Anti-Assad protesters in Turkey today.(Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images)

• Syria experienced its largest day of protests yet today. [WP]

• You know how the Last Supper was a Seder? Yeah, it probably wasn’t. [Menachem Mendel/JI Daily]

• Gal Beckerman profiles the left-wing group Jewish Voice for Peace. [Forward]

• Neo-Nazis are marching in Trenton, New Jersey, tomorrow. Enjoy the rain, scumbags. [NYC ANTIFA]

• People are really excited about an Israel slasher film called Rabies, and now I am, too. [Capital]

• Kehinde Wiley—L.A.-born, of Nigerian descent—paints Israelis. [LAT]

• Some 1300 Ethiopian immigrants in Israel will hopefully set the Guinness World Record for largest Seder on Monday. [JPost]

• Unbeatable headline: “Cohen Media Acquires ‘Chasing Madoff.’” [Variety]

• In some Orthodox communities, only immodest women vote, or so they say. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• President Obama acknowledges the Lubavitcher Rebbe. [JTA]

Helen Mirren as a former Mossad agent? Yes, please.

Eli Valley’s “The Four Sons.”(Eli Valley/Forward)

Yesterday, in Tablet Magazine, Eddy Portnoy traced the history of Jews using the familiar, rigid structure of the Haggadah as a vehicle for parody. While Portnoy’s focus was on the Yiddish press of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, there are still Jews and there is still Passover and, therefore, there is still satire that borrows from the Passover book. Here are three examples that caught my eye in the past 24 hours. If anyone has seen more, do leave ‘em in the comments.

• What really gets asked during the Four Questions. [The New Yorker]

• Ten Jewish car writers on the ten automotive plagues. [VF]

• Eli Valley on what the Four Sons ask today. [Forward]

Paschal Lampoon [Tablet Magazine]

The vodkas, with Meyer lemons.(Photos by Len Small)

A few months ago, Alana Newhouse invented the world’s greatest cocktail. This, dear readers, is not an assertion or a claim open to discussion. It is a hard, incontrovertible fact.

The cocktail, for reasons too convoluted to explain but that have something to do with this article, is named the Chuckles, and it consists of Tito’s vodka; the juice of half a lemon; and, sometimes, some ice. It may sound simple. It isn’t. The power of the Chuckles is so great that even Liel Leibovitz—a cantankerous whiskey man who formerly esteemed vodka the simple son of the spirit world—was converted.

But while Chuckles is the world’s greatest cocktail and Tito’s is the world’s greatest vodka (again, fact), Tito’s is, alas, not kosher for Passover. As a public service, then, we set out to find the best Chuckles made with potato vodka for your holiday drinking pleasure. (more…)

Translated by Sondra Silverston

Cows grazing on kosher-for-Passover feed in Ma'aleh Hahamisha, outside of Jerusalem.(Daniella Cheslow)

For those who adhere strictly to the laws of Passover, this is a busy time of year. Homes are purged of anything leavened, or anything that might become leavened. Out go the cereal, the crackers, and the flour. Just how strict we need to be when it comes to the presence of grain elsewhere in the food chain is a matter of some debate. In Israel, kosher certifiers insist that that for milk, eggs, and meat to be considered fit for the holiday, the cows and chickens from which they are derived must also be grain-free. Reporter Daniel Estrin went on a tour of a dairy farm outside Jerusalem to find just what this entails. [Running time: 6:20.]

Kosher sangria.(Thrillist)

Yesterday, in the other daily magazine of Jewish life and culture, contributing editor Joan Nathan reported on the growing trend of dining out for Seder, complete with restaurants competing to offer the coolest menus. (The granddaddy, as Nathan notes, is the proto-locavore Savoy, which is about a block away from Tablet Magazine’s SoHo office.) Three specific meals caught my attention:

• Craigie On Main, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose logo is literally a pig, is serving a fabulous-looking prix fixe without any pork and with, as could probably be guessed, an emphasis on Sephardic dishes and fat. Because fat is delicious.

• Aaron Israel, sous chef at Mile End, is cooking Seder for the James Beard Foundation’s pop-up restaurant. It’s already sold out, natch.

• Octavia’s Porch, in the East Village, wins for two reasons. First, they are careful enough to be charging $36 for the meal. Second, they are offering two hours of bottomless Manischewitz sangria, which sounds like it will be so good, you’ll taste it twice, if you catch my drift.

Seder for Two, Please: Restaurants Court Tradition [NYT]

Zodiac and men of four nations, sefer evronot [906], 1664. From Klau Library, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, reproduced by permission of The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 2011.

