And… a four-line quote from John 8:12, which readers of this blog might recognize as belonging to the New Testament. Better luck next year, Santorum.

Happy Hanukkah from Rick Santorum [Slate]

• The United States is trying to articulate exactly which “red lines” would prompt a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, in an effort to dissuade Israel from acting on its own. [The Daily Beast]

• A prominent Syrian activist in exile has called for humanitarian intervention. His request won’t be the last. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• Photographer Lynsey Addario, who while pregnant was harassed at a Gaza checkpoint, gave birth this morning. [Twitter]

• Now we have the head of Iran’s navy mentioning that it would be really easy to close the Strait of Hormuz. Gulp. [AP/WP]

• In Brooklyn’s Hasidic enclaves, the Beit Shemesh conflict with the anti-women ultra-Orthodox is seen primarily as a shanda fur die Goyim. [Haaretz]

• The prominent Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler died at 83. [NYT]

• Hamas and Fatah are best friends again, unless you want to celebrate Fatah’s anniversary in Gaza, and then Hamas won’t let you. [JPost]

• A Tunisian-French Jew lobbies for Yad Vashem to include her savior as the first “righteous” person who is Arab. [NYT]

• Paul Berger continues his reporting on George Washington’s letter to the Rhode Island synagogue with a profile of the document’s reclusive owner, Richard Morgenstern. [Forward]

• Former yeshiva kid Brett Ratner led Hanukkah services for all the rich celebrities on St. Barts. [Page Six]

Maybe the most cogent explanation Matisyahu has offered yet for his sudden, recent change from being Hasidic. Hint: still a little confusing.

• Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged that he would not negotiate with a Palestinian government that included Hamas, as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority currently plan. (Of course, he’s not negotiating with the Palestinian government that doesn’t include Hamas, either.) [Haaretz]

• Turkey may insist on poor relations with Israel as the Knesset debates whether to commemorate the Armenian genocide. (Of course, Turkey already insists on poor relations with Israel.) [NYT]

• Are policy-makers reckoning with the potential radioactive consequences of bombing Iranian reactors (and possibly seeing Israel’s bombed in retaliation)? [NYT]

• It’s being treated as a scoop, but it’s not really news that, as his former senior aide says, Rep. Ron Paul is genuinely anti-Israel. [Haaretz]

• Netanyahu appears to be forcing the closure of an independent television station that isn’t right-wing and has also reported embarrassing details about him and his family. [NYT]

• Do I need to tell you that Don Blanquito, Brazil’s newest funk sensation, is an L.A. Jewish kid named Alex Cutler? [NYT]

• Imagine if the White House had termites and no hot water. Israel is real estate. [JPost]

• A judge dismissed two students’ lawsuit alleging that Berkeley did not adequately protect them from anti-Semitism during a campus “Apartheid Week.” [JTA/Forward]

Matt Damon and (half-Jewish) Scarlett Johansson take a Hanukkah quiz. It gets very real a little after the two-minute mark.

Today, the language is all but forgotten, except by those like Jagoda who spoke it growing up. The group has grown to include more than 20 participants. At their monthly meetings—which members call vijitas de al’had, or “Sunday visits,” after a centuries-old tradition from the Old Country—the men and women eat Sephardic treats, sing songs, and study a Judeo-Spanish reading exercise, complete with vocabulary lists. Vox Tablet’s Julie Subrin visited their annual Hanukkah gathering in 2009 for this audio postcard from our archives. [Running time: 7:33.]

The Dirge Singer (1922)
This radio special starring Al Jolson was based on the singer’s life. His character betrays his traditional Jewish family to sing in blackface (rendered on radio by his, er, different way of talking, about which the less said, the better). Yet emotional catharsis is achieved by the end, when he returns to sing “Ma’oz Tzur” on the first night of Hanukkah. Listeners complained that “Rock of Ages” lacked the necessary foundation on which to carry the climax of such an ostensibly moving story. They also expressed frustration at not being able to see Jolson transform to blackface and back. RCA bigwig David Sarnoff is said to have responded, “Well what would those [unprintable] suggest we do—invent some way that they could see Jolson and hear him at the same time?”

The Magical Maccabees (1955)
Sitting by a slightly threatening-looking fire, a gigantic Old Country menorah partially obscuring the camera’s view, Bernard Malamud sat for two hours and sternly lectured viewers about the importance of not giving in to modern-day Hellenization, much as Mattathias (whom Malamud insisted on calling Matityahu in part to prove his point) fought the oppressors rather than allowed himself to become assimilated. “Enlivening” the jeremiad were Malamud’s periodic stories about shtetl folk falling in love and performing magical acts, which all had the twist that these modest peasants actually lived in major United States cities. After the special aired, CBS’s Newark affiliate received an angry phone call from a young watcher who demanded why there were no Jewish writers who showed the Jewish community in America as it really was.

The Banality of Hanukkah (1962)
Taped during The New Yorker’s annual Christmas party from their midtown offices, this NBC special featured Hannah Arendt, at her desk, calmly explaining that Hanukkah is an ordinary holiday and the Maccabees were just ordinary people who happened, together, to commit an extraordinary deed (she also noted that not all the Syrians were evil, much as certain Nazi philosophers, for example Martin Heidegger, were good people). Arendt was frequently interrupted by the partiers outside her office: A clearly inebriated Joseph Mitchell noiselessly walked in, vomited on Arendt’s desk, and walked out; Lillian Ross brought in an unidentified man and proceeded to “neck” with him for several minutes before noticing the camera and embarrassingly fleeing. Some historians have suggested Arendt’s experience producing this special led her to be Tom Wolfe’s source for his articles about the magazine a few years later. Arguments over whether this special ought to be deliberately blocked from historical consciousness, so that nobody is ever subjected to it again, or specifically replayed every year, as a reminder of how awful television can be, have been known to ignite an Upper West Side salon to this very day.

The Smurfs Team Up With Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for the Festival of Lights! (1973)
This extremely ill-advised special, meant to boost morale in the Jewish-American community after the Yom Kippur War, cast the Smurfs (who had yet to star in their own Hanna-Barbera TV show but had had a feature film) as the underdog Maccabees/Hebrews fighting oppression. Meir’s inclusion led to further incongruities, as when she declared, in reference to the Smurfs’ historic enemy and his sidekick cat, “Peace will come when Gargamel loves Azrael more than he hates Israel.”

Oiled Up (2006)
This Judd Apatow-directed special was based off scripts that Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen independently wrote at the ages of 12 and 10, respectively. In it, Benjamin, a contemporary kid played by Jay Baruchel, sits around with his friends (Hill and Rogen, as well as Aziz Ansari and Jason Segel), takes a hit of some really powerful marijuana and finds himself in ancient times, leading the Jewish revolt against their Syrian oppressors. Hiding out in the mountains with his parents, Mattathias (Adam Sandler, in a purposefully fake-looking white beard) and Ali (Leslie Mann), he figures out the best way to defeat his enemies is to distract them with scantily clad women, played by various models. It seems likely that the Jews will win but end up not having enough oil for the Temple because they used it to oil up their decoys. But we don’t know for sure: Despite being allotted a two-hour time slot by ABC, Apatow’s program went way too long and nobody has seen the conclusion. Nobody has ever wanted too, either.

Bonus fact! The most-requested Hanukkah special ever is 1981’s People, Chosen People. One word: Barbra.

The Ten Least-Successful Holiday Specials of All Time [Whatever]

For neurotic parents freaked out about their kids’ development: Philip Schultz’s memoir My Dyslexia demonstrates that even a kid with learning disabilities, who couldn’t read until the fifth grade, can grow up to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

For the comic-book fan who needs a little help growing up: Created by a brother-sister team, Galit and Gilad Seliktar’s graphic novel Farm 54 describes in harrowing style growing up amid tragedies on a moshav, or settlement, in 1980s Israel.

For the aspiring New York intellectual: If they accomplish nothing else, Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook, should counter any youngster’s callow yearning for a more vibrant age of American Jewish culture, by making very clear just how lousy it felt to hang out at the Podhoretzes’ with Irving Kristol and Norman Mailer.

For the sports fan willing to go deeper than, say, Moneyball: In uncovering the role of Jews in running Negro Leagues baseball teams and then integrating the majors, Rebecca Alpert’s history Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball offers support to those who understand American athletics not just as bread and circuses but as a site for the negotiation of key racial and social relationships.

For the religious pedants you can’t avoid: If they’re constantly quoting a baraita at you, they might be interested to learn in Talya Fishman’s Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures that it was hardly inevitable that the Talmud would be transformed into the primary text of rabbinic Judaism.

For a friend in want of a good orgasm: Christopher Turner’s history Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America surveys the career and ideas of Wilhelm Reich, who evangelized for the psychological necessity of getting off.

For an American Jewish World Service-supporting exoticist: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s stories and essays, collected in Mongrels or Marvels, do more than revel in the charms and dangers of the East; they offer the insights of a Jewish woman who was born to Iraqi and Tunisian parents in 1917, raised in Cairo, and wrote exclusively in English while living in Israel.

For the Us Weekly devotee: It may not satisfy TMZ hardcores, but for milder celebrity junkies, Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness will allow your loved one to cook and eat a little like the Hollywood royalty descended from the Gaon of Nitzy-Novgorod.

For someone ignorant about Israeli and American culture who nonetheless insists on spouting off about the politics and culture of both countries: Yoram Kaniuk’s Life on Sandpaper, a genre-bending work of autobiographical fiction, introduces the reader to a young painter and veteran of the 1948 War of Israeli Independence who spent the 1950s hanging out with Miles Davis and Marlon Brando, and who reels off anecdotes of his youth idiosyncratically and with none of the comfortable clichés one might expect.

Fans of Zorn’s work, which includes an exploration of new Jewish music known as the “Radical Jewish Culture,” must have at least been scratching their heads at the news. A Dreamers Christmas is now airing on NPR, not merely its songs but also a live interview, during which Zorn spins a few tracks from the album and other holiday songs that have inspired him over the years. The composer has a reputation for shunning the press—at times, abrasively. But in this segment with NPR’s David Garland, he’s warm, perfectly charming, and really accessible—quite like the album itself.

Indeed, the album’s accessibility is perhaps more surprising than the fact of its existence. As Zorn puts it in the interview, this is one of his most user-friendly projects ever. “My message is joy to the world,” he says. “This is a record to play while you’re trimming the tree.” A subversive thinker and composer, Zorn has often gravitated toward subversive sounds—of screeching free jazz, punk, hardcore, and noise. This project is nothing like that: Playing at the supermarket before and after other traditional carols, it might not raise any flags to an average shopper. A connoisseur, however, will discern the difference, since the date includes, among others, art-rock and avant-jazz giant Marc Ribot, who was instrumental in the establishment of the Jewish Radical Culture phenomenon, along with Kenny Wollesen on vibes and glockenspiel, and the Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, a frequent Zorn collaborator. Everyone in the band is a tremendously accomplished musician who at some point or another gravitated toward aggressive, thrashing music—of which, on this project, there’s hardly a trace.

So, what’s going on here?

Before I even listened to the tracks and the interview, Lenny Bruce’s classic routine came to mind: “Count Basie’s Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor’s goyish. B’nai Brith is goyish. Hadassah, Jewish. Marine corps—heavy goyim, dangerous.” And so then, Christmas may be goyish, but writing Christmas carols is very Jewish. Based on Zorn’s chat on NPR, however, this project appears a much deeper and more intriguing affair. In the interview, Zorn talks about growing up in a largely Jewish neighborhood but being the only Jewish family there to not observe Hanukkah and hoist a tree instead. Zorn’s grandparents had been down the route of assimilation, and they’d passed this attitude on to his parents, who understandably thought their son crazy when he began to not only rediscover his Jewish roots but also grow into the face of the New York Jewish avant-garde in the early 1990s.

