Is It Okay to Make Your Seder About Trump?Keeping politics out of Judaism might have made more sense before a biblical villain got elected president of the United States.
Yankee Stadium: The Long Good-byeAnd so it begins: the final season in the old Yankee stadium (built in 1923) begins today. The first regular game, against the Blue Jays, starts today at 1:05 p.m. What the press is wondering about on the big day.
intel
How Is a Park Slope Seder Different From All Other Seders?“All right,” said the rabbi. “We’ll try to get to the food as fast as we can.” Rose Water, the Haute Barnyard Park Slope restaurant, was holding its second-annual second-night Passover Seder, and the obstacle between the starving, secular attendees and the five-course prix fixe was an hour-long ritual leavened, as it were, with trademark neighborhood sanctimony. The plagues recitation became a mini-lecture on abused women (the modern-day plagues were rape, shame, and so on); we were even more riveted by the time- and nabe-specific Four Questions.
in other news
Everything Is PesadichWe somehow missed the news Friday that Park Slope’s own Wise Son, Jonathan Safran Foer, has announced he will publish his own version of the Passover Haggadah. Why? Are the 4,000 known versions of the book insufficient? As he explains in the current Forward, it’s because he doesn’t think those versions are good enough.
“We talk about slavery every year,” Foer said. “We talk about the movement toward freedom every year. But when was the last time a Seder made you really feel those things in a deep way — when you said, ‘I want to become more active, say, in stopping what’s going on in Darfur’? Because if that’s not an example of a situation that needs this movement toward freedom, nothing is. Or, ‘I need to work harder to make my life more energy independent,’ because we are slaves to energy right now.”
Next year in a Prius!
Jonathan Safran Foer to Release English Version of Haggadah [Forward]
the morning line
Mother of Mercy, Is This the End of San Gennaro?
• Now that’s not very Italian! A subcommittee of Little Italy’s community board voted against approving the annual San Gennaro feast, calling it a noisy nuisance. (The CB’s votes are merely recommendations to the city, though.) Zeppoles will fly! [NYDN]
• Every night can be a night at the museum if you’re the lucky (and rich) person who paid $276,000 for a dinosaur skull, or $4,500 for a mummy’s hand, at yesterday’s I.M. Chait Gallery natural-history auction. [NYT]
• Hillary sets a new early fund-raising record, trotting out five-star attraction Bill and netting an Obama-and-Edwards-are-gagging-worthy $10 mil over four events in one week. [NYDN]
• Not just the real thing, but kosher, too. The just-for-Passover version of Coca-Cola — made with real sugar, not corn syrup, because corn’s among the Passover no-nos — is again available in area supermarkets. [NYP]
• State Senator Jeff Klein wants to rat out (ha!) dirty restaurants by giving eateries an A-through-F health grade they must post at their doors. Can penitent taco chains earn an “E” for effort? [amNY]
