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.

My goyishe mother also took us to the movies. She found a job baking cookies and brownies for a concession stand at our town’s movie theater, rehabilitated by a band of hippies who didn’t want to peddle corporate candy. My fourth summer, while my mother baked, I played in the theater. On the sunniest of days I sat in the dark eating warm cookies and watching reverently as the hippies threaded the two movies they owned through the projector, over and over: Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Harold and Maude. This constitutes my early Jewish education.

I was a pale child. Nobody cut my hair, so I went off to kindergarten like a little chubby Ramone, hidden behind a thick brown curtain that hung down to my eyes in front and my shoulders in back. The other kids asked me if I was a boy or a girl. I refused to answer. Around December I tried to explain my complicated yet-clearly-superior holiday situation. While the other kids would receive presents only on Christmas, I’d be getting gifts for nine days (Hannukah plus December 25), although, given the Tuesday/Thursday schedule, several of those days would have to be crammed into a few evenings, between Spaghettios and R-rated movies.

This was a lot for my classmates to absorb. My hair was unkempt and my clothes were dirty (I insisted on sleeping in them), and my mother sometimes dropped me off at school in a belching rusty blue Plymouth that looked like a rotten blueberry. So obviously I was poor, maybe even poorer they were. But nine days of presents? Was I a liar? Were my parents thieves?

My parents provided another conceptual dilemma. There were a few kids whose fathers had simply left, but at the time not a single one of my 25 classmates had parents who split them, mothers on Monday with whom they watched Little House on the Prairie and fathers on Tuesday with whom they watched The Paper Chase.

Plus, I was “Jewish.”

Or so I claimed. For the fall of my first year of schooling this ancestry provided me with minor celebrity, until it came time for Christmas vacation. On one of the last days of school that December, Mrs. Augusta asked a student to volunteer to explain Christmas. A girl named Heather shot her hand up and told us about the baby Jesus and Santa Claus while the rest of us stewed, since this was an answer we all knew, and we wanted Mrs. Augusta to love us. When she asked if anyone could explain the Jewish holiday of Hannukah, I raised my hand and she smiled, since the question, of course, had been meant for me alone. I stood. “On Hanukkah,” I declared, “I get extra presents.”

Mrs. Augusta kept smiling. “Why?” she asked.

“I’m Jewish.”

“Yes,” she said, “and what does that mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“Judaism.”

I had never heard of “Judaism.”

My classmates, until that day free of that ancient sentiment that, I’d later learn, had prompted whispers and unhappiness when my Jew-father had moved onto Washington Road, began to giggle.

Mrs. Augusta tried to help. “What else do you do on Hannukah?”she asked.

I beamed. I knew this one: “I eat gelt and chopped liver!”

Giggles grew into guffaws, as kids parrotted me, special emphasis on gelt. It was a stupid word they had never heard before. “Gelt.” “Gult.” “Ga!”

Oh, Mrs. Augusta! She tried.

“Now, now. Doesn’t anyone have a question for Jeffrey?” Silence. “About being Jewish?”

Bob Hunt raised his hand. This would not be good. The rumor was that he had actually flunked kindergarten, so this was his second time through, and he was older, dangerous. For Halloween he’d been Gene Simmons, of KISS. If only I had known then what I know now about the American-Jewish tradition of “Who’s a Jew?,” a campy little game that is, in truth, a self-defense training maneuver intended to prepare you for encounters with goyish hostiles such as Bob Hunt. Who’s a Jew? Gene Simmons, for one. Han Solo, Fonzie, yer mother.

Bob’s question: “Yo. Sharlet. What’s gelt?”

“Gold coins?” I tried.

“Jewish people eat gold?” (And thus the endless cycle of anti-Semitism keeps on turning.)

“I mean, chocolate?”

Mrs. Augusta frowned. She had expected Maccabees and dreidels. Instead she was getting gelt, which she had never heard of. I was making a mockery of “Judaism.” “Which is it?” she asked. “Chocolate or gold? It has to be one or the other, Jeffrey. It can’t be both, can it?”

How to say that it can?

Like this: “It—it comes in a golden net,” I said.

“I think he means candy,” Mrs. Augusta fake-whispered to the class, winning their laughter.

I sat down. Mrs. Augusta decided to smooth things over with a song, “Jingle Bells.”

Bob Hunt leaned toward me, fake-whispering just like our teacher: “Candy-ass.”

I didn’t know what this meant, but it was clearly two things at once, and not good at all. Thereafter I resolved to be halfsies. I could not be fully both Jeffrey and Jew, chocolate and gold. If anyone asked, I decided, I was half-Jewish, on my father’s side, and he didn’t live with us anymore.

Reprinted from Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country in Between by Jeff Sharlet. Copyright 2011 by Jeff Sharlet. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Jesus Christ, Shal, said my wife. If you don’t want to go, just don’t go.

I didn’t want to go.

We had been invited to a Memorial Day barbecue, and I was feeling guilty. I’d been buried in work for months now—writing, rewriting, editing, copyediting—and I thought it would be good for my son to see me behaving like a human being, interacting with neighbors, nursing a beer while standing around the grill with the other dads.

It’ll be fun, Dad, said my son.

Of course it will be, I said. I can’t wait.

We brought wine. My wife saw some friends of hers from town and quickly fell into their conversation, my son ran off to play with the other children, and that left me alone with the men. I busied myself with the family dog for a few minutes and pretended to read some magazines that were lying on the deck, but soon I had no choice but to join them.

“Hey, Shalom,” called the homeowner. “Glad you could make it.”

He was standing in a tight half-circle around the barbecue grill with three other men, leaning in, hands in their pockets and licking their lips. “Oh, yeah,” said one. “That looks good,” said another. Perhaps I’ve simply watched too much pornography, but I was fairly certain they were about to gang-rape that poor grill.

I smiled and waved. Where was that damn dog?

My son called to me; he was playing tetherball with the other kids.

“Hey, Dad!” he called.

“Hey, buddy,” I called back, walking to the men. I wanted him to see me walking toward the men. He waved. I waved back.

When I reached the grill, one of the men was telling a lie. I didn’t know their names. He was, after the homeowner, Man No. 2. As he lied, Man No. 3 and Man No. 4 nodded.

“So, I said to the guy,” said Man No. 2, “ ‘I don’t think so. I think you’re going to go back into the stockroom, and get me a new one.’ ”

The other men nodded.

“I was like,” the liar continued, “ ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

Men are not my favorite people. I dislike them. I dislike them so much, I’m fairly certain they all dislike each other. How could they not? Everything with men is a pissing contest, a clumsy attempt to prove their manliness over one another. And so every story becomes a lie, every tale some macho confrontation. If we can’t outright ban testosterone, in the interest of world peace I think we should at least establish that men should measure their penises from the bottom; this adds a fast couple of inches and might negate the need for these contests once and for all.

Everyone nodded at Man No. 2’s lie. I did the same, glancing over at my son. He was trying to hit the tetherball back to a much larger boy, who was hitting the ball as hard as he could. The other boys cheered.

Man No. 3 decided to tell his own lie. He was the soccer coach, and his lie involved standing up in a manly manner to the father of one of the players.

“So, I said to him, ‘I don’t think so,’ ” he said. “ ‘I think you’re going to sit down and shut up while I coach this team.’ ”

Everyone nodded.