Needless to say that Zorn is no Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae musician, nor Danny Zamir, the religious soprano sax player who got his start on Zorn’s Tzadik label. He did not “return” to institutionalized Judaism, or publicly commit himself to a prescribed praxis. Instead he forged a new identity, informed by the encounter with a number of things Judaism had to offer him—particularly, what he referred to as the “radical” side of it.

“Radical,” a good Latin word, means something pertaining to the roots, something originary. And our roots always grow—usually, in opposite directions to the way we grow. A few decades ago, Zorn engaged his mythic Jewish roots: mysticism, protest, social justice, and above all, ideas about Jewish otherness, which resonated with his own eccentric approach to art. Perhaps, then, with this Christmas album, the composer is addressing his actual roots: his family traditions, including the manner in which they observed the December holidays. Who is to say that this true bit of his family history is any less Jewish than someone else’s memories of celebrating Hanukkah? The content may be different, but both are actual, lived experiences of equal value.

Zorn’s experience speaks of a complex reality of the Jewish identity in this place and time. His Jewishness is informed by his family’s customs, and these customs aren’t merely a form of rebellion but a component as vital as a body part. The album contains no religious tunes but lots of classics: “Winter Wonderland,” for example, and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” which, in the great jazz tradition of transforming simple pop tunes into complex explorations, roam far and wide—be it in Ribot’s spectacular guitar work or in Jamie Saft’s endlessly exciting piano solos. There are also two Zorn originals, “Santa’s Workshop” and “Magical Sleigh Ride,” which both feature rhythms and textures that will be familiar to a Zorn listener, and a mellow feel reminiscent of some of Miles Davis’ fusion albums as well. But there’s also an unmistakable hint of caroling, especially in Wollesen’s festive chimes and vibes and Baptista’s percussion work.

Whether or not these originals will become part of the American carol canon remains to be seen, because music as complex as Zorn’s is a highly personal, subjective experience. When I first listened to these songs, I found myself getting defensive, then tried hard to like it, then tried hard to dislike it, then got lost in the music because it was very good, and perpetually came back to a feeling of pleasure laced with dismay. And then I realized that I was really thinking about my own memory of a decorated tree in my parents’ home.

When Zorn says, discussing his Christmas music, that he misses “the tree,” I know what he means: When I pass by a street vendor in New York with rows of evergreens the smell immediately brings back a recollection: growing up in a Russian Jewish family in the still-Soviet Ukraine, where a tree was less of a novelty than it might have been for an American Jewish family in New York. In fact, I didn’t know of any Jewish families who didn’t celebrate the holiday for ethnic reasons. The holiday was for everyone. Celebrations, with gifts, were held on New Year’s. While over the past 16 or so years I made no secret of this in my Jewish circles—even at the time when I was committed to a largely Orthodox milieu—it felt like something of a dirty little secret. Very quickly, my memories of the holiday became marred with disdain, and over the years, when I’ve called my parents on New Year’s Eve, hearing their cheerful voices laced with festivities, I’ve had to squelch a certain disaffection. But listening to Zorn brought back a surge of positive memories: family-time, days spent cooking, gifts, and decorations. As a child, the only night I was allowed to stay up past midnight was also the first time I tasted champagne.

This is not to say that suddenly now I have any desire to run out and get a tree. I live a traditional Jewish life, and a Christmas tree no longer has a place in it. Frankly, I don’t even know if I’ll listen to this album again. The point, really, is that I have a whole lost world inside of me, and Zorn’s engagement with his lost world reminded me of that and brought that world back to me. Buried memories suddenly surfaced against the backdrop of my life’s trajectory. It feels like a catharsis, and only real art is able to engender that.

Zorn’s Christmas album is not a practical joke or a jest. Zorn is a serious composer, and he approached this album with the seriousness he brings to all of his music. As he says in the interview, when working with a specific style, his goal is to make it into “more what it is.” That is, he seeks to summon the style’s essence and spirit. In this case, that’s to avoid celebrating the consumerist hype or drunken stupors of the holiday season, in favor of the national, nearly secular festivity. As Bob Dorough sings on a record with Miles Davis—which Zorn brought for Garland’s listeners—“When you’re blue at Christmas time/ You see through all the waste/ All the sham, all the haste/ And plain old bad taste/ It’s a time when the greedy give a dime to the needy.” Zorn’s album takes its name from his band, the Dreamers, but maybe there’s also a bit of an actual dream in its concept: That of a holiday time for everyone.

To come back to Lenny Bruce: “Celebrate is a goyish word. Observe is a Jewish word.” Christmas most certainly will not be celebrated at the Sixth Street Synagogue this Saturday night. That’s why the event—which, in addition to Zorn’s own Aleph Trio features three other top-notch Jewish bands, two of which include the synagogue’s rabbi, illustrious sax player Greg Wall—is billed as “Nittel Nacht.” That’s how Jews named this day in the Old Country. The evening is not about celebration, but the act of observing—looking around and inside, riffing and transforming, revealing and questioning.

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Related: ‘Eight Days of Hanukkah’ [Tablet Magazine]

However, I’ve never felt more like getting a Christmas tree than this past week, thanks to the trend in Jewish media of non-intermarried Jews telling intermarried Jews not to have Christmas trees. Articles like these make me want to put up a Christmas tree just to symbolize my defiance of self-appointed assimilation police. Of course it wouldn’t work, because their very point is that I don’t get to decide what my own Christmas tree would symbolize. These writers assume that what the tree—or even “celebrating Christmas”—symbolizes to them is what it represents universally and objectively, beyond the touch of actual humans who make decisions and appoint significances based on their own needs, interests, and complex familial relationships.

Thankfully, I hear these recriminations about interfaith families less frequently than I used to. I’d be shocked if there is a single Reform rabbi out there who’d admit to an anti-Christmas-tree sermon in the past decade—and that’s not, as some cynics might argue, out of fear of unemployment. It’s because they know that the intermarried families they’d be chastising are within earshot only because they’ve dedicated countless hours and thousands of dollars toward raising Jewish children—often with the non-Jewish partner as the driving force. We should be thanking these folks, rather than pushing them away.

****

My wife is from Japan, a land of 127 million mostly secular Buddhists and Shintoists and almost no Christians. Yet almost all Japanese families put up Christmas trees and teach their kids to believe in Santa Claus. Try explaining the concept of Jesus as messiah to Japanese people and most will look at you politely but baffled. If my wife and I were to have a tree, would that represent “Christianity,” even though there are no Christians in our home?

Believe me, I get the objection. I understand the fears of assimilation. In many cases, it can be confusing for young children being raised Jewish to also celebrate Christmas in their home—which is why, in fact, I don’t feel like such a Grinch denying the tree to my own future children: Even though it was a part of my wife’s childhood experience, it’s not really a part of her true cultural heritage—and our kids will be confused enough being 100 percent American, 100 percent Jewish, and 100 percent Japanese. But after working with literally thousands of interfaith families as a Jewish communal professional over the past decade, I feel that I’m in a much better position to suggest what a Christmas tree actually symbolizes than those critics. The answer is: It depends who you ask.

There are well over a million intermarried Jews in the United States and likely more intermarried than single-faith households. There are more Americans under the age of 20 with one Jewish parent than there are with two. To make blanket statements about anything related to intermarried families is about as helpful as making blanket statements about “The Jews.” Can you imagine how many different responses you’d get if you put 20 Jews in a room and asked what the Hanukkah menorah symbolizes? If the math from the old Jewish joke holds, you’d have 30 opinions. Interfaith families are no different.

For many Jews looking in from the outside, a Christmas tree might represent the threatening, monolithic assertion: “Christian Household.” But for vast swaths of the intermarried population who put up Christmas trees but still successfully raise strongly identified Jews, that’s just not factually correct. And it’s why Tablet’s Marc Tracy drew the wrong red line when he wrote on the Scroll that the flexibility of identity requires some limits “and celebrating Christmas is beyond that limit.”

Really? Why does anyone get to decide that limit for someone else?

The overwhelming majority of Jews pick and choose which Jewish laws they find meaningful and which they reject. Keeping kosher all the time? Rejected by 85 percent of American Jewry. Believing homosexuality is an abomination? Thankfully, rejected by a growing majority. When we start telling each other that our own individual red lines are the universally accepted “Jewish” red lines—and if you cross them, you’re a bad Jew—our community descends into recriminations. Those of us working to actually grow the Jewish community understand that the message of “our way or the highway” more often than not results in the highway. Rather than telling people what they shouldn’t do, why not provide more ways for them to express their Jewish identity?

To me, the message of Hanukkah continues beyond the victorious Maccabees’ oppressive enforcement of Jewish ritual to the following decades, when it turns out that Judaism actually did “assimilate” many aspects of Greco-Roman thought, and that doing so made Judaism stronger. I believe Jewish ideas are strong enough today to survive comparisons to other religions, even within the same household. And that’s why I defend the right of interfaith families to acknowledge the heritage of their non-Jewish relatives’ traditions, including by putting up Christmas trees—even if I don’t endorse celebrating Christmas or exercise that right myself. (Sorry, honey.)

Hanukkah has only grown bigger year after year, even in many interfaith homes, which demonstrates that most American Jews don’t want to assimilate away into the warm embrace of tinsel and eggnog but instead are proclaiming their Jewish identity loudly and proudly. That is a miracle worth celebrating.

Gratitude isn’t just a civilizing influence that prevents us all from being overgrown babies; it also makes us happier. Psychologist Robert Emmons, at the University of California, Davis, who studies gratitude, has shown that it improves health, resilience, and emotional well-being. But it doesn’t grow in a vacuum. It’s our job as parents to make sure our kids develop social awareness and menschlikheit. But like many parents, I think I could be doing a lot better. So, on the eve of Thanksgiving, I’m pondering ways to step up my thankfulness training. Learn from my screw-ups:

I’m not religious about modeling the behavior I want to see.

I’m pretty good at saying “thank you” to the guy at the pharmacy. I’m not so good at expressing appreciation closer to home. A few years ago, I read an article about how spouses should say thank you regularly for the everyday tasks of family life. If your partner makes a delicious dinner, works late to bring home the fakon, or takes the kids to the asthma specialist, you’re supposed to say, “Thank you for supporting our family.” The cheesiness of this phrase made Jonathan, my husband, and me giggle, but for a few months we did it, and you know what? Hearing it feels really good, especially when paired with Meaningful Eye Contact. Kids should see their parents expressing appreciation. My own kids are good at the automatic “please” and “thank you,” but because I don’t often enough consider the big-picture “do I appreciate all I’ve got?” they don’t either.

Jeffrey Froh, a professor of psychology at Hofstra University, did a study in which he asked a group of middle-schoolers to keep “gratitude journals” for two weeks. The kids wrote down a few things they were grateful for every day. A second group of kids wrote down the day’s petty annoyances, and a third group did neither. The students who were made to think about what they had to be grateful for experienced a surge in optimism and a decrease in negative feelings.

Maybe I could suggest we talk about What I Have to Be Grateful for Today at the dinner table instead of playing Two Truths and a Lie (which I must ungratefully admit I’m utterly bored with) every time the conversation lulls.

I’m not being consistent with chores and allowances.

