Let’s talk about Christian-normalcy, Hanukkah, and why I loathe the Holidays with each passing year
It’s December 10th. Happy Hanukkah to all my fellow Jews out there! And for everyone else, here’s some reflections about how Hanukkah makes me feel about what it means to be Jewish in this country.
I’ve often struggled with my Jewish identity in this country. I’m not religious, I don’t believe in God, and I haven’t attended synagogue in years. I began to develop these feelings after my Bar Mitzvah. It wasn’t hard to see some gaps: for one, Judaism wasn’t the dominant religion in my hometown of Overland Park, Kansas. There were plenty of Jews, to be sure, but it never made sense to me how I could be taught Judaism was The Truth about the world when so many other people around me clearly disagreed.
I didn’t handle the process well. I was angry. I felt lied to. I picked fights with everyone over their religious views, exhausting my friends. I picked fights with my parents, who forced me to continue to go to Hebrew School so I could get confirmed- another Jewish tradition. And at Hebrew School, I was often angry. I didn’t want to be there and I made sure everyone knew it.
Complicating all of this was the legacy of the Holocaust. I’ve written about this at lengths before, but to summarize it briefly here: I hated learning about it. I learned about it all the time (seriously, all the time) and it felt like we learned about it so much that that was all being Jewish was to me, some sort of duty to hold onto the pain and trauma of a genocide meant to Other us because of our culture. This made me resent my Jewish identity and I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. I didn’t want an identity so often-defined in relation to persecution and pain.
Ultimately, I completed my Jewish education and pretty much left the religion behind me when I went to college. Whereas other Jews joined their respective campus Hillel and went to Israel on Birthright, I did not. (Worth mentioning that Birthright is a separate beast that no Jew who cares about justice for Palestinians should participate in.) I slowly forgot about all the various Jewish holidays and my Jewish identity faded greatly as I focused on my career.
But there were two things that never allowed my identity to fade away completely: the rise of anti-Semitism under the Presidency of Donald Trump, and the celebration of Christmas.
Though I am not religious, I have retained many of the memories of Purim Carnivals, Passover Seders, Shabbats, and the lightning of the menorahs. Whether it was Nazis marching on Charlottesville and our President calling them “very fine people;” the shooting at a Pittsburgh Synagogue; being asked to explain the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by a friend; or even the harassment I faced tweeting about my #JewishPrivilege on Twitter; I felt strongly connected to my identity and desired to preserve the dignity of the memories my Jewish heritage had given me. I felt this connection out of a desire to fight back against being Othered.
But those instances have taken on a new meaning for me, especially as I’ve grown to understand my own white privilege and faced my own reckoning with racial justice. Because you see, I’ve realized that my Jewish identity is something I can hide. You wouldn’t know that I’m Jewish unless I told you. Unless I dressed or talked Jewish, using Yiddish words like “chutzpah” or “schmutz.” And I have been hiding my Jewish identity because of those instances of anti-Semitism and because I don’t want to have to explain why I’m different, validate my own experiences, or inconvenience people. And nowhere has this been truer than with Christmas.
The United States would like to pretend that it is not a Christian country. In theory, this is true. There is a separation of Church and States and folks are free to practice whatever religion they wish. But in practice, this far from true. All of my life I have celebrated Hanukkah, but I’ve also been forced to celebrated Christmas due to the fact that the sheer majority of Christians running our government and major businesses also celebrate it.
Sure, in typical Jewish fashion, I don’t buy the tree or do much on the actual holiday other than get Chinese food and see a movie. But I am forced to hear the Christmas carols everywhere I go. When I worked in retail and the food service, I was forced to set up the Christmas displays and peddle Christmas beverages as a barista. The term “Holiday” may have been used instead, but let’s not pretend this was anything other than a euphemism to please people and make it socially acceptable to continue to peddle goods during the busiest time of the year for commerce.
And then of course, there’s the day itself: December 25th. It’s a whole federal holiday where everything shuts down. Restaurants, banks, businesses, and schools close. Whether I am Christian or not, in this country, I am forced to celebrate Christmas, because it is the default, the unspoken dominant holiday in every way. I don’t have to do the holiday song and dance of Christmas morning and presents from Santa, but I am forced to cease business on December 25th so that others can. (I also had to walk on eggshells throughout all of elementary school to not spoil the truth about Santa for Christian kids. You’re welcome, Christian parents!)
