Slice of Bread for LGBT Jews and All the Excluded

A Statement on Your Seder Plate

By Rebecca Alpert

In 1997 I wrote a book with the title “Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition.” The book was about how we Jewish lesbians had begun to claim our place in the Jewish community by reinterpreting traditions, as the half of the title after the colon suggests. But the provocative words before the colon had a different purpose. Saying that lesbians identified with what it would feel like to be “bread on the Seder plate” was meant to draw attention to how unwelcome they felt in the Jewish world at that time.

For the record, neither at my own Seder nor at any Seder conducted by any lesbian I know was bread ever placed on the Seder plate. The idea was so alien that my editor could not even find a Jewish person on staff to donate a Seder plate for the simulated image on the book’s cover. (I shipped them my own Seder plate after being assured that bread never touched it.) I will admit that the year the book came out, we did put it on the Seder plate, but that’s as far as it went.

So if the purpose was not to make a ritual of bread on the Seder plate, what’s this all about? Like many things Jewish, it started with a story.
In 1979 a rebbetzin from the local chapter of Chabad in Berkeley gave a talk at the local Hillel about women in Halacha. When someone asked about lesbians, she (correctly) described sex between women as a minor transgression in Jewish law and likened it to eating bread during the week of Passover. The Jewish lesbians who heard her took the analogy to heart, and discussed putting a crust of bread on their Seder plate that year to symbolize their anger at feeling like outsiders in the Jewish community.


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