Posted on 12/05/2018 5:32:35 AM PST by SJackson
The New York Times and Hanukkah
Ever since Adolph Ochs purchased The New York Times in 1896, launching what eventually became the Sulzberger family dynasty that still presides over the newspaper, it has embraced Jewish assimilation. Judaism, for Ochs, was a religion only. Zionism was anathema to the Times, threatening to compromise the loyalty of American Jews to the United States. The restoration of Jewish statehood, two millennia after the destruction of Jewish national sovereignty in the Land of Israel, increased Times discomfort for publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Ochs’s son-in-law and successor. During most of the past seventy years, the Times has reflected the palpable uneasiness of the Sulzberger dynasty with the State of Israel.
As difficult as it might be to select the most obnoxious example of this distress, a recent Times opinion article surely deserves consideration. Entitled “The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah” (December 2), it was written by journalist Michael David Lukas, who had previously authored “A Skeptic’s Guide to Passover.” Clearly distressed by Zionism and Israel, he seems to find little value in Judaism other than as a target of his scorn.
After trying to persuade his young daughter of Hanukkah’s supremacy over Christmas, he realized that this was “a zero-sum game.” And Hanukkah was the zero once his “dual identity” as an American and a Jew became “a big deal for mostly assimilated Jews” like himself. Why? Long a holiday when Jews “spun tops and ate greasy food to commemorate what has to be one of God’s least impressive miracles,” he perceives Hanukkah as “a kind of Semitic sidekick for Christmas … a minor festival pumped up.” In his warped understanding, the Hanukkah story is nothing more than “an eight-night celebration of religious fundamentalism and violence.”
Indeed, Lukas professes to have discovered “a darker story in Hanukkah.” In his retelling, harmless Hellenized Jews (perhaps with himself in mind) were “mostly city-dwelling assimilationists who ate pork, didn’t circumcise their male children and made the occasional sacrificial offering to pagan gods.” But the dreaded Maccabees were “religious zealots … who practiced an ancient form of religious warfare.”
Lukas proudly displays his discomfort: born in Berkeley as “the product of intermarriage,” he eats pork (“every so often”), leaving him to wonder (accurately): “what am I if not a Hellenized Jew?” Why, he wonders, “should I light candles and sing songs to celebrate a group of violent fundamentalists?” Although, for the sake of his children, he will light candles, “I’ll be saying a prayer for the Hellenized Jews and for the ‘renegade Jews’ of our day,” his own form of self-worship.
Having once been a Hellenized Jew, I can empathize with Lukas, still embedded in his rebellion against Judaism. Had he lived two millennia ago in the Land of Israel, he surely would have identified with the assimilated Jews who, as the First Book of Maccabees recounts, petitioned Antiochus to give them “authority to introduce the customs of the Gentiles.” Rather than rebel against him, as Mattathias and his followers did, Lukas would have scorned those who were “zealous for the Law” and determined to “maintain the covenant” with God. Their restoration of the Temple and rededication of the altar, prompting the celebration of “great gladness” that lasted for eight days and became known as Hanukkah, would have passed him by.
As Simon the Jewish high priest would tell a representative of the Roman king, “We have neither taken other men’s land, nor have we possession of that which [belongs] to others. … But we, having the opportunity, hold fast the inheritance of our fathers.” That inheritance is of little value to Lukas, and even less to The New York Times, ever eager to display its assimilationist identity and assert its patriotic loyalty.
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American Jewry’s Hanukkah Hypocrisy?
The New York Times’s coverage of Jewish topics has long been fodder for those who study both media bias and the complicated relationship between the newspaper and the members of the tribe that are among its most loyal readers. An article published the week before Hanukkah about the health risks associated with eating fried potatoes set off a debate as to whether the feature was a not-so-subtle dig at a holiday tradition. But whether you think the piece (which actually never mentioned Hanukkah or latkes) really was proof of antisemitism or just an unfortunate coincidence that should remind us that sometimes a fried potato is just a fried potato, the discussion was indicative of the suspicions that many Jews hold about the Times.
But there was little doubt that a Times op-ed published in its Sunday edition — the day the holiday began this year — would set alight the debate about its attitude to Jewish sensitivities. In the piece, novelist Michael David Lucas made a couple of accurate observations while attempting to pour cold water on Hanukkah celebrations and promoting a misunderstanding of both Jewish history and the struggle to preserve Jewish identity in our own day.
Lucas, who identifies as a “assimilated Jew,” was absolutely right about two things.
One is that for many Jews, Hanukkah’s sole significance is as a counterweight to the dominance of Christmas in American popular culture. The other is that many of the otherwise non-observant Jews who embrace it — either on its own or as part of a “Chrismukkah” conflation of the two winter season holidays — know little or nothing about the history of the festival or what the conflict it discusses meant.
But he’s wrong to assert, even obliquely, that it is hypocritical for non-Orthodox or predominantly secular Jews to join in the Hanukkah fun.
