev Pesach:

Thank you all for your support!

The Urban Family Passover Haggadah has arrived! Everyone who pre-ordered will receive a little something in the mail next week. If you or anyone you know would still like to buy copies, be sure to place your order by April 8 to ensure delivery before Passover.

From Whence it Came

Arielle’s holiday table: the print-out that would become the Urban Family Passover Haggadah.

From the foreword:

This book began as a few pages of supplemental readings at a potluck Passover seder in Washington, DC in 2004. That night there were only two Jewish people present, and most of the guests had never been to a seder. As I explained the symbols and put the narrative into context, I was–for the first time in my life–really telling the story of Passover.

Like anyone who hears a story for the first time, my guests asked questions and made connections between this story and other stories they knew. Sitting among my urban family–the connected group of friends, colleagues, neighbors, and classmates–I began to comprehend the power of this ritual to connect us to one another and to history. As the tradition continued in subsequent years, the questions asked and stories told at the urban family seders inspired the addition of new and different meditations and explanations. Eventually, those elements became the Urban Family Passover Haggadah.

While the Torah does not refer explicitly to urban families in Exodus, the fact that it refers to the Jewish people not as individual family units, but as a community, is significant. The Torah tells of a people who suffered together in Egypt as a community, and who were freed together as a community. However you celebrate Passover with your family–however you characterize them–may you feel the strength of this community.

A Look Inside

Want to see more? Feast your eyes on more spreads and bigger images right here.

Giving Back

The message of Pesach, “All who are hungry, come and eat; all who are needy come and celebrate Passover” calls on us explicitly to engage in tikkun olam, the repair of the world. We decided to answer this call by donating 25% of the proceeds from our Haggadah to Polaris Project, a non-profit organization combating human trafficking and modern day slavery.

Order your copies here!

The best designs seem inevitable in hindsight, but the path to them is often circuitous and painstaking. Many ideas go through several rounds of sketching or get fully developed into finished directions, only to be abandoned. Curious to see covers that didn’t make the cut? Here are a few outtakes from the design process, straight from the cutting room floor:

Pins

I took a lot of photographs of pins and thread in various configurations, thinking I might use them either for the cover design or the interior illustrations.

The circles were inspired by the seder plate:

I also tried creating shapes with thread strung from the pins:

I ultimately used that last shot in conjunction with a photograph I had taken of a seagull to make a cover design. I was playing with the theme of constraint and freedom:

Collage

Another direction for the cover started as a physical collage and later became a digital collage. The first sketch I made was a series of lines sewn into paper. This idea later became a line illustration for the interior, but it was first considered as a dimensional element to be used for the cover:

I used printing ink and a roller to create the ground for this collage, and then added pieces I had painted with gouache before sewing into the composition with thread:

I decided that the color from the collage was vibrating too much, so I digitally constructed a similar layout:

Bold shapes

I tried incorporating traced letterforms to give a feeling of the hand:

I also experimented with bolder artwork – I was trying to capture the energy of seeking freedom. This was the collage I used to mock everything up:

And the finished flat:

A small circle of trusted advisors saw all of these covers, as well as the one we ended up using. The feedback was nearly unanimously in favor of the one that made the cut. Arielle and I were too close to it at the time, but now that we’ve had some time to live with the final design, it seems so obviously right. So, to celebrate the launch of our Haggadah tomorrow, I’ll show you some of the photographs I took to make the final cover on Friday!

Summer of ’74. Suzanne Lutwick in Kansas, en route to California.

It wasn’t until I began this Haggadah project that I thought to ask my mother, Suzanne Lutwick, about her first Passover seder. I never really considered that there was a part of her life when she wasn’t convening family and friends for holiday meals. It would seem that she was planning elaborate Passover menus in utero.

But there was life before Suzanne’s holiday table. Unlike my siblings and I, my mother didn’t grow up a New York Jew. She grew up outside of Toronto, the daughter of a British war bride and an Italian Catholic from Des Moines, and she found her Judaism as a young adult.

She attended her first Passover seder in 1969 while she was in nursing school. Her boyfriend at the time invited her to join him at his family’s home for the holiday. She didn’t know what to expect, but she knew that a Passover seder was a special occasion. To show her excitement, she got all dolled up. She chose a navy blue velour mini dress and a fancy necklace, borrowed from a classmate named Poppy. That day, she went to the salon and had her hair done up in curls.

Suzanne remembers that night vividly – sitting at the long table set up in the living room, amidst parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles, and following along with the traditional Haggadah. It was quite possibly the first brisket she had tasted. Though she did not know the tunes to the songs and was too polite to search under the couch cushions for the afikomen, she did take away from the evening a strong sense of the warmth and connection that can be created when food, family, and tradition intersect.

She met my father, Larry, in San Francisco in 1971 and converted to Judaism soon after. In the 10 years that followed, my parents lived in 4 different cities – none close to home or family. But most years at Passover, they were welcomed guests at the homes of friends and colleagues. At those seders – with her urban families of sorts – my mom began to learn more about Passover traditions and the many ways the commandment to retell the story of the Exodus can be fulfilled.

When our family moved to New York in the 1980s, my mom began to host her own holiday meals. Each year, she performs stunning feats of physics, squeezing more family, friends, and lovingly prepared foods into our dining room than the previous year.

Now that my siblings and I are grown and we have begun to host our own seders, around our own crowded tables, we follow in her footsteps. Every time I drag out the folding chairs to fit just one more guest, I channel her unshakeable verve for gathering and nourishing. And every time I learn to interpret the Passover tradition in a new way, I know I am on the right path.

The Haggadah is on press! Here’s a little peek at some of the press sheets with illustrations:

It feels great to have everything off to the printer. Now that the files are out of my hands, I can start sharing some behind the scenes goodies with you! Here are a few glimpses of me at work:

Laying out the introduction.

Playing with string! We ended up using line illustrations for the interior instead of these tableaus, but it was fun to make them.

Drawing one of the final illustrations that made it into the Haggadah.

Next week, I’ll share some of the b-sides from the cutting room floor, as well as more Haggadot from our research.