“ ‘I’m a better player than you,’ ” he continued, “ ‘and I’m a better coach than you, so sit down and shut up.’ ”

“Good for you,” said Man No. 2.

Man No. 4 nudged me.

“Did you see the Barcelona-Manchester game?” he asked.

“The what?” I asked.

““Man-Barcelona,” he said. “Yesterday.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I don’t follow sports, because they’re so stupid. I just never particularly cared for them. Let’s see a little hustle out there! my camp baseball coach used to shout at me. Why? I asked. I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer.

“Manbar Silona?” I asked.

I looked up and saw my son walking away from the tetherball court, alone, his head down. The other boys were shouting at each other, grabbing the ball, pushing each other.

“Man never had a chance,” said Man No. 2.

“Man,” agreed Man No. 3, “never had a chance.”

My son came over and hugged my leg.

“You OK?” I asked him.

He nodded, but I knew something was bothering him. I stepped away from the grill, and knelt down beside him.

“Did you have fun playing with the boys?” I asked him.

He shrugged and shook his head.

“Not really,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“They just want to win,” he said.

Man never had a chance.

I asked him if he wanted to go home. He said no; it had rained that morning, and he wandered off to look for newts.

Back at the grill, the pissing continued. Man No. 2 mentioned that he was going to go to his house on Cape Cod. Man No. 4 mentioned his trip to South America. Man No. 3 described the mountain-climbing trip he was looking forward to. I silently wondered how we could pass the measure-from-the-bottom law. I watched my son wandering through the tall grass as the other boys continued to fight over the tetherball.

Only two more months to Fuck-Off Day, I wanted to tell him.

Only two more months.

But there’s not much textual guidance. The Book of Esther opens with a description of a feast. It tells of white cotton and royal-blue wool wall hangings embroidered with cords of fine linen and purple wool, suspended over silver rods and marble pillars. There are gold and silver couches on platforms of green, white, shell, and onyx marble. When Queen Vashti, King Ahasuerus’ first wife, refuses to come to the banquet when summoned, Ahasuerus banishes her. After that, the Purim story is all plot, no scenery. With the exception of the royal finery that Mordecai, Esther’s uncle, will don for his parade—a line about blue and purple robes and a large gold crown—there is no visual information to go on.

Looking for inspiration, I rang Susan Handler, co-owner of Manhattan’s Creative Costume, which rents costumes for theater and film and to the general public. “No, we don’t really have Purim,” Handler said. “Nobody asks for Purim. People come in for Purim and want in general what everybody wants.” What in general do people want? “Today I just did a Purim couple: a mermaid and king Neptune.” Frankie Steinz, the owner of the eponymous costume shop in Manhattan, concurred: “Nobody wants Purim—we do things like fruit bowls and refrigerators and movie stars,” she said, adding that typically Purim is a time for theme parties, just not 6th-century-BCE Shushan-theme parties.

I thought I’d turn to movies, but it turns out unless you want be a Raoul Walsh-ian Middle-Eastern siren (such as Joan Collins in Esther and the King or Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra), there’s not much to go with.

Finally, I looked to fine art and hit the jackpot. Painters have depicted nearly every scene of the Purim tale. Not only does Western art offer interpretations of Shushan garb from 1650s through the 1890s, but many of the looks are easy to approximate from stuff you could grab from your or your grandmother’s closet. Ernest Normand’s portrait Vashti Deposed, from the late 19th century, reveals the banished queen wrapped in an indigo robe, her black hair falling over her face, lying in a commodious bed. It’s an affecting look—and easy to replicate. For the more risqué, there’s a blonde Esther in Theodore Chasseriau’s La Toilette d’Esther, from 1841, in which our heroine is naked but for a piece of white fabric draped across her waist, a gold necklace, and bangles.

The Purim scene that garnered the most painterly attention is Esther appearing before king Ahasuerus. Poussin’s Esther Before Assuerus (1640), Batoni’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (1740), and Lefevre’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (1675) each contain solid blocks of colorful cloaks, which my eye gravitated toward. Sir John Everett Millais’ 19th-century Esther is a magnificent portrait of a red-haired queen in contemplation, wearing a loose canary-yellow robe with splotches of color. (Millais used an authentic Chinese Qing-dynasty robe turned inside-out for Esther’s gown, I discovered: There’s a great idea.) I made my decision: I would try my hand at just such a Purim cloak, a simple no-sew affair.

I called Mood Fabrics, of Project Runway fame, located in New York’s Garment District. The clerk assured me that making a cloak and dyeing it to my specifications would be easy. “Dyes work best on natural fibers like cotton or silk or wool,” she explained. “Your best bet would be cotton, but for more weight go for wool.” An adult-sized cloak requires 4 to 5 yards of fabric, one for a small child, 2 to 3.

On the Rit dye website I found a neat color chart that indicates precise color recipes. Esther’s robe by Millais? That would be Yellow 2 #61: “1/4 Tsp Rose Pink, 1 Tbs Lemon Yellow and 1 Cup water.” Batoni’s pink and pea-green Ahasuerus is a cinch to match, as are Poussin’s courtiers in blazing orange and cobalt blue.

It seemed so easy, I wanted to do more. And what about crowns and accessories? I called Ellen Christine Colon-Lugo, a New York milliner whose confections are sold at Bendel’s and the shop of Metropolitan Opera and have appeared in publications like Elle and Vogue. She suggested investing in a turban. “They are in right now, and it’s a good excuse to buy one,” she said. “You can stick feathers in a turban, or pin on broaches.” She suggested visiting a South Asian emporium for a costume. “Indian shirts, the embroidered or mirrored ones, the cotton ones with shiny dots are a good choice, and Sari fabric is also great.”

Jessica Harris, a buyer at the Wasteland, a popular vintage shop on Los Angeles’ Melrose Avenue, suggested keeping it simple. “You can buy some fabric and add jewels,” she said. “Tie a bunch of different scarves together to make a cape or stoles and visit a crafts store—there are tons of ideas there for fabric decorations.”

Sandy Schreier, a private collector of haute couture and Hollywood costumes (she owns Rita Hayworth’s gown from Gilda), hesitated to offer Purim costume advice—at first. “I am not a Purim dresser,” she said. “It’s hard for me to dress up because of what I do and what I’m known for—it has to be all or nothing.”

She recalled that the last time she attended a Purim party, she and her husband dressed as Esther and Haman, and they “made the costumes as if they were at Sunday Hebrew school.” She glued feathers on her nightgown and made tin-foil crowns. She encouraged aggressively homemade-looking confections—Sunday School chic. “Everyone’s got cardboard and tin foil, so start with that,” Schreier said. “Make a crown and glue glitter on it. Take various dollar-store beads like for Mardi Gras, or better, your mother’s or grandmother’s costume jewelry, and pile it on.”

Once she got going she couldn’t be stopped: “Take that old bridesmaid’s dress or prom dress and put that on as a base—or the nightgown, a great fallback. Go to a sewing store or fabric shop and buy some of that silver or gold crinkled fabric and make a train from your shoulders, fastening the fabric with a broach around your neck. I would also wear a wig—actually two or three piled on top like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.” For footwear, don sandals. “This is the season for gladiators,” she said.

As for men, Schreier thought that evil Haman would be the most fun to dress. She suggested using a bathrobe and making a three-cornered hat out of cardboard and brown felt and then adding small hamantashen. “You can shellac them,” she said, “or better yet, don’t. Let people pick and eat from the hat, an edible hat, and put a sign on his back ‘Haman likes to share’.”

