Easter / Passover Mashups, Part II: Barbie buys matzah

As I wrote in Easter / Passover Mashups, Part I: Passover Peep Panoramas, I've always liked the hands-on craftiness of coloring Easter eggs, and although I don't celebrate Easter, I have been known to put out on my seder table a plate of hard boiled eggs bearing brightly-colored eggs shells.

So naturally I'm a fan of other mashups of seasonal Jewish and Christian cultural vocabularies, like the DIY Tiny Matzah box for Barbie which Hatam Soferet posted on Jewschool.


She writes:

To make your own box of Barbie matzah you will need:

• corrugated cardboard
• ruler
• scissors
• glue
• tape
• pencil
• this scan of a box of matzah (print it at 300dpi)
  

Measure, mark, and cut four pieces of corrugated cardboard 30mm*27mm. Tape them together in a bundle. These are your matzot (hahaha, insert matzah/cardboard joke of choice here).

For the complete directions, you must visit her post.

Hatam Soferet, aka Jen Taylor Friedman by the way, is the creative mind behind Tefillin Barbie. A sofer, she's the first woman known to have written a sefer Torah.

Take a look at her project and what she has to say about being a female sofer. It's all on her website:

"Tefillin Barbie generated an extraordinary amount of feedback. She featured on Jewschool and Jewlicious, on BoingBoing, in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, on Ritualwell, Lilith magazine (Winter '06-'07 issue), New Voices, the London Jewish Chronicle, The Jewish Advocate, the Philadelphia Jewish Voice, the New Jersey Jewish News, the Forward, the Jewish Week..."

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Easter / Passover Mashups, Part I: Passover Peep Panoramas

A Very Peeps Passover by Nycole Klein and Chris Patton, placed 32nd in the Washington Post's 3rd Annual Peep Show. "Our Peeps have sat down to a traditional Passover Seder, complete with the requisite Passover Haggada (prayer book), Seder plate, candles, matzo and lots of wine. As an added bonus, the Afikomen is hidden somewhere in the room!" says Klein.

've always liked the hands-on craftiness of coloring Easter eggs, and although I don't celebrate Easter, I have been known to put out on my seder table a plate of hard boiled eggs bearing brightly-colored eggs shells.

So naturally I'm a fan of other mashups of seasonal Jewish and Christian cultural vocabularies, like the above panorama of a Pesach dinner attended by Peeps®. (Gives the expression "my peeps" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?)

Peeps®, if you don't know, are bizarre little marshmallow candies traditionally shaped like little yellow chicks and popular at Easter.


According to Wikipedia, theyare made from marshmallow, sugar, gelatin, and carnauba wax, but they have a distinctly unfoodlike texture. In 1999, scientists at Emory University performed experiments on batches of Peeps® to see if they really are indestructable: "They claimed that the eyes of the confectionery 'wouldn't dissolve in anything.'"

Their apparent indestructability and their excessive cuteness challenges people to desecrate them, and so many bricoleurs have tried their hands at making Peeps® dioramas that newspapers now hold annual contests. (These are not to be confused with "Peep Offs," where contestants compete to choke down the greatest number of stale Peeps.)


Writing on Jewschool,feygele called our attention to flickr user stylecouncil1's wonderful Peeps for Passover, a series of photos of the ten plagues as performed by Peeps®.

Chag Sameach Pesach!

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Seder at the White House / Seder b'beit h'levon

From the White House blog:

"President Obama hosts a traditional Seder dinner in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House on Thursday night, April 9, 2009. Some friends and White House employees and their families joined the Obama family. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)."

NB: to find out who was gathered around the Obama's seder table, see Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet's "Ma Nishtanah in the White House."

Tip o' the kippah to Jill at Writes Like She Talks for pointing out that the Obamas and their guests are using the trusty old Maxwell House Haggadah. Used by millions of American Jews over the years, the free Maxwell House Haggadah began in the early 1920s to promote Maxwell House coffee when it became certified Kosher for Passover.

The seder at the White House appears to have been a somber, respectful, traditional seder.

But maybe next year, the Obamas could join the trend and host a more playful, child-oriented seder. Then Sasha and Malia can enjoy acting out the 10 Plagues with plastic frogs, fake blood, sunglasses (darkness) and marshmallows (hail). Like my kids.

Sure, it's goofy. But we had a good time.

And I did set a very nice table, as my mother would have said, with the nice china and tulips from my own garden.

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Passover song gets whimsical with matzah

Tip of the kippah to Jill at Writes Like She Talks.

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Facebook Haggadah

How long until Haggadah parodies outnumber serious ones?


My all-time favorite is still Michael Rubiner's Two Minute Haggadah (subtitle: A Passover Service for the Impatient).

But this Facebook Haggadah is good too.  Here are some screen shots:

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