Calendars are always complicated and sometimes baffling. Layered with history and ritual, they bind communities together by preserving traditions and erasing the passage of time. My father taught me to observe Passover as if I had been a slave in Egypt: to imagine that I had dragged stones up pyramids and then followed Moses to freedom. Hearing his powerful voice and evocative words, I could see the Exodus, once a year, in my mind’s eye. Yet time does pass, and as it passes traditional calendars develop fissures and contradictions. The long Seder my family celebrated, reclining at table, did not much resemble the Passover prescribed in Exodus 12:11: “And thus shall ye eat it, your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste.” The Jewish calendar as a whole, with its year count and months that did not match the standard ones, was a mystery to me. It was even more confusing to realize, as a child, that it must have changed in multiple ways since ancient times.

If you’ve ever wondered about the Jewish year and its history, Elisheva Carlebach’s marvelous new book, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe, has much to offer you. A preeminent specialist on the Jews of early modern Germany, Carlebach concentrates on what became of the calendar in the early modern period. In the 16th century and after, technical literature about time, which had once been treated as an esoteric knowledge reserved for an elite, became widely available to Jews for the first time, and Carlebach traces this process in detail. But as she reaches back to explain the distant origins of early modern debates and practices and sets the calendars into their larger contexts, Palaces of Time provides even more than it promises: a fascinating and provocative introduction, full of surprises, to the Jewish experience of time.

Richly documented and sumptuously illustrated, the book tells a sinuous and sometimes wild story, one in which books of many kinds, in all their grubby materiality, play central roles. Carlebach has long been known as a supremely skillful reader of texts—an approach long central to Jewish scholarship, and one sometimes combined with a reluctance to admit that readers actually encounter texts in the material form of books, where they often leave rich evidence about these encounters. From the 1970s on, historians of the book—Robert Darnton, Lisa Jardine, William Sherman—have shown how to enrich intellectual history by combining textual analysis with the study of books as material objects. Malachi Beit-Arie, Adam Shear, and others have successfully applied this method to Jewish texts. Carlebach too now attends, with great skill and sensitivity, to the material forms of the books she studies, to their sometimes-cheap paper and poor print, their complex and powerful illustrations, and their annotations. Reading in this new way, she can tell us not only what the calendar texts say, but what mattered most in them to the Jewish readers and thinkers who printed them, and copied them, and annotated them, and wore them out.

In the 15th century and after, Jews produced calendars of every kind, from simple wall charts listing feasts for the year to come to ibburim and sifre evronot, technical treatises on the structure and meaning of the year and longer cycles. Like the rabbinic Bible and the Talmud, Hebrew works on the calendar were printed and reprinted, not only by Jews but also by Christians. Johann Froben, the great Basel printer who was Erasmus’ chief publisher for much of his life, brought out the first printed ibbur in 1527.

Yet calendars also continued to circulate in manuscript form for centuries. Printed calendars and treatises often swarmed with typographical and technical errors, as press correctors noted when they produced what they claimed were better editions. Mistakes piled on mistakes could make these technical works too inaccurate to use. A careful reader—like the two portrayed on a page from a Berlin manuscript reproduced by Carlebach, studying their sifre evronot on opposite sides of a table—might well prefer to make his own copy, especially if he could use a sefer yashan noshan (very old book) as his model. In the wake of ritual murder trials, efforts to ban the Talmud, and expulsions of ancient Jewish communities, scholarly Jews in the German world feared that their traditions might disappear. They transcribed ancient treatises on the calendar as zealously as ancient works of Kabbalah. The literature of time spanned a spectrum from smudgy single sheets, mechanically reproduced and swarming with errors, meant to be nailed to the walls of shops and hovels, to quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, treasured by the learned bibliophiles who had copied them.

Carlebach emphasizes the learning of the Jews in Frankfurt and other centers. But no one, not even the most erudite scholar, could master all the mysteries of the Jewish calendar and its development in this period. The Jewish calendar tries—like other calendars—to square the circle. It follows both the motion of the sun, which passes through the zodiac, determining the seasons, in 365 and one quarter days, and that of the moon, which does the same in 29 and a half days, defining the months. The solar year isn’t evenly divisible into lunar months: how then to know when each Jewish month should begin? In the early centuries of the Common Era, Jews relied on direct observation. Once two independent, sober witnesses had given formal notice that they had observed the new moon, the Sanhedrin would declare that the month had begun and send out messengers with the news. But this system had obvious disadvantages, especially for Jews who lived in the Diaspora. Worse still, because the lunar year was only 354 days long, its months drifted forward in the seasons. Nisan, which is supposed to be the first month of spring, moved into winter. From time to time, accordingly, the Sanhedrin had to intercalate another month, to ensure that Passover took place, as it should, in the spring.

