What role can Passover play in the cause for animal liberation?

Professor Danielle Celemajer, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute, explores how the Jewish Passover seder might help us approach the momentous challenge of animal liberation. Today is the first day of the Jewish holiday of Passover. It is also, serendipitously, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Peter Singer's essay  "Animal Liberation" . Passover is the holiday of liberation, and the Passover  seder  - the ritual meal that takes place on the first night - is dedicated to presencing the meaning and significance of liberation and calling all those who participate to bring liberation into the world. Historically, the focus of liberation has been humans and humans alone. What, however, might it mean to bring animals into this conversation, to presence animal liberation as a living possibility, an ethical call? To many, it might seem bizarre, even unwelcome, to bring religion into the "animal liberation" discussion - especially a religion that gave us the narrative of human supremacy and the relegation of animals to use-objects, which became foundational to dominant Western ethics. A religion, moreover, which, as represented in by its current state form, is hardly a beacon of the capacious enactment of liberation.