In the Passover seder, there is possibly no more controversial section than the Four Children. As the seder sets up a series of conversations and pedagogical devices around the Exodus story, the Four Children is the most explicit set of instructions for parents to teach their children how to internalize the preferred message. The four children – the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one who does not know how to ask – each ask in their own way about the meaning of the story. The haggadah, the guidebook of the seder, then offers a set answer for each one. The controversy mostly surrounds the wicked child, whose phrasing “what does this story mean to you” seems largely innocuous and doesn’t seem to warrant the harsh response that, because the child has distanced themselves from the leader of the seder and the Biblical Israelites, they should in turn be distanced from the community. This call and response is particularly offensive to the analytical, inquisitive, and skeptical liberal Jew, and from that perspective I and almost everyone I’ve ever made a seder with has bemoaned this portion of the lesson. But this Passover I find myself drawn to the child who does not know how to ask.
The setup of the four children implies differences in both age and intelligence. And most haggadahs (fine, haggadot) will illustrate this section as children in descending age order, from early teen (the age of religious adulthood) to toddlerhood. That’s how I’ve always experienced it, especially since there were four children in my family when I was a kid, and, importantly, the wicked child mapped appropriately onto my impish second brother. The child who does not know how to ask is therefore often depicted as a pre-verbal or otherwise very young child who literally lacks the cognitive development to comprehend the basics of the story or to phrase a question. And so the response to simply repeat the most basic message of the story to this child (“this story has meaning because of what God did for us when They brought us out of Egypt”) seems both obvious and patronizing.
But as with every aspect of the seder, this setup is also a metaphor. And coming around to the end of my first year of teaching as a professor, I could easily call them the four students. Put that way, I’m thinking about this as a pedagogical framework, a way of fostering discourse and managing my classroom.
The reason that the child who does not know how to ask is drawing my attention is because I am faced for the first time in over a decade of teaching with students who exist passively in my classroom. Literally, children who do not know how to ask. Before, I encountered students who engaged in the material in its intended spirit, asking deeper questions about the specifics and the implications of the lesson (the wise child). Students who intentionally derailed the conversation with personal challenges, loaded questions with thinly veiled political agendas, or rude comments (the wicked child). Or, like the wicked child, students who had no genuine interest in what I laid before them, but only asked me for my interpretation so they could parrot it back, thinking that would get them the best grade. And of course students who requested extra repetition of the material in order to comprehend the basic facts and move towards a superficial interpretation (the simple child).
Although not all students actively speak in class, my experience was that they all communicated engagement that fell into one of these categories. Still stuck in the literal interpretation of the four children, a student who does not know how to ask would be a student who is so far below the level of the material that they cannot begin to experience their own reception of it critically – not only would they not know how to ask me, the instructor, a relevant question, they would not know how to ask themselves the basic self-assessment questions to gauge their own comprehension.
In the study of history, we don’t really believe that any material is beyond a student. We think there are methods of analysis that are complex and require some perspective to fully grasp, but ultimately all of these are accessible at any level, at least in part. In that vein, my public humanities project, The Medievalist Toolkit, has been experimenting with introducing students to medieval history through its uses and abuses – rather than starting with the time period itself and adding on critiques of its politicization in later classes, we tell students about how later peoples have imagined this time period from the start. This has been quite successful, because it’s not advanced material, it’s just more complex. We don’t always have to go from the simple to the complex if we trust our students to ask good questions.
So what is the student who does not know how to ask, and why am I encountering them for the first time this year?
My students who do not know how to ask are not incapable of comprehending the material, or even of checking their comprehension. They are disengaged. They are passive. They do the readings like they are lying at the edge of the ocean, letting it wash over them without trying to swim or even float. They wait for me to justify why the subject is interesting, entering the classroom without any drive of their own except the obligation of earning a degree. The student who does not know how to ask is passionless, uncritical, and impenetrable.
Any teacher working now can tell you exactly what is producing these students. It is the COVID-era cocktail of emotional burnout, stunted schooling, and a rapidly devalued education. It’s not that I haven’t had to justify the value of history to my students before – it’s history, half of the world’s most-hated subject. But that students who went through all of high school during COVID are on an educational conveyor belt that is constantly at risk of breaking. There’s little room in brains fogged by anxiety and taxed by traditional modalities for genuine interest in the subject matter.
This sounds too harsh, and I don’t mean that my students are dull. But I do see that as soon as they enter the classroom, the Zoom screen goes up over their eyes, and four years of passive education under strained circumstances take over.
