“It’s kind of embedded in pop culture,” Germain said. “We were really proud of it. We never thought of it as a bit deal.”
"A Rugrats Passover" first aired on Nickelodeon on April 13, 1996. It was 22 minutes long, twice the length of the average 11-minute episode. (Usually multiple installments would air in the show's 22-minute time slot.)
The episode has achieved a cult-like status among fans of the classic Nickelodeon show. Some watch it every year the way they do with "A Rugrats Chanukah".
Nickelodeon approached Germain and his colleagues about doing a Hanukkah episode following the success of their Christmas episode since Tommy Pickles is half-Jewish.
“We said sure,” said Germain, but then they suggested Passover instead since it was a more “important” Jewish holiday.
Passover is an eight-day holiday celebrated in the spring honoring the Jewish liberation out of Egypt. It’s celebrated with a seder, or ceremonial feast, on the first two nights, which includes bitter herbs, matzo and wine, all symbolic of different elements of the holiday.
It was quickly decided among the writers that the Rugrats episode would feature Angelica as the pharaoh and Tommy as Moses. While all the adults are downstairs having a seder, Grandpa Boris and the kids get accidentally locked in the attic. That’s where he tells them all about the holiday’s history.
The writers molded the story of the plagues and slaying of the first born to make it more child-friendly, Germain noted.
A Hanukkah episode did eventually air on Dec. 4, 1996, which was recently adapted into a comic, but Germain still hears from fans thanking him for the series' attention to Passover.
"What I am really proud of, is it kind of introduced Passover to kids and their parents who really didn’t know about it," Germain said. "I think it really brought people together.
“... I still get letters, ‘This is how I taught my kids about Passover,’ or people telling me, ‘This is how I learned about Passover,'" Germain, who added that he's working on a reboot of the show, continued. "It’s kind of exciting."
From Forward:
How ‘A Rugrats Passover’ became an iconic holiday special
For Millennial Jews, the coming of spring brings the anticipation of participating in cherished Pesach rituals: eating matzah, having a Seder, and watching “A Rugrats Passover.”
Twenty-five years ago this year, on April 13, 1995, Nickelodeon debuted the Jewish holiday special of what was then its most popular cartoon series – one of the first times a Passover Seder was depicted in an American television show. The episode was the highest-rated show in Nick history, and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program. A revival of the series is currently in the works, led by the creators and many of the original writers.
In subsequent years, watching the episode, either in reruns or on Nick’s iconic orange VHS tapes, became an annual tradition for many young Jews – some of whom have maintained the tradition with their own children. When it came to depictions of Judaism in popular culture, “As a kid, the only thing that I had was the ‘Rugrats’ Passover special,” writer/director Benny Safdie told Slate last year.
In preparation for tonight’s Seder, I showed my kids the Rugrats Passover episode. I mean, let’s be honest, they probably learned more from that than they will tonight! pic.twitter.com/Ogzb42hYka— lisa hendricks (@MsLisaHendricks) April 19, 2019
The Rugrats Passover special was the first time I felt like I saw myself represented in the media.— Alex Wyse (@alexwyse) April 1, 2018
Fun fact: Rugrats was the only show for kids (that my family knew of) that did special episodes for Jewish holidays.— Sam White (@samwhiteout) August 11, 2019
The Rugrats Passover and the other specials were *VERY* big deals for us. pic.twitter.com/SyymXPJ0Z7
A cartoon show about the inner lives of toddlers that broadcast from 1991 to 2004, “Rugrats” was highly popular and critically renowned for the way it depicted the adult world through children’s eyes. Steven Spielberg called the show “sort of a TV Peanuts of our time.” The success of the show led to three feature films, a sequel series, a newspaper comic strip, multiple video games and more than $1 billion in merchandise sales.
During production of the Passover episode, the show’s Jewish writers, producers and actors were excited by the prospect of sharing their heritage with the children (and their parents) who watched the show. But they never anticipated that the reaction would be this positive and widespread.
“We had the responsibility to be factually accurate, and we tried to get a lot of information in 22 minutes,” recalled Rachel Lipman, one of the writers of the episode. “But being entertaining was the most important part. Because if you can engage emotionally in a story, you’re going to watch it again.”
In the episode, the characters attend a Seder at the home of Boris and Minka, who are Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants and the maternal grandparents of the protagonist baby Tommy Pickles. Although there had been Jewish lead characters on television before, Tommy – whose mother is Jewish and father is Christian – was the first to lead an American children’s series. His upbringing was important to the show’s creators, Arlene Klasky and Gabor Csupo (who were themselves in a Jewish-Christian mixed marriage) and Paul Germain, who is Jewish.
