By AMY KLEIN
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Here are 10 popular Passover videos of years past: many animated, many musical, not all kid-appropriate.
• “20 Things to Do with Matzah” by Michelle Citrin and William Levin is a funny acoustic guitar song about using leftover Passover matzo. “You can make a matzo pick and play the guitar / Or you can make a matzo license plate for your guitar.”
• “Moses Rap: A Pesach/Passover Video,” a Matt Bar Beat and Music Production, is an old-school, MTV-style hip-hop video showing recording of the song mixed with Passover’s 10 plagues. “Moses in the Red Sea / Like who’s gonna follow me / Pharaoh’s in the tides, we’re gonna ride to our destiny…”
• “Matzah: hip hop fo’ Hebrews” is by Smooth-E (comedian Eric Schwartz) of “Crank That Kosha Boy” fame and produced by Jib-Jab. The video follows Slick, an animated hip-hop kid (in “Chai” baseball cap and bling Jewish star), who sings about matzo. “How could one bread rock it so famous / when the taste is the same flavor of the box it came in?”
• “Matza Ball Rap” is by D’ Dog Dorf for Giving Tree Productions, a marketing company for Jewish nonprofits. The video is a grainy parody of Sir Mix-A Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” “My rabbi tries to warn me / but those matzo balls got me so horny / oh roll that knaidel …”
• “Who Let the Jews Out” was created by Sam Apple, for his book Schlepping Through the Alps. The video is a simple animated greeting card that Pharaoh sings to the tune of “Who Let the Dogs Out.” LAMB: “Oh hello, Pharaoh. Listen, the Jews have escaped.” PHARAOH: “What! That’s impossible!”
• Taglit Birthright hired Brendon Walker (of “Chinese Food on Christmas” fame) to create “Get Down Moses!” In the video, ancient Moses gets fired from his modern-day job and goes to the streets to part hair, rap and sing. “We’ll eat some good food if you come to my seder / My favorite mode of transportation is the elevator / We’ll put you on the show, I’m quite the showman / But you gotta RSVP so we know if you’re afikoman.”
• American Comedy Network’s “Matzah Man” is a kid-friendly animated video of dancing matzos to the tune of the Village People’s “Macho Man.” “Matzah Matzah man, I’m gonna be a Matzah man.”
• “Getting There Is Half the Fun” was created by Stephen and Joel Levinson for Nextbook’s “God & Co.” series of modern interpretations of Bible stories. The video is an animated sketch of Aaron “roasting” his brother Moses (with some profanity) after 40 years in the desert. “My brother Moses is such a great man, if we had known what a great leader this kid was gonna become, mom might have not thrown him in the Nile!”
• “Happy Passover!” from Unleashed TV is a Family Guy-type animated sketch in which a Hollywood agent invites a talking dog to dinnner. DOG: “I wanna bring over the breadsticks.” AGENT: “There’s no bread.” DOG: Breadsticks!” AGENT: “Oh, I guess that’s alright.”
• “The Matzah Challenge” was created by Video Jew Jay Firestone for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. It’s a fake news story on the tasting of five matzos. “This unleavened bread can sometimes be accused of tasting bland … and that argument has more holes than the subject in question.”
