When Easter Sunday and Passover overlapped in 2022, artist Danielle Durchslag created a unique way to mark this at the iconic NY Easter Parade. This “Seder Bonnet” featured a traditional looking seder plate as a fascinator hat, colored by green moss. The inside reads “let my people grow,” a play on Moses’s line, “let my people go”- adding a layer of meaning about what it means not just to “go,” but to “grow” and to thrive. 

The hat, which may appear silly, prompted tremendous buzz – the NY Post snapped a pic and simply said, “a person in a Passover seder plate hat.” At its core, this piece of conceptual wearable art told a bigger story, the story of the shared roots of Passover and Easter. According to Christian theology and the gospels, the “Last Supper,” the iconic meal that Jesus and his apostles ate the before he was crucified, was actually a Passover seder. In this way, the Seder Bonnet brings a visual representation of this story to the parade, and reminds us of the shared roots of Judaism and Christianity. 

Seder Bonnet was not Danielle’s first foray into holiday-themed performance art. In 2021, she premiered another Passover-themed hat at NYC’s iconic Easter Parade, titled Taylor Bonnet. Like so much of her work, Taylor Bonnet advocates for a form of Jewishness rooted in abundance and play, and much less in a sense of scarcity. Her personal, wearable, physical manifestation of Jewish Joy. 

"Taylor Bonnet" created by Daniella Durchslag for the 2021 NYC Easter Bonnet Parade

COURTESY EMILY TEAGUE

It’s called Taylor Bonnet because she took inspiration for this project from an iconic fashion headpiece, designed and created for Elizabeth Taylor (one of most glamorous Jews of all time), in 1967, by Alexandre de Paris, for the film “BOOM!”.  

As Danielle says, “The movie is a real stinker, but the hat, as you can see, is divine!”