How the conference explores Passover Haggadah art beyond the Seder
Over a week in Madison, Wisconsin, Practicing Jews: Art, Identity, and Culture brings scholars, artists and community members into the same conversation. The programme asks how the art of the Passover Haggadah extends beyond the Seder, treating its images, typography, materials and changing uses as evidence of Jewish creativity.
At a family table, the Haggadah is often treated as a text to recite and a sequence to follow. Yet it is also a designed object: Hebrew and occasional Aramaic words share space with pictures, songs, directions and places for interpretation. Illuminations, hand-cut paper, photographic sequences and artist books all shape how Exodus is remembered.
The Madison meeting places that object within a wider ecology of Jewish visual culture. Keynotes and focused talks move among manuscript history, contemporary studio practice, dance, identity and gender, while gallery encounters allow visitors to examine work rather than only hear it described. The emphasis is on people who make and use cultural forms, rather than a fixed canon.
For Australian readers, this broadens the familiar setting of Pesach. In Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, seders take place in homes, synagogues and hired venues, and Haggadot circulate through families, classrooms and community groups. Questions about who is pictured, who is represented and how tradition is designed therefore have clear local relevance.
Images that carry memory
An illuminated Haggadah does not illustrate Exodus in a neutral way. Choice of crown, architectural setting, gesture, colour and script can place the biblical narrative within a particular Jewish culture and century. Looking at these differences turns the book into a map of migration, patronage, religious custom and artistic training.
That is why the conference treats visual comparison as a form of historical argument. A manuscript detail may reveal a motif travelling from one city to another, while a modern artist may borrow the same motif to question authority, memory or belonging. Such exchanges do not depend on declaring one version the authentic Haggadah; they show how meaning changes across settings.
Ritual design also carries family memory into the present. A celebration’s visual choices can be as revealing as its spoken programme, as a Springfield mansion wedding shows in a different commemorative setting. Applied to the Haggadah, this attention to setting, object and story asks how an inherited book becomes a personal archive.
The book as performance
Pages are handled, turned and revisited during the Seder. The sound of participants, the pause before a response and the breaking of matzah all give the book a temporal life. Conference discussions of performance therefore move beyond what a Haggadah depicts towards what people do with it.
This perspective connects text, voice, body and space. A crowded page can guide a group through dialogue; a spare image can leave room for memory. In talks about dance and visual culture, such ideas become tools for considering ritual as choreography: every instruction produces movement, and every object becomes part of a shared sequence.
The point is not to drain the Seder of its religious purpose. It is to notice how form helps communal meaning take shape. A well-designed Haggadah can clarify a tradition, welcome people less familiar with its language and carry controversies that are otherwise hidden by custom.
Who gets to interpret the story
Who has authority to interpret sacred narrative becomes a central question. Haggadot are often associated with inherited male voices, even when women, children and gender-diverse participants contribute readings, translations, drawings and leadership. Conference conversations about identity and gender ask how visual form can redistribute that authority.
Artists working in photography, printmaking, embroidery and book arts can expose omissions built into familiar compositions. They may replace a distant heroic figure with an ordinary domestic scene, use multiple points of view or design pages that invite annotation. Such choices are formal decisions, but they also carry ethical and theological weight.
Pairing historical objects with contemporary work prevents innovation from being treated as a break with tradition. Instead, it reveals continuity in the practices of selecting, arranging and responding. The Haggadah becomes a meeting ground where old symbols are altered and where new Jewish visual languages can be understood as serious scholarship.
From Madison to Australian tables
Madison’s university and city venues give the conference a deliberate rhythm. Formal keynotes occupy larger rooms, smaller talks create space for close looking, and gallery visits invite discussion beside the work. The conference participants page shows how the roster joins academic specialists with artists, educators and community members whose knowledge is produced through making, teaching and ritual participation.
Australian audiences may encounter the Haggadah differently across cities. A household in Sydney may use a Hebrew and English edition passed between generations, while a Melbourne family might commission hand-lettered pages or use a contemporary English-language Haggadah at its table. In a smaller community such as Perth’s, a shared seder can make the book a bridge among people with varied levels of Hebrew knowledge.
Shopping in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market or Adelaide’s Central Market makes those choices tangible. Dried fruit and nuts may be ordinary market goods, but Passover requires attention to chametz, additives and kitniyot; rice and legumes remain customary exclusions in some Ashkenazi homes and acceptable foods in others. Certified brands, imported matzah and locally adapted recipes add another layer.
Learning through objects and exchange
Gallery display changes the conference from a series of abstract claims into an encounter with material detail. Paper thickness, binding, marginal notes, metallic leaf and traces of handling become available to discussion. These qualities matter because they show the Haggadah as both historical evidence and a book made for use.
Studio conversations offer a complementary method. Participants can describe decisions about cropping, sequencing, translation and collaboration, while visitors compare those explanations with the finished pages. The week-long schedule supports movement among disciplines, allowing an artist’s account, a curator’s observation and a community reader’s response to inform one another.
Jewish visual culture also extends beyond a single ritual. Artists may work across dance, architecture, textiles and performance, and their practices reveal shared concerns about memory, embodiment and belonging. The Haggadah becomes one entry into a larger field rather than a self-contained topic.
The Passover Haggadah is a living visual argument, renewed through design, performance and debate. What readers should remember is that looking closely at its pages reveals how Jewish communities hold history in their hands, and how that act continues in Madison, Sydney, Melbourne and every table where the book is opened.