FRATERNAL GREETINGS...
Happy Hanukkah
Tonight’s the fourth night of Hanukkah. Do you celebrate it?
I do. I’m Jewish by way of my mom. My dad’s not Jewish. He’s Canadian and that side of my family, with the exception of my dad, all live in Ontario. I was raised in New York around my mom’s side of the family - the Jewish side.
We are secular Jews. Like, very secular. My great-grandparents were the last generation to keep kosher. My Jewish grandparents were avowed atheists - modern first generation Americans for whom, I think, religion represented a backwards, old country way of life. They were also leftist agitators, active especially in the New York City labor movement. My grandpa, Gerry Friedman, was chairman of the Brooklyn chapter of the American Labor Party in the 1940s.
Communism and labor activism intersected significantly in the first half of the twentieth century. Was the labor movement philosophically and politically averse to religion, as communists tended to be? My grandma never said exactly that, but she did tell me once that it would break her heart if I ever became a religious person. This was when I was a teenager. The kids and grandkids of some of her lefty atheist friends were dabbling in religious judaism and she was concerned I might do the same.
My grandma Ruth had nothing to worry about on that front. I’m not a religious person. As a kid I understood Jewishness as a culture, not a religion. My Jewish bona fides are modest. I didn’t have a bat mitzvah, nor ever set foot in a synagogue unless it was to attend someone else’s. But we had a Passover seder most years. I have searched my grandparents’ house for the afikoman. I was reared on Ashkenazic cuisine (rugelach, chopped liver, noodle kugel, amazing bagels). I got drunk for the first time on Manischewitz. And I navigate the world with the generational trauma - and the gallows humor it engenders - of a Jew. I feel and have always felt Jewish.
I don’t lament my secular upbringing one iota, but it has created a conundrum in my adult life. Namely: I have Jewish kids who don’t understand what it means to be Jewish. Like me, they have their dad’s Irish surname and nothing to indicate their Jewishness.
Unlike me, they’re not being raised in the suburbs of New York, surrounded by Jewish culture and family. I’m trying to help them reconcile their identities as gentile-passing non-religious members of a major world religion, during a rising tide of anti-semitism that makes their status as cultural Jews not only confusing, but also scary. It’s hard! And I’m not a great teacher. I don’t have answers to a lot of basic questions about Jewish stuff. I mix up all the holidays. Yesterday Milo asked me what Purim was and I had no idea. I’m not sure what “keeping kosher” entails. Every year I forget how to say Happy Holidays in Hebrew and have to google it for an instagram post. (Chag Sameach!) Et cetera, et cetera.
But we do celebrate Passover and Hanukkah. Each year we have both a seder and a Hanukkah dinner with some friends who have a similarly tenuous yet important relationship to their Jewishness. We all grapple with it together.
On Passover our seder plate is political. We put a pinecone on it to represent incarceration; the invisibility of the pine nut at its center symbolizes the relative invisibility of prison inmates. My grandma Ruth, who volunteered at a women’s prison until she was elderly and understood mass incarceration as the instrument of racist oppression that it is, probably would have approved. Maybe this - the idea that everything is political and it’s our civic duty to stay engaged - is the Jewish tradition that I’m passing on to my kids. I hope I am. For better or worse, it was passed on to me.
Happy Solstice
Today is also the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Our annual Hanukkah dinner was supposed to happen tonight but someone came down with covid. We have a new plan to celebrate Hanukkah in January, which you can get away with when you are as casually Jewish as I suppose we are. Alas, I was excited about the prospect of a solstice Hanukkah, undoubtedly as pagan as it would have been Jewish.
A few years ago I had the honor of adapting Susan Cooper’s beloved winter solstice poem, The Shortest Day, into a picture book. Do you guys know Susan Cooper? She’s the Newbery award winning author of The Dark is Rising, a series of wild, brilliant fantasy novels written in the 1960s-70s. Would you like to hear this eloquent British folklorist talk about the significance of the winter solstice? And recall the air raid shelters and German bombings of her English childhood? A few years ago, we were on Weekend Edition together. I’m so lucky to have fallen into this amazing woman’s orbit.
Well, Happy Solstice and Hanukkah Sameach! Happily, the days get longer from here on out. Whether you are Jewish or not, or kind of, or kind of not, today is a good day to light a candle.
P.S. ON TO THE FINAL AND COMPLETE VICTORY OVER WORLD FASCISM ! !
The Shortest Day by Susan Cooper
So the Shortest Day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow‐white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen,
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us ‐ listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This shortest day
As promise wakens in the sleeping land.
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends, and hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!
Love this post, thanks! Happy Solstice and Chag Sameach!
Your grandma Ruth is badass. Thank you for sharing this post with us. Happy Holidays!