The kids are supposed to get their allowance and tzedakah money on Friday afternoons before Shabbat. I usually forget. This means that every time the kids want something—a giant gumball, a Webkinz—they start wheedling and calculating how many weeks allowance I owe them. Their pleading little voices make me want to stab myself with a fork. Josie is supposed to feed the cats in the morning, and Maxie is supposed to feed the fish in the afternoon, but they often forget, and I’m perpetually noodging them until my own voice makes me want to stab myself again with that fork. We need a simple, regularly implemented system: This is what you do as a member of this family. If I have to remind you, or if you don’t do it, your allowance gets docked. If you want something, you use your own money from your piggy bank, save up, or wait to see if you still want it when your birthday rolls around. I want to increase their list of tasks, too—we should have family dinner more often for all the usual reasons but also because I want the girls regularly setting and clearing the table. It’s not rocket science: Having to work for stuff makes you more grateful for the stuff you have.

I place too much emphasis on getting, not enough on giving.

It would be simply divine if Jews and Christians alike didn’t make December a month of gifting. Christmas is about Jesus’ birth; turning it into a celebration of nebulous merriment and wrapping paper is irksome. Hannukah is a minor holiday about the rededication of the holy temple and the tension between traditional and acculturated Jews. In my own tradition of hoping technology will solve all my parenting problems, I have allowed the girls to maintain their own Amazon wishlists, which they endlessly groom like My Little Ponies. They understand that putting things on a wishlist doesn’t mean they’re going to get anything on that list; it’s fantasy shopping, like fantasy baseball. I am draconian about the need for thank-you notes, but I need to work harder on getting the kids involved in gift purchasing for others. They also could be more involved in choosing how and where we donate money in honor of other people.

I fail to seek out gratitude and tolerance stories.

The book Molly’s Pilgrim is about a little girl who has recently emigrated from an Eastern European shtetl to the American Midwest, where her classmates mock her clothing and accent. As a Thanksgiving homework project, Molly’s teacher assigns her the task of making a pilgrim doll. When Molly explains to her baffled mother that a pilgrim is someone who leaves his or her old country in search of freedom and tolerance, her mother surprises her with a gorgeously made doll that looks like mama herself, not like a black-dress-and-buckle-shoe-wearing Puritan. At first the kids sneer, but Molly’s teacher sets them straight. Leaving aside a moral lesson today’s hyper-meddly parents should not be learning—when your child fails to do her homework, do it for her!—Molly’s Pilgrim is a great way to talk about how the values of Judaism and Thanksgiving intersect, and how lucky we are to live in a time when the people who are nastiest to American Jews are usually other Jews. I should make reading Molly’s Pilgrim—honestly, one of the best Jewish children’s books of all time—an annual tradition, like making hand turkeys and nutter-butter gobbler cupcakes. Thanksgiving is the perfect time to discuss the Jewish value of hakarat ha’tov, recognizing the good in our lives, and drawing parallels between books and news stories and our own privileged lives is something we should do far more often.

There’s never enough shehechiyanu.

Yes, we say the prayer for new and wonderful experiences on big occasions. But we could say it all the time. There are so many things to be thrilled by and grateful for. Last weekend my beautiful cousin Misha got married, and my Uncle Michael’s toast was a simple distillation of the prayer: “Dear Lord: Thank you for the gift of being here now.” It was the perfect blend of ancient Jewish values and hippie zen. But Uncle Michael’s words made me realize: Why wait for weddings? Why wait for the first night of Hannukah? Because remember, to quote the great Jewish sage Buckaroo Banzai, no matter where you go, there you are. Opportunities for gratitude are all around us. I want my kids to see them.

• The U.S. State Department chastised Israel over its announcement of new building in the settlement of Ariel. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Twilight actress Kristen Stewart, apparently not a Jew, nonetheless got her start singing “a more serious dreidel song” (which is to say, presumably not the “I made it out of clay” one). [W]

• Splitsville for the Madoffs. [JTA]

• The U.S. military has learned several counterinsurgency tactics from the Israelis. [Abu Muqawama]

• Camp Be’chol Lashon, in Marin County, California, is specifically for Jews of color. [NYT]

Amy Winehouse made out of pills? Amy Winehouse made out of pills.

Next slow day, Tablet’s readers can name our fish.

Earlier: Name the Cat

The candle lighting was a resounding success. Lev then suggested in the holiday spirit that he also light the curtains in the living room and the bedspread in the bedroom, triggering another urgent discussion between the wife and me on the balcony.

“We’ll tell him that it’s dangerous and that’s that,” the wife said. “We have to be firm with him.”

“Ya’allah,” I said. “Let’s go for it.”

When Lev heard that he couldn’t burn the curtain, he burst into tears and claimed that in kindergarten, they said that every day you have to light a curtain and eat eight jelly doughnuts. My wife still tried to argue that the only things that gets lit are candles and the exact number of jelly doughnuts to be eaten isn’t specified in the holiday manual. But her flimsy arguments shattered on the armor of our pyromaniac son’s terrifying determination.

As the front got increasingly hotter, I realized that responsibility for resolving the situation rested on my broad shoulders. So I chose to apply the strategy I had developed in past conflicts, a method that never ceased to prove itself: bribery. “If you give up on the curtains,” I said to Lev, mustering the most soothing voice I could find, “you’ll get—”

“But Daddy,” Lev said, “I don’t want to give it up. I want to kill Greeks and burn things like the Maccabees.”

I tried to calm him down. “When you get older you’ll have lots of chances to kill Greeks and burn things,” I said. “But until then you’ll have to wait, and as a reward for your patience, you’ll get—”

“Eight jelly doughnuts, a jug of oil, and a rifle that shoots top-like bullets like the one Ronni Cooperman has?” Lev asked excitedly.

“No,” I said. “But you’ll get an amazing bedtime story that Daddy will make up just for you about the best kindergarten in the whole solar system.”

Lev lay beside me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, he loves my stories, but on the other, with all due respect to the world of imagination, a story, however funny, surprising, and thrilling, still isn’t eight doughnuts full of strawberry jelly or a made-in-China dreidel-launcher sold under the counter by a scar-faced salesman in the mall toy store. He listens attentively, though somewhat suspiciously, to my story about the Nice-Kids kindergarten.

After I spend a few minutes introducing the kids—Marty-Smarty, Dwight-faster-than-the-speed-of-light, and Matt the mind-reading cat—Lev asks me who their enemies were. I tell him that they were just kindergarten kids and didn’t have any real enemies. But Lev persists. “Come on, what’s the name of kindergarten where the bad kids go, the ones who fight them?” he asks. I hesitate. Then I tell him that the kindergarten is called the Nasties Kindergarten.

“The Nasties Kindergarten,” Lev says, smiling happily. “And how do the Nasties want to destroy the earth and the planet of the mind-reading cats Matt comes from?”

An uneasy silence filled the room. “Lev,” I say, “are you sure that’s what the Nasties want to do?”

“That’s how it is with Nasties,” Lev says, shrugging.

The wife comes into Lev’s room with a warm down blanket just as I am telling him how Nick-Karate-Kick landed a blow on the terrifying robot dog that threatened to devour the Nice-Kids Kindergarten while Paul-Walk-Through-Walls is breaking the tail of the Nasties’ spaceship, which is about to crash into the yoga and educational-game corner of the Nice-Kids playground, just as Fred-Iron-Head is shattering the wall of the Nasties’ kindergarten in a retaliatory attack. The look on her face makes it clear that an educational talk awaits me in the living room.

That night, I dream I’m sitting at a small plastic table with Benyamin Netanyahu sipping chocolate milk. “The Americans don’t want to play with me,” he complains, “because I sent Nick-Karate-Kick and Fred-Iron-Head to Dubai to beat up a kid from the Nasties’ Kindergarten.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked. “Was he a threat?”

“No,” Bibi shrugs. “But the kid wanted us to do it.”

“What kid?” I ask.

“Yours,” Bibi says. “He said that either we do that or it’s eight jelly doughnuts. And where does that little turd expect me to dig up eight jelly doughnuts, what with the economic crisis and all?”

“So what you’re actually saying,” I rebuke Bibi, “is that this whole conflict is because of my son, a 5-year-old kid?”

“Not just because of him,” Bibi admits. “Smash-’em-Now Lieberman and another couple of Nasties from the party asked for it too.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “But I just can’t accept, that you, the prime minister of Israel, are evading responsibility and trying to shift the blame on a 5-year-old.”

“Prepare for action,” Bibi interrupts me in the middle of my dream. “A huge, nasty robot dog at 12 o’clock is trying to devour our slide.” And then I woke up, I think, or maybe I was just watching the news.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

Here is the original track for “Yishama-O-Rama (Radiata Edit),” by Klezmer Rebs:

Here is the remix, by Cut Loose, aka Jen Bell:

On the sixth night of Hanukkah the authorities confiscated my menorah with all my candles. I ran to the duty officer to find out what had happened.

“The candlesticks were made from state materials; this is illegal. You could be punished for this alone and the other prisoners are complaining. They’re afraid you’ll start a fire.”

I began to insist. “In two days Hanukkah will be over and then I’ll return this ‘state property’ to you. Now, however, this looks like an attempt to deny me the opportunity of celebrating Jewish holidays.”

The duty officer began hesitating. Then he phoned his superior and got his answer: “A camp is not a synagogue. We won’t permit Sharansky to pray here.”

Camp Fire

Click here to listen to the original track for “Hava Nagila,” by Paul Toshner and Felix Benasuly, who perform together as poi43.com.

Here is the remix, by Roddy Schrock:

They even made me a wooden menorah, decorated it, and found some candles.

In the evening I lit the first candle and recited a prayer that I had composed for this occasion. Tea was poured, and I began to describe the heroic struggle of the Maccabees to save their people from slavery. For each zek—the term for a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag—who was listening, this story had its own personal meaning. At one point the duty officer appeared in the barracks. He made a list of all those present, but did not interfere.

On each of the subsequent evenings of Hanukkah I took out my menorah, lit the candles, and recited the appropriate blessing. Then I blew out the candles, as I didn’t have any extras. Gavriliuk, the collaborator whose bunk was across from mine, watched and occasionally grumbled, “Look at him, he made himself a synagogue. And what if there’s a fire?”

On the sixth night of Hanukkah the authorities confiscated my menorah with all my candles. I ran to the duty officer to find out what had happened.

“The candlesticks were made from state materials; this is illegal. You could be punished for this alone and the other prisoners are complaining. They’re afraid you’ll start a fire.”

I began to insist. “In two days Hanukkah will be over and then I’ll return this ‘state property’ to you. Now, however, this looks like an attempt to deny me the opportunity of celebrating Jewish holidays.”

The duty officer began hesitating. Then he phoned his superior and got his answer: “A camp is not a synagogue. We won’t permit Sharansky to pray here.”

I was surprised by the bluntness of that remark, and immediately declared a hunger strike. In a statement to the procurator general I protested against the violation of my national and religious rights, and against KGB interference in my personal life.

When you begin an unlimited hunger strike, you never know when or how it will end. Are the authorities interested at that moment in putting a swift end to it, or don’t they give a damn? In a few weeks a commission from Moscow was due to arrive in the camp. I didn’t know this at the time, but the authorities, presumably, were very aware of it, which probably explains why I was summoned to Major Osin’s office two days later, in the evening.

