post-post-jew

Is Jewish Christmas a Holiday? By that I mean, is it widely practiced, similarly practiced, and/or repeated? Most of us in class last Tuesday found the SNL  “Christmas for the Jews” song utterly recognizable; conforming to stereotype, all the American Jews in class actually spend (or have often spent) Christmas together as a family eating Chinese food and going to the movies. The level of Jewish observance seems not to matter; Reform Jews, Conservative Jews, and Orthodox all get Chinese food—though observance may impact entrees ordered and the quality of your meal. It may have emerged as a counter-holiday, but it seems phenomenologically the same as a regularly holiday: we come together as a family unit by eating food both real and symbolic, seeing ourselves as conforming to a wider, unique nation/family in the process.

Of course the big difference is that there is no textual basis for “Jewish Christmas,” no legal code calling for its existence, nor even hinting at it. It appears to be a fully cultural holiday, likely unique to American Jewry. As such, we don’t readily perceive it as something Jewish. Ivan Marcus distinguishes between assimilation and what he calls “inward acculturation.” Inward acculturation is a borrowing from another culture wherein the item borrowed is perceived as Jewish. Circumcision. Bar Mitzvahs. Wedding bands. All of these things aren’t unique or original to Judaism, but we’ve nonetheless made them Jewish rituals. Is Jewish Christmas perceived as Jewish? It certainly doesn’t describe regular Christmas practice. As the song goes

On Christmas Eve, The Gentiles gather
Around the Christmas Tree
They stay at home, and party with
Their Goyishe family

And yet, without any sort of textual element, we don’t readily conceive of this phenomenon as Jewish. We seem to have entered a sort of neutral space when it comes to religion, though we’ve perhaps created a true ethnic holiday.

This year we have another innovation in Jewish practice: The Hanukkah Dragon.

DAVE: You know, a lot of people think that Jews don’t have anything like Santa Claus.

MARISA: Not true?

DAVE: We have a Hanukkah dragon!

MARISA: Instead of bringing holiday cheer he brings holiday guilt!

DAVE: And fire!

MARISA: (and Nice Jewish Guys calendars)

I’m not sure what to make of the Hanukkah Dragon. Why shouldn’t Jews have a mascot? John Stewart suggested as such back in Naked Pictures of Famous People. And a fire-breathing dragon is so ridiculously non-textual that it might work. After all, it would take a pretty grand misreading of the apocryphal story of Daniel and the dragon to link this back to Judaism.  And even though that would probably be the greatest act of inward acculturation of all-time, I’d prefer to let the Hanukkah dragon be its own creature, a nice piece of Jewish Americana with a bonus shout-out to one of next week’s topics, the Nice Jewish Guys calendar.

The last two days have seen us explore the past. We’ve been working off of the idea of a “usable past,” a concept first developed by Van Wyck Brooks in 1918, later imported by David Roskies into Jewish Studies, but we could just as easily have focused our attention on the “unusable past,” looked instead at the waysides of Jewish history. Yesterday we mentioned that Charleston was once the city with the largest Jewish population in America, a fact rather far from the cultural memory of American Jews. Sure, Charles Reznikoff once wrote a book celebrating Charleston’s history and tried to write a novel about Charleston’s Jews, but the first was tepidly received and the second never did come about–and Reznikoff isn’t exactly Philip Roth when it comes to popular consciousness. Charleston was never fully represented as a Jewish site, and was left out of the Jewish memory map of America. (Though Earl Raab once wrote in Commentary that “To be not only Jew and American, but also Chariestonian, would seem to be thrice chosen.”) How can it be recovered? Should it?

This is a somewhat oblique way of reintroducing a topic The Lazy Scholar mentioned yesterday:

What makes [Everything is Illuminated] still compelling, and more complex than one expects, is that it is at once about the desire to recover the past and the impossibility of ever doing so in a stable way…Trachimbrod only exists in the pages of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book.

This is unfortunately as true for the real shtetls of Eastern Europe as it is for the fictional shtetls, and life in both is entirely dependent on the strength of the representation. Abraham Sutzkever, the most important Yiddish poet of his era, explored this notion in countless poems. The poet’s ability to bring back the dead, to revivify, is only as strong as his ability to link words and phrases, to construct a poetic artifact. Only artistic strength ensures an audience, and only with an audience can we begin to discuss memory. (See, especially, the great “Green Aquarium”)

Incidentally, another text of ours touched upon revivification: “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” I say incidentally, because we hadn’t explicitly chosen it for that purpose; rather, something related. But here it is, a description of revivification in all its grotesque beauty:

Now how I remember you
How I would push my fingers through
Your mouth to make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet

The illusion is momentarily put aside. So much of the album is about reincarnation (“Now she’s a little boy in Spain…”), reminding us that the process of reincarnation necessitates transformation–perhaps one of the reasons the dark brother refuses to come back (“says it was good to be alive/but now he rides a comet’s flame/and won’t be coming back again”). The only way to reanimate the body is through physical manipulation, to make the muscles move; an image strikingly beautiful in its honesty.