From the 4th century onward, the Jews of Babylon—where astronomy had been practiced in a sophisticated way for many centuries—reconfigured their calendar. An astronomical cycle, 19 years long, at the end of which the lunar and solar years coincided, determined when to add intercalary months. This fixed calendar, traditionally associated with Hillel II, found widespread acceptance. But it was challenged by the Qaraites, who insisted that the calendar, like all other Jewish practices, must rest on the Bible alone. And it provoked fierce debates in the 10th century, when Palestinian and Babylonian communities celebrated Passover on different days.

Two Jews, four calendars. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Jews mastered the new astronomy of the Muslim world. But if Maimonides and Ibn Ezra agreed that these shiny new tools should be put to work perfecting the Jewish calendar, bar Hiyya denounced them and insisted that the astronomy of the patriarchs and ancient rabbis had been more accurate. Only inklings of these fierce arguments—and of the issues they had turned on—found their way into the calendrical texts that were actually printed or copied in Renaissance Europe, and that “winnowed, diluted and mediated the mass of material for the common reader,” Carlebach writes. The great Christian student of calendars Joseph Scaliger may well have been right to proclaim that most 16th-century Jews believed that their fixed calendar went back to Moses himself.

For all their lack of concrete historical information about the Jewish year, the calendrical texts were richly stocked with other materials. Under Carlebach’s skillful hands they yield a flood of new information about Jewish life and thought. Manuscript sifre evronot were often richly and imaginatively executed. Carlebach reproduces many pages, which she explicates with great skill. Like astronomical writers in the Islamic and Christian worlds, Jewish calendar experts equipped texts with volvelles: dials made of layered paper rings, precisely marked off, which could be used to speed up computations. The calendrical works that included these were little analog computers made of paper.

Like Christian illuminators, Jewish ones introduced a rich vein of visual fantasy into many technical books. At the chart for checking one’s calculations, known as a panim ahor (face-back), manuscripts show a man standing on his head or displaying his bare backside to the reader. Puns and plays on words are common. To illustrate the new moon, for example, the illuminator might show a mother rocking her baby in the crib (molad, the technical term for new moon, literally means birth).

Sometimes the symbols are more than idle fantasies. Christian books of hours, designed to help laymen perform their daily devotions, often contained elaborate illustrations of hunts. So did sifre evronot. Mounted and on foot, armed with spears and guns, well-dressed hunters pursued tags and hares, boars and birds across the pages of these technical, largely quantitative books. Sometimes the hunted animal escaped. Pinhas of Halberstadt, in the 18th century, copied hunting scenes directly from Christian models. As their captions he inscribed verses from Isaiah that evoked the eventual triumph of the Jews. For Christians riffling the pages of their prayer books, a hunted hare was just a hare. For Jews reading their calendars, the hare became an emblem of their hope for survival among hostile nations. The calendar really could be a palace of time—or at least a pleasure garden, where Jews found a real if limited refuge from the humiliations and terrors of everyday life in a persecuting society.

Continue reading: saints’ days, chronographs, and “moshi’a.” Or view as a single page.

The Hitler Haggadah from Moment, 1934. (Courtesy Eddy Portnoy.)

Rarely do people hear the word “Passover” and think “hilarious.” But as early as the 13th century, there emerged a Jewish comedic tradition of creating parodies of the haggadah. By the 19th century, the Jewish Enlightenment’s penchant for parody created a robust mock haggadah industry, with imitations of the Seder liturgy burlesquing nearly every aspect of Jewish life.

Appearing every spring in the Yiddish press and in humor journals produced specifically for Passover, these haggadot lampooned the poor, the rich, communists, socialists, capitalists, alcoholics, farmers, lepers, immigrants, loose women, politicians, rabbis, Hebrew teachers, even vacation homes. You name it and there is probably a mock haggadah skewering it.

Some of these spoofs functioned as political propaganda or critical commentary masked as holiday fare. Leftist ideologues, often products of the yeshiva world, took to undermining the traditional texts they knew so well. An early, beloved secular parody first appeared in the London-based Worker’s Friend in 1887 and was reprinted multiple times as the Socialist Haggadah. Lamenting the pitiful situation of the Jewish worker versus the exploitative Jewish capitalist, the author took a text familiar to every Jew and used it to promote socialism:

“Ma nishtane, why are we different from Shmuel the manufacturer, from Meyer the banker, from Zorach the money lender, from Reb Todros the rabbi? They don’t do anything and they have food and drink during the day and also at night at least a hundred times over, we toil with all our strength the whole day and at night we have nothing to eat at all.”