Osin, the camp commander, was an enormous, flabby man of around 50, with small eyes and puffy eyelids, who seemed to have long ago lost interest in everything but food. But he was a master of intrigue who had successfully overtaken many of his colleagues on the road to advancement. During my brief time in the camp he had weathered several scandals and had always managed to pass the buck to his subordinates. I could see that he had enjoyed his power over the zeks and liked to see them suffer. But he never forgot that the zeks were, above all, a means for advancing his career, and he knew how to back off in a crisis.

Osin pulled a benevolent smile over his face as he tried to talk me out of my hunger strike. Osin promised to see to it personally that in the future nobody would hinder me from praying, and that this should not be a concern of the KGB.

“Then what’s the problem?” I said. “Give me back the menorah, as tonight is the last evening of Hanukkah. Let me celebrate it now, and taking into account your assurances for the future, I shall end the hunger strike.”

“What’s a menorah?”

“Candlesticks.”

But a protocol for its confiscation had already been drawn up, and Osin couldn’t back down in front of the entire camp. As I looked at this predator, sitting at an elegant polished table and wearing a benevolent smile, I was seized by an amusing idea.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m sure you have the menorah somewhere. It’s very important to me to celebrate the last night of Hanukkah. Why not let me do it here and now, together with you? You’ll give me the menorah, I’ll light the candles and say the prayer, and if all goes well I’ll end the hunger strike.”

Osin thought it over and promptly the confiscated menorah appeared from his desk. He summoned Gavriliuk, who was on duty in the office, to bring in a large candle.

“I need eight candles,” I said. (In fact I needed nine, but when it came to Jewish rituals I was still a novice.) Gavriliuk took out a knife and began to cut the candle into several smaller ones. But it didn’t come out right; apparently the knife was too dull. Then Osin took out a handsome inlaid pocketknife and deftly cut me eight candles.

“Go, I’ll call you later,” he said to Gavriliuk. Gavriliuk simply obeyed orders. He was a fierce, gloomy man, and this sight must have infuriated him.

I arranged the candles and went to the coat rack for my hat, explaining to Osin that “during the prayer you must stand with your head covered and at the end say ‘Amen.’ ” He put on his major’s hat and stood. I lit the candles and recited my own prayer in Hebrew, which went something like this: “Blessed are You, God, for allowing me to rejoice on this day of Hanukkah, the holiday of our liberation, the holiday of our return to the way of our fathers. Blessed are You, God, for allowing me to light these candles. May you allow me to light the Hanukkah candles many times in your city, Jerusalem, with my wife, Avital, and my family and friends.”

This time, however, inspired by the sight of Osin standing meekly at attention, I added in Hebrew: “And may the day come when all our enemies, who today are planning our destruction, will stand before us and hear our prayers and say ‘Amen.’ ”

“Amen,” Osin echoed back. He sighed with relief, sat down and removed his hat. For some time we looked silently at the burning candles. They quickly melted, and the hot wax was spread pleasantly over the glass surface of the table. Then Osin caught himself, summoned Gavriliuk, and brusquely ordered him to clean it up.

I returned to the barracks in a state of elation, and our kibbutz made tea and merrily celebrated the end of Hanukkah. Naturally, I told them about Osin’s “conversion,” and it soon became the talk of the camp. I realized that revenge was inevitable, but I also knew they had plenty of other reasons to punish me.

Copyright © 1986 by Natan Sharansky. Reprinted with permission from Fear No Evil by Natan Sharansky, published by Random House, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

• An Orthodox man was beat up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last night. It is being investigated as a potential bias crime. [WABC]

• This water slide you ride down two-by-two. [NYT]

• Bagelfuls. Kraft ought to be ashamed of itself. [Contentions]

• “Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are ruthless people who faithfully follow the rules of classical economics, even if they violate the dictates of decorum. In one episode, Jerry barters away the intellectual-property rights to one of his sexual techniques. Where the rest of us laugh and gasp, an economist would only nod in understanding.” [Business Week]

• Did Mossad try to kill Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was in Lebanon earlier this fall? They would never do anything like that! [Ynet]

The original “Eight Days of Hanukkah,” written and sung by the great and late Tuli Kupferberg.

Here is the original track for “Chanukah Chag Yafe,” by Alexandria Kleztet:

Here is the remix, by ocp, a.k.a. João Ricardo:

Listen to the original track for “Ose Shalom,” by the Fourth Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra, here.

Here is the remix, by Diego Bernal:

Here is the original track for “Thermoglyphics,” by New Klezmer Trio (composed by Ben Goldberg):

Here is the remix, by Dance Robot Dance, a.k.a. Brian Biggs:

Here is the original track for “Die Goldene Chasen”:

And here is the “Die Goldene Chasen remix”:

Here is the original track for “Sivivon Sov Sov Sov”:

And here is the “Sivivon Sov Sov Sov” remix:

Original “Die Goldene Chasene” by: Dave Tarras (Permission from Shanachie/Yazoo Records)
Remix by: xntrxx, aka Harro van Duijn (Etten-Leur, Netherlands)

Original “Sivivon Sov Sov Sov” by: Alicia Jo Rabins
Remix by: Paula Daunt (Berlin, Germany)

So Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s dates back 26 years, but Yo La Tengo during Hanukkah at Maxwell’s dates back only nine. As such, the self-conscious nostalgia is practically built into the evening (nostalgia, that ultimate escapist comfort, must have been on everyone’s mind during the first Hanukkah show in December 2001), and both the Gen-X band and their mostly Gen-X fans, who were predominantly early-middle-aged and laughed at comedian Jim Gaffigan’s jokes about the gym and a high preponderance of whom sported earplugs, did not disappoint. There is no back room at Maxwell’s: Performers climbed onto the stage from the room, and disappeared into the crowd after performing. An electric menorah, correctly lit right-to-left, two candles glowing dark turquoise, sat on an amp in the back, stage right.

After a quite good opening act—a local six-piece band named Parting Gifts, some of whose members had clearly known Yo La Tengo for years—and Gaffigan, Yo La Tengo took the stage at 10:42, and immediately entered a wall of sound, bassist Jim McNew expertly laying down thick chords that allowed guitarist Ira Kaplan’s own chords to sound like a solo.

They wore ‘90s slacker apparel, and played the part. Drummer Georgia Hubley looked annoyed (though less so after her husband Kaplan’s vocals were removed from the speaker next to her right ear). McNew looked nonchalant, chewing gum during the opening numbers, quietly singing when it was his turn to sing, cracking the odd, supporting-cast joke.

Kaplan, the clear frontman and leader, is really into noise, and he throws himself into it earnestly, his expression never changing even as he is creating the musical equivalent of the Big Bang. Yo La Tengo struck me as embodying everything that makes one want to be in a successful rock and roll band—commitment to music and each other, adoration of fans, creative freedom, lack of a day job, the ability to look and indeed be really, really cool—once you boil away the part where you are actually a rock god (I suspect Kaplan would not have sex with groupies even if he didn’t happen to be married to the drummer).

The band was intimate with the audience, which could not have numbered above 250, but more, they were intimate with each other. They switched places and instruments several times. At one point, Kaplan, over at the keyboard, taped himself and put it on loop, keeping it going as he walked over to put on his guitar for the next song, as the others continued to play; when they were finally ready to go into the next song, the loop was still playing, Kaplan was over on the other side of the stage, and McNew went and shut the loop off, timing it exactly to coincide with the beginning of the next one. It was thrilling showmanship and it is why you go see live music. Trigonometry is an interesting mathematical discipline because the triangle is the only polygon where altering one side must alter every other side. The triangle is therefore the most delicate of shapes, but also the most dynamic and, potentially, the most fascinating. This was brought to mind as I watched Kaplan whale away at the keyboard with pure confidence that the rhythm section behind him would do what needed to be done, that it literally had his back.

Some of the tracks were quite tight: “Stockholm Syndrome,” the amazing center of their 1997 magnum opus I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, clocked in at three minutes. They played several tracks off their most recent album, Popular Songs, which was quite good; they played “The Weakest Part,” from 2001’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. As 11:30 passed, things picked up. They played Beating’s “Sugar Cube”—the closest thing they have ever produced to a hit single, and the basis for a beloved, quintessentially Gen-X music video—before leaping into something very noisy indeed. Kaplan screamed brief, three- or four-syllable lines into his microphone as two chords played behind him, and it took a few of these before I caught one: “I … I have made … A big decision.” They were doing the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” but unlike many covers, which are designed to draw some sort of bond between audience and band—it’s a song everyone knows equally as well, since the band itself is “new” to it—this “Heroin” was an assault, loud, and with the lyrics reassembled in a random order, like a collage, subverting the possibility of singing along. It was reminiscent, moreover, not of the album “Heroin” but of the barely controlled fury of the live versions (whose closest album equivalent is the VU masterpiece “Sister Ray”).

That was the set-closer. It was almost midnight, which is when I assumed the curfew was (I mean, it’s Thursday in Hoboken, and people live upstairs). I guessed they’d come back onstage, do a quick encore, and that would be that.

Instead, the encore was almost a second set, filled with random guests—most notably Glenn Mercer of the legendary Jersey post-punk group The Feelies. And here, the Hanukkah theme came to the fore, as there was a conscious effort to play songs by Jewish songwriters. These included Burt Bacharach, Jonathan Richman (“Roadrunner”!), Lou Reed again (this time “White Light/White Heat”), and one Mary Weiss, whom one of the guest performers, from Parting Gifts, insisted wasn’t Jewish, prompting Kaplan to respond, “Mary Weiss is Jewish. I’m not being disabused of that notion. What, she changed her name from Williams?”; the requisite Dylan cover found Hubley coming up to the microphone and, with the barest accompaniment on guitar and bass, singing “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” Nico-inflected but with a prettier voice. (Also in the encore: An improbable punk cover of the Stones’ “Brown Sugar” with the words “Rice Krispies” substituted—“How come you taste so good?/Just like a breakfast should.”)

“You guys don’t have to work tomorrow, right?” Kaplan asked as 12:30 approached. “No, it’s Hanukkah!” someone shouted from the audience. Well, eventually the thing had to end. “Thanks for coming,” Kaplan said. “Oh, and because it’s our birthday, there are cookies.” And cookies there were: almond cookies with chocolate chips, from “Giorgios,” as the familiar type of white box announced in red lettering, which must be a local Italian bakery, one that has probably been there since 1952 and maybe was used for a Sopranos location. The audience sang “Happy Birthday” in appreciation. Then some of us walked the ten Hoboken blocks south to the PATH station in the freezing late-autumn late night to catch the train back to New York City.

In my sophomore year of college, my mother died. Her illness was long, breast cancer that played hide and seek. My grandmother, my co-parent since my parents divorced when I was 7, collapsed under the weight of her daughter’s death. With her went the ability to pay the mortgage on our house.

In the end, our house was foreclosed on. Weeks before, I was told to collect everything—furniture, papers, clothes—I wanted; everything else would be sold or thrown away. I took very little; I had no room for the rocking chair, the loveseat, the vases, the china. For the most part, I don’t regret the things left behind, but although I wasn’t there to see it, I’m haunted by the image of the contents of our home being thrown into a trash bin, leaving the green Victorian an empty coffin.

Walter Benjamin wrote, “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” I visited my grandmother often in the nursing home where she lived before her death in 2007 at the age of 96. Our conversations during that time orbited around two things—how much she wanted to leave the nursing home, and the location of her antiques.

