Finding Meaning, Joy, and Humor in Passover Foods
Food plays an important, even defining, role in Jewish holidays. Passover is no exception.
At the Seder meal Jews eat and discuss symbolic foods. Of the many foods associated with the Seder, matzah — flat, unleavened bread — is the hallmark of Passover. The holiday, which lasts for seven days (eight days outside of Israel), is even called the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Hag ha-matzot). During Passover matzah is the only type of bread that is traditionally consumed.
Eating matzah connects the distant past to the present. The ancient Israelites, as told in the biblical book of Exodus, fled Egypt in such haste that they could not wait for their bread to rise. Jews, therefore, customarily eat this type of flat bread (matzah) during the holiday to remember the story. People may enrich matzah — bland in appearance (and possibly in taste for some) — with other foods. For example, some Jews add sauce and cheese to create “matzah pizza,” while others follow favorite recipes passed down through the generations. Meals during the holiday may seem limiting, but dishes can be quite creative, joyful, and personal. Passover-style foods have also inspired artists to interpret the holiday, comment on its traditions, or simply make Passover relatable, fun, and even humorous, as seen through objects in the Jewish Museum’s collection.
Classic Passover-style foods are the subject of Audrey Flack’s Matzo Meal, which the artist made in 1962. Flack’s work features products by Manischewitz — a well-established Kosher food company especially known for its matzah and wine — as if the painting were an advertisement for the company. Until the turn of the twentieth century, when industrialization was applied to the food industry, matzah was handmade. Factories like Manischewitz began mass-producing matzah, allowing many Jewish families to buy it in bulk.
But Flack’s painting is not merely a supermarket on canvas, filled with monotonous store-bought items. The work started with Flack assembling boxes she had available at home, carefully arranging them in a composition. The artist was particularly drawn to the Manischewitz potato pancake mix — pictured faceup in the foreground — which she describes as “elegant” in its height and narrowness. She treats these objects as distinct geometric shapes with different angles and nuances of lighting.
In a recent conversation, Flack acknowledged in retrospect how innovative her painting was for its time, notably in its mundane, domestic, and Jewish content painted by a female artist. She commented on her own realization of the work’s theme as radical: “As I was painting the boxes of Manischewitz’s matzo meal, I remember stopping, holding up my brush, and thinking, ‘This kind of Jewish subject matter has never been painted before, at least not in any paintings I have seen in museums or art history books.’ It gave me a moment’s pause but I decided to go on; it was important.” Flack came to understand that she subconsciously integrated her essence — as a woman, a Jew, and an artist — into the work’s creation.
Flack’s choice of subject matter is matched by her use of artistic techniques that were bold and innovative for a female artist working in 1962. The work heralds photorealism, a method of painting after photographs that uses tools such as slide projections, that the artist pioneered a year later. Flack’s technique challenges, even if unintentionally, the postwar stereotype of women as confined to the domestic sphere and art history’s marginalization of women artists. Working in oil on canvas, Flack also subtly (and rightfully) inserts herself within the male-dominated tradition of oil painting and chooses to depict mass-produced items in this medium and in the still-life genre. The objects look glamorous in their oil sheen, but also comforting in their softened tonalities, conveying the simple joys of Passover at home.
Similar to Flack’s work but painted thirty years later, Adam Rolston’s Untitled (Horowitz Margareten Matzohs) glorifies Passover food in acrylic on canvas. Rolston presents the holiday staple within the wider context of consumer culture; he additionally creates a dialogue with the art and imagery of Andy Warhol. Flack’s small and intimate canvas is a prescient and daring feminist gesture in the early years of Pop art in the United States. Meanwhile Rolston’s giant painting proposes an all-out, unapologetically Jewish alternative to Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s soup cans. The viewer can see Rolston’s hand in the bold, painterly brushwork, which differs from the silkscreening process preferred by Warhol.
A distinctive sensibility on the part of the artist is also evident in Nicole Eisenman’s Seder plate. The object’s energetic, freehand sectioning and cartoonish letters provide levity as well as instruction. Eisenman uses vernacular words to describe the various Passover foods, making the Seder ritual more accessible. At the same time, she irreverently exposes the foods’ intricate and occasionally confusing symbolism: What is the difference between the various herbs on the Seder plate? And why do some plates have six places for the foods and others five?
Eisenman specifies the names of the foods commonly used in the Seder rather than their formal titles, which can be overly general and somewhat difficult to understand. “Horse / radish” is the food typically used in place of the bitter herb maror, a reminder of the bitterness of slavery. A second bitter herb known as hazeret often takes the form of romaine lettuce, but may not appear on many Seder plates — the reason that they do not all have the same number of sections. And then, there is the karpas, usually parsley, which gets dipped in saltwater to bring to mind the tears shed by the Israelite slaves in Egypt. As Eisenman bluntly summarizes on her Seder plate, some of these herbs are indeed “bitter” while others are “not so bitter.” A crowd-pleaser at Seder tables around the world, “cementy stuff” alludes to the haroset, a mixture of fruits, nuts, and wine or honey that signifies the mortar used by the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt.
Like Eisenman, Neil Goldberg tackles the Passover story with a dose of humor in his Seder plate Untitled, made in 1996. The artist demonstrates the symbolism of the matzah — an embodiment of the Israelites’ hurried departure from Egypt — by mounting a piece of the unleavened bread on heavy-duty industrial wheels. Goldberg used a matzah he purchased from a Hasidic factory, which mandates a strict eighteen-minute baking time to prevent it from rising. Many Jewish families also rush to finish the cleaning and preparations for Passover, another important part of the holiday. The Seder plate encapsulates all this haste, past and present. Yet introspection is at the heart of Goldberg’s piece, which certainly provides “food for thought.” Traditionally the youngest child at the Seder table asks four questions that highlight the difference between the night of Passover and all other nights:
Why on all other nights do we eat leavened products and matzah, and on this night only matzah?
Why on all other nights do we eat vegetables, and on this night only bitter herbs?
Why on all other nights do we not dip our food even once, and on this night we dip twice?
Why on all other nights do we eat sitting or reclining, and on this night we eat only reclining?
In the spirit of the holiday, which encourages children to be inquisitive at the Seder, the artist worked with students from six Jewish day schools of different denominations. He invited children to write down the questions they would like to pose to God:
Why did God take seven days to create the world when he could have done it in a couple of seconds?
Why did Eve come second?
Why did God wait so long to take us out of Egypt?
Why do have to wait ’til next year to be in Jerusalem?
How come we ask the same four questions every year?
These questions, written in spirals, are the placeholders for the traditional foods in Goldberg’s Seder plate.
As this Passover has been different than all other celebrations of the holiday, what are your questions this year?
— Abigail Rapoport, Curator of Judaica, and Claudia Nahson, Morris and Eva Feld Senior Curator
To learn more about Passover and related ritual objects in the Jewish Museum collection, visit TheJewishMuseum.org/Collection.
Did you attend a virtual Seder this year? Don’t forget to #ShowUsYourSeder by sharing photos from your Seder plate or table on social media.