But every parodist had an ax to grind, and if the subject being parodied wasn’t the might of the capitalist bourgeoisie, it was something else. In 1909, a New York satirical weekly, Der groyser kundes, worked a bit of Yiddish-theater criticism into its haggadah:

“Ma nishtane, why is the current theater season worse this year than in all previous seasons? Shebekhol halaylos, every season for the past ten years had chometz and matzah, awful potboilers, but also some good literary dramas, and this season has been only unadulterated crap.”

The characterizations of the four sons in a 1916 Der groyser kundes parody might seem dated in the details, but its underlying dynamics are surprisingly familiar:

“The Wise Son: a shtetl horse thief who escaped from prison, stowed-away on a ship to America where he became a horse poisoner and a gangster until he managed to become a saloon keeper and a politician. Today he’s the president of his synagogue, a fighter for Judaism, in short, a mentsh …

“The Wicked Son: a man who fills his wallet with relief receipts for victims of the war that he picked up off the ground and shows them to volunteers asking for money to prove what a big philanthropist he is. ‘See how much I already gave?’

“The Simple Son: a kid who sits with a girl until 2 a.m. waiting for permission to kiss her.

“The Son Who Doesn’t Even Know How to Ask a Question: a traveling salesman who only comes home on Passover to find his wife about to give birth and doesn’t think to ask how a woman can be pregnant for 12 months.”

By the early 20th century, the haggadah had become the most parodied text in Jewish history. It’s easy to see why: With its fixed structure of four questions, four brothers, and 10 plagues, it is a simple text to manipulate. The vast majority of Jews—from children to the elderly—were at least nominally familiar with the text, a fact that made the gags easy to understand.

The parodies ranged in scope and ambition, from a 1911 advertisement titled “The Eleventh Plague,” which explained how the most horrible affliction of the Passover holiday was hemorrhoids, to longer parodies that took the “Kadesh, Urkhats” Seder mnemonic and played on the various duties required of Seder participants. Some parodies are complete haggadahs unto themselves.

The quality of the parodies often depended on the Yiddish news cycle. Local and international news always crept into these works. A good local scandal often made for the juiciest parody. When, for example, a political scandal surrounding a Jewish beauty pageant in Warsaw exploded in the early spring of 1929, Yiddish satirists produced an unusual amount of beauty pageant-related Passover material.

But politics was always paramount in the Yiddish press, and the roles of the four sons and the 10 plagues were often filled with political figures. The Hitler Haggadah of 1934 is a typical example.

Appearing in the humor section of the Warsaw daily Moment, just prior to Passover, the Hitler Haggadah zips through the main sections of the text with all manner of sarcastic political commentary in Yiddish interspersed with the original Hebrew. The four sons are Mussolini (wise), Hitler (wicked), Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss (simple), and Paul von Hindenburg (doesn’t know to ask a question). The 10 plagues are transformed into the litany of problems facing German Jewry. The parody is a pastiche of bitterness: A cartoon shows a German Jew sitting in front of a huge bitter pile of horseradish. The four questions wonder how long the Nazis will stay in power. Hitler, who ostensibly answers but simply dodges the questions, is compared to Laban the Aramean, a figure considered to be the Deus ex machina of the Exodus by some rabbis. But Pharaoh only killed the first-born males, whereas Hitler “wants to uproot everything: the males, the females, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, the living and even the dead,” a frightening premonition of what was to come.

(Photoillustration: Tablet Magazine; iPhone image from No Chametz)

The first Passover apps are a mixed bag of the ugly, the helpful, the entertaining, and the inscrutable. But in small ways they may ease your shopping, enliven your Seder, or occupy your children while you clean. Since you won’t pay more than a few dollars apiece, you can afford to keep your expectations low. (If you’re an Android phone owner, you’ll be wandering in the desert for at least another year: Virtually all the current Passover apps are for iPhones.)

If you’re tired of consulting a thick brochure of kosher-for-Passover brands—this year’s edition of the popular OU guide is 92 pages long—free apps from the OU and the OK let you to browse lists of kosher-for-Passover products by manufacturer or product category. A third app, from the Chicago Rabbinical Council, gives the rule rather than the product name (unflavored, caffeinated coffee beans do not require certification) and helpfully incorporates a guide to kashering methods and a directory of hechshers. The search function is a sticking point: Only the OU app makes it easy to find, say, all kosher brands of cream cheese.

When it’s time to search for hametz, the No Chametz (free) app not only gives you the relevant laws and blessings but makes a checklist of hiding places and simulates a candle with your LED flash.

