Nina Lewis
A Haggadah for Migration Memory
2017, Bard College Berlin
Presented here is a Haggadah that I both compiled and contributed to. A Haggadah is
the book which guides participants through the ritual of celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover. For me, Passover is the most intersectional Jewish holiday in terms of relating to the experiences of others’ oppression, in order to address and commemorate one’s own oppression.
Additionally, Passover is also a holiday about migration, specifically remembering an
experience of forced migration. Initially I had hoped to write this Haggadah in order
to both relate to the experiences of other immigration stories as well as address the
themes processed in our Migration History class in a way that felt personally relevant
to me. As I celebrated Passover using this Haggadah with my classmates however, questions of the universality of memory came to the foreground. We wondered what it meant for myself, as a Jewish person to share my holiday with the intention of providing it as representative of universal experiences. After we had this Passover seder, I went back through the Haggadah, writing commentary relating to this shift in understanding memory and migration. The finished Haggadah shows this conflict and shift in the narrative I had hoped to represent as well as the one I ended up representing.