My grandmother began working at the age of 9, at a now-defunct department store in Springfield. She collected her antiques slowly, strategically, filling first her small apartment and then our large house. There were ornate sofas and chairs, curio cabinets, lamps, tea sets, jewelry, picture frames, dolls. This was meant to be our inheritance, my mother’s and mine, in a world where the order of death would be different. When my friends visited the house, they seemed convinced that behind this museum existed a profound aesthetic and enormous wealth, but it simply wasn’t true. For my mother, my grandmother’s collecting was a nuisance, a sign of an old woman’s decline, the misplaced locus of her love and affection.

During the last years of her life, my grandmother became excruciatingly paranoid. She was convinced that my aunt and uncle were pilfering her antiques, hoarding them for their own children, when in reality, they both used the term “crap” liberally to refer to her collections.

The foreclosure freed us from it all, but my grandmother, beset by grief from losing my mother and confused and hurt by no longer being able to care for herself independently, obsessed about her possessions every day, with no idea what had really happened to them. My aunt, uncle, and I resolved to never tell her, and so I lied, athletically. I told her the antiques decorated my dorm rooms and apartments, I pretended to know the exact locations of things, the story of their journey from our old house to my new life.

My mother and grandmother meant to leave me objects when they died, objects that would provide me with money, with safety, with the knowledge that someone had wanted me to be taken care of, to know that I was loved. What remains instead are notions about money that are twisted, yet enduring.

One: Not having money is shameful. My mother worked hard to create the illusion that we had money and to deflect the reality, even if it meant hiding it from me. She became a single mother when she was 40, after she and my father divorced. Her shame was always palpable; not having money meant that she was a failure, asking for help meant that she couldn’t take care of me, that she wasn’t responsible, that she had made bad choices. I see her situation as complicated by these factors and her illness, but I’ve still managed to replicate her emotions about money. I’m surrounded by people with money, and so I avoid open discussion of my own financial state, although I’m quick to point out the overwhelming classism in the Jewish community. I’ve been willfully financially ignorant, broke beyond comprehension, debt free, well appointed, and terrified, all in the 12 years since my mother died. Ironically, I’ve also only worked for nonprofits, and I’ve chosen to live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, so maybe, ultimately, I don’t want to have money. It would mean breaking the cycle, becoming someone else.

Two: Home is fleeting, and money will never be able to buy it. I’ve avoided returning to the town where I grew up, and when that’s been impossible, I’ve been sure to avoid driving past our old house, convincing myself that it had been demolished. Last year, on a whim, I Google-mapped it, and there it was, painted a different color, obscured by overgrown grass in the front yard. I wonder who lives there, if there are any remains of my mother, my grandmother, or me.

The places I’ve lived since then have never felt real, or secure. Transience brings me a strange comfort, and I almost always live in small spaces that other people probably wouldn’t tolerate. I know home can disappear quickly, like everything else.

Three: Possessions are dangerous and meaningless. I think sometimes of my mother’s orange house sweater, which hung on the back of her chair at the kitchen table. As far as I know, it remained there until the house was cleaned of its contents. Out of everything left behind, it’s that sweater that I wish I had taken with me, even if years later, the smell of her would be gone. These days, I make it a point to not be trapped by things, to not be defined by the use or the accumulation of them.

Ideas about money are really just ideas about who you are and where you have been. One of the worst things about the cycle of financial need is the inability to conceive of another reality, the perpetual feeling of being at a dead end, the bald, quivering fear. There must be an opportunity for interception, reversal, potential.

There’s a Jewish saying about deriving benefits from the illumination of the Hanukkah menorah; you should not even use the light to count your money. I imagine the three of us hovering around the flickering, inconsistent light of the candles that burn out quickly, struggling to see ourselves and our lives clearly.

Chanel Dubofsky is a writer living in New York City.

Here is the original track:

Here is the remix:

Original by: Dov Rosenblatt, Rosi Golan, and Deena Goodman
Remix by: Mark Rushton (Iowa City, Iowa)

Sweet and Light

Because—and here’s my point—has anyone actually ever successfully played the game? You know the rules. You put your gelt in the center and take turns spinning. Get a gimel, you get the pot. Get a nun, nothing happens. get a hei, you get half the pot. Get a shin, you put back in the pot (depending on various rules I’ve played) one of your gelts, half your gelt, or all your gelt.

See the problem? The game is over basically right after it’s begun! At best, it turns into some weird and boring stalemate-cum-lesson on fractions, in which you learn that if you keep halving a pile you will never get to zero. Moreover, the game requires none of those characteristics—wit, ingenuity, or even brute strength—that the Maccabes used to vanquish those evil Syrian bastards two thousand-plus years ago.

Oh, and raise your hand if you’ve ever actually made your dreidel out of clay? I thought so.

I’m going to let Howard Jacobson, writing in today’s Times, have the last word:

How many years did I feign excitement when this nothing of a toy was produced? The dreidel would appear and the whole family would fall into some horrible imitation of shtetl simplicity, spinning the dreidel and pretending to care which character was uppermost when it landed. Who did we think we were—the Polish equivalent of the Flintstones?

BUT STILL: Happy almost-Hanukkah!

Major League Dreidel’s Spinagogue [Modern Tribe]
Hanukkah, Rekindled [NYT]
Yeshiva U. Group Tops Dreidel-Spinning Mark [JTA]

Chef Melissa Petitto, a private chef in New York City, has opened up the gustatory possibilities for Hanukkah with four recipes below. (In the above video, you’ll see her cooking two of them with Vox Tablet‘s host Sara Ivry.) You’ll find a colorful winter salad tossed with walnut oil; an inventive gelt coin made out of cheese instead of chocolate (a hat tip to the tradition of eating dairy on this holiday); apple fritters with two different toppings; and latkes made out of sweet potatoes and parsnips, all of which do well to remind us on Hanukkah that light, too, is being honored along with the miracle of oil.

Wild Arugula Salad With Asian Pears, Honey-Glazed Walnuts, Ricotta Salata, and Walnut Oil Vinaigrette

4 cups wild arugula
1 Asian pear, julienned and kept until needed in a bowl of water along with the juice of half of a lemon
¼ cup pomegranate seeds
1 cup walnuts
¼ cup honey
1 teaspoon fleur de sel
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ cup ricotta salata, shaved
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon honey
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
½ cup walnut oil
sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper

1. In a medium sauté pan, combine walnuts, ¼ cup honey, fleur de sel, and cayenne over medium heat. Allow the walnuts to caramelize and become golden brown, about 4 minutes. Transfer them immediately to a piece of foil sprayed with cooking spray and allow to cool completely.

2. In a small bowl, combine Dijon, honey, and apple cider vinegar. Slowly whisk in the walnut oil and season with salt and pepper. Set aside.

3. To assemble the salad, arrange the arugula on a platter, top with the drained julienned asian pear, the cooled honey-glazed walnuts, the pomegranate seeds, and the shaved ricotta salata. Right before serving, drizzle with the walnut oil vinaigrette.

Yield: 6 Servings

Hanukkah Cheddar Gelt Coins

8 ounces sharp Cheddar cheese, shredded (about 2 cups packed)
½ cup (1 stick) butter
1 cup all purpose unbleached white flour
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons onion powder
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 cup sesame seeds

1. Place cheddar cheese, butter, flour, Worcestershire sauce, onion powder, and cayenne pepper in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Blend until a dough forms.

2. Divide dough in half and shape each into a log about 1 inch in diameter and 12 inches long. Roll logs in sesame seeds to coat. Wrap each log tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 4 hours or overnight.

3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line baking sheets with parchment paper, nonstick foil, or Silpats.

4. Slice dough into ¼ inch-thick rounds and place on prepared baking sheets. Bake 10 to 12 minutes until lightly browned and firm. Let rest for 5 minutes and move to wire racks to cool. Store in an airtight container to keep them fresh and crispy.

Yield: 7 dozen

Hanukkah Apple Donut Fritters

1 cup all purpose flour
¼ cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1/3 cup milk
1 large egg
zest of half of a lemon
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 large Granny Smith apple, cored, peeled, and diced
Canola oil for frying

Cinnamon Sugar Mixture
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Cinnamon Apple Glaze
1 cup powdered sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons apple juice

1. In a large bowl, stir together the flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt.

2. In a medium bowl, combine the milk, egg, zest, lemon juice, and vanilla.

3. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add the mixed wet ingredients and stir together well. Add the diced apple and stir to combine.

4. In a deep fryer or large saucepan, pour the canola oil to a depth of 2 inches and heat over medium heat until a thermometer reads 360 degrees. Test a bit of dough to ensure it is the correct temperature. When the oil is the correct temperature the dough will bubble immediately and rise to the top. If the oil is too cold, the dough will sink to the bottom; if it’s too hot, the dough will immediately turn brown.

5. Using a 1-inch cookie scooper, drop about 4 to 5 scoops of the batter into the hot oil. Be sure not to overcrowd the oil. The fritters should float to the top and puff to about double their size. Deep-fry until dark golden brown on the first side, about 2 minutes, and then using a slotted spoon or tongs, flip over and cook for an additional minute. Remove with a slotted spoon and transfer to a baking sheet lined with paper towel to drain.

6. Repeat with the remaining dough.

7. Let cool if you are going to glaze and use a wire rack to let excess glaze drip. If you are going to make a cinnamon sugar mixture, then dip fairly soon after removing from the oil so the sugar mixture sticks.

8. For the cinnamon sugar, mix together and roll warm donuts in the sugar to ensure it sticks all over.

9. For cinnamon apple glaze, add sugar and cinnamon together and stir. Then add the apple juice and whisk together until smooth.

Yield: 24 fritters

Sweet Potato Parsnip Latkes

2 pounds Garnet sweet potatoes, peeled
1 pound parsnips, peeled
1 large sweet onion, peeled
6 large eggs, beaten
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons matzoh meal
1 tablespoon coarse Kosher salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
olive oil for frying
sour cream
applesauce

1. Using the coarse side of a box grater or a food processor fitted with a medium coarse grating disk, grate the potatoes, parsnips, and sweet onion. Toss together in a large bowl.

2. Add eggs, matzoh meal, salt, and pepper to potato mixture and toss to mix well.

3. Pour ¾ inch of oil into a 10 to 12 inch frying pan (with sides at least 2 inches high) over medium high heat. When oil reaches 350 degrees, scoop 1/3 cup of potato mixture from bowl and shape into a patty about 1/3 inch thick, then gently slide the pancake into hot oil. Cook 3 or 4 pancakes at a time (do not overcrowd pan) until edges are crispy and well browned, 2 to 3 minutes. Gently turn and cook until other side is golden brown, 2 to 3 minutes longer.

4. Transfer pancakes to a baking sheet lined with paper towels and drain briefly, then keep warm in a 200 degree oven while you cook the remaining pancakes. Serve hot with sour cream and applesauce.

Yield: 18 Latkes

• Jewish Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Carl Levin petitioned AIPAC to support the Obama administration’s START missile defense treaty, on the grounds that it would strengthen ties with Russia and thereby help deal with Iran. [Ben Smith]

• Palestinian Authority President Abbas called for the release of Gilad Schalit. It is part of the rising tensions between him and Hamas due to the WikiLeaks revelation that the P.A. was consulted before Operation Cast Lead. [JPost]

• So the Tehran airport has a gigantic Star of David carved into the outside of its roof. Seriously. [Atlantic Wire]

• Natalie Portman compares learning to dance ballet (for Darren Aronofsky’s new film) to putting on tefillin. [NYT]

• Prominent Bay Area Jewish philanthropist Richard Goldman died at 90. [JTA]

Because you asked for it (or even if you didn’t): Matisyahu does Hanukkah.

