Is Passover Jewish?

Is Passover Jewish. Yes and no. Jenna Joselit informs us in her (poorly titled) Forward essay, "How Religious Customs Take Their Toll" that Passover is no longer exclusively Jewish.

Christians have taken a fancy to Passover celebrations, especially to celebrating the Seder. This trend used to be condemned as "Judaizing" in the early church. Apparently in the modern American pluralistic context, curiosity rules. Few Christian leaders fear that mass conversions to Judaism will follow a dinner started with the eating of matzah and horseradish.

As Joselit puts it:

...More pronounced by far is the frequency with which this millennial Judaic phenomenon has appeared over the course of the past decade or so within avowedly Christian — and largely evangelical — contexts. I have in mind here the Holy Land Experience, a religious theme park in Orlando, Fla., where, day in and day out, visitors in shorts queue up in front of the Shofar Auditorium to see the “Passover Seder Presentation.”

According to this peppy, 30-minute rendition of the Passover ritual, the three matzot used in the Seder represent the Holy Trinity; the youngest person in the family asks the Four Questions as an homage to John the Apostle, who was reportedly the youngest person at the Last Supper, and the reason that red wine is consumed at the Seder is that it represents the blood of Christ rather than Manischewitz’s market share or an age-old affinity for the sweetest of grapes.

There’s no need to travel as far as Orlando, though, to participate in a Christianized Seder like this one. The Holy Land Experience may offer a more extreme — and crowded — version of “recovering Passover for Christians,” as Dennis Bratcher’s “Introduction to a Christian Seder” would have it, but it’s hardly an isolated one. Elsewhere throughout the length and breadth of the United States, as a quick Google search makes abundantly clear, Christian Americans have taken to holding their own Seder. Some see it as a way to experience the “story of God’s grace in history.” Others view it as an opportunity to highlight what they have in common with the Jews or to come closer to Jesus, whose last meal on earth happened to be either a Seder or some other religiously inspired get-together. Meanwhile, some Christians even go so far as to substitute matzo for the Eucharist wafer....