I liked this idea of incorporating edible elements. I might try lining my Millais-inspired robe with hamantashen.

Erika Kawalek is a New York-based writer. Her first book, Ragpicker, will be published in 2012 by Riverhead Books.

Reality, however, didn’t turn out exactly as I’d expected. When my husband and I had started dating, I’d had a gut feeling that I could handle the challenges of joint-custody step-mothering. But I wasn’t ready for the challenges to be, well, so challenging. From the pile of hummus-smeared plates sitting in the sink and the school gym T-shirt that needed to be clean for the next day to the realization that mushroom risotto wasn’t an acceptable dinner option, I just wasn’t accustomed to being pulled in so many directions. Add to that the stresses of disagreements with my stepdaughters’ mother over issues big and small; the tensions regarding the girls’ split religious lives, from our Sabbath-observant household to their mother’s stridently secular home; my older stepdaughter’s teenage strife, and my younger stepdaughter’s pre-tween tantrums—life was simply intense.

We needed an escape. We needed to go somewhere, away from the edgy existence of life in two households, a place that was a blank slate for us all, preferably out of the village-like atmosphere of Israel and our southern Jerusalem neighborhood.

We took our first trip together in 2008. It was over Hanukkah vacation, and we flew to Marmaris in southwest Turkey, a cheap charter-flight destination for Israelis. I worried that the location wouldn’t be exciting enough to sustain us for four days, that there wouldn’t be enough to eat or that the wrong topics would come up in conversation.

But just the concept of a journey seemed to suffice. From the car ride to the airport and throughout our long weekend away, we succeeded in vacationing. It didn’t matter that the cool weather prevented us from swimming in the hotel’s massive outdoor pools, that the food was mostly unappetizing as well as predominantly non-kosher, or that there weren’t many sightseeing opportunities.

What we all reminisce about was an afternoon spent in the hotel hamam, the Turkish bath, where we hopped in our bathing suits between the array of pelting showerheads, steam rooms, saunas, and the bathtub-like pool. We loved heading to the hotel lobby each day to snack on the complimentary chocolate doughnuts that seemed to have been planned for the visiting Israelis who traditionally eat sufganiyot on Hanukkah. My younger stepdaughter, then 10, was thrilled to zip down the hotel’s imposing marble corridors in her new Heely sneakers, while my older stepdaughter, 16 at the time, was mortified and maybe more than a little flattered by the waiters who flirted with her in Turkish.

We lit our Hanukkah candles each night in the hotel room, giving the girls the simple gifts we’d brought with us. The girls were intrigued to create a Shabbat atmosphere in a place that felt so far from home, and the ability to experience it together, without the tensions of splitting weekends between a secular mother and observant father, made it that much more peaceful.

It was that first initial trip that set the pattern for us, taking family vacations whenever possible, whether over Sukkot, Hanukkah, and Pesach breaks or for longer stretches during the summer. We would scrimp and save, taking on extra work to make the trips possible, such as my educator husband’s two-week gig as an amateur chazzan at a synagogue over the high holidays, an annual event for which he leaves all of us in Israel while he travels to Toronto to boost his salary.

Sure, the memories faded between vacations. The same old tensions rose and erupted, whether between me and the girls or me and my husband about the girls. Yet I had determined that time away from our regular routine worked a certain kind of magic on us all, reminding one another that although we’d been thrown together in life, we actually even like and perhaps even love each other a good chunk of the time. We have our disagreements and usual annoyances during our time away, and I hold out hope that one of these breaks will allow us to talk about the things that really matter, like the way life has been disrupted by divorce. But that hasn’t happened yet.

Some major changes have disrupted our fragile but steady arrangement. The first was the birth of our twin sons two years ago, a welcome yet significant alteration in our blended family fabric. The girls fell in love with their brothers, but then a year after they were born, both girls ended the long-standing joint custody living arrangement. My older stepdaughter was spending her gap year before the army at a mechina, a pre-army program, and so was pretty much out of both houses. My younger stepdaughter, however, decided to live full-time with her mother, a decision that caused much grief and pain for all of us.

At the time, we had been planning a special Hanukkah vacation, 10 days in South Africa, where we would be visiting good friends from the United States who were living there for six months. We had been thinking of it as a bat mitzvah present for my stepdaughter, who, due to her complicated feelings about religion, given her parents’ very different beliefs on the subject, had eschewed any kind of celebration. Now we were stymied and angry. But after much hand-wringing and discussion, we decided to go ahead with the plan.

We didn’t even know if she was going to be coming with us. Her older sister couldn’t, as she wasn’t allowed to leave the country during her mechina year. In retrospect, I now realize that my younger stepdaughter wouldn’t have considered missing the trip, as it gave her the opportunity to be with her little brothers for 10 days straight, miss some school, and allow herself to be just with us, without the complications of having to constantly consider the needs and issues of both her mother and father.

Going on that vacation turned out to be the right decision for all of us. The sense of leaving behind all the strife of the recent events was calming, even with the singular silences of things that sometimes go unsaid. And now that my stepdaughter was no longer living with us, it felt important just to live together for 10 days, remembering what it was to just be us, without the complications of her parents who live life so differently.

In many ways, that is the best part of these family vacations: the ability to be together without wondering whether the girls will be joining us for dinner, worrying about whether it’s time for them to leave, or if they’re calling their mother from the bathroom while in our phone-free Shabbat home. We can almost feel like a normal family, or our version of that unit.

The hard times aren’t over. In fact, we entered into a new and difficult phase with my older stepdaughter shortly after that Cape Town vacation. It took months to renegotiate the relationship, and it wasn’t until a four-day stint in Eilat this past Hanukkah that I felt she and I had returned to our previous camaraderie, as she took a sip of my pre-dinner beer without asking. There are certain comfort zones that can’t be overstated.

As my stepdaughters have begun to make their own choices, which, seemingly inevitably, are more aligned with their mother’s life than their father’s, we’re struggling to keep the girls attuned and involved in our life. Vacations are one good way of doing that, gently forcing us into one common place, at the same time.

Jessica Steinberg is a freelance writer living in Jerusalem with her family.

And yet the secular New Year calls to us. It’s a marker of time passing. Even once we’ve had our youthful spark beaten out of us by childrearing, we’re drawn to the idea of wearing something sparkly, going somewhere festive, and drinking something alcoholic. We want to toast the future, the unknown. We want to make resolutions.

I asked Tablet Magazine’s readers and Facebook friends to share their vows for 2011.

One reader calling herself “Half a Jew” replied: “Use my time wisely, keep focused on my end goals, play with my cat more, and most important, keep remembering to tell my best peeps I love them.” Amen to that. Especially the playing with the cat part.

Another, named Jennifer, said: “The best new year’s resolution I ever made was to never turn down anything in the new year. Wanna go to a hockey game? Yes. Wanna join me for lunch? Yes. Wanna go on tour with me up the West Coast? Yes. That was the year that I did more, saw more. and experienced more fun than I had ever imagined … and all cause I said ‘Yes’ instead of ‘No.’ ” Love it.