Click here for PDF version of album cover artwork.
Brian Scott/Boondesign

Download the entire album. [.ZIP file, 47 MB]

They are a people, albeit a diverse and dispersed one, spread throughout the world, separated by geography and language, yet still connected through a rich and shared cultural lineage.

I’m speaking, of course, about remixers.

Remixers are electronic musicians who take a pre-existing piece of recorded music and turn it into something else, sometimes something else entirely. They delight in finding choice moments in the original and rearranging what was there until it resembles the source material yet feels wholly new, wholly its own.

As Hanukkah approached this year, I sent a note to various remixers, asking if they’d be interested in selecting a holiday staple, or a song from another festive Jewish event, and taking a stab at remixing it. The response was swift, strong, and positive—as was the supportive response from the musicians and bands who had recorded the originals from which the remixers would subsequently work. Permission having been granted by the originating musicians (or their respective record labels), the remixers dove in deep, enacting their alterations with everything from laptops to modular synthesizers.

To remix is to act with various intentions: to pay homage, to tweak, to update, to comment, to gloss, to cross-reference, to entertain, to reflect. One thing, however, that none of the remixes on this compilation intends to do is to correct; all the original tracks from which these remixes were constructed are excellent in their own right—there is no kitsch, no camp, no music-by-the-yard, no cloyingly infant-oriented forced cheer, no tongues in any cheeks, no winking among them.

And so, while some of these remixes are quite radical—just try to detect the sonorities of the klezmer original in ocp’s version of the Alexandria Kleztet’s holiday favorite, “Chanukah Chag Yafe”—everything done here was committed out of affection for the music.

The album’s content ranges widely, from the kid-friendly (the “Chag Yafe”) to lush ambient-pop renditions of “Maoz Tzur” and “Sivivon Sov Sov Sov” to hip-hop-derived takes on three klezmer favorites (“Od Yishama,” “Ose Shalom,” and “Die Goldene Chasene”) to an original by the New Klezmer Trio, “Thermoglyphics,” reimagined as a feat of traditional Eastern European android folk music. And of course it wouldn’t be a Jewish festivity without “Hava Nagila,” heard here moving back and forth between heavy synthesis and a piano/guitar performance.

As the project was nearing completion, I got in touch with a wise friend, one who knows far more Yiddish than I do—which is to say, he knows more than just words involving disappointment, food, bodily functions, and relatives. I asked my friend, “How would you say ‘remix’ in Yiddish?” Being wise, he thought better than to come up with a new word; he thought better than to reply with some snazzy neologism, some antiquated-sounding yet entirely newly created term, some ersatz steampunk Yiddish.

Instead, he sent me a steady stream of short phrases, each an attempt to probe, in Yiddish, what a remix is at its heart. The best of his probings, “anander mol, anander veig,” became the title of this set. It means, in a literal translation, “another time, another way”—old ways, reconsidered; old modes, remodeled; old music, remade.

Download the entire album. [.ZIP file, 47 MB]

Listen to individual tracks, or download them individually (on a PC, right-click on the song title to save; on a Mac use CTRL-click):

1. “Maoz Tzur (Rock of Ages)”
Remix by: Mark Rushton (Iowa City, Iowa)
Original by: Dov Rosenblatt, Rosi Golan, and Deena Goodman

2. “Die Goldene Chasene”
Remix by: xntrxx, aka Harro van Duijn (Etten-Leur, Netherlands)
Original by: Dave Tarras (Permission from Shanachie/Yazoo Records)

3. “Sivivon Sov Sov Sov”
Remix by: Paula Daunt (Berlin, Germany)
Original by: Alicia Jo Rabins

4. “Ose Shalom”
Remix by: Diego Bernal (San Antonio, Texas)
Original by: Fourth Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra

5. “Thermoglyphics”
Remix by: Dance Robot Dance, aka Brian Biggs (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Original by: New Klezmer Trio (Composed by Ben Goldberg)

6. “Chanukah Chag Yafe”
Remix by: ocp, aka João Ricardo (Porto, Portugal)
Original by: Alexandria Kleztet

7. “Hava Nagila”
Remix by: Roddy Schrock (Brooklyn, New York)
Original by: Paul Toshner and Felix Benasuly, who perform together as poi43.com (London, England).

8. “Yishama-O-Rama (Radiata Edit)”
Remix by: Cut Loose, aka Jen Bell (Wellington, New Zealand)
Original by: Klezmer Rebs

Cover Art by Brian Scott (boondesign.com)

Special thanks to: Aaron Bisman and JDub Records, Cedar AV, Elizabeth Chur, Jared Dunne, Gregor Ehrlich, Giselle Fahimian, Ben Goldberg and the New Klezmer Trio, Randall Grass and Shanachie/Yazoo Records, Shawn Kelly, Seth Kibel and the Alexandria Kleztet, the Klezmer Rebs, Josh Kun, Thomas (Mystified) Park, Alicia Jo Rabins, Leonardo Rosado, Dov Rosenblatt, Roger Ruzow and the 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra, Paul Toshner and poi43.com, Alec Vance, Rob Walker, Adam Williams, Archive.org, Bandcamp.com, drop.io (RIP), Freesound.org, Soundcloud.com.

I was shocked at how much I liked An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank, by Elaine Marie Alphin. It’s rigorously researched and very, very gripping. One spring day in Atlanta in 1913, 13-year-old Mary Phagan put on a pretty violet dress and went to pick up her paycheck at the National Pencil Company. She intended to go from there to the Confederate Memorial Day parade. She never made it. Her body was found in the factory basement, a cord around her throat, her dress pushed up past her knees. Leo Frank, the pencil factory’s supervisor, who was seen as a rich, dirty Yankee Jewish interloper, was convicted of the crime in a rigged trial. When Georgia’s governor commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment, a crowd of furious citizens kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him. The miscarriage of justice led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. Alphin’s book, chock-full of photos and newspaper clippings, tells the story in an immensely readable way, like a horrifying, absorbing mystery novel. Alphin presents evidence about who really committed the crime, offers a picture of post-Reconstruction-era Southern bigotry, and names the prominent citizens who led the lynching party. For budding true-crime readers, this book would be a terrific Hanukkah gift. It’s my pick for both the Newbery Award (it actually is distinguished!) and the National Jewish Book Award. (Recommended for ages 12 to adult.)

The Song of the Whales, by Uri Orlev, translated by Hillel Halkin, is equally distinguished but will appeal to very a different audience. It’s a mystical, fairy-tale-like novel about Michael, a soulful 11-year-old boy who moves to Jerusalem from Long Island and develops a close bond with his grandfather. Michael soon discovers that his grandfather has a secret power—traveling through dreams. The two start taking fantastic voyages together, repairing broken dreams by infusing a bit of hope into them, taking beautiful dreams that have “faded like old carpets” and restoring them. As his grandfather becomes frailer, Michael shifts from merely holding his Grandpa’s dream tools to becoming the lead dreamwalker himself. When my daughter Josie, 9, finished this sweet, sad, minimalist tale, she said haltingly, “It’s beautiful, but I think it’s very metaphorical?” Indeed. (Ages 10 to adult.)

I was very taken with The Year of Goodbyes, by Debbie Levy, another slim book. This one should appeal to youthful poetry lovers and reluctant readers. There’s a lot of white space on the page, and the voice is approachable; it’s not at all intimidating. It begins:

I write these words

on the very first page

of my brand-new book,

my wordless

untouched,

blank-new book

with sturdy brown covers,

like heels of bread

spread with smooth butter pages inside.

It goes on to tell the story of Levy’s mother, Jutta, a privileged young girl in Germany in the 1930s. Levy’s jumping-off point is her mother’s actual poesiealbum, a sort of scrapbook kept by young girls. Levy shares some of the album’s inscriptions, drawings, and stickers, layering them upon her own verses about her mother’s life, told in the first person. Through Jutta’s life and friendships, we see the restrictions on German Jews grow. Jutta obviously survives—after all, we know that her daughter is writing her story—so kids who are terrified of Holocaust narratives should be able to handle this one. At the end of the book, we learn what happened to Jutta after she escaped the Nazis by sailing to America on the Queen Mary. We see family photos and learn the fates of Jutta’s friends. Part of me thinks the book would have worked better as a web site—a clickable version of the physical pages of the poesiealbum, looking as it really looked. Ms. Levy, perhaps an iPad app? (Ages 9 to adult.)

Under a Red Sky: Memoir of a Childhood in Communist Romania, by Haya Leah Molnar, is a more challenging read. When the story opens, Eva is a much-loved 6-year-old living in a cramped multigenerational household of sniping, snarking relatives in 1950s Bucharest. Her formerly wealthy, staunchly anti-Communist family is suffering under Romania’s Communist regime. Terrible things have happened during the war, but little Eva can’t quite figure out what. The secret police are everywhere. Family secrets are, too. When Eva’s family applies to emigrate to Israel, she begins to learn about her relatives’ history and her own Judaism. The ending—will the family make it out of Europe?—is suspenseful and dramatic. But the memoir has plenty of humor, too. Don’t be put off by the unappealing cover and dry, school-sounding subtitle; this is an engaging read as well as a thoughtful one. But because it looks forbidding, and the first few pages may be confusing, I’d only give it to kids who already love to read. (Ages 15 to adult.)

Ashes, by Kathryn Lasky, a Newbery Honor winner, also suffers from a slow beginning, but it gathers steam fast. It’s the story of 13-year-old Gaby, a pretty, book-loving non-Jew in 1930s Germany. Her father is an astrophysicist at the University of Berlin, a colleague and friend of Albert Einstein; her mom’s best pal, Baba, is a fabulous Jewish society columnist. Gaby’s life seems sweet—luscious descriptions of parties, society events, and fabulous outfits will delight fashion-loving girls—but the Nazis are gaining power, and anti-Fascist intellectuals like her family are disparagingly called “White Jews.” Einstein’s work is derided as “Jewish physics,” and Gaby’s beloved, chic literature teacher isn’t who she seems. Adults may see some of the plot twists coming, but kids won’t. Each chapter begins with a well-chosen, pointed quote from an author Gaby loves—Jack London, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Heine—authors whose books are burned by the Nazis at the book’s climax. Jewish kids need to know that not all Germans were Nazis, and this very readable book is a good way to teach them. (Ages 10 to adult.)

I did not want to like Once, by Morris Gleitzman. I hated the cover line: “Everybody deserves to have something good in their life. At least once.” More important, Once sounded to me like a rehash of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a book I loathed. Children (and adults) do not need faux-naif, manipulative, emotionally inauthentic Holocaust books. But I was wrong. Felix, a Jewish boy in Poland in 1942, isn’t an idiot. He’s in denial. As the book goes on and the horrors mount, Felix’s denial evaporates. Storytelling has been his shield and survival strategy. As he loses that ability to tell himself truth-deflecting stories, you feel sick. The pacing of this book is incredible—Gleitzman is known in his native Australia for writing funny, goofy, contemporary children’s books—and the book’s short paragraphs and use of humor will make it enticing to boys and non-book-lovers. But be forewarned, this was the only book on my list that made me cry. The Nazis’ brutality is explicit and disgusting; this should not be any child’s first Holocaust novel. (Start with Number the Stars instead.) Once, which is influenced by the story of Janusz Korczak, offers no false hope. (Ages 11 to 15.)

