Passover Comedy “When Do We Eat?” Still Puts the “Fun” in Dysfunctional Seder

When husband and wife team Salvador Litvak and Nina Davidovich Litvak released their Passover comedy “When Do We Eat?” in 2005, they knew they had created something special.  Seventeen years later, the film still attracts a cult following, especially in the Jewish community. 

The movie is about the Stuckmans, a large, dysfunctional family attempting to have a Passover seder after the patriarch accidentally gets high on ecstasy.  The Stuckmans also have a difficult time expressing love to each other. Underneath the bickering and quips, there’s a deep-seated need between each family member to address the wounds they have inflicted on each other over the years. These are difficult topics to discuss, but the film manages to depict the process as a farcical comedy.

“There’s this enhanced expectation of what a family seder should be like. And everybody starts to fall short of that right away.” – Salvador Litvak

“Why would [a family seder] be difficult? They’re people you care about, they’re people who know you, but maybe not as well as they should,” Salvador told the Journal. “There’s this enhanced expectation of what a family seder should be like. And everybody starts to fall short of that right away. I don’t know if it’s guilt or frustration or anxiety, but it’s coupled with what everybody thinks the seder should be like.”

Like a Passover seder, “When Do We Eat?” is full of symbolism. The family name “Stuckman” symbolizes how stuck each family member is at addressing their problems with one another. Some of the problems between family members are quite perilous, and some whimsical. 

The surly Ira Stuckman, played by Academy Award nominee Michael Lerner, runs a factory that manufactures Christmas ornaments and is often bemoaning family members for bilking him for “his” money. His father Arthur, played by the late Jack Klugman, is a Holocaust survivor who carries a suitcase everywhere he goes in case Nazis rise again. He often berates the family for not adhering to Jewish traditions, and is repulsed by the family not doing the seder completely in Hebrew. There’s also the daughter Nikki (Shiri Appleby), who is a sex therapist and takes phone calls at the seder table. One of her brothers, Ethan (Max Greenfield), has become Hasidic after several spectacular business blunders. He also hits on his cousin. 

Several more characters at the Stuckman seder table have unresolved grudges and resentments with each other. As the seder begins, it becomes apparent that it won’t end quietly. 

“When we set out to write the movie, we knew that for the Stuckmans, this is not the same seder as every other year,” Salvador said. “It’s a unique seder in their family history. When we set out to design the family, an idea we really liked is that at Yom Kippur we recite the ‘13 Attributes of Mercy.’ Each of the characters in the movie was deficient in one of those qualities. We figured if each of them can have some growth in those attributes, at the end of the day, the divine presence would bring that forward.” 

The film is a depiction of how trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. Salvador and Nina carefully address this through a pile of crude and sometimes uncomfortable laughs.

“It was very hard in the past for people to understand whether this film was a comedy or about Holocaust descendants,” Nina told the Journal. “We feel like comedy shouldn’t be so segmented. This movie came out before ‘Borat,’ and it was considered very edgy and extreme at the time. I do think that comedy culture and Jewish presence have become bigger and people are more used to crassness, but I don’t think it’s as shocking [now] as when it came out.”

Both Nina and Salvador insist that their childhood seders resembled nothing like that of the Stuckmans. Salvador’s grandmother lost her husband in the Holocaust. She even carried Salvador’s infant mother through the Theresienstadt Ghetto in what’s now the Czech Republic. His grandmother never remarried, and the absence of his grandfather was always present, particularly with an empty chair at Passover seders.

If there is one lesson to take from “When Do We Eat?” it’s the importance of presence. Throughout the film, the words “here” and “here and now” are used several times. The film shows just how valuable it is to listen, be distraction-free and face the demons that fester inside of you. 

Both Salvador and Nina are thrilled that audiences still find joy in watching the Stuckman family seder in “When Do We Eat?” And the screenwriter couple is excited about their next film, titled “Guns and Moses.”

It’s a thriller about a string of murders that appear to be hate crimes, so the rabbi of the targeted community investigates and finds a far more sinister conspiracy. It’s currently in pre-production. But until then, they plan to be present at their own Passover seders so they don’t resemble the Struckmans. 

Salvador, who runs the Accidental Talmudist and edits the Journal’s “Table for Five,” offered advice on making anyone’s seder experience more meaningful and possibly even transformative.

“We always tell our guests to think before you come to the seder, ‘What is your Pharaoh? What is your behavior that you have been enslaved to that you’re trying to break and haven’t had success with?’” he said. “Perhaps this will be the year, just as G-d redeemed us from slavery thousands of years ago, that G-d can give you the power to be redeemed from your own Pharaoh this year.’”

“When Do We Eat?” can be streamed on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and several other outlets that can be found on whendoweeat.com