Maxwell House Haggadah this year is different from all others

FOR THE FIRST time in 79 years, Maxwell House has updated the text in its Passover Haggadah, a booklet that narrates the story of the Exodus and ranks up there with the poppy-seed bagel as a touchstone of the American Jewish experience. One million copies are printed every year for use around the seder table.

In the new telling, according to publisher Elie Rosenfeld, "The Jews end up in Boca."

He's joking.

After 5,700-odd years in circulation, the basic narrative of the Jews' escape from bondage in Egypt hasn't changed in any Haggadah that we're aware of, whether it's the gorgeous Elie Wiesel edition, the Zen Santa Cruz Haggadah, the Family Haggadah, the Holistic Haggadah, Sammy Spider's First Haggadah or the new interfaith Haggadah that Cokie Roberts was in Philly to promote last month at the Free Library.

The essentials of the Exodus story certainly haven't changed in the tradition-bound Maxwell House version that's been given out free in grocery stores since 1932 and found its way in 2009 to the first White House seder (then found its way back last year). Josh Perelman, a curator at the new National Museum of American Jewish History, on Independence Mall, calls the old standby "an American icon."

The museum has one Maxwell House Haggadah on permanent display and 23 others in its archives, dating as far back as 1933 and going up to 1993. "I imagine we'll collect one of the new ones, too, basically when we go to pick up our Passover things at the grocery store," Perelman said.

Rosenfeld said that the main change in the 2011 revision is the removal of antiquated "ye," "thou" and "wherefores" to get with the times.

The first of the "Four Questions" that Jewish children recite at the festive seder meal, for example, always went as follows in the Maxwell House script: "Wherefore is this night distinguished from all other nights?"

In the streamlined update, it's "Why is this night different from all other nights?"

or not to bean?

Here's another question you might be asking: How on earth did Maxwell House manage to get product placement into the hands of a million American Jews annually on the most beloved of all American Jewish holidays?

It's a two-part answer. In 1923, Maxwell House appealed to an Orthodox rabbi to categorize the coffee bean a berry instead of the symbolically prohibited legume - and hence kosher for Passover.

He did, and General Foods proceeded to promote the Maxwell House brand (and later its sister brand, Sanka) to Jewish households. In a similar vein, the Jewish museum has a groovy commercial from 1970 featuring Sammy Davis Jr. as a religious-niche pitchman for Manischewitz.

Today, a nice cup of Joe with the dessert macaroons is a staple of the American seder table. "You have to have coffee at Passover," said Jewish food maven Joan Nathan. The three-ingredient Pistachio Macaroons from her Jewish Cooking in America (see recipe on Page 39) are a foolproof and delicious accompaniment.

The first Maxwell House Haggadah was published in 1932, nine years after the coffee-bean decree.

The idea for the booklet and its free distribution came from New York adman Joseph Jacobs. His ad agency, now owned and run by Rosenfeld, has printed and circulated the promotional Haggadah every Passover for the past 79 years (currently on behalf of Kraft Foods, which now owns the Maxwell House brand).

"I happen to be holding one at the moment," Rosenfeld said by phone from the company's headquarters. "I don't live most of my life more than 10 or 15 feet from a Haggadah."

David Auspitz, the owner of the Famous 4th Street Cookie Co., also spent quantity time with the Maxwell House Haggadah as a kid in the 1950s. Actually, when he sat at the seder table in his scratchy suit and tie at his grandparents' house at 8th and Girard, the time felt like an eternity.

"My grandfather was religious, so he used to read the whole Haggadah. Every word," Auspitz said. "They used to read it all in Hebrew, and, of course, I didn't speak Hebrew. You want a boring dinner?"

In his mind's eye, he can see his uncles and aunts and cousins packed in like sardines around the dining room table for the Passover seder. "We all sat in a pecking order of sons in the family, by age. First it was Uncle Lou and his wife and son, and then Uncle Harry and his wife and son, and then going around the table you had the others."

And in front of each uncomfortably attired relative, he can picture a copy of the Maxwell House Haggadah, circa 1953. "I remember it like it's right in front of me now."

Philly cookbook author Aliza Green also remembers the Maxwell House edition from seders during her postwar childhood in Washington, D.C. The coffee-company Haggadah often found a place at the table "because, you know, you could get a bunch of them."

"Of course the wording was very old-fashioned," said Green, who teaches Jewish culture and cooking at Gratz Jewish Community High School, in Elkins Park. (See Page 39 for a moist Passover cake recipe from her cookbook Starting with Ingredients: Baking.)

"It always disturbed me, because I was always a feminist," Green said. "I didn't want that patriarchal God, the man."

The 2011 revision extends an olive branch in the form of a gender-neutral God, who is referred to in the English passages of the Maxwell House Haggadah as "God," "the Omnipotent," "Monarch of the Universe" and so forth - never as "he."

Traditionalists can take refuge in the Hebrew passages, which now alternate pages with the English ones (another innovation for 2011) but contain precisely the same text as always, down to the last dalet.

Alas, fidgety children may be disappointed to learn that "updated" does not equal "shorter." Rosenfeld said that the Maxwell House seder text has not been abridged and will still have a run time of three to four hours in households that follow the book to the letter.

For those who approach the service as more of an a la carte experience, an index offers page numbers for the Exodus' greatest hits, including The Four Questions (page 8), The Ten Plagues (page 18) and, eventually, The Festive Meal (page 28).

This handy feature debuted in 1998 as part of a graphic-design update and was included as a nod to the seder-lite camp, Rosenfeld said.

"In my family, we do the Haggadah from the beginning to end," he said. "There are other families that will sit for just a couple hours and do the basic sections. Every family's different."

Regardless, Nathan said, "Everyone waits for the part where they say, 'The meal is served.' "