It would be tempting to point to Hanukkah and suggest the Jewish Festival of Lights is a way for us Jews to be included in the “holiday” spirit. Further examination of this holiday and its religious merits prove otherwise.
If you were to actually read the Torah, the Christian equivalent of the Bible, you would find virtually no mention of Hanukkah in it. The events of the holiday are discussed at length in the Talmud, but its religious significance and the story we tell about it are extremely overhyped, in large part because Jews immigrating to the United States in the 18th Century needed a way to feel economically and culturally included, and capitalists wanted a way to economically and culturally include them as well.
You see, the true story of Hanukkah is that it was an agreement we Jews reached with the Christian-majority of this country, an unspoken social contract that we (the Jews) would put up with Christmas in our own way. Never mind the fact that we still basically celebrate Christmas against our will anyways. Never mind the fact that Hanukkah (nor any Jewish holiday nor any non-Christian religious holiday) has not received the designation of a federal holiday. Like every Jewish holiday, we may of course take it off from school or work free from discrimination, but the world does not stop for us and we are often expected to hustle back and make up our school work or job duties on our own time.
In fact, today is December 10th, and I am working, as was expected of me. My supervisor and company have acknowledged Christmas when discussing our holiday policy several times already. I’ve received emails about our company’s “Sack it for Santa” program. No one has discussed has Hanukkah at all. If I want it to be in the conversation, I would have to bring it up. I don’t think I have ever taken the day off for Hanukkah, because again, it it is not a major religious holiday, but that’s not the point. There’s no company policy that allows me to have those days off separate from our normal paid time off. Why should the onus be on me? Why do I have to go out of my way to work within the default constraints? Quite frankly, I’m activist in many other aspects in the workplace and in my life in general, and when it comes down to it, this is not the hill I will die on because I’m not religious enough to care. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t discrimination. If I were to fight this, I would be the inconvenience.
None of this should read as a surprise to anyone who has come to understand how Christmas has become increasingly commercialized with every passing year or that is more politically correct to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Ironically, some even try to justify the fact that Christmas has become so commercialized as a way to end discussions on its federal holiday status, even though the commercialization of the holiday is precisely the reason I am forced to celebrate against my will or attribute value to other aspects of my culture that aren’t really there. But every year when the Holiday Season approaches, I look at the Hanukkah/Christmas dynamic in the same vein as the rest of the anti-Semitism I’ve witnessed or personally experienced; it’s just another way that society has told me I’m different from the unspoken normal and that I must conform. I’ll still buy presents for my family this year and maybe I’ll even light the Menorah, but I’ll do so with a bit of sadness and resentment, because it’s expected of me.
I know that I personally turned away from God because I didn’t find the evidence compelling. But I can’t help but place the celebration of Hanukkah into the same bucket as not wanting to wear a Star of David or Yarmulke at school because I didn’t want to answer questions about it. I can’t help but draw a line from the Holidays to the Holocaust and to defining my Jewish identity in response to unintentional or intentional systemic anti-Semitism. And I know that I wouldn’t have begun to question my belief in God if I didn’t also have to question why I was different.
This is the part where I am supposed to give you hope and optimism with some story about how I will be reclaiming my Jewish identity and Hanukkah. But that’s not gonna happen. The conclusions I reached are the conclusions I’m sticking with, and I still view Hanukkah as another capitalist ploy to get me to spend money and allow Christians to feel good about doing the same with their holiday. I have no interest in reclaiming it because I have interest in further upholding racial capitalism anymore than I already have to. And to anyone who thinks this makes me a buzzkill for ruining your holiday fun in a year where Christmas already sucks because the pandemic has made it hard enough for you to celebrate it: I don’t care and I shouldn’t have to. That’s the whole point of this essay.
Instead, I’m going to openly mourn the loss and distortion of my heritage and invite you to do the same. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll move toward a fairer world that examines harms and seeks to repair them. One that seeks to embody diversity and not just pay lip service to it.
Solidarity to all of my non-Christian comrades this “Holiday” season.
