Mendel Letters 101 — We are Jews
October 29, 2022
Dear Mendel,
We weren’t a religious family, but it was always important to you that we knew we are Jews and that we followed certain rituals. When we talked about beliefs in my teens and twenties it was clear you were a bit of a skeptic, but ritual was always important to our identity. Before Mommy died, we kept a kosher home and she always lit the candles for Shabbos and holidays. You went to work on Saturdays and the only religious holidays you shut the luncheonette and went to schule were Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when we fasted, but Warren and I went to youth services every Saturday and every holiday until we were thirteen. The rule was no synagogue Saturday morning, no ball playing that afternoon; no synagogue on Jewish holidays, then you go to school. You had a mezuzah on the front door and kissed it whenever you went in or out, a habit you were never able to break. There was no such thing as Christmas when I was a boy. It didn’t exist. Later, I remember, you started to sing Christmas songs. When I asked you why, you said you liked the idea of Christmas. For you, “The only problem with Christmas is the Goyim,” the non-Jews.
When I married Judi she and the girls had a small Christmas tree. She made decorations with them and they shared gifts. Judi’s argument, that I came to accept, was that we were sharing Christmas with our neighbors. We still had Hanukah, we invited the staff and families from the day care center for a latkes festival where I made 20 pounds of potato pancakes and told the story of the Maccabees as a freedom struggle. When our kids lit the candles they had to explain that they were lighting the candles as an expression of their hope for the future. We kept Hanukah as Hanukah instead of transforming it into the Jewish Christmas. You never seemed to mind our decision.
As an adult I am a confirmed atheist. I joke that I am an evangelical atheist because I recruit. But I always identify as a Jew, a secular Jew, a position has always challenged me with hard issues to sort out. Too bad you passed because I could still use your advice today.
We like to celebrate the holidays with family and friends to confirm our ethnic Jewishness and to share our very untraditional takes on Judaism. For Passover we sing the Paul Robeson version of “Go Down Moses,” always one of your favorites, and other African American Civil Rights songs. I never forget to mention that there is no independent historical evidence that the ancient Hebrews were slaves in Egypt or that what we know as the ten plagues were probably caused by a volcanic eruption on the Greek Island of Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea.
For Rosh Hashanah I bake round challahs. We break off pieces and dip them in honey for a sweet year. Challah is one of my baking specialties. I created four-foot long twisted strand challahs for Heidi and Solomon’s weddings.
Only once did I ever deny I was a Jew. I was hitching north from San Francisco with my friend Kenny in 1968 when a biker gang pulled up. They offered us rides but first wanted to know if we were Jews. I figured the safest bet was to say no. I didn’t think they were a Jewish biker gang looking for landsmen to help out.
There are things, because I am a Jew, that disturb me. I don’t like politicians, both Jews and non-Jews, who pretend that ultra-Orthodox Hasids represent all Judaism and before Election Day they race to get their pictures taken with men in black hats and robes with long white beards and side curls. Even worse are the politicians who pander for the Orthodox vote by promising their children won’t have to be vaccinated against infectious diseases or learn English and math in Orthodox Yeshivas. I also don’t like when Hasidic young men approach me in the street and ask if I am a Jew because they are proselytizing and want to recruit me.
As a Jew and a human being I cannot support Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands on the west bank of the Jordan River and its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and Israel proper. I believe Israel has the right to exist but not as a religious state and not as an occupying power and I will not visit while these policies are in place.
Today there is a lot of anti-Semitism in the air in the United States and I feel it is important to publicly be a Jew. The Republican candidate for Governor in Pennsylvania says he wants America to be a Christian nation and he attacks his Jewish opponent as an “elitist,” but we know he means Jew. In the past attacks on the “Rothchilds” for controlling global banking were really claims that somehow Jews secretly ran the world. No one remembers the Rothchilds so now the anti-Semites blame a guy named Soros, another Jews, and claim he is the evil puppet master conspiring with his co-religionists. A loony Black entertainer who supports Donald Trump, who has been cozy with anti-Semitic groups, declared “I’m going death con 3 on Jewish people.” Decon-3” and then announced that Jews aren’t the real Jews anyway. Now this guy is nuts, but it is dangerous to dismiss deeper antipathy towards Jews as the work of cranks. We know what happened in Europe in the 1930s.
Recently I attended a play about the European Holocaust and I wonder how many non-Jews were in the audience. It was a one-actor show about the life of Jan Karski, a Pole who put his life at risk to help European Jews and it was an excellent production. My questions, as I sat there with tears in my eyes, are “how relevant is the European Holocaust and the murder of European Jews to American students today who are not Jewish and should it be?” New York State is pushing for expanded Holocaust education, but this is for political reasons. These events happened over 75 years ago and for students they are ancient history. Since the European Holocaust there have been so many other horrific events, genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and the Congo, wars all over the world, and the forced displacement of populations, that the European Holocaust and the near extermination of European Jewry, no longer stands out, at least for me, as a topic that deserves a special place in the school curriculum.
So Mendel, am I still a Jew? Can a non-believer be a good Jew? What makes a good Jew?
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
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