My own parenting resolutions for 2011 are similar. “Try to say yes” is a great philosophy for life. (Stephen Colbert thinks so, too!) That doesn’t mean indulging the kids their every whim; it means aiming for “yes” and, if “yes” isn’t possible, figuring out a more affirmative “no.” I hate playing with Playmobil and Lego, but it wouldn’t kill me to do so more than I do. And if the sight of those little farshtunkiner plastic things makes my heart sink too much, I could offer a different “yes”—Blokus, Quirkle, Perfection, story-writing, tangrams or my girls’ new favorite game, “fake newscast.” It’s an old parenting trick, but one I could use more often: When the kids ask for a cookie, I don’t have to bark “No, it’s almost dinnertime.” I could say, “Yes—after dinner.” There’s a difference, and it’s not just semantic.

But back to reader resolutions. Writing on Facebook, one responded: “Same resolution I seem to make every other day—try to be more patient with my kids and enjoy the time I get with them.” True that, too. But like the traditional New Year’s resolutions about losing weight, going to the gym, and enrolling in an adult-ed class, this one is easier said than done.

For whatever it’s worth, here are my other resolutions:

I want to teach Josie to edit video, not only for “fake newscast” but also to encourage her finally to make her All-of-a-Kind Family movie.

I want to be better at scheduling flute practice; be a more attuned and encouraging listener; find more “performance” outlets (even if that just means making Bubbe to sit on the couch and kvell).

I want to be more religious about date night (as much as we love the spawn, being away from them more would be good for my husband and me).

I want to watch Matilda, Singin’ in the Rain, and Freaky Friday as a family.

I want to expand my children’s food horizons, even if it kills me (and them). Recipes welcome, people!

I want to keep better track of the comedy—you’d think as a writer I’d have a record of the kids’ best lines, but no.

And this summer, I swear, I will open a lemonade stand.

What about you?

The last time I was alone for Christmas, I had to be told it was a problem. It was 1979, and I was living in a cold, damp flat in West London, earning a pittance in publishing. When a colleague asked about my plans for Christmas, I said I had none. “Poor dear,” she exclaimed, “alone for Christmas. We won’t have that!” I kept to myself that I had never before celebrated Christmas. Two days later, I hopped aboard the family “dormobile,” a VW microbus with mattresses on the floor instead of seats. The kids—Annabelle, Natasha, Tristram—and I slept in our coats and woke up in Inverness. We stayed in a hunting lodge heated (imperceptibly) by an Aga stove in the kitchen and lit by a whining generator that was powered down at bedtime. Christmas Eve we trekked across the moor to a small cabin—a Scottish shtibl—and sang carols with the local crofters. Christmas day, we baked a Christmas cake full of sultanas, popped Christmas “crackers” (a wrapped tube that snaps open like a cap gun), and took the Guardian’s Christmas Quiz. Christmas night I warmed myself with Glenfiddich, a hot-water bottle, and a novel about sweltering Rhodesians. So this was Christmas: dark by 3 p.m., bone-cold, but otherwise not bad, not bad at all.

Thirty years later, I’m alone for Christmas, and I know it. I ponder a solitary afternoon of chow fun and Meryl Streep, and I decide I won’t have it. Instead, I sign up to work at Elijah’s Promise, a nearby soup kitchen, in a basement in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

When I arrive, I’m hurried off to wash my hands, issued a hairnet and plastic apron, and told to find Felipe, “the guy in the red apron.” He’s a stocky guy with a biker’s swagger and a wide, open smile; among the volunteers, an eminence. His charges are me and Gwendolyn, a lithe, black 20-something with amber eyes. She seems embarrassed by her beauty, like a swan caught becoming a woman.

Felipe explains our task. At noon, when the doors open, the line of people waiting out in the cold will file in. (Pairs of legs, hopping to keep warm, can be seen through the basement windows.) Each client, as the patrons are called, will take a carnival ticket and sit in front of a red or green placemat adorned with snowmen, candy canes, and Bible verses scrawled in a child’s cursive hand. Our job is to serve them dinner. Like school kids on a lunch line, we’re to present our trays to the women of the missionary club of the First Baptist Church of Carteret, who will portion out the turkey dinner—with green beans, sweet potato, gravy, and cranberry sauce—the women spent Christmas Eve preparing.

“If they ask for seconds?” I ask.

“Sometimes they do, but most don’t stick around,” Felipe says. “Some of them eat and run to catch the shuttle to the other soup kitchens in town, they go from one Christmas dinner to another.” He shrugs, amused. “Ya can’t blame them.” The cohort of volunteers has swelled, most of them African-American: a grizzled 75-year-old man, a tall dad with two skinny-jeaned teenage daughters, assorted able-bodied young men, one goateed like a calendar Confucius. The only other white person is a well-heeled petite woman in a chunky cable sweater. She’s Jewish, and I think I know what she’s doing here—repairing the world where it’s caving in. But how many of those here are alone for Christmas, like me, without husbands, wives, parents, children?

Felipe has left us to join a woman with a reporter’s pad at a nearby table. Apparently he’s not just the majordomo; he’s also the press secretary. But Gwendolyn knows the drill. “The hungriest folks will wave their tickets in the air,” she says. “Serve them first. See that everyone at the table is served at the same time. And don’t bus their plates; they have to do that themselves.”

While we wait for the stroke of noon, we place a platter of pie—slices of pumpkin, pecan, and pineapple—on each table, then pour 80 paper cups of V8 juice. One of the skinny-jeaned teens sticks out her tongue in disgust “V8?” “Never mind,” says one of the Carteret ladies. “It’s filling and nutritious. It’s almost soup.”

At noon, the doors open, and the line of people slowly slithers in. I ask myself if, out on the street, I could peg these people as Elijah’s clients. The answer, for nine out of 10, is yes. Many are elderly and move slowly; they walk with difficulty, as though back pain is a fact of daily life, not a cause for steroid shots and acupuncture. Several are missing front teeth, and here and there are cheeks with open sores. The men tend to be unshaven; the women look more kempt, and a few sport silver and green Christmas beads. Some are both hungry and obese, which is perhaps why there are diabetes information posters on the walls, in English and Spanish. And many, more than I want to admit, have a withdrawn, absent look that means—what? That they’re resigned to life on the bottom? Or that fate has consigned them to the limbo of their minds?

A clutch of teens from a nearby Hindu temple appear out of nowhere, giving each client a wrapped, ribboned gift, a pair of gloves, and a scarf. “Let us bow our heads!” bellows an elder of the First Baptist Church, then he mumbles a speedy grace. The Hindu teens, as if on cue, begin to sing “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” reading the lyrics off their Blackberrys. Singing along are four siblings ranging in age from 3 to 8, the only little kids in evidence. Two walked in with winter jackets, two did not; all are clad in Gymboree castoffs of aqua and pepto-bismol pink. Presently trays arrive for them with plates of baked ziti, not turkey; they’re vegetarians. While mom runs off in search of missing napkins, spoons, juice, dad hovers to make sure they finish their food.

It turns out Gwendolyn was wrong. The hungriest are not the ticket-wavers. The hungriest are the ones who sit down and tear into the pie on the table. One woman drains a styrofoam cup of water and begins stuffing it with pumpkin pie; the pie’s to go. I bring a plate of food to a man in a black overcoat whose placemat has verses from scripture but no utensils. I’m starting to feel expansive, and put my hand on his shoulder. “You can’t eat string beans off the words of God,” I say, and offer to fetch utensils. “Fuggetit, darlin’,” he says broadly and plucks a fork from his overcoat pocket. Five minutes before closing, two stragglers arrive: an old man in an army jacket and a large woman lashed in scarves and bundled in three layers of coats. They’re not ticket-wavers; in fact, they keep their eyes on the table and speak to no one, so abject, they make the others look like game-show hosts.

