“Saturday Night Seder” and the Affordances of Cultural Arts during COVID-19

Saturday Night Seder (SNS) was broadcast online on 11 April 2020 as a public celebration of Passover and as a benefit for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Foundation. Part seder, part telethon, and part Broadway theatrical performance, SNS was the first online event to create a national Jewish communal gathering space in the context of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and has since been viewed over 1.5 million times. This article examines SNS as a uniquely situated manifestation of COVID-19, and draws attention to the various affordances engendered by SNS for Jewish gathering, learning, and exchange. It draws upon interviews with members of the production team, featured participants, and expert informants, as well as viewer responses from Twitter and YouTube: a dataset that includes 2000 tweets and over 1800 YouTube comments. Collectively, these data suggest that cultural arts productions such as SNS have afforded an expansive network of online Jewish conversations during COVID-19, and have invited a broad audience of Jews and non-Jews into dialogue over Jewish themes and content.