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Giving a Haggadah a Makeover

Why is this Haggadah different this Passover from all other Passovers?

On all other Passovers, this Haggadah describes God as a King. This Passover, God is a Monarch.

On all other Passovers, the Haggadah tells of the Four Sons, including one who is wise and one wicked. This Passover, the Haggadah talks about “four different sorts of children.”

Changes to any religious texts are noteworthy. But these changes are sure to be the talk around many Seder tables this Passover because this particular Haggadah — a retelling of the story of the Exodus, along with commentary and prayers — is by some estimates the most popular in the world.

And it has undergone its first translation since it was originally published in 1932, with fusty language updated and gender bias removed. Oddly enough, perhaps to those who do not observe Passover, the Haggadah is distributed by Maxwell House, the coffee company. The reason was a simple matter of marketing.

Maxwell House was manufactured in Nashville when its corporate parent, hoping to improve sales to an important demographic group in the New York City market, first offered the soft-cover Haggadah as a giveaway for every can of coffee purchased.

Although there have been scores of Haggadot published for all manner of religious, political and artistic tastes, and for all pocketbooks, the Maxwell House version emerged as close to the gold standard because it provided an inexpensive way to provide a dozen or two dozen diners with the same Hebrew and English text.

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At a supermarket in Paramus, N.J., the revised Haggadah is available, with no purchase required.
Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times

Everyone can read off the same page, stained though it might be with horseradish and drops of Manischewitz wine.

Even President Obama has used the Maxwell House Haggadah, to conduct Seders in the White House.

Over 50 million Maxwell House Haggadot have been published since the 1930s, said Elie Rosenfeld, chief executive of Joseph Jacobs Advertising in Manhattan, an agency that specializes in marketing Jewish products and that arranges for the Maxwell House Haggadah’s publication. One million of the 58-page Haggadot are being printed, and on the first night of Passover, which this year falls on April 18, many of the more than five million American Jews will be reading the revised Haggadah, though many copies wind up in Israel and other countries.

William B. Helmreich, a professor of sociology and Jewish studies at the City University of New York, said that he had acquired many “fancy Haggadahs” — filled with exegesis and commentary that can stretch a Seder out for four or five hours— but that he preferred the Maxwell House edition because it was “suffused with tradition.”

“It is the Haggadah that I used when I was growing up and it’s still around,” Dr. Helmreich said. “It reminds me that the essence and beauty of the story lies in its simplicity. The average person can’t get through the flood of information in the fancy Haggadahs, because people want to eat and the kids are restless.”

Amazon offers at least 50 different Haggadot, priced from $1.49 to $75 each, not including electronic versions for the Kindle. But the Maxwell House Haggadah has the virtue of being free as long as a customer buys a can of the coffee, which happens to be kosher for Passover, and many homes reuse the books year after year.

Until this year, the Maxwell House version contained a traditional translation of the immutable Hebrew and Aramaic that referred to God in male terms; although Jews do not attribute a gender to God, the Hebrew uses the male pronoun. The Haggadah also spoke in the thees and thous of a flowery Elizabethan that in the 1930s seemed to give religious texts their proper reverential tone.

But in recent decades, Jewish denominations have been modernizing prayer books. The Maxwell House Haggadah lagged — until now. The book was translated anew, by Henry Frisch of Teaneck, N.J., a former high school English teacher who taught a course in the Bible as literature.

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Copies of the Maxwell House book from 1934, the 1950s and 1998.Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times

Although he had never before translated a Hebrew book, Mr. Frisch was chosen, Mr. Rosenfeld said, because the agency was looking for someone who would simply tweak the existing text without substantially altering its meaning or adding commentary.

The new Haggadah does not refer to “leavened or unleavened bread” but prefers “bread or matzoh” so children can better understand. The Third Plague, once called “Vermin,” is now called “Lice.” For the first of the Four Questions, which are read by the youngest literate child, the old version of the Haggadah said: “Wherefore is this night distinguished from all other nights?” The new Maxwell houses puts it simply: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Mr. Rosenfeld said of the old version, “What 7-year-old is going to be able to read this and understand what they’re asking.”

Because the changes are in the English, not the Hebrew, there has been no outcry from Orthodox Jewish leaders, said Mr. Rosenfeld and Mr. Frisch, both of whom are Orthodox.

“There’s nothing unorthodox about this translation,” Mr. Frisch said. “I wouldn’t expect anybody to have complaints.”

The Haggadot are shipped out of a warehouse in Chicago by Maxwell House’s current corporate parent, Kraft Foods, and are available in supermarkets like Shop-Rite and Pathmark in Jewish neighborhoods. In some stores they are stacked near cardboard display cases, while in others shoppers must ask a manager for one. Not every store has them, Mr. Rosenfeld said, adding a twist on a classic Haggadah phrase.

“Next year in Wal-Mart,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Giving a Haggadah a Makeover. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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