How Passover became a design problem

Despite my incredibly Anglo full name and patrilineal line, I am – at least according to Jewish law, which assigns Jewish-ness matrilineally – 100% Jewish. And though most gentiles (that is, non-Jews) know about Hannukah due to its inclusion in the broader “Holiday Season”, far fewer are familiar with what I consider to be the best Jewish holiday: Passover. For those not yet in the know, Passover is one of the most widely observed holidays in the Jewish calendar, and takes place every spring, typically landing around the same time as Easter. If you’ve seen The Prince of Egypt, you more or less know the story: Moses, Pharaoh, plagues (blood rain, frogs, locusts, etc.), a split sea, and eventual liberation from slavery in Egypt. The associated ritual dinner, called a Seder, follows a highly ordered structure, and uses a religious text called the Haggadah to guide participants through storytelling, music, symbolic foods, and more.

Growing up, Passover always meant Florida. Every year, we’d fly down to Boca Raton, the capital of septuagenarian Jews, for Seder at my great-aunt Elaine’s house. While she and my grandmother kibbitzed over matzo ball soup, my cousins and I would screw around on a nearby golf course as my aunts and uncles snuck sips from “Prophet Elijah’s” glass of wine. The Haggadah we used for our Seder was informal, to say the least. Photocopied from the prominent Maxwell House Haggadah (originally created as a marketing promotion for the Maxwell House Coffee Company in 1932, with over 50 million copies produced since) it had been re-printed so many times it was barely legible. Though the original Maxwell House text is one of the most widely used, the yearly edits were unmistakably ours. Passages that were deemed “too long” were crossed out, and the margins were jotted with notes from past years. All serve as evidence of the Haggadah as an evolving document shaped as much by commentary as by content.

In 2020, like many others, we hosted Passover online. The logistics were awkward; it’s hard to simultaneously dip your pinky in wine and click the unmute button. We also used a new Haggadah – one that felt decidedly contemporary. Designed by Dani Balenson specifically for digital Seders, it was grounded in ritual structure while still tailored to the practical realities of the moment (that is, narrow enough to sit alongside a Zoom window). It used contemporary typefaces and stylish gradients, and had a tone of voice that balanced thoughtful commentary with just enough cringey puns to keep things lively. My family loved it. So did I. At some point, I realised why. A Haggadah is really just a zine – self-published, idiosyncratic, and community-driven. And I love zines! It left me curious: how had others approached the document? And what does it mean to redesign something that’s never really been finished in the first place?

This approach reflects a broader shift in contemporary Judaica design – one that engages historical reference without being bound by it. Projects like Via Maris, whose visual identity by Zan Goodman includes a rounded W evoking the Hebrew shin, or Mitch Wiesen’s work for Token Jew, which pairs a Star of David dieline with irreverent mascots, show how tradition can be echoed without falling into cliche. Other works, like Bentzion Goldman’s Kosher Symbols book, treat Jewish design as a genre in its own right, as worthy of close examination as any other cultural lexicon. Jewish designers pull from this shared visual language, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with critique – but always with an eye toward what might come next.

Dani Balenson, who’s been designing Haggadot annually since 2018, doesn’t try to make a definitive version. “I didn’t necessarily want to subvert anything, or make any big statement with the design,” she told me. “I just wanted to make objects that felt good for people to use, felt of the now, encouraged some kind of play, and helped design a meaningful conversation and experience.” That motivation came from her own childhood Seders, which followed the same rigid script year after year. “It got really expected and boring, more of a slog than a joy. Everyone read the same parts, and I was always just waiting to get to the food. I wasn’t engaged, and I wasn’t encouraged to make any connections between what was in the Haggadah and what was happening in the world.” Designing her own Haggadot became a way to make the ritual feel reflective and interactive again – centred on freedom not just as a narrative theme, but as a design principle. “Doing it year over year and making a series was exciting because it would always challenge me, design-wise and content-wise. It felt like a great almost-blank canvas each time – a designer’s dream.”

Unfortunately, designing a Haggadah means navigating a tangle of constraints: it has to be cross-generational – no type too small for kids or grandparents – easy to reprint, able to sit flat on a table during dinner, and typographically flexible enough to accommodate a mix of languages, transliterated text, and call-and-response cues. “As I’m looking through my old InDesign files, I’m remembering just how hard it was laying the Haggadah out for the first time,” James says. “Some of it is set in Hebrew, which reads from right to left, some passages are spoken aloud or sung, alongside other passages that are unspoken and purely instructional.” It’s a dense typographic puzzle and a heavy lift for any designer. But it doesn’t have to be perfect. Unlike a professionally typeset book, a Haggadah isn’t expected to be finished on the first try. Most aren’t – they’re revised, reprinted, written over, passed down, and reassembled year after year. It’s a format built to be revisited, not conclusive.

That model aligns closely with Jewish pedagogy, which prioritises commentary over conclusion. The rabbinic tradition thrives on interpretation layered over interpretation and invites debate rather than resolution. As Deborah notes, “Torahs, the Jewish books of worship, used to have huge margins so people could contribute their thoughts and additional questions in the book itself over generations.” Dani’s annual redesigns mirror that recursive structure – iteration not just as a design process, but as a form of spiritual continuity. But it’s not just interpretation that defines the tradition; it’s also attention. So much of Jewish law is rooted in repetition and interruption – rules that are deliberately hard to follow, meant to pull focus and create awareness. Take the Four Questions, traditionally asked by the youngest person at the Seder. Each begins with “Why is this night different from all other nights?” and prompts an explanation of the rituals – from eating matzo to reclining while we eat. They’re not difficult questions, exactly, but their repetition year after year (and in the middle of dinner) signals something deeper: that the act of asking, and re-asking, is itself sacred. The Haggadah works much the same way. It’s less a rulebook than a framework – imperfect, recursive, at times a bit tedious, and built to be reshaped by the people gathered around it. The friction is part of the ritual.