Germain “loved his bubbe and wanted to integrate that remembrance of his into the stories, and didn’t realize what a touchstone it would be,” said Melanie Chartoff, who played Minka as well as Minka’s daughter Didi (meaning she sometimes had to record arguments with herself).
When she auditioned for Minka, Chartoff recounted, “I was told that the character was ‘from the old country.’ I said, ‘Which old country?’ They said, ‘The Jewish old country.’”
Chartoff is Jewish, but grew up in an assimilated home among parents who had “prided themselves on not having accents.” So to pick up the voice, she traveled to Fairfax, a Los Angeles neighborhood with a large Jewish population, and began observing Russian immigrant women.
Michael Bell, who played Boris, the grandfather character, as well as two other parental characters, said that the producers didn’t know he was Jewish when they asked him to audition. He modeled his accent after his immigrant grandfather, whom he had been imitating for years. “He would call me ‘yungele kaker,’ and when I got older, I knew what he was saying and I’d call him an alter kaker,” he said.
Chartoff and Bell said that they often had to improvise when episodes featuring their characters were written by non-Jews.
“They’d have her say, ‘Oh lordy, lordy’” – which didn’t sound in-character – “and I had to kind of come up with a Jewish improvisational thing that I would scream at my husband,” Chartoff said.
Sometimes, Bell slipped in some Yiddish vernacular that, if properly translated, wouldn’t have been allowed on a children’s show. “I would say, ‘Gei kaken afn yam,’” Bell said. “They said, ‘What does that mean?’ I said, ‘It means, “Go spit in the ocean.”’” (It actually means, “Go shit in the ocean”).
The episode itself came about when Nickelodeon executives suggested a Hanukkah episode to accompany the show’s Christmas special. But the show’s producers wanted to go in a different direction.
“We thought about it, and we said, Hanukkah does fall at the same time of year, but it doesn’t have the same significance to who we are, and we’ve seen those before,” Lipman said. “We’d like to tell a story that has the same kind of weight that Christmas had. We hadn’t seen a Passover episode before. They were so supportive, and gave us so much leeway to go forward.”
The writers settled on a plot device to allow them to tell the Passover story: Boris has a fight with Minka, then disappears. One by one, they find Boris, who has accidentally locked himself in the attic – and the rest of the characters soon find themselves locked in too. So Boris passes the time by telling them about the Exodus from Egypt.
The main baby characters imagine themselves reenacting the Exodus story. Lipman said that although the episode writers toned some of the more graphic elements of the Passover story, they didn’t have any qualms showcasing what can be a very dark tale.
“All through ‘Rugrats,’ we didn’t stay away from dark or complicated concepts,” she said. “The babies were treated as though their feelings are big, even though their physical presence is not. Our characters would understand, for example, that Pharaoh is a bully” – a perfect quality to be embodied by the character of Angelica.
The Seder story is retold fairly faithfully, though it was Rugratsified – the Hebrew slaves are babies, so Tommy, as Moses, tells Pharaoh to “Let my babies go”; the bickering twins Phil and Lil fight over who is older and therefore at risk from the plague of the death of the firstborn; Chuckie, the hapless sidekick, accidently invents matzah because he forgot to add yeast to the bread.
Lipman said her favorite scene was when Pharaoh Angelica is undisturbed by the threat of the final plague – until she calls her dad and realizes that she is a firstborn child. “I always love when she gets her comeuppance,” Lipman said.
Lipman said that making the episode gave her an unexpected insight into Seders themselves. “I realized that recreating, or retelling, or making something our own, is something that we can all do,” she said. “We’re part of a religion that needs to keep being retold and reminded. That’s why we said Passover was the most significant holiday we could choose. It’s full of tradition and ritual, and we do have to tell the story and make it a personal connection….It’s something that I had to do when I had my own kids later on.”
Chartoff, an actor and writer who often contributes columns to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, said that when the episode first aired, she had only been to a few Seders as an adult, and so didn’t remember the Passover story before recording the episode. “They made it so simple on the ‘Rugrats’ episode that it educated everybody, including me,” she said.
Years after she recorded the episode, she married a man whose children had been “brought up on the specials.” Her new family celebrated many more Jewish holidays than she was used to, but, she said, “I felt more familiar with them because of my experience playing Minka and Didi.”
Despite the awards nominations and huge TV ratings, the impact of the episode was hard to gauge in the era before social media – though Lipman said that some fans mailed letters to the network saying things like “My kid is now proud to be Jewish.” But as the episode, and a later Hanukkah special, continued to air in reruns, and were played in homes and Sunday schools across America, its popularity grew. Today, it’s the subject of numerous nostalgic articles and listicles — and its impact on Jewish kids was even the subject of a master’s thesis in Jewish studies.
And non-Jews, too, learned about Passover from watching the episode, which made young Jews feel that the mainstream accepted their beliefs.
