Passover seders are built around old symbols. The roasted shank bone recalls the festival sacrifice. Bitter herbs point to slavery. Haroset suggests mortar and labor. Even people who do not know every detail of the Haggadah usually recognize that the seder plate is supposed to be traditional.
That is why the orange stands out.
It is not part of the classic seder plate described in the Haggadah. No rabbinic code requires it. Many Jews never use it. Yet in a lot of liberal and progressive Jewish homes, an orange has become one of the best-known modern additions to the table. The custom has lasted because it does something useful: it turns a broad moral claim about Jewish inclusion into a physical act that people can see, touch, taste, and explain.
The problem is that the custom is often explained badly.
The orange did not begin as a generic "women's symbol"
The most reliable account comes from Susannah Heschel herself. In a short essay often cited as the definitive version of the story, Heschel says that in the early 1980s she encountered a feminist Haggadah at Oberlin College that suggested placing a crust of bread on the seder plate as a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians. The bread was itself a protest symbol, a response to the line that there was "as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate."
Heschel rejected the bread. Her objection was not to the cause, but to the symbol. Bread on Passover is chametz. Putting it on the seder plate would suggest that lesbian Jews were somehow incompatible with Judaism. So she chose a different object. At her next seder, she placed an orange on the plate and asked everyone to eat a segment as a gesture of solidarity with gay and lesbian Jews and others who felt pushed to the margins of Jewish life.
That detail matters. The orange was not introduced as a vague sign of modernity. It was not originally a catch-all token for "inclusion" in the abstract. It came out of a particular Jewish argument about who gets named, who gets welcomed, and who gets erased.
Why an orange worked better than bread
Heschel's choice was clever because it stayed inside the grammar of the seder instead of trying to shock the ritual from the outside.
Bread would have broken Passover's rules. An orange did something subtler. It signaled that new meaning could sit beside old ritual without canceling it. In Heschel's telling, the fruit represented "the fruitfulness" of a Jewish community in which gay and lesbian Jews are active, present, and honored. The seeds, which diners spit out, were meant to represent the rejection of homophobia.
That is one reason the custom spread. It is easy to explain to children, but it is not childish. It is concrete, but it still leaves room for thought. At a holiday centered on memory and liberation, the orange asks a simple question: who still experiences exclusion inside a people that tells a story about leaving bondage behind?
How the story got distorted
Over time, the origin story changed. Many Jews heard a cleaner, more dramatic version: a man supposedly told Heschel that a woman belongs on the bimah as much as an orange belongs on the seder plate, and the orange became her rebuke.
Heschel has explicitly said that this version is wrong.
Her objection to the myth is not just about factual accuracy. She argues that the distortion repeats the very pattern the ritual was meant to fight. A woman's idea gets credited to a man. A ritual created to affirm gay and lesbian Jews gets retold as a generalized statement about women's equality. Both moves flatten the history and remove the people the ritual was meant to name.
That does not mean women are irrelevant to the symbol. Feminist liturgy and feminist Passover practice were part of the setting in which the orange emerged. It does mean that the custom should be described honestly. If a seder host says the orange stands for inclusion, the next sentence should explain inclusion of whom, and why that question reached the seder table in the first place.
Why the custom survives
The orange lasted because it fits the way many contemporary seders work. Passover is one of the few Jewish rituals that large numbers of less observant Jews still keep, often with extended family, guests, and children. It is also a ritual that invites additions, readings, songs, and political analogies. People use seders to connect the Exodus story to refugee policy, racial justice, Soviet Jewry, hostages, queer Jewish life, and a long list of other communal concerns.
The orange remains one of the better modern additions because it is not just decorative. It requires a table to say something out loud. Why is this here? What does this ritual ask of us? Which Jews have been welcomed, and which Jews have had to fight to be seen?
At the same time, the custom is not universal, and it should not be treated as if every Jewish community has embraced it. Many traditionalists keep the classic plate unchanged. Others may agree with the values behind the orange but prefer to express them in teaching, hospitality, or liturgy rather than in new seder symbols. That disagreement is part of the story too.
How to use the symbol well
If you include an orange at a seder, the strongest version of the ritual is also the simplest one. Name its history. Credit Susannah Heschel. Explain that she chose the orange after rejecting bread as the wrong sign. Mention that the ritual was created in solidarity with gay and lesbian Jews and, in her own practice, with others marginalized in Jewish life. Then let people eat it as part of the table's conversation about freedom and belonging.
That approach is better than turning the orange into a sentimental prop. The point is not that every symbol must represent everyone. The point is that Passover has always asked Jews to tell a story in a way that reaches the people in the room. In the late twentieth century, one Jewish feminist scholar looked at her room and decided the story was not complete without naming the people left out of it.
That is why the orange is still there.