Lucas is right that Hanukkah is more important to American Jews than other more important religious observances. A survey published by the Jewish People and Policy Institute last week claimed that as many as 60 percent of American Jews light candles on Hanukkah, which is more than the 53 percent who fast on Yom Kippur or the 23 percent who light Shabbat candles, according to the 2013 Pew Survey on Jewish Americans. It’s also greater than the 32 percent of those identifying as Jews who have a Christmas tree.
He is also correct to point out that the main significance of Hanukkah to many Jews is that it is a Jewish answer to Santa Claus. That doesn’t just mean providing Jews with an excuse for taking part in the national obsession with December consumer spending. It also gives them a holiday for which they can demand equal time at public-school assemblies and municipal ceremonies in protest against the annual reminder that Jews are in the minority. For others, it is, as Lucas says of himself, an answer to the pleas of their children for Christmas.
The problem is that the two holidays just don’t compare. Hanukkah is fun, but it can’t compete. Even more to the point, as Lucas observes, Hanukkah is not a blue-tinseled version of the “good will to all men” of Christmas.
Hanukkah is, instead, the story of a conflict in which religious Jews waged war against Seleucid Greeks and their Jewish collaborators. Lucas’s understanding of the history is limited (in the original published version of his piece, he actually claimed the Maccabees were fighting the Romans rather than the Greeks before this gaffe was corrected), but he’s right that the war waged by Judah Maccabee was as much a civil war against those who had embraced Hellenism as a struggle for national independence.
Lucas concludes that if he were around in 165 BCE, he would have identified more with those city-dwellers embracing Hellenistic practices like eating pork than the efforts of “rural religious zealots.” He sees the Maccabees’ victory as one of “fundamentalism over cosmopolitanism.” Lucas seems to see the victorious Jews as the moral equivalent of red state evangelical supporters of US President Donald Trump and their opponents as people, well, like him, who have mixed feelings about circumcision, don’t keep kosher, and support Bernie Sanders, who the Maccabees would have hated.
But the point of the festival isn’t one of warfare against less observant Jews. The Maccabees weren’t so much religious fundamentalists as people who were opposed to having their faith not merely marginalized but eradicated. In that sense, Lucas’s mischaracterization of their struggle in terms of contemporary American politics is ironic, since what the Jews fighting the Greeks wanted was to be left alone to worship in freedom. They fought against a foe who didn’t merely disdain their faith, but actively sought to suppress it.
Hanukkah is actually an apt holiday for assimilated Jews (those Pew labeled “Jews of no religion”) because it remembers a profoundly liberal struggle for the right to preserve a culture against the majoritarian impulse.
Lucas may think that the Hellenizers were defending diversity, but they — and perhaps the author — were actually too narrow-minded to tolerate those who think or worship differently.
Hanukkah is about the struggle of Jews, both then and now, to refuse to bow down to the idols of popular culture. The miracle is not merely the one about the oil lasting eight days, but the ability of a small ethno-religious tribe to resist the forces that sought to eradicate their existence and to preserve the flame of Jewish civilization. Hellenism threatened to wipe out a moral vision of the world rooted in the Torah, as well as the autonomy of a small people. Had the Hellenizers, for whom Lucas says he will say a prayer, prevailed, it would not have been a triumph for individual freedom, but one in which the right of a small group to defend their own culture and identity would have been extinguished.
If you can’t sympathize with that cause, then don’t blame Judaism, Hanukkah, or a foolish desire, as Lucas puts it, to “beat Santa.”
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Leaving aside the fact that I don't ever remember children or grandchildren fretting about not having Christmas, to say Lucas’s understanding of the history is limited is an understatement. Had the Selucids prevailed, there would have been no Judaism, likely no Jesus thus no Christmas. No Chanukah either.
The NY Times editorial.
Consider the clouded mind of New York Times Jews:
They have pledged allegiance to repaganized Western Civilization only to now understand in their deconstructionist bubble that Western Civilization is evil and deserves to die!
No wonder they are self-hating and suicidal, and encourage others to feel the same.
They were, you moron!
Hanukkah is actually an apt holiday for assimilated Jews (those Pew labeled “Jews of no religion”) because it remembers a profoundly liberal struggle for the right to preserve a culture against the majoritarian impulse.
Lucas may think that the Hellenizers were defending diversity, but they — and perhaps the author — were actually too narrow-minded to tolerate those who think or worship differently.
This is the same liberal bull that has been used to distort Chanukkah for decades. I note that the whole Maccabeean revolt began when Judah's father, Mittityahu, cut the head off a fellow Jew who was "exercising his personal freedom" to violate the Torah. The whole "multicultural" context was missing, as the story took place in a totally Theocratic society. "Majoritarian impulse" my tachat!
I'd like to hear these liberal hypocrites cast Mattityahu's act in liberal, multicultural terms!
Louis Foxwell
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