It’s good to be busy, and I’m saying “Merry Christmas” to all comers, happy to be wished one in return. There’s a buzz of purpose and enthusiasm, at the tables, in the kitchen, among the ferrying volunteers. In fact, I’m starting to feel freilach, and not because it’s Christmas. It’s like being at the wedding of a beshert match: a hungry person, a steaming plate of food.

Felipe’s journalist is heading for the door, and Felipe returns to the lunch counter. He’s revved, a little anxious; whatever that interview was about, it didn’t go so well. “She heard that I’m the volunteer of the year, that I’m taking the culinary arts course,” he says. (Elijah’s Promise doesn’t only feed people; they train people to feed others.) “I told her I started coming here every day to give something back, but all she wanted to know about was how I ended up in prison. She smelled a story, but I wasn’t gonna talk about it. Those journalists, they seem interested, but they just wanna sell papers.”

“You have to be careful with journalists,” I tell him. “At least you have to make them read back the quotes.”

“I told her mainly I come here because I love the volunteers,” Felipe continues. “They just love doing what they do, taking care of these people. So what if some are just putting in hours for their community service?” I take a second, harder look, at my fellow volunteers—felons? Misdemeanants?— but all our crimes are expunged by the smell of ammonia. The goateed man stacks the chairs, and a guy with a bandana mops up. Gwendolyn and I wipe down tables. At each, two or three cups of V8 remain, uncouth, unkissed.

When I get home, I look up Elijah’s promise. It is not, as I’d assumed all day, a story about Jesus. It’s a promise to the starving Widow of Zarephath: “The jar of meal shall not be spent, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the land.” (I Kings 17:14) It’s a promise of bread for those with a handful of meal, and oil for those who bear an empty cruse—a promise that, when the heart is cracked and dry, the God of Israel will notice.

Esther Schor, a poet and professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Emma Lazarus.

Then, last month, Mile End began to offer an ambitious dinner menu that took your Eastern European Jewish grandmother’s evergreens and ran them through up-to-the-minute, fat-happy trends: shmaltzed radishes, veal cholent, kasha varnishkes with confit gizzards. What was this cool Canadian place doing serving traditional food? “To me, this is what deli is,” Montreal-born Noah Bermanoff, the place’s founder and co-owner, said earlier this week. “I’m not trying super-hard to be Montreal. I’m trying super-hard to serve food as I know it.”

So take a guess what Mile End is serving on Christmas Day. That’s right: Chinese food.

Titled a “traditional Jewish Christmas,” the $35 prix fixe—served to two seatings on Christmas Eve and four on Christmas Day and made right in the kitchen—will start with wonton eggdrop soup, continue to roast duck with smoked-meat fried rice and Chinese broccoli, and end with fortune cookies and orange wedges. (Mile End’s printed menu is here.) It’s your traditional Chinese meal, made hip, and—with that crucial addition of smoked meat—brushed gently with Mile End’s idiosyncrasy.

But it’s not a twee hipster affect or a one-chuckle joke; it’s a stark claim—almost a polemic. You will not go to Mile End on Christmas because you happened to feel like fried rice. You will go to proudly proclaim your Jewish-American identity. And yet even as the meal is mining this phenomenon, it also recognizes that, more than ever before, Jews are just another brand of white person, and so, especially, for young Jews, simply going to the local lo mein joint may not be enough.

***

The Hebrew year is 5771 and the Chinese year is 4707. That must mean, the joke goes, that against all odds the Jews went without Chinese food for 1,064 years. In fact, Jewish love for Chinese food is neither hallucinated nor arbitrary. It is very real and very determined, and it originates roughly a century ago, in a place about four miles away from Mile End: the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The predominant groups in the area were Eastern European Jews, Italians, and Chinese. According to Matthew Goodman, author of Jewish Food: The World at Table, Italian cuisine and especially Italian restaurants, with their Christian iconography, held little appeal for Jews. But the Chinese restaurants had no Virgin Marys. And they prepared their food in the Cantonese culinary style, which utilized a sweet-and-sour flavor profile, overcooked vegetables, and heaps of garlic and onions. Sound familiar?

Additionally, argued Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine in a 1992 academic paper titled “Safe Treyf,” Chinese food featured the sort of unkosher dishes you could take home to your mother, or at least eat in front of her. For one thing, there is no mixing of dairy and meat, for the simple reason that there is no dairy. (Think about it!) Of course, there is trayf aplenty, chiefly pork and shellfish. But it is always either chopped and minced and served in the middle of innocuous vegetables all covered in a common sauce, or it is wrapped up in wontons and egg rolls—where you can’t see it. Goodman notes that the purveyors of Chinese restaurants eventually picked up on this: “They would advertise wonton soup as chicken soup with kreplach,” he told me.

Beyond the trappings and the cuisine, Chinese restaurants offered poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants the opportunity to feel cosmopolitan and sophisticated (food of the Orient!). It also let them feel superior, a truism that has achieved the most definitive canonization available: its own Philip Roth quotation. “Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese,” Alexander Portnoy tells us. “Because one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white and maybe even Anglo Saxon. No wonder they can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP.”

The final part of this story is the one you already know: Most Chinese people are not Christian. Therefore, on Christmas, Chinese restaurants are open.

***

OK, you say, but since the Lower East Side’s glory years, and even since the Baby Boomers’ halcyon suburbia, many more options have cropped up—Indian, Korean, Thai. But, still, as Rabbi Joshua Plaut, who is putting the finishing touches on a book about Jews and Christmas (it has a chapter on Chinese food), says: “For Jews, the decision to go to a Chinese restaurant on Christmas is conscious and intended.”

“It’s a love affair and a sacred tradition to partake of Peking duck,” Plaut quips. He argues that to eat Chinese on Christmas is a ritual, not unlike the rituals that traditional Judaism—which has always valued observance where Christianity has valued faith—requires. For some, the Chinese-on-Christmas experience is a replacement for traditional rituals: A prayer you can eat.

But more than standing in for religion, going to Chinese restaurants on Christmas as a Jewish person is an elective assertion of your culture. “As ridiculous as it is, there’s something kind of wonderful about it, that you’re paying homage to what has come before you,” said Goodman, the Jewish Food author. Bermanoff, of Mile End, has a nearly identical take: “If there is a culture that revolves around eating pork wontons on Sunday evenings,” he insisted, “then fine, that’s a legitimate culture, and therefore I’m allowed to recreate it.”

(The only time I can remember not eating Chinese on Christmas was several years ago, when my family was vacationing in Rome. No doubt we could have gone to the place that stays open for the American tourists, which surely exists, or stocked up on sandwiches the day before. But instead, we traveled to a kosher place located where the ghetto used to be. The restaurant was the only lighted thing on the street, and it was crowded and cozy. It served Italian food, not Chinese, but the night felt just like Christmas.)