You may have noticed: This list contains a lot of Holocaust books, though I know many young readers would prefer books about the world they know, where the dramas involve cute boys, popularity, and finding oneself in a land of pop culture and plenty. Inconvenient, by Margie Gelbwasser, will engross those readers. Alyssa, 15, feels herself growing away from her best friend, Lara, who’s desperate to be part of the popular crowd. While Lara sucks up to the cool kids, Alyssa wants to get closer to Keith, her running partner on the school track team. What makes the story intriguing from a Jewish perspective is that Lara and Alyssa are Russian Jews whose families have emigrated to New Jersey. In their culture, alcohol is part of every gathering. Russians are used to laughing off hangovers, but Alyssa’s mom’s drinking is spiraling out of control. In this closed culture, where the belief in not airing your dirty laundry in front of the goyim also applies to the non-Russian Jewish community, Alyssa feels ashamed and isolated. Inconvenient isn’t perfect—Keith is the dreamiest boy ever, and Alyssa’s dad is underwritten—but the romance is very romantic (conservative parents should know that there’s some explicit fooling around), and the ending is perfect. (Ages 13 to 17.)

Perfect throughout is Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, by Barry Deutsch. It’s a very weird, confidently drawn graphic novel about an 11-year-old Orthodox girl who fervently wants to fight dragons. Mirka Herschberg lives in a tight-knit community in an unknown time and place where boys have payos and married women cover their hair, but where the woods are full of trolls and witches and humungous crazed pigs. I love that the stepmother in this book is good instead of evil, and I love that Deutsch really knows how to tell a story in his chosen medium. Characters burst free of their panels; the interplay of image and text is flawless; the entire book is kinetic and action-filled, but thoughtful too. A must for graphic-novel fans. (Ages 8 to 13.)

A very different depiction of life in an Orthodox community is Hush, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It’s terrific, but so harrowing I don’t think it’s for everyone.

There you go. Shop well, and Happy Hanukkah.

It is the Vox Tablet theme song, originally composed by Jewlia Eisenberg and re-conceived here by remix masters Cedar AV. They did it on assignment from Marc Weidenbaum, founder of the popular music and sound blog Disquiet, who himself took on a much more ambitious assignment from Tablet Magazine: Commission eight songs for a Hanukkah remix album. The results are in, and we’ll be posting the album for free download on Monday. Plus, also on Monday, Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry interviews Weidenbaum about the project. Get psyched!

My favorite Jewish picture book this year, by far, is Beautiful Yetta, the Yiddish Chicken by Daniel Pinkwater and illustrated by Jill Pinkwater. This multi-culti immigration fantasy is funny and sweet. Written in simple, poetic sentences, it is the story of Yetta, who will not be soup. After being delivered to Phil’s Poultry World, she escapes and finds herself on the streets of Brooklyn. The pigeons are unhelpful schmucks. All seems lost until she rescues a parrot from cat-related disaster, and suddenly Yetta has friends to show her the ropes of city life. She speaks only Yiddish and her new parrot friends speak only Spanish (there are translations), making this book hilarious to read out loud, especially if you speak neither language. My 6-year-old now wanders around the house exclaiming “Gevalt!” and cooing “Meyn teyehreh kinder!” at her stuffed animals. The Yiddish feels organic to the plot, not grafted-on. (Recommend for ages 4-8).

The Rooster Prince of Breslov by Ann Redisch Stampler and illustrated by Eugene Yelchin, is a more traditional poultry-driven story—it’s based on an old folktale attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov—with edgier, funkier illustrations. In this one, the prince suddenly decides he’s a rooster, rips off his clothes, and starts pecking around on the floor. The king and queen are at wits’ end until a mysterious, frail old man shows up and works wonders. Stampler retells the fable beautifully, and I love the oddball art. (Ages 5-9)

On the board-book front, Happy Hanukkah Lights by Jacqueline Jules and illustrated by Michelle Shapiro, is a fine choice despite its lack of poultry (actual or delusional). Saying “It’s better than Happy Hanukkah, Corduroy” is not the most rousing recommendation, but hey, it’s also better than Biscuit’s Hanukkah. Unlike some other books for the very wee, it mentions Judah Maccabee, the folk-arty illustrations are appealing, and the couplets actually scan: “Our smiles spin from face to face/ Like dreidels by the fireplace.” Plus the daddy is the one making the latkes. (Ages 1-4)

There are some kids—frequently boys—who love “true books.” For them, there’s Zishe the Strongman, by Robert Rubinstein and illustrated by Wendy Miller. Zishe, born Siegmund Breitbart in 1883, was a Polish Jew who toured the world demonstrating his strength—bending iron bars with his bare hands, cracking Brazil nuts between his fingers, pulling a wagonload of people down Fifth Avenue by his teeth. But Zishe was sensitive, too, playing his cello for hospitalized children and meeting with the Jewish community everywhere he went. The sepia-toned illustrations have a soft-edged, wistful, pencil-y feel, but with a cartoony zing that keeps them from looking too “historical” and therefore boring. (Ages 5-8)

Another wonderful nonfiction book is Emma’s Poem: The Voice of the Statue of Liberty by Linda Glaser and illustrated by Claire Nivola. We don’t get many historical portraits of wealthy American Jews in children’s books. So, the notion of Emma Lazarus—the rich, artistic 19th-century lady who wrote the poem inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty—caring about the fate of poor immigrants is appealing, and Glaser wisely focuses on explicating the famous last five lines of “The New Colossus” (the entire sonnet is reprinted in the back), which are the easiest for kids to understand. Plus, the painterly illustrations are so full of wonderful texture and detail that budding fashion and interior designers will plotz. (Ages 5-10)

Yet another story set in the late 19th century was a big hit with my younger daughter Maxie. Feivel’s Flying Horses by Heidi Smith Hyde and illustrated by Johanna van der Sterre is a dreamy little tale about immigration, this time from the perspective of a member of the huddled masses. Feivel, a woodcarver of ritual objects in the Old Country, leaves his beloved family behind to create a better life for them in America. He apprentices to a Coney Island merry-go-round maker, and every horse he makes is a tribute to a member of his family. In tiny letters, he carves his loved ones’ names into the saddles. Maxie’s favorite is the little pony covered in glittering glass jewels that Feivel makes for his baby Lena, who, he notes sadly, “was no longer a baby.” Finally Feivel finishes the carousel and can afford to send for his family. Reunited, they ride around and around. You get familial love, Coney Island, fancy horses, sorrow and sweetness. What’s not to like? A note in the back discusses the many Jewish artisans who became carousel artists in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (Ages 4-8)

And, hey, look, a contemporary story! A Tale of Two Seders by Minda Avra Portnoy and illustrated by Valeria Cis is about life after divorce. A little girl tries to get used to having a seder in each parent’s house (she notes that Passover, with its two seders, is “a lot easier than Thanksgiving, when there’s also lots of food but you have to decide where to eat it”). While she longs for her parents to get back together, she also comes to understand that “families are like charoset. Some have more ingredients than others, some stick together better than others, some are sweeter than others. But each one is tasty in its own way.” (In context, the quote isn’t as sappy as it sounds.) The brightly colored art, full of pattern and delightful outfits, does its part to keep sorrow at bay. Figures that the author of Where Do People Go When They Die?, one of the best Jewish children’s books about death, wrote an honest and bittersweet book about another tough topic. (Ages 4-8)

It’s been a good year for Pesach books. Passover: Celebrating Now, Remembering Then, by Harriet Ziefert, is ravishing—it’s like an illuminated manuscript in children’s book form. Illustrator Karla Gudeon is also a fine-art painter and ketubah artist. Her work’s the star here—the two-page spread of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea is breathtaking, alive with color and movement. There are flaps to lift, showing the differences between “then” (the story of the Exodus) and “now” (what we do to commemorate it today), so there’s a bit of interactivity to keep kids engaged. I could see the book standing in for a Haggadah for minimally observant families, but I think it would be welcome on anyone’s coffee table. (Ages 4-10)

I’m not sure why Howard Schwartz isn’t a bigger rock star. I couldn’t find a single copy of Gathering Sparks in any bookstore in Manhattan. A shandeh. Schwartz’s 2005 collaboration with illustrator Kristina Swarner, Before You Were Born, made my best-books list at the Forward that year. It’s now out of print. Another shandeh. Both books are serene, lovely, intimate—perfect bedtime books. In Gathering Sparks, told in the second person, you are a child asking your grandfather about how the stars came to be. He tells you the story of God filling vessels with light, the vessels shattering, the responsibility we all share to gather the sparks and heal the world. “For every good deed you do, one of those hidden sparks rises up and a little bit of the world is repaired,” the grandfather tells you. Again, Swarner’s radiant, hazy, mixed-media paintings work perfectly with Schwartz’s poetic text. The stars blend with the flowers and look like fireflies dancing around the storyteller and listener. Tikkun Olam is beautiful, and so is this book. (Ages 4-8)

Be sure to check back next week for the second half of the list—chapter books and graphic novels.

Hanukkah 2010

Hanukkah: A Guide for the Perplexed: Everything you wanted to know about the Festival of Lights, by the Editors

Gelt and Innocence: A feverish love of collecting masked a family’s shameful truth: There was no money. By Chanel Dubofsky

Festival of Birthdays: Behind drawn curtains, the author’s family celebrated the holidays the only way they could, by David Bezmozgis

Dolled Up: American Girl teaches the economic realities of the old Lower East Side—and of today, by Daphne Merkin

Miracle on New Jersey Avenue: An unexpected profusion of gifts for six Brooklyn siblings, by Ben Birnbaum

Can’t Buy Jappiness: An illustrated memoir of Hanukkah, materialism, and materials, by Vanessa Davis

Headlights: A comedienne’s special kind of holiday cheer, by Jackie Hoffman

Music:
Anander Mol, Anander Veig: Another Time, Another Way: Tablet Magazine’s Hanukkah album, remixed versions of holiday and Jewish classics, by Marc Weidenbaum

‘Eight Days of Hanukkah’: How Orrin Hatch came to write a Hanukkah song for Tablet Magazine, by Jeffery Goldberg

Hanukkah Alegre!: A Ladino conversation group gathers for festivities, by Vox Tablet

Ocho Kandelikas: Flory Jagoda’s popular holiday song has its roots in a Bosnian village, by Vox Tablet

Food:
Sweet and Light: A well-oiled selection of Hanukkah fare—from a new twist on latkes to salads and savory ‘gelt,’ by Melissa Petitto

My Hanukkah Gift: A writer’s reflections on her olive grove and a holiday ritual, by Ruth Ellen Gruber

News & Politics:
Camp Fire: In his memoir, the famous refusenik remembered celebrating Hanukkah in the Soviet Gulag, by Natan Sharansky

Cast Lead: What the Gaza operation and dreidels have in common, by Shoshana Kordova

Throughout the vagaries of my connection to religion, I’ve never once had doubts about my connection to its material culture—the challah knives, washing cups, mezuzahs, etc., of Jewish life. Of this stuff, and it is stuff, none has been more alluring for me than our various candle holders. That these pieces occupy the particularly female realm of our religious universe is relevant, but that the point of these accoutrements is to hold fire is even more so. The Hebrew word shamayim—the heavens —is comprised of two words: aish, or fire, and mayim, which means water. As rabbi Shlomo Riskin, among others, has noted: “[While] fire has the ability to bring warmth, it can also devour and destroy. … [C]loud and fire—the lack of clarity expressed by a cloud and the inability to gaze directly into a flame—likewise express one of the deepest truths of the Jewish message: religion is not so much paradise as it is paradox. God demands fealty even in the face of agonizing questions and disturbing uncertainty.”

