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- Books<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
30 April, 2019<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/books-lipman.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\n\u201cO<\/em>y veh iz mir<\/i>.\u201d This is the cry of the diaspora Jew from Newcastle to New Jersey. \u201cNu<\/i>?\u201d Now what? Oy<\/i> for the sadness, the salt tears, the tears of laughter, the shock of the new persecution and blame mingling with the weariness of the same old, same old. Woe is me. Why is this night different? Why<\/i> me? Why measles? When do we eat? <\/p>\n
And why me? For in this year, 5779 \u2014 the final year of EU. . . gh, allegedly \u2014 I get the job of reviewing the Jewdas Hagaddah,<\/i> an alternative version of the text that tells the story of Passover. I didn\u2019t, to be fair, have to take the job but sometimes, as Comrade Corbyn might say, it pays to sit down and learn from the opposition. (In his case, that\u2019s Hamas, the IRA and Hezbollah obviously, not Chuka Umunna). <\/p>\n
On Passover, when the Lord wreaked vengeance on the Egyptians for the enslavement of the Jews, \u201cpassing over\u201d the Jewish homes and slaying the firstborn of their captors, it is incumbent upon the Jewish community to re-tell the Exodus story to our children. We are to narrate the tale as though it happened to ourselves, not our ancestors, and to consume unleavened bread and other edible symbols by the plate-load.<\/p>\n
As a child I had a beautiful, wine-splattered Hagaddah, filled with playful gimmicks, including a tab you could pull to release baby Moses in a coracle along the Nile, and a wheel you could push round to reveal the ten plagues \u2014 all guaranteed to keep a bored little girl engaged in the story while covertly fighting with her wicked older brother about who least wanted to ask the traditional Four Questions (more of that later).<\/p>\n
Jewdas, whose website describes its aims as to \u201cmercilessly satirise Anglo-Jewry, suggest new and more radical ways of being Jewish and also throw excellent parties\u201d, is the organisation with whom Jeremy Corbyn spent Seder (Passover) night in the year 5778 \u2014 or, if you favour the nomadic calendar, 2018. At that particular Seder, by all accounts, an anti-capitalist beetroot was waved, \u201cPin the blame on the bosses\u201d was played, \u201cThe Internationale\u201d was sung in Yiddish already, and everyone joyously shouted \u201cFuck capitalism.\u201d No wonder Jeremy said, \u201cI learned a lot . . . a lovely time.\u2019\u2019 <\/p>\n
And now they have published this radical Haggadah, which claims to celebrate \u201cfree-thinking, socialist and diasporist Judaism\u201d and promotes, in a foreword, by \u201cRabbi Geoffrey Cohen\u201d, a collective loathing of capitalism, the State of Israel and the Jewish Chronicle \u2014 <\/i>\u201cDescribes itself as the Jewish Organ. We all know which organ.\u201d<\/p>\n
A word from the Foreword, as it is said: \u201cRabbi Geoffrey Cohen here. I\u2019ve been dragged out of retirement to write a foreword for some piece of banal narishkeit<\/i> they\u2019re calling the Jewdas Hagaddah. Unpaid of course, the fucking shnorrers. Don\u2019t they know how busy I am? In the time it\u2019s taken me to write this I could have ate twelve fishballs and a challah and cream cheese.\u201d The scribe of this cutting-edge stuff purports to be a 44-year-old lesbian mother-of-three living in a bedsit in Slough, whose passion for Sheffield knows no bounds. So far, so right on.<\/p>\n
In the pages that follow, Jewdas celebrates its newfound notoriety by giving supporters a rag-week version of the Passover ceremony for pubescent Marxists. On the cover it claims: \u201cJewdas activities are infused with satirical humour, joyfulness and radical politics.\u2019\u2019 But inside it\u2019s tricky to find much satire. There are good-natured asides about pickles, salt beef and bagels \u2014 or, sorry, beigels \u2014 yes, lots and lots of jokes about the spelling of beigel\/bagel and almost as many mentions of the F word both as verb and adjective, plus a suggestion to procure menstrual blood to smear on Jewish doorposts. It\u2019s so undergraduate that one almost wants to smile and say \u201cBless.\u201d<\/p>\n
To be fair, I did learn a few interesting things. Who knew there were six different recipes for charoset (a sweet paste symbolising the mortar used by the Hebrew slaves to build the pyramids)? In my neck of the woods \u2014 Hull \u2014 it was made from almonds, apples, cinnamon and sweet Passover wine. But here I discover it is made with figs, dates and coriander in Yemen or boiled eggs, raisins and matzo-meal in Italy. The Ashkenazi recipe \u201cfails on all categories. Doesn\u2019t bear a resemblance to poo\u201d. The word always raises a laugh from my four-year-old grandson, so fair doodoos, Jewdas.)<\/p>\n
The Four Questions, usually asked by the youngest member of the party to explain some of the traditions of the Seder, are reinstated here from the pages of the Jewish Labour Bund in 1900. These, too, are new to me and contain the cries of the poor workers, for instance: \u201cQuestion 3: They do nothing and wear the most expensive clothes and we toil like oxen and have not a shirt on our bodies.\u201d Not actually a question but a useful reminder to Ken L. and George G. that there were and are such things as poor Jews.<\/p>\n
There is a new Brocha<\/i> (prayer) for Israel, which states that \u201cIsrael cannot be pro-LGBT while gay Palestinians are shot while protesting and trans Palestinians\u2019 houses are demolished. For Israel, the LGBT community is a shield with which to fight off attacks from the Western world and behind which to hide their oppressive regime.\u2019\u2019 Yeah, sure, gay and trans Palestinians are being targeted by one of the gay capitals of the world, while Hamas, Hezbollah and the Arab states just kvell over their queer populations. <\/p>\n
In the fictionalised minutes of the organisation, beneath the strapline \u201cDestroying the Nuclear Family\u201d, it reads: \u201cCampaign to promote homosexuality and undermine the nuclear family is going well. Yael W. is still working on turning Luciana Berger gay but no luck since their last date.\u201d OK, I did smile at that, but I keep wondering if the whole thing isn\u2019t just a send-up with its tongue so far in its cheek that it just ends up plain cheeky.<\/p>\n
This is not a Hagaddah I would ever dream of using, but no doubt it straddles a line for those who are ambivalent about the faith and want to pay a lippy sort of lip-service to tradition. It has nerve, chutzpah<\/i> in fact, and you know the Leo Rosten definition of that? A small boy peeing through someone\u2019s letter-box, then ringing the doorbell to see how far it went. Too far in my book, but then my book is old and tearstained.<\/p>\n
A Jewdas Haggadah
\n<\/b>By Jewdas
\n<\/i>Pluto Press, 128pp, \u00a312.99<\/p>\n<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n
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Beat that<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
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\nBeat that<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cOy veh iz mir.\u201d This is the cry of the diaspora Jew from Newcastle to New Jersey. \u201cNu?\u201d Now what? Oy for the sadness, the salt tears, the tears of laughter, the shock of the new persecution and blame mingling with the weariness of the same old, same old. Woe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6735,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}