Include women’s voices with JWA’s Passover Haggadah

Last week Kathleen Peratis shared her disappointment with the widely acclaimed The New American Haggadah by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander:

I loved it at first touch. Then I read the first line: “You are blessed, Lord God-of-Us, King of the Cosmos, who has set us apart with his mitzvot, and instituted us to eliminate all hametz.” “Lord”? “King”? “His”? Oh no.

And then page after page of more of the same: male pronouns for God, and other words referencing a male God: king, father, etc. And the story of the four sons was the four sons, not even the four children. Women and girls are totally absent from the greatest story ever told in The New American Haggadah.

For the last 20 years at least, “gender inclusiveness” in Jewish texts has been an option for us as writers. Some of the contributors of The New American Haggadah must have grown up with such “gender inclusive” texts.” Yet they neither employed this model, nor explained why they didn’t.

Read More: @ jwa.org

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