Whether they have fully thought it through or not, Jews who eat Chinese food on Christmas are proclaiming that, for them, Jewishness is what philosophers call a second-order value. In contrast to valuing Judaism on the first order—enjoying the rituals themselves, sincerely adhering to the tenets themselves—they value the fact of their Jewishness. They go out of their way to do it. They may or may not enjoy General Tso’s Chicken, but if they are eating it on Christmas, their prime motivation is not the general’s sweet, spicy deliciousness, but rather the knowledge that they are doing something that in some adapted way reinforces their Jewishness. They are moved by their hearts, not their tastebuds.

***

Which brings us back to Mile End. Despite Bermanoff’s partaking in a well-worn tradition, he represents something markedly different: Jews are making their own Chinese food now. Bermanoff—who is, perfectly, a law school drop-out—encapsulates a younger Jewish culture. It is more aimless, less rooted—Boerum Hill, not Borough Park—and it sees its tradition less as a comfortable inheritance and more as a starting point. Perhaps it is the fact that Bermanoff is not American and therefore somewhat alienated to begin with that enabled him to more clearly perceive that assimilation and co-optation had ground what it meant to be a “New York Jew” down to little more than a nub with Woody Allen glasses.

Because let’s face it: Jews are not outsiders anymore. It’s not only to Chinese people that we can seem, at times, like “just some big-nosed variety of WASP.” Only among ourselves, on a special day that comes only once a year, can our commonalities and our distinctiveness become apparent.

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.

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.

It was a funny moment, but the daughter was making a crucial point: She felt her mother’s cooking made her family different from other families, and she wanted to protect that difference. Like many Jewish women, she was also superstitious. K’naina hora—even recipes should stay in the family.

There’s a good argument for those kinds of traditions, too. I believe that children not only need but crave repetitive traditional foods to reinforce the folkways of their household. The question of traditions and how we impart them to our children is especially on the mind at this time of year, with Thanksgiving and Hanukkah right around the corner. We’re all busy, and it can be time-consuming to put a meal on the table, but if someone lives on a steady diet of take-out dishes, no matter how healthful, then take-out dishes are what their memories will contain. One young woman told me that she had perhaps three homemade meals in her home per year. What memories will she have, and what traditions will she transmit to her own children?

The encounter in Detroit recalled another book tour of mine, five years ago, when I made a stop in Brookline, Mass., at the home of Myra Kraft, a childhood friend, and her husband, Robert, the owner of the New England Patriots and a sponsor of the Israeli Football League. The Krafts had organized a get-together of about 35 people, mostly mothers and daughters, for a cooking demonstration.

Because many more people attended than Myra had originally planned, not everyone fit in the Krafts’ kitchen. With the help of the video team from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play, many of the Krafts’ guests watched me on closed-circuit television throughout the house as I cooked newfangled Jewish food, like fish with ginger and scallions and wafer-thin chocolate macaroons, both recipes that appeared in my book New American Cooking. After the demonstration of these modern foods, we discussed the transmission of recipes from one generation to the next and the importance of traditional food in making memories for children.

“Foods at different holidays are very important for children to remember,” said Myra, whom I first met years ago at a meeting of the New England Federation of Temple Youth in Hartford, Conn. Two dishes that she says her grandkids love to eat are her brisket and her tsimmes, made of sweet potatoes and carrots and topped with a potato crust. She serves her tsimmes for Rosh Hashanah and Passover. I serve mine for Hanukkah.

Her brisket is first cooked, then the vegetables are added, and then it is sealed and cooked again in a golden potato crust. She got this recipe from her Russian forebears, who originally settled in Worcester, Mass. Like many of us, Myra is busy—she is a leader of the Boys and Girls Clubs and the Jewish Federation, to name two organizations—and she sometimes cooks her dishes ahead of time and freezes them, to ensure she’ll have them whenever she needs them.

For the Krafts and other families, these recipes bind the family. There are jokes made about them, and love transmitted through them. They are what make family folklore and what helps to differentiate one family from the next.

Annette Lerner, of Chevy Chase, Md., agrees. “Once I got a phone call from my grandson Jonathan, who was at NYU,” said Annette, who represents a new type of grandmother, one who exercises, sculpts, and cooks. “ ‘Nana,’ he said. ‘I want your chicken soup.’ When I told him that he could get better soup from the Second Avenue Deli, located around the corner from his dorm, he said, ‘But it is not your chicken soup.’ ” So, Annette dutifully made chicken soup, packed it in dried ice, and sent it to New York, where her grandson put it in his dorm refrigerator. “That was the most expensive chicken soup he ever ate,” she said.

For Annette and her husband, Ted, owners of the Washington Nationals, Jewish traditions are such an important part of their lives that they will not go to ballgames on Friday nights. “Ted is rather observant,” she said. “We always have Friday-night dinner at home. When the children are in D.C., they always come to our house for Friday.”

Not only does Annette serve kosher food at home, but her butcher sends kosher meat to the president’s suite at Nationals Park, to be cooked there and served to guests. Annette is known for her apple cake and mandelbrot, which she brings to guests at the Nationals games. “These foods are ‘Grandma love,’ ” she said, adding that her apple cake is “a very, very old recipe from Russia” that her mother used when she started baking in Northern Virginia. “She measured by eggshells instead of cups. I updated the apple cake by adding the nuts, chopping the apples more, and I make the layers fancier. We have been making that cake for over 75 years, and it is still the family favorite.”

BEEF TSIMMES WITH POTATO KUGEL TOPPING
Adapted from The Way We Cook, by Sheryl Julian & Julie Riven

For the Brisket:
1 6-pound double brisket of beef
2 quarts of water, or more as needed
½ teaspoon coarse salt, or to taste
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste
6 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch pieces
2 pounds carrots, peeled and cut into ½-inch pieces
1 cup pitted prunes
1 cup dried apricots
1 cup honey
1 cup pineapple juice
1 cup orange juice

1. Put the meat in a large flame-proof casserole and add enough of the water to cover it. Sprinkle with the salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Cover the pot and reduce the heat to low and simmer for 1 ½ hours.
2. During the last 15 minutes of simmering time, set the oven at 300 degrees. Transfer the meat and liquid to a large roasting pan. Add the sweet potatoes, carrots, prunes, apricots, honey, pineapple, and orange juices. Sprinkle with salt, cover with foil, shiny-side down, and transfer the pan to the oven.
3. Cook for 4 ½ to 5 hours, adding more water to the pan, ¼ cup at a time, if the mixture seems dry, until the meat is very tender.
4. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool. Cover, refrigerate overnight, and skim the fat from the cooking liquid.
5. Cut the meat on the diagonal into thin slices. Arrange the meat, vegetables, and cooking liquid in a large roasting pan and set aside while you prepare the kugel.