And this is where I find myself surprisingly drawn to the haggadah’s answer for how to approach this student: just teach them anyway. Explain the material, tell them the meaning of the story as I understand it. Offer them an answer to a question they didn’t ask. It’s a harder job than the haggadah makes it out to be, since I have to bring all the energy to the room, and smile through weary sighs and blank faces, and offer extra engaging tidbits that would normally come from the Wise or the Wicked or even the Simple students in the room. It’s even more of a one-woman show than teaching is under “normal” circumstances.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention what the story of Passover means to me. Passover is not about the land or even the time of suffering. It is about building community through stories, conversation, and food. It is about taking on the pain of another person in order to fight against injustice. It is a course in experimental pedagogy. On Passover I focus on the suffering that is inflicted in my name and work to end it. Especially while I am teaching my course Landscapes of Medieval Mediterranean Religion, “next year in Jerusalem” is a state of mind, a vision to restore the historical pluralism of a place and to achieve a reality in which everyone has a deeply rooted home.
It started with an ill-fated search for a seder plate.
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I’ve written before about how complicated it is to be Ashkenazi in the US, both othered to the extreme by virtue of being non-Christian and having features that are definitely NOT considered the American ideal (curly dark hair and big noses being the obvious ones), while also very much passing as white. Growing up in New York, it was easy to ignore or at least shrug off a lot of the American standards that felt othering, because, frankly, most New Yorkers don’t really think of themselves as “typically American” anyway. But despite New York’s tremendous cultural influence and the massive bubble New Yorkers are often able to build around themselves, as Americans we still consume plenty of culture and media that is based in the social and cultural standards of the rest of the country. In fact, having lived in Minnesota and California, I’ve come to realize how much of what I think of as typical American culture is really an invention of California in the 1950s and ’60s, probably due to the fact that the film industry is based here. So, as a kid who was always aware of feeling not quite white and not quite American, I was always drawn to movie and TV characters who were signaled as strange, different, or exotic. And, I realized very recently, the mental gymnastics I performed to help myself identify with them was that I decided that they were all Jewish.
This thought really crystalized as I was watching this most excellent recent video from the YouTube channel BeKindRewind. At one point, the video discusses how two different adaptations of the Addams Family approach Christmas (which, as a colleague reminded me when I attended a Catholic university, is an American holiday). While the 1960s sitcom had the Addamses play out a pretty standard Christmas plot of convincing the children that Santa is real, the original comic and the ’90s movies on which I was raised showed the family pouring a boiling cauldron on carolers. BeKindRewind’s interpretation of this, which I think is probably correct, is that the Addams family is showing its distaste for the saccarine schlock of caroling and its insincere wishes. But as a kid, I thought this gleeful disdain was based in the fact that the family was Jewish. I mean, they hang out in their family graveyard. They wear all black. They perform a family dance called “the mamushka”. Tell me I’m not crazy to interpret them this way. (There’s an argument to be made that the kind of creepiness the Addams Family taps into is the same one behind the original Dracula novel, which some people have also argued is meant to represent a Jew, although it could also be just straight-up Orientalism.)
For me, the Addamses, especially Wednesday, in their refutation of classic Americana, were everything that felt right to me. They were funny and joyful without performing. They celebrated being dark and angsty. They had close and genuine relationships within their very insular family. It also didn’t hurt that my mom looked like Morticia, with her signature long dark hair. And my dad clearly loved these movies for their humor and transgressions, which is why we had VHS tapes of both of them in our regular rotation.
But it wasn’t just the obviously weird outsider Addams Family that I read this way. I always identified with the strong-willed female characters who were visually established as not properly white. And it’s not that much of a jump to see them as Jewish. Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Jasmine in Aladdin, Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Why is Belle singled out in the town as weird? Because she reads and, so the visuals of the movie imply, she’s the only pretty girl with brown hair. If you were raised in an Ashkenazi household, chances are you had the value of education beaten into you, while also being told you were attractive enough despite your “darker” features.
Jasmine, well, she’s… let’s just say Oriental and put the subtext out there, shall we? But she’s also a self-possessed young woman trapped by a structurally sexist society. And my experience of Judaism has very much been that. The Jewish tradition I was raised in is explicitly patriarchal. It also helped that around the time I first watched Aladdin was also when I was learning about my familial connection to Israel. The movie and my experience of the country played off each other in my mind: the market scene where Jasmine first goes out of the palace in disguise, the Jerusalem shouk, and NYC summer street fairs all swirled together into an open air market dreamscape.