Sabbath candles certainly fit the bill, as they demand our weekly attention to the challenge of this uncertainty. But what of the chanukiah, the nine-armed fire-holder that represents, in addition to Judaism’s essential paradox, the assertion of a miracle—an alleged interruption into our earthly landscape by the Divine? And here we are, back at the original problem: God.

Ah, but we don’t need to be—and that is one of the enduring gifts of Jewish life. Take a look at the chanukiahs—the proper name for the menorahs used at Hanukkah—collected here, which show evidence not of God’s hand so much as of man’s: the seemingly eternal creative engagement of human beings with our history and tradition. Of these, my favorite is Candlesticks United by Reddish, a partnership of the Israeli designers Naama Steinbock and Idan Friedman. As Daniel Belasco of the Jewish Museum recently observed, the Reddish piece is part of a trend of repurposing regular or Sabbath candlesticks into menorahs. But in Candlesticks United, this trick moves beyond clever to poignant: Built out of orphaned Sabbath candles Steinbock and Friedman found at flea markets and vintage stores, it enables the Jewish past not simply to speak to the Jewish present, but to create it. It’s almost inspired enough to make us forget something perhaps more perplexing, more painfully out of reach, even than God: our own human history, and the fact of what our ancestors chose to, or were made to, leave behind.

Who is the senator? It’s Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), last seen in these digital pages singing about Hanukkah. In addition to his respect for private property, Muslims, the Constitution, and everything else, Hatch cited past instances in which his Mormon faith has been threatened with similar discrimination.

Because it’s been nine months since it was last in your head … here’s “Eight Days of Hanukkah”!

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Republican Orrin Hatch Stands Up For Cordoba House [TPM]
Related: Eight Days of Hanukkah [Tablet Magazine]

The real story of Hanukkah is not about oil; it’s about factionalism and human suffering. When I first read that grisly story, the one in the apocrypha, my feelings about my ancestral religion slid a notch away from disinterest and toward dyspepsia.

In the book of 1 Maccabees, the gentiles have desecrated the Jews’ Holy of Holies, the Temple at Mount Zion. A family of badass Rambo Jews—the Maccabees—retake the Temple by force. They re-sanctify the altar by lighting a menorah, and the oil lasts eight crazy nights. That’s the part they teach you in Hebrew school.

But then, having made their omelette, the Maccabees go on breaking eggs. The tale of the magic fuel starts and ends in chapter 4 of 1 Maccabees, but for the rest of that book (chapters 5 through 16) and for the entirety of 2 Maccabees (15 more chapters), the Rambo Jews go on kicking ass. They slaughter gentiles and lapsed Jews alike. “They forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys they found within the boundaries of Israel,” says the book. They burned their enemies alive and “divided a very large amount of plunder.” They decapitated the enemy king and impaled his head on a pike, “a clear and conspicuous sign to everyone of the help of the Lord.”

At best, the Maccabees were fundamentalist freedom fighters. At worst, they were terrorists—the Bible clearly reports that they targeted civilians. When the Maccabees were triumphant, they made sacrifices unto God; when times were tough, they went on praying and retreated to the mountains, sleeping in caves and growing scraggly terrorist beards. These are the heroes of the Hanukkah tale: the Taliban without dialysis.

This is where I normally put down religious texts and start reading Thoreau. What good is a Holy Book if it lavishes praise on guerrillas? What good is monotheism if it countenances murder?

This is also where most big-budget action movies lose me. The screenwriters are so eager to start the carnage that they don’t spend much time justifying the conflict. And, of course, they don’t have to. This is the compact audiences make by entering the multiplex: we’ll be on Will Smith’s side from the moment he steps on screen, and the badder you make the bad guys, the louder we’ll cheer when they blow up. All of which leaves tree-huggers like me alone with our incongruous gripes: wouldn’t this be easier if nobody started shooting in the first place? I am especially impatient with popcorn flicks that hinge on vague, quasi-religious morals. Onscreen, the most irrational solution is always tried first, everything is possible if you just have faith, and righteousness prevails against all odds. It’s infuriating.

Avatar does not shy away from that Hollywood formula. The jungle people are a variation on the “noble savage” stereotype, the villains are relentlessly, one-dimensionally villainous, and the heroes utter groan-worthy battle cries (“You’re not the only one with guns, bitch!”). But you don’t groan. At least, I didn’t, because by that point I was literally on the edge of my seat, fists clenched, praying for the evil humans to die.

“The last time I came out of a movie feeling that way it was the first time I saw Star Wars,” Steven Spielberg has said. I wasn’t alive in 1977, so I’ll just say that Avatar is the first blockbuster that ever made me reach catharsis. Cameron’s pacing is flawless, and the visuals are as stunning as everyone hoped they’d be. Moreover, Cameron takes the time to set up his conflict. He doesn’t take for granted that you’ll side with the hulking azure aliens against the greedy humans. Rather, he shows you the world through the aliens’ eyes.

Their world is a lush DayGlo jungle, a decadent mushroom trip of a place. So when the capitalist war criminals start eying the precious metals under the forest floor, you feel it like a punch in the gut. “But you haven’t been there,” you want to yell at Giovanni Ribisi. “It’s so pretty!”

I won’t spoil too much, because I’m expecting everyone to see this movie. Let’s just say that Avatar lets you walk a mile in the broad prehensile feet of a proud race whose connection to their ancestral land is in danger of being brutally severed. Cameron draws on several real-world scenarios, sometimes ham-handedly, sometimes movingly, sometimes both at once. Politically minded viewers will recognize parallels to Afghanistan, Iraq, Native Americans, colonial Africa, and present-day Gaza. But I think what allowed me to empathize so easily with the blue guys was that they reminded me of yet another people—my own. What is it like to belong to a tribe whose central shrine has been ravaged, who live in fear of persecution, who zealously—perhaps overzealously—guard their fragile slice of holy land? I don’t have to guess. I already know.

And, through the blue guys, for the first time in my life I found myself empathizing with the Maccabees. They were right about some things, at least: Antiochus was a tyrant, and he did not seem open to diplomacy. The Maccabees saw only one way to stand up to power and they did so bravely. If it weren’t for the Rambo Jews, who knows? Perhaps the rabbis would have been killed off, the Hellenized Jews would have named their uncircumcised sons Alexander, and Judaism would have become nothing more than a memory.

I don’t think the Temple at Mount Zion was worth killing and dying for 2,000 years ago, and I don’t think its memory is worth killing and dying for now. I’m a lover, not a fighter. But as much as I want to, I cannot categorically dismiss the possibility that there some things in the universe worth fighting for. Even Thoreau believed that.

These are wild-eyed and fuzzy sentiments—the kind one might have after, say, a three-hour romp through a supernatural CGI forest. I know things are more complicated than they appear in the movies. Avatar will clean up at the Oscars, but I don’t expect it to solve any geopolitical conflicts. What it can do, though, is expand our collective narrative vocabulary. Humans understand the world as much through stories as through reason. The real story of the Middle East is not about oil; it’s about factionalism and human suffering. Perhaps Cameron’s story can help us empathize with the creation myths of national identity, both others’ and our own.

Andrew Marantz is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Slate, Heeb, New York, The New York Times, and other publications.

For me, though, the olive harvest and subsequent production of oil provide a parallel seasonal ritual, in which bruschetta, or grilled bread drenched in dense new oil, provides the ceremonial flavor.

My family and I have property in an olive-producing area of Umbria, in central Italy, where the landscape is a hilly mix of forest and farmland, and many of the slopes are covered with groves of olive trees.

Umbria is home to several big olive oil concerns, with huge groves comprising thousands of trees. But many people, like me, have small private holdings that provide enough oil for their own needs, as well as a portion left over for sale.

On our land, we have several dozen olive trees. I keep most of them pruned, but otherwise, I admit, I’m a very poor farmer. I don’t plow or fertilize or do much else to care for them; I regard what they produce as something of a gift, and only about half of the trees, in fact, bear fruit.

Still, each November sees me out in the field, gathering olives and then having them taken to a local frantoio, or olive press, where they are turned into oil.

The picking process is hard, repetitive work, but it’s simple. I spread a net on the ground at the base of each tree and then strip the branches, using my fingers or an orange plastic hand-rake specially made for the job.

In Umbria we pick olives before there are overly ripe, so that you have to really pull them off. They are green and purple and brown as well as a mature black, and I love the little tug and the sound they make as they detach from their stems. The ripe black olives look luscious, but there is no temptation to sample them: raw olives are intensely bitter, inedible unless dried, salted, or processed in brine.

Sometimes friends come by to help me pick, but most of the time I do the job alone. I like it. The mechanical action of reaching up to strip the fruit induces a meditative state: I see olives when I close my eyes. Hanukkah is the festival of light and rededication, and in a way the process of picking is one of renewal. On quite a few occasions, with my thought processes detached from the physical activity, I have been able to sort my way through complicated writing problems or other issues.

Once off the trees, the olives are placed in plastic crates, each of which holds between 20 and 25 kilos, and taken to the frantoio. You need a certain amount to be pressed and processed at one time, usually about 300 kilos. With my small yield I rarely have enough for this, so I usually give my olives to a neighbor who takes them to the frantoio with his.

This year was a particularly poor harvest, for me but also for many of my neighbors. All told I got just 120 kilos—though I know I left olives still clinging to high branches that I could not easily reach.

The two olive presses closest to my house are in a hilltop village of several hundred inhabitants about eight miles away, overlooking the Tiber River. Both produce superb oil from local olives; the loading zones at each are piled high with big stainless steel oil containers of various sizes and neat piles of red, yellow and green plastic crates, filled with olives ready to be processed.

One of the mills, run by a local policeman, uses the type of modern machinery that has become widespread in recent years. Most of my olives went to the policeman’s mill for processing, as the neighbor who takes my olives prefers this frantoio.

But I also took some to the other press, just down the street, which is one of the very few in the region that still produces oil in a more traditional way—more like the oil used in the Temple would have been produced. The olives are placed in a huge bowl and crushed into pulp by two giant rotating millstones. The pulp, then, is spread on mats, called fiscoli, which are piled atop each other on a spindle—like old LPs. When the pile reaches a certain height, it is pressed together vertically until the liquid runs out, at which point the oil is separated from the water.

Waiting around, watching and kibitzing a little is part of the ritual. And forget about latkes and doughnuts, both mills have an open fireplace in the corner where anyone who wants can grill a slice or two of bread and make bruschetta with fresh-pressed oil.

The taste of new oil is often slightly peppery, and an earthy tang of fresh olives scents the air, gets into your clothes, and makes everything feels slightly greasy. As it says in the Shulchan Aruch, “Oil permeates the entire substance of a thing.”

Ruth Ellen Gruber is the author of National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe and Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.

Top 5: Latkes [Always Hungry NY]

Every December, I’ve noticed two things. First, I’m a huge fan of Christmas movies, aside from the Jesus part. And second, I’m a huge fan of Christmas movies because there are very few Hanukkah films that can rival them. Where is the sweet story of the boy and his candle? The rollicking adventure of the little menorah that could? The tale of the rich ba-humbugging Avi Goldberg who hates Hanukkah until the ghosts of famous Jews teach him the way?

One day, I intend to make a film like that. But until then, I present you with a very special Hanukkah episode of my show, Break a Leg, one of the most successful shows on the web. The lead character, David (played by me), is met by his publicist, Stan Marley, who has what he thinks is a genius idea: a movie about Hanukkah and Zombies. He only needs a Jewish writer to put it all together.

Yuri Baranovsky is co-writer of Break a Leg. His work can be seen on www.breakaleg.tv and www.yuribaranovsky.com.