Publisher Comments
This Haggadah offers a rich feast of story and insight for anyone's Seder Table. It can be used year after year and remain fresh. I look forward to using it with my family" Rabbi Harold Kushner (Conservative) Author, When Bad Things Happen to Good People This is not just "another" Haggadah. It is itself a rich, joyful, and immensely informative celebration that will help transform the Pesach Seder. It is a book that becomes a trusted and encouraging companion. No matter his or her starting point, everyone will emerge with an expanded sense of personal competence." Leonard Fein (Founder and former editor of MOMENT Magazine) Each Pesach we seek ways to make the Seder different and stimulating, being faithful to pedagogy and halacha at the same time. Here is a fascinating Haggadah for all Pesachs, demonstrating how to be both halachic and creative, while learning and having fun in the process." Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, Orthodox, Principal of the RAMAZ School, NYC A Different Night is to my mind the best and most interesting Haggadah to appear in many years. The authors have managed to structure the book in imaginative ways that engage family members of all ages in serious and engaging discussions that explore the ever expanding meanings of the Passover Haggadah. The book is truly a delight. Dr. Barry W. Holtz Associate Professor of Jewish Education, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Editor, Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts This rich Haggadah enables Jews to connect with their tradition in deeply personal ways, while at the same time opening the tradition to Jews, showing it to be responsive and flexible. As I prepared for Pesach last year, this Haggadah taught me that our most important heritage is to question. It opened our Seder to deep and exciting discussions. Rabbi Rachel Cowan, Reform Director of Jewish Life Program, Nathan Cummings Foundation New Haggadah Earmarked for Families By Rabbi Jack Riemer Jewish Journal South April 8, 1997 BY NOW THERE are who-knows-how-many different editions of the Haggadah. It is probably the most published book in all of Jewish life. There are haggadot for vegetarians, for peaceniks, for secularists, for art lovers and for almost every other category that you can think of. So what do we need another one for? That was my thought until I opened this one, and then I understood which niche this book is intended to fill. It is for those who may not know much, but who want to learn and who want to have a seder that is user-friendly and interactive and meaningful for both adults and children. That is a pretty big segment of the market, and so this is a book that deserves to be considered for possible use for at least one, if not both, of the nights of the seder. The people who put it together are not only good pedagogues, they are master designers. And so they have worked out a number of formats and prompters on each page that make it clear and easy to use For example, each section of the Haggadah is listed in faint blue on the right hand side of the page so that the user knows how much has been covered and the section that you are up to is listed in dark blue. For those who don't want to or are unable to stay up till midnight, there is a "bare bones seder" that consists of both text and ideas for discussion and projects for the kids and that can be completed in an hour. There are thought questions, such as "Was it right for Abraham to break his father's idols?" and "Are we not all Jews by choice today?" that are bound to raise debate and discussion at the seder. And there are quotations from a whole range of people such as Frances Bacon, William Shakespeare and Winston Churchill as well as Maimonides and Rav and Chassidic masters. Shakespeare's thoughts about whether revenge is good or bad are a lovely sendoff to the discussion of why we spill ten drops of wine for the ten plagues. My favorite parts are the cartoons. A teenager named Tanya Zion, who, I suspect, is the daughter of one of the editors, has some marvelous depictions of different parts of the seder, and there is artwork that has been culled from the creations of Marc Chagall, Jakob Steinhart, David Sharir, Shraga Weill, Ben Shahn and others. The whole idea of the seder is that it should be an experiment in intergenerational communication. And so the editors do something very special with the section about the four children (or "the four sons," as they used to be called before our consciousness was raised by the feminists). They bring us about fifteen pages of different drawings of the four children, so that we can discuss together what constituted wiseness and what constituted badness, and what constituted simpleness and inability to ask in different periods of our people's history and in the imagination of different artists. They show us one rendition from the Prague Haggadah of 1526 and, right next to it, one that comes from Budapest in 1924. They include Yariv Ben Aharon's warning about the pitfalls of labelling, and his suggestion that the four children are really four facets of each and every child. And they suggest that we might do some role playing or debate whether "the wicked child" may not be an unfair description. They show us Don Isaac Abrabanel's opinion that "the wise child" may really be a smart ass, wise guy trying to show off his knowledge instead of the good guy that we have always thought hi to be. Then comesan artistic rendition of the four children from a Haggadah done in Chicago in 1879 (that shows the wicked son smoking at the seder) anone done by Lola in 1920 (which surely gets the prize for the world's worst Haggadah art!) showing the wicked son as a prize fighter. Tanya Zion chimes in with two marvelous pictures: one of the four versions of the ideal Jewish girl and one of the four children in contemporary Israel. Look at it just to see if you can figure out why the haredi child is the one who does not know how to ask. There are portraits of the four children by Arthur Szyk and David Moss, done in America, and by Zvi Livni and Shraga Weil, done in Israel. There is one, by Dick Codor, that uses the Marx brothers as models (Quick - do you remember which brother never spoke?) And there is a version, from Rony Oren's Animated Haggadah, in which the four children are made of clay. I bet that you can't get through this section of the seder without a good many laughs and a lively interchange on what constitutes goodness or wisdom or rebelliousness or apathy in our age. But try to save some time for the rest of the Haggadah, for there are a lot of innovations and surprises all through this book. By the way, one of its most helpful suggestions is to expand the meaning of the karpas that we eat at the beginning of the seder to include dipping and tasting various fresh vegetables and other appetizers so that When do we eat already?" does not become the kvetch of the evening. The seder is not supposed to be an endurance contest or a speed race or a rushed-through prelude to the meal. It is supposed to be a holy moment, when parents teach children who we are and what our story is and manufacture the memories that will nourish them for years to come.


Book Description
A Different Night(180 pages)is a family participation haggadah for all Jewish denominations and levels of knowledge that offers stories, discussions, explanations, readings, songs, activities and games. The art work is eclectic from Chagall, Rembrandt and Ben Shahn to cartoons. It features 20 illustrations of the 4 children including the 4 daughters. The language is accessible and directions complete and it offers both a short and a long seder guaranteed to be fun and intelectually stimulating for adults, teenagers and children. Recommended by rabbis of all denominations, it has become an enormous best seller. The enormous variety of activities offered allow one to tailormake seder so that every year produce new Jewish memories.


About the Author
Noam Sachs Zion and David Dishon, educated in ivy league schools in the U.S., made aliyah to Israel in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. They are on the Judaica faculty of the Shalom Hartman Institute for advanced Jewish studies in Jerusalem. Noam runs the curriculum development department specializing in Bible, midrash and art.He also contributed to the Bill Moyers book entitled Talking about Genesis(Doubleday) issued in conjunction with the Moyers Genesis series. David Dishon is the Judaic studies coordinated at the experimental Hartman high school, author of The Pluralistic Culture Of Rabbinic Debate(Schocken, Hebrew)and currently writing on rabbinic views of warfare.