Everyone craps on TV for not being educational enough but the Passover episode of Rugrats was my first exposure to another religion.— Hamsandcastle (@hamsandcastle) April 22, 2016
For Chartoff and Bell, the episode had another significance – through Boris and Minka, the show memorialized the generation of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who were passing away.
“We don’t have that sound, and that memory and tradition,” Bell said. “It’s a thing of the past. So bringing Grandpa Boris alive vocally was such a treat for me. It’s a memory and testament to my grandmother and grandfather.”
However, the depictions were not without controversy – the Anti-Defamation League complained that Boris and Minka were anti-Semitic stereotypes. Bell, who went on to serve on the Los Angeles chapter board of the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union, said he was infuriated by the charge. “My grandfather looked like that, my grandmother sounded like that,” he said. “Do you think they were supposed to look like Nicole Kidman? They looked like potatoes!”
Due to pressure from the network, “We had to change our actions and depictions a little bit,” Chartoff remembered. “I was told to alter my voice a little bit, to make her a little less of a Yiddish character.”
Chartoff said that her mother was also offended by the character. “I said to my mother that the characters were made to tickle, not to be role models,” she said. “But she was not appeased - her parents had escaped the pogroms. Her sensitivity was very heightened. I made it up to her by buying a condo with the residuals. She’s 95, still alive, living on Didi’s money.”
Lipman is now one of the writers on the Rugrats revival, though she declined to share details about the show or reveal when it would debut. “I asked if I could be on it again, and they said they’d be going with some young celebrities,” Bell said. Chartoff said that Didi would have a reduced presence on the show. As for Boris and Minka? “I think they live in Florida now,” she said.
All involved said that they were heartened that the Jewish characters of “Rugrats” – and the Passover special in particular – has had such an impact on Jewish children.
“Every year, when we read the Hagaddah, I look for ways to make it personally relevant in terms of our own lives and what’s going on around us, because there are different kinds of exoduses and different kinds of freedom,” Lipman said. “So, we can relate to what the babies are looking for.”
###
From Forward:
My dad co-wrote ‘A Rugrats Passover.’ I had questions about it.
The episode is a cultural touchstone, and he’s proud of it. So why didn’t we watch it together?
 |
| Jonathan Greenberg, left, with the Daytime Emmy Award for the the Rugrats Passover episode, which he co-wrote, and his son Hank Greenberg. They stand before a stuffed version of Angelica, a Rugrats character. Photo by Megan Blumenreich |
My father, Jonathan Greenberg, came up with the idea for “A Rugrats Passover” five years before I was born. He was a writer on what was then Nickelodeon’s most popular cartoon series when the show’s producers asked for a Rugrats Hanukkah special. He argued instead for a Passover special starring the animated cast of talking babies. It aired on April 13, 1995, in the second of the show’s 13 seasons.
The episode, in which the babies’ parents and grandparents moan and fight about the family Seder, was the highest-rated show in the network’s history, and nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding animated program. For many millennial Jews, the episode — which moves the telling of the Passover from the Seder table to the attic, where Grandpa Boris regales the babies with a far more enthralling version of the story — became a Passover ritual. For many non-Jews, it introduced a holiday they knew little or nothing about.
I’m proud of my father’s work on the episode, but he was never eager to share it with me. I had to discover it for myself. My younger sister isn’t sure she’s seen it at all. She thinks she might have read a book version of it in Hebrew school. This Passover I put my longstanding questions about “A Rugrats Passover” to my father, who is now an English professor.
He told me that some of his answers reflect his current perspective, rather than what he remembers from nearly 30 years ago. My interview with him has been edited for length and clarity.
You start the episode with Angelica, a toddler, crushing up matzo in her car seat. Why?
Yes, this is Angelica deliberately making a mess. Part of what we wanted to do is set up why Passover is meaningful for people who don’t know Passover. It might not feel like what they think of as a big holiday, especially for kids. It’s not Christmas. It’s not even Hanukkah. It’s not a birthday. There’s no presents, but it’s gonna be fun.
Rugrats didn’t like trying to sanitize things and give you a false picture. Kids know when stuff is boring. They know that sitting around a table reading or listening to prayers is incredibly boring. You can’t just tell them that’s fun. They won’t believe you. We had to make it fun. Crumbling up matzo is fun.
Why did you want to do a Passover special instead of the Hanukkah special the network executives had asked for?
Passover is actually the most important Jewish holiday, except for maybe Yom Kippur. It shows what a Christian-centric world we live in. People just assume Hanukkah is the biggest Jewish holiday because the modern American version is modeled on Christmas.
 |
| Tommy Pickles parts the [sea] on ‘A Rugrats Passover.’ Courtesy of Nickelodeon |
What made the episode work?
