The New Yorker magazine has been part of my life as far back as I can remember. When my mother came to the US in 1945 a friend recommended the magazine as a good way to learn English. My mother has subscribed to it ever since. That’s still good advice, by the way, even for a native-born English speaker.
The New Yorker captures the spirit of the City in its best sense – cosmopolitan, intellectual, liberal (in the sense of generous and broad-minded) with the right touch of self-deprecating humor. And New Yorker cartoons can’t be beat. It almost was ruined during the tenure of Tina Brown as editor, but like all great institutions, it managed to survive even disastrous leadership. This article from Hendrik Hertzberg is quite fitting for the Christmas holiday.
Personally, I too am annoyed by the PCness of the “happy holidays” greeting. Growing up as an Orthodox Jewish kid with Eastern European parents and grandparents, Christmas had a rather ominous feel to it. That was a result of the memories passed down to me of Christmas as one of the Polish pogrom seasons, where my grandparents had to live in fear of rape and murder. Despite New York’s reputation, rape and murder by rampaging goyim is not a real concern for the Jews of this great city. But the site of Christmas trees nonetheless evoked a queasy feeling in me when I was a child.
That feeling along with a sense of inferiority as a minority, induced American Jews to pump up the rather minor holiday of Hanukka into something far more important than it is. A Holy Day in the Jewish calendar – a hag – is a pilgrimage specifically to the site of the Temple in Jerusalem (in an ecumenical spirit, I remind my readers that the Muslim haj is really the same word, except the pilgrimage is to Mecca). Hanukka is not a pilgrimage holiday ordained in the Bible but a holiday instituted by the Hasmonean kings, whom the Rabbis despised.
Hannuka barely gets mentioned at all in the Talmud. The source of our knowledge about the holiday is the Book of the Maccabees. Unlike the Book of Esther and its associated holiday of Purim, Maccabees was left out of the official Biblical canon – the Rabbis of the Talmud no doubt would have preferred it never got written in the first place. The Rabbis’ antagonism was rooted in the fact that the descendants of Judah the Maccabee, the Hasmonean dynasty that ruled Israel until the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion in 70 CE, were in fact blood thirsty tyrants of the worst sort, who, ironically, advocated close ties to Rome and were intimately associated with the wealthy elite Sadducee establishment.
Side note: Rabbinical Judaism in its roots was an anti-establishment working class movement. Jesus probably was a leader of one of the more radical fringe groups within the overall revolutionary rabbinical movement. It was the wealthy Sadducee toadies who betrayed Jesus to their Roman masters.
Fast forward to modern day US of A, where assimilationist toadies emulating their Sadducee forbears in wanting to please their capitalist masters, had to find an equivalent Jewish shopping holiday to Christmas. Hannuka is the perfect fit in more ways than one. And they even one-upped the goyish capitalists by instituting eight days of gifts.
Considering the abysmal record of the Hasmoneans and the Sadducees, it is even more ironic that Hannuka and the Maccabees were seen as models by Zionists as a fore-runner to modern day Jewish nationalism. Hannuka is hardly as important in Israel as it is in the US, but it still is accorded far more importance than it should be.
Living in Israel for 19 years purged me of any dread associated with Christmas. I now thoroughly enjoy the beautiful decorations on the streets and stores, and take pleasure in the green Christmas trees stacked in piles by street vendors hawking their wares. I even can tolerate (for about five minutes) the Christmas jingles that you hear everywhere (many of which, by the way, were composed by Jews).
Side note: I do pity the poor retail workers who have to listen to those songs over and over and over and over and…all day long. every day throughout the Christmas shopping season.
So if you wish me a happy holiday it would take me a few minutes to even know what you are talking about. The main Jewish holiday season is not December but September and October. We Jews have plenty (probably too many) holidays of our own and I for one am quite happy to concede this time of year exclusively to my Christian friends. So to all of you, Merry Christmas.
P.S. As Hertzberg rightly notes, right-wing politics in America has long been associated with xenophobia and hatred of Jews. Intellectuals, liberals, gays, New Yorkers, Hollywood and the like, all of whom the right-wing hate so much, are used by them as code words for Jews. The neo-cons, Likudnicks and other Jews, who ally themselves with these right-wing creeps, are like their Sadducee counter-parts, stupidly aligning themselves with their true enemy. As for Bill O’Reilly, no happy holiday greetings from me to him. My fervent holiday wish for Mr. O’Reilly is that he get trapped in a store playing Christmas jingles non-stop for a full year. The horror, the horror!