For the Potato Kugel:
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon coarse salt, or to taste
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste
2 medium Spanish onions, grated
2 russet (baking) potatoes, peeled and grated
2-3 tablespoons chicken fat or vegetable oil
2/3 cup matzo meal
1 ½ cups cold water

1. Set the oven at 350 degrees. Combine the eggs, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. With a wooden spoon, stir the mixture for 1 minute. Stir in the onions, potatoes, chicken fat or oil, matzo meal, and water. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for 1 hour, or until it thickens. The mixture may seem watery, but it will thicken as it sits.
2. Spoon the potato mixture in mounds over the meat in the roasting pan. Bake for 1 hour, or until the kugel topping is golden brown and the meat and vegetables are hot.
Yields: 10-12 servings

GRANDMA LILL’S APPLE CAKE
Adapted from Annette Lerner
4 medium baking apples, such as McIntosh or Cortland
2 ¼ cups sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts or raisins (optional)
4 large eggs
3 cups all purpose or pastry flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup vegetable oil
7 tablespoons orange juice
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease a spring-form pan or a bundt pan and dust with flour. Set aside.
2. Core, peel, and cut the apples into ¼-inch slivers in a bowl. Mix ¼ cup of the sugar, the cinnamon, walnuts and/or raisins, and sprinkle over the apples. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl, beat the remaining sugar and eggs together until creamy. In a separate bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
4. Gently stir in 1/3 of the dry mixture to the sugar/eggs and then add ½ of the oil. Continue alternating until all ingredients are used. Add the orange juice and the vanilla.
5. Pour a layer of batter into the pan then top with a layer of apples. Repeat, creating layers, until all the ingredients are used. Finish with a thin layer of apple slivers.
6. Bake for 60 to 70 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Be sure not to underbake. When the cake has cooled, sprinkle with confectioners sugar and serve.
Yields: 12 servings

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.

This essay has motivated nearly all of my work, though perhaps nothing as much as my most recent project: Sukkah City, an international design competition organized with my friend Joshua Foer, based on the primitive, biblical construction of the sukkah. If the members of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association could turn the minor holiday of Hanukkah into a major annual festival, maybe could we reverse the process and restore Sukkot—a ritual once central to the Jewish year—to its rightful pedestal.

***

The Sukkah City crew entered in Union Square as interlopers: a phalanx of nervous architects and engineers accompanying a dozen hulking sukkahs, partially built and arriving on a procession of flatbed trucks. At dusk on the evening of September 18, our convoy had left from a holding site in Brooklyn. We didn’t reach Union Square until downtown was dark.

Our mood had been so calm and optimistic back in the workshop. Over the previous 10 days, teams of architects had arrived from France, England, Japan, and Germany. Not just Jews, but Catholics, Muslims, and Bahai, all unexpectedly joined by a newly discovered yet nonetheless passionate fascination with sukkahs. They had dropped everything to re-locate to New York City, source materials, and coax carpenters, fabricators, and engineers to lend a shoulder and make their visions real.

Three days before the competition, the teams’ arsenals of raw materials—still at the studio in Gowanus—sufficiently resembled sukkahs for us to throw a preview party in Brooklyn. But just as we arrived at the space, a storm of biblical proportions tore through Queens and Brooklyn, rattling down the street in front of our studio, leaving it littered with shattered tree branches. I watched with fear, aware that an encore of this weather in Union Square would immediately tear apart our sukkahs. But many of the architects were delighted, seeing it as some kind of a heavenly sign that everything would be fine, since, after all, God had made schach—the foliage that traditionally covers a sukkah roof—rain from the sky.

Before we knew it, we were on that ride, and then standing at the precipice of our project: Union Square, on a Saturday night.

The plaza crackled with merriment as thousands of New Yorkers and tourists tangled around buskers, jugglers, chess hustlers, and an entire 10-piece New Orleans brass band. A dozen skaters and stunt bikers propelled themselves off the steps below the plaza, careening at speed, buzzing passers-by. The folly of our mission became instantly clear: How were we going to build these sukkahs amidst this havoc, under cover of darkness, in front of a Whole Foods and a Filene’s Basement?

Two enormous banks of floodlights were laboriously wheeled into position. With a flick of a switch, their beam turned night into day (and caused half of the plaza dwellers to scatter instantly away in search of darkness). The sukkah builders seized their chance, scurrying to their assigned positions with drills and hammers at the ready. The build-out began.

Union Square was transformed into a construction site. The sounds of buzzsaws, shredders, and power drills were pierced only by the scream of a forklift backing up—none of which, of course, kept inquisitive New Yorkers from risking life and limb to figure out what was going on, pressing eagerly past the danger signs for a peek. At 4 a.m., we realized just how fast and far word had spread: A gaggle of frat boys stormed the plaza, breathless: Where, they demanded, were the “hookers” they had heard rumor of in Union Square?

By 6:30 a.m., the last of the sukkahs was complete. The architects dragged themselves off to bed. The plaza was eerily silent. I was left almost alone at dawn in Union Square, with only the fantastical structures for company.

The visitors came in droves. First the dog-walkers, followed by young stroller-pushing dads foraging for early cups of coffee. Teams of architectural photographers silently clustered around the exhibits, clicking away, eager to finish their work before the crowds emerged. And then, at 10 a.m., as if from central casting, a crushing mass of New Yorkers descended on the plaza.

A basketball team from the Bronx clustered in a pack. Sailors paraded past. Girlfriends posed daintily in front of a sukkah as their boyfriends snapped away with their cellphones. Elderly couples strolled hand in hand. Entire Orthodox congregations snaked behind as their rabbinical leaders examined the halakhic qualities of each building. By lunchtime, I had heard more than one group of homeless men debating the merits and demerits of the different approaches to schach.

The waves of viewers were relentless, and each brought with it its own set of characters. When night returned, the crowd became younger—the party kids, drinkers, BMX-ers and skaters. At 4 a.m., the square was packed with a mellow crowd for whom the sukkahs were akin to some epic HBO original programming they remained glued to for an hour at a time. By Day 2, our architects had been fairly battered by crowds’ eager, repetitive questions:

• How many shims were in the Shim City sukkah? (Over 10,000.)
• Was Single Thread really made out of single thread of wire? (Yes.)
• Was Log really kosher (Yes, according to our Orthodox engineer)

Every time I saw a tourist snap a photo, each moment our Twitter count trended upward or people asked us where the nearest hardware store was located so they could go and build a sukkah of their very own, I thought of Sarna’s essay and the brilliance of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association who had the smarts to transform a festival with a succinct performance on a single evening.

At 5 p.m. on September 20, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived to present the People’s Choice award to the winner. As he opened the envelope and announced “Fractured Bubble,” a scream emerged from one corner of the plaza. The mothers of the two winning architects had been unable to contain themselves, and—as we learned that moment—there are few sounds more joyous than that of a proud Jewish mother and a proud Bahai mother celebrating in unison.

Roger Bennett is the co-founder of Reboot, Sukkah City, and the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation.

But even I was disappointed to realize that I would be stuck in Bloemfontein this Rosh Hashanah. Bloemfontein is a very old city in the middle of absolutely nothing on the country’s high, windswept central plain. Historically, it was a gathering-spot for Afrikaner generals and intellectuals, but now it’s also home to a growing and socially ascendant black population. This double life makes it a rich vein for stories but an unlikely place to find people for whom September means watching Barbra Streisand sing “Avinu Malkeinu” on YouTube.

Imagine my surprise at seeing people walking into the building where I’d been directed to worship wearing yarmulkes and prayer shawls. Some of their children had blond peyes. Many of them were carrying kudu shofars. It turned out Bloemfontein has a burgeoning group of locals who celebrate every Jewish holiday and a lot more intently than I do—only they celebrate it in the name of Yeshuah. The Jews on the upswing in this part of South Africa are the ones for Jesus.

