"We’ll Be Here All Night: Stories for Passover” is a one-hour Passover-themed special from Tablet Magazine’s National Magazine Award-winning podcast, Vox Tablet, and PRX. The special airs Saturday at 3 and Sunday at 6.
The special features funny, poignant, and thought-provoking stories and conversations that touch on the plagues, on slavery, on food, on the act of story-telling and more, and are meant to appeal to people of all religious (and non-religious) backgrounds. Hosted by Sara Ivry (Vox Tablet) and Jonathan Goldstein (WireTap, This American Life), the show’s contributors include Israeli writer Etgar Keret, DC food historian Michael Twitty (Afroculinaria), and radio producers Sally Herships (Marketplace), Debbie Nathan (This American Life), and Jonathan Groubert (The State We’re In).).
In the first segment of the show, hosts Sara and Jonathan briefly lay out the basics of the holiday of Passover, and then Jonathan speaks with writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret about the narrative strengths and weaknesses of the Passover story, from a Hollywood producer’s point of view, ending with an animated discussion of the ten plagues.
Next, Sally Herships takes us into the home of Abigail Rosenfeld, one of Brooklyn’s "lice ladies,” the women (usually Orthodox Jews) who make a living helping desperate parents rid their schoolchildren of this pest. Rosenfeld is therefore an expert on this plague which was visited upon the ancient Egyptians, though she’s quick to note that today’s lice bears little resemblance to the ones we read about in the Passover story.
Debbie Nathan shares a moving, probing, and funny story on learning that her Southern Jewish great-great-grandparents owned slaves in Mississippi, on the history of Jewish slave owners in the American South (with historian Stuart Rockoff, Mississippi Humanities Council), and on her elderly aunts and cousins' responses to this revelation.
In the final segment of the show, we hear from Michael Twitty, a Washington, DC based food historian and Jewish educator on how he's adapted one of Passover’s symbolic rituals to reflect his ancestors' slave history.
That's "We'll Be Here All Night: Stories for Passover" Saturday at 3 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m.
