Locusts! Matzoh! Cowboys!

The last good passover seder we had in our family was when everyone was still alive and we videotaped it. It was instant performance art, tossing red wine onto white china with exuberant cries announcing each plague, goofing on the four questions while doing our best Henny Youngmans, and feeding matzoh to the dogs (who quickly spit it out–what do dogs know of desert suffering and guerrilla baking skills?). Well, it’s passover time again (which means college students everywhere will be invoking Bob Marley over bitter herbs), so Mr. Campus thought he’d send over a little something you might want to play while pouring a little liquor for Elijah. No Jewish holiday should go uncommercialized and nobody knows that better than Manischewitz, resident matzoh monopolizers and the reason for all Jewish pre-teens’ first hangover (”Manischewitz wine, the original Jesus Juice”). They out did themselves in the 60s by releasing this 45 that paired “a real honest-to-goodness Jewish cowboy” named Harold Stern (he’s pre-law, single, and can ride bareback!) with Avram, a former Israeli paratrooper who sings tunes in Hebrew and, without explanation, Italian. It’s a plug for Passover products that interrupts Stern’s aw-shucks musings on Jewish prairie seders with Avram’s international song stylings. Stern wasn’t the first Jewish cowboy of course and he wasn’t the last: rewind to Jewish gauchos in Argentina and “Yonkle the Cow-Boy Jew,” then flip to pioneer, gold rush Jews out West, then head to Mickey Katz’s “Haim Afen Range” settlers and Gene Wilder’s reluctant Polish cowboy Avram Belinsky (Frisco Kid), then end up with Kinky Friedman and his Texas Jewboys and this guy, a Yiddish singing chicken rancher up in Petaluma. The wagon train must be murder on the allergies.