Aligning the theme of “freedom” with the theme of “childhood.” A lot of childhood is about wanting to do stuff and not being allowed to do it. If you tell it right, the themes of Passover should have a natural resonance for kids.
I would say relative to a lot of other Rugrats stories, this one came together pretty easily. The Passover story is a very strong, easily understood narrative. For that retelling of Passover, we just used the Charlton Heston movie The Ten Commandments. We didn’t even have to look at the Haggadah. We just watched the film and did whatever they did in the 1950s. It was still like telling a Jewish story as a blockbuster.
Of the four writers on the episode, only Peter Gaffney was not Jewish. This might be a better question for him, but how did he contribute to the episode?
Peter knew the characters really well and it’s not like he never met a Jew before. He knew the story and the holiday. I don’t think anyone cared that he wasn’t Jewish.
I’m thinking that it would have been strange though, if you had a hand in writing about an important piece of Black culture, or another culture that was not your own?
It’s an issue that people care about more now than we did in the ’90s. It’s not that we didn’t care then, but we care more about it now. It’s interesting, but I think if a bunch of Christians or non-Jews wrote something really well-done and fascinating about Judaism, I would not have a problem with that.
Your question reminds me of a conversation from my James Joyce discussion group. There’s a great Jewish literary critic, Leslie Fiedler, who wrote that James Joyce’s Ulysses probably has the best Jewish character since the Bible. The first modern Jew in literature is written by an Irish Catholic. Leopold Bloom is totally convincing. A part of that is because Joyce wrote with sympathy. He made a real effort to learn about Jewish history and culture. It came across as real. He talked to Jewish friends. He read Jewish books.
Rugrats does Jewish representation well, but there also seemed to be some effort on the series to represent Black people.
Rugrats creator Paul Germain and head writer Joe Ansolabehere knew it was important. I think pretty early on they felt that Rugrats was already getting to be pretty white. They wanted to make a show more representative of what America looks like.
Many ’90s shows did not do that. There aren’t regular Black characters on Seinfeld, Friends, or even The Wild Thornberrys.
We weren’t perfect. Even in the Passover episode, we got flack for the grandparents, Boris and Minka. We got some flak from Jewish groups. It wasn’t a lot, but they felt it was stereotyping.
There’s also a joke in the scene where our 3-year-old Pharaoh receives presents from around the world. You probably couldn’t have the Chinese baby offering fortune cookies today. The idea was to convey our toddler Pharaoh’s sense of reality, and she would think the Chinese baby would bring fortune cookies. Even though it might be what a 3-year-old thinks, it’s a joke we probably wouldn’t do today.
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| Jonathan, left, and Hank Greenberg. The Rugrats Passover episode plays on a laptop between them, and shows an upside down pyramid, one of the jokes Jonathan Greenberg wrote for the episode. Photo by Megan Blumenreich |
How are your own feelings about Passover reflected in the show?
The Haggadah always felt like it had a problem to me. The Haggadah says the main thing to do is to tell the story, but during the Seder, there’s all this time wasted when you’re not telling the story. There’s so much talk about symbols and their meanings, but the actual story is supposed to be known already. If I could do a Haggadah my way, I would make it more like “Rugrats Passover,” where you would actually tell the story in a relatively brief and snappy and lively way. You wouldn’t spend that much time on saying “OK, now we eat the matzo with haroset and bitter herbs.”
If you see “Rugrats Passover” as your version of telling the Passover story, and if you believe telling the story in your own way is important, then why didn’t you sit down and show it to me? I don’t think my sister has even seen it.
She should see it. The question is more about me than Passover. It’s a hard question. I’m actually happy with how the episode turned out. I think it’s a good show. Here is the beginning of an answer: I feel like I was raised in a family where there was a lot of showing off. People were proud of things that they would accomplish. I became very self-conscious about getting people to notice my accomplishments or getting people to watch an episode I wrote. If people want to watch it, they will watch it. I won’t say “no.”
Your parents, your siblings and I are much more willing to promote your writing than you are.
I understand why my parents take pride in their children, even if my parents are a little over the top. Coming from a child, I understand why it’s appealing that your dad is connected to this thing that your friends know about.
Maybe part of the reason is that I feel like I really hit the jackpot to work at Rugrats. I was part of writing and rounding out the characters. I came up with stories and jokes and ideas, but it was Paul Germain’s creation, and Joe Ansolabehere also did a lot of intellectual work to make the show what it was. Of course, the other writers like Peter Gaffney, Rachel Lipman, Craig Bartlett, Mike Ferris, Steve Viksten, and Holly Huckins were all very talented. Everyone in the group gets the credit.
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Originally published: Friday, April 19, 2019.
Original source: WKMG.
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