Esmeralda is a gypsy (I’m not saying Romani or Roma here because she’s written in the book and the movie as the gypsy stereotype, not the actual Roma ethnic group). That one is a pretty obvious connection. There’s an international club of minority ethno-religious groups that have been systematically abused and shunned by Europeans (and some countries in western Asia), and that includes Jews, the Roma, the Kurds, the Druze… It’s the same association that made me love the Kurdish militia when I first started to learn about them back in high school.
These associations are pretty well-grounded, even if they’re not 100% accurate.
Are you ready for what I realize is probably my strangest interpretation?
Star Wars.
To this day, you can’t tell me that I’m wrong. The Skywalkers are Jewish.
This one is harder to explain. It’s not so much that Luke and Leia tap into actual stereotypes or associations with Ashkenazi Jewishiness, but that I identified with these characters so strongly that I had to make them Jewish in my mind so that sympathy was acceptable. I’m very literal. Someone has to actually be me for me to identify with them. I didn’t just love Princess Leia, I was going to grow up to BE Princess Leia. I mean, sure, I could find explanations that make this fit a little better – the destruction of Alderaan (which as a word kind of looks like Canaan) and Leia’s resulting homelessness, Luke’s feeling that he didn’t belong; those ring true for me as part of my identity as the grandchild of refugees, as well as my own ambivalent relationship with the state of Israel. But I don’t think that’s why I saw them as Jewish. Maybe part of it was just that Leia has brown hair, and I really appreciated seeing that (seriously, hair is a big thing).
There’s a part of this strange habit of mine that I think is more important than just a thing I do. I am able to do make these associations because all of these characters are still essentially white. Maybe not Jasmine, unless you’re the US government. But the same degree of whiteness that allows me and other Ashkenazi Jews to pass most days in America unmolested (despite the very real and present threat of antisemitism) is also what makes all of these characters acceptable as protagonists or supporting characters in major works of American media. If you’ve never seen someone who looks like you represented in film, it’s hard to understand why that representation is so important. But the reality is that it is difficult to really identify with and care about characters that you don’t feel that fundamental connection of identity to. The degree to which that identity is literal is pretty variable. But I think race and ethnicity have a lot to do with it. If you are white – by which I really mean of primarily northern European descent and Christian – you have a bit more freedom to see yourself in a range of characters based on their upbringing or their personality traits. But if that identity doesn’t read onto your own in a meaningful way, that difference can be a barrier to feeling a connection to what you see on screen. In my case, I would describe it as a fundamental mistrust. Similar to what I wrote previously about the baked in sense that people who aren’t Jewish won’t stick their necks out for you, I find that I am not fully convinced that a character understands the issues they are purported to be grappling with (otherness, patriarchy, discrimination based on their (relatively) darker features) unless I have reason to believe that they have really been othered in a meaningful way. And so I invent this Jewish identity for them to convince myself that what they have to say about their struggle is actually a valid comparison to my own struggles. It’s a thoroughly self-centered way to consume media. And so recognizing that I do this has also made me aware of what it must mean to people who experience much more direct and systemic discrimination not to have those connections to a character. My white privilege as an Ashkenazi Jew is in being able to invent connections to people who were not intended to be me, but are similar to me in ways I find compelling. But those connections are simply harder or not available if you can’t suspend your disbelief to interpret the Addamses or the Skywalkers as a marginalized group that is distinctly non-white.
I’m finding some optimism in the greater racial diversity of media at the moment, but this habit of mine is cluing me in to just how superficial that representation is. So, after reading all this, I want you to ask yourself “how much does this character’s racial image actually impact their experience in the narrative?” If the answer is not very much, then representation isn’t really doing enough, is it?
Hey, have you heard of this thing called cancel culture?
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It was perhaps not surprising just after the 2016 election to discover that a portion of president-elect trump’s base espoused ideologies of white supremacy. What was surprising to those who were paying attention but perhaps less familiar, was that trump also garnered significant support from Orthodox Jews, particularly Zionists, both in the US and Israel. While there are many reasons, both historical and expedient, that these particular Jewish groups chose to throw their support behind trump, it’s the coincidence that one of the most historically maligned groups would agree on their choice for political representation as the people who have fought both in the past and present for their extermination and removal from power. What is the connection between Zionist Orthodox Jews and white supremacists?
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