Why is this night different? Israel’s democracy movement answers with a new haggadah

Israel’s holiday season has not stopped the protests. One of the most creative is a haggadah that intersperses the traditional texts with musings on freedom and liberation from such prominent voices as David Grossman, Etgar Keret and Nurit Zarchi.

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to halt his judicial overhaul until after Pesach, that doesn’t mean that the upcoming holiday and its festive seder meal will be free of politics.

This week, a number of Israel’s most prominent literary figures have released a new haggadah tying the Israelite exodus from Egypt to latter-day Israelis’ struggle against what many see as the government’s efforts to curtail their freedom.

Titled The Freedom Haggadah: A Story of Struggle and Hope, this new take on an ancient liturgical work intersperses the traditional Biblical and rabbinic texts with “all kinds of musings on freedom and liberation,” said Etgar Keret, a Sapir Prize-winner and one of Israel's best-known authors, who contributed to the project.

“Being an Ashkenazi heterosexual Jew, I never found myself in any position where I felt oppressed and attacked and with this new [overhaul] for the first time this concept of people who want to take away freedom has received a new meaning. Now for the first time I don't take the idea of freedom for granted,” he said.

The Haggadah also includes contributions from International Man Booker Prize-winning author David Grossman, Israel Prize laureate Nurit Zarchi and Sapir Prize recipient Ilana Bernstein interspersed with photographs of the recent anti-overhaul protests.