Can your smartphone help you plan the festival meal? Passover Food Street ($0.99) provides 50 recipes in six categories, but you may prefer dishes more modern than chicken in dill sauce (made from nondairy sour cream) and raspberry relish (canned cranberry sauce mixed with raspberry gelatin dessert). The app’s best feature is that it lets you take a photo of your dish to clip to the recipe. Cooking With the Bible: A Passover Meal ($0.99) is extracted from a larger book about how people cooked in biblical times, but its menu is unlikely to surprise: It includes matzoh-ball soup, spinach salad with “bitter herbs,” and coconut macaroons.

Haggadah apps provide an array of multimedia page-turning effects, along with basic blessings and instructions, but sadly little in the way of commentary. Hadar Porat’s haggadah ($2.99) is unusual in combining Hebrew blessings with English instructions and transliterations. Zebrapps’s haggadah ($0.99) and Inbal Geffen’s haggadah ($0.99) can switch between all-English and all-Hebrew modes, but it takes a few clicks. Geffen’s haggadah comes with a bonus feature: synthesized instrumental recordings of nine Passover songs that will take you back to the glory days of the Casio keyboard. Outsite’s haggadah (free with ads) is entirely in Hebrew, with little more than the basic text, but it’s multicolored and has a few illustrations and a memory game to cheer it up.

The Union Haggadah (at $3.99, the most expensive of the group), revives the Reform movement’s 1923 haggadah in digital form, and though it is short on new-media features, it contains the widest-ranging discussion of the Seder and its significance, albeit in archaic terms: “Among the ceremonials which nurtured the Jewish idealism of generations, a place of peculiar charm is held by the Seder.” As a free alternative, you could download the 1907 first edition from Google Books.

The gold standard in the limited field of kids’ Passover apps is the modest-looking iMahNishtanah ($0.99). Kids can read the Four Questions in Hebrew, touching any word to hear it spoken, or listen to a complete rendition in a child’s voice. Flash cards and a matching game reinforce pronunciation and meaning, and you can even record yourself and play it back. Parents will no doubt tire of the app’s voices and noises, but it gets the job done. Masochists should encourage their children to download Plague Audio (free), which turns an iPhone into a 10-sound noisemaker, alternately terrifying (the sound of rushing blood accompanied by a woman’s scream), harmless (serenely croaking frogs), and bizarre (ominous crescendo of TV-style soundtrack to signify darkness). Younger children might enjoy Passover—The Journey to Freedom StoryChimes ($0.99 or free with ads), an illustrated Passover storybook with an orchestral soundtrack and a voice that can read the story aloud. Unlike the haggadah, this story is all about Moses: his appearance among the bulrushes, his discovery of the burning bush, his negotiations with Pharaoh. If your kids prefer writing in books to reading them, Jewish Coloring ($0.99) offers a Seder-plate tableau, among other images, and a box of virtual crayons.

As for pure games, M.A.S.H. Passover (free), the only Passover app with an age restriction, is a version of the classic “mansion, apartment, shack, house” preteen prognostication game, restyled as “matzo, afikomen, salt, haroset.” Answer a series of questions and get a Mad Libs–influenced solution: “At the Seder, Luke Skywalker will find the Afikomen and get Justin Bieber tickets as the prize.” Satisfying only the shortest attention spans, Passover Trucks Game ($0.99) asks players to sort boxes of food coming off a conveyer belt onto two flatbed trucks, one for Passover, the other not. The maker of this game appears to be a mad entrepreneurial genius of the Jewish iPhone app, having also created Kippa Game, in which you move around a boy’s head so that yarmulkes land on it, Kosher Fishing Game, in which you sit in a wooden boat with a fishing pole and try to catch only the kosher fish, and Judaica Store Game, in which you fetch tallises for Japanimated avatars.

How you decide to use your iPhone on Passover is between you, your rabbi, and your conscience. But once you’ve started, you may not want to stop. To carry the holiday feeling into the weeks to come, download an omer-counting app, which automatically updates it with the latest numbered day. The apps are largely alike apart from the backdrop: Sefirat HaOmer (free) has wood grain. CountingTheOmer ($0.99) has burnt-edged parchment and also includes information about the history and rules of omer-counting borrowed from Wikipedia—the Shulchan Aruch of our time. Ultimate Omer 2 ($0.99) claims to be the only app that shifts to the next day at sunset, according to your location. Omer Count (free) is the most colorful, structured around the kabbalistic sefirot. With the help of these, you’ll be downloading Shavuot apps in no time. And perhaps next year—l’shana haba’ah—we’ll get all the Passover apps we deserve.