Before the service began, I met their spiritual leader, who introduced himself as “Da-VEET.” He told me he grew up snug in the crucible of the Afrikaner community’s strict Calvinist faith and yet was always troubled by a mystery: Why was he circumcised, when other Afrikaner boys were not? Around the time his wife started to take an independent interest in Messianic Judaism, David learned that an ancestor of his had been a Jewish emigrant to South Africa from Lithuania. Everything began to come together. “Baruch Ha Shem,” murmured David’s co-leader Theo.

Once, there were many Jews—traditional Jews, I mean—in Bloemfontein. Jews came to South Africa in the 19th century as peddlers and merchants, and they embraced country life. Every little hamlet around Bloemfontein boasted at least one Jewish family, many of them hailing from the same town in north-central Germany. The Lithuanians spread down into the mountains to the south and became ostrich-feather barons. Even Ladismith, the sheep-farming village where I feared I’d picked up bedbugs during last year’s High Holidays (just fleas, it turned out), had its own synagogue, though nobody uses it anymore. In time, the children of the Jewish emigrants entered the professional class, and those who didn’t decamp for New York left for the bigger South African cities to open law firms or work in hospitals.

This cosmopolitan ambition has left something sad in its wake: the disappearance of the bright Jewish thread out of the fabric of rural South African life. In the early 20th century, Bloemfontein had three Jewish mayors. Now almost nobody I meet from Bloemfontein or similar towns has ever met a Jew before me. And if they have, their familiarity with Judaism is such that they foresee no particular difference between celebrating Rosh Hashanah as I normally would and celebrating it with Bloemfontein’s contingent of Messianics.

To be fair, the Messianic Jews of Bloemfontein were very hospitable—David and Theo had me sing the Kiddush, although usually women in their community aren’t allowed to lead prayer—and they went to great pains to get the trappings right. They blew a perfect tekiah, shevarim, and teruah on the shofar; they sang with the ardor of Miriam. But, this year, worshiping with a ritual-fastidious group made me realize how important the liturgy is to the High Holy Days, and not just the customs. They had changed the English text to reflect a more Christian perspective on sin, one in which atonement equals not one more year’s struggling to improve our complicated relationships with our friends and with God but a permanent triumph over the corrupt “Self,” capital S. The sermon was on the book of Matthew, and in Afrikaans. The prayer of Avinu Malkeinu—Our Father, Our King—emphasized a Father-Son motif, and the whole New Year theme was downplayed, since rebirth, for Messianic Jews, more properly begins around Passover, when the lamb of God also purportedly gave up the ghost. Oddly, among these Messianics, there actually seemed to be a direct correlation between ardor for the trappings of Judaism and ardor for Jesus. David told me he’d Christianized the Rosh Hashanah service more than usual to appeal to some newcomers, who turned out to be the same people who’d come in toting their own shofars.

After the Kiddush, Theo led me over to what he called the “Jewish corner” of the dinner hall, which consisted of one single, cranky old man named Herman. Herman told me he was a “real Jew, a Jew-Jew,” and he lamented the flight of his fellow Jews out of rural South Africa. Still, he seemed able to find strength in what remained behind. This Messianic stuff “was OK,” he guessed: At least they don’t swear constantly using the Lord’s name in vain, as he gathers they do nowadays in New York.

Eve Fairbanks is a writer living in South Africa as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs.

I have to admit that the jetlag this time was way beyond physical and made the return to Israel especially difficult. After three weeks in Urbana, Illinois, with my wife and son, the American Midwest had penetrated deep into our bones through the grease in the food, the bagel-shaped billboards, and the ubiquitous supermarket specials (otherwise it’s hard to explain why Lev, my five-year-old, insists on presenting himself as “only $4.99”).

My wife’s jetlag manifests itself in the new daily routine she developed in consultation with the unusually sticky menu of the Urbana IHOP. Back in Tel Aviv, she continues to begin her morning with pancakes and strawberries, goes on to a lunch of French toast slathered in butter, and rolls up to a dinner of Nutella crepes topped with whipped cream and a side of onion rings. If she lumbers in at this rate, very soon Lev and I will be able to leave our apartment and go to live inside her.

My son’s tough return to Tel Aviv has mostly taken the form of heartbreaking monologues about “our home in Urbana.” He’s constantly telling anyone who will listen how much he misses the safe we had in our hotel room and how much he wants to go back to the LL floor, “my favorite floor in the whole world,” as he loves to say in a pathos-filled voice. LL was where he was free any hour of the day to bowl and to choose from an array of alluring snacks and neon-colored energy drinks on display in the glittering, greedy vending machines.

And I, like the rest of my battered family, also got hit square in the stomach. My addiction was to doughnuts. Surprisingly, I discovered that the combination of the sugar high, the doughy softness, and the unsaturated-fat poisoning my body caused psychedelic hallucinations. After three doughnuts, the sky turned purple, and after five, I believed that the shanah tova card I got from the American Embassy was actually a three-dimensional hologram of a huge doughnut out of which Chelsea Clinton leapt, topless.

And burdened by all that baggage, we’re supposed to deal with Yom Kippur. I don’t want to complain, but you have to admit that diving into that fast while a 3-D hallucination of Chelsea Clinton jumping out of a huge sugar-coated confection rolls around my brain is a bit Job-like. Except that your faithful servant, unlike that cursed biblical figure, didn’t just sit on his backside and scratch himself, but decided while still in Urbana to prepare for resisting culinary temptation on the coming Day of Atonement. At night, when my sweet family was sound asleep and dreaming of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I was busy recording 60 straight minutes of fast-food commercials in our hotel room. The kind of ads where the announcer, with the jaded tone of someone who’s already seen and swallowed everything, promises you a 4-foot-long sandwich and a gallon bottle of Coke for under five dollars (maybe that’s where my son got it) or a free vat of fries with every sizzling 9-pound steak topped with bubbling cheese. And so, for the entire hour of my recording, the screen is filled with horrifying shots: a frenzied dolly zoom of a monster-sized hamburger bleeding ketchup; a giant pizza spinning wildly around your head, threatening to destroy the world with an artillery shelling of extra spicy pepperoni; and a waffle the size of the U.S. national debt sinking slowly into an endless swamp of chocolate chip ice cream in a calorie-rich homage to the Titanic.

Since we’ve been back in Tel Aviv, that disk has been sitting innocently in the inner pocket of my suitcase. And when the right moment comes, exactly one hour before the fast begins this evening, I’ll innocently invite my nuclear family into the living room, shove the doomsday disc into the kishkes of the DVD, and make us all watch it straight through to the end, extra-crunchy, jalapeno-coated Buffalo wings commercial included, no exemptions or bathroom breaks. And if that disgusting commercial diet fails to keep us food free for the next 24 hours, I’ll have no choice but to submissively accept any flood God sends my way. Although if it turns out that we have a say in the matter, my wife would strongly prefer a maple syrup one.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

CREDIT: Jonathon Rosen

— I don’t know, this just isn’t working.
— You’re being too hard on yourself, Dear.
— It feels obvious.
— What’s obvious about it?
— I feel like I’ve heard it all before. I want to surprise people, I want to make them think, you know? It’s the Yom Kippur sermon, Hon, it’s the biggest sermon of the year. Packed house. I really want to knock it out of the park.
— Remember what Hemingway said, Dear: The first draft of anything is shit.
— I thought Rashi said that. What am I going to do?
— Did you mention the Holocaust?
— Everyone mentions the Holocaust.
— The Inquisition?
— Old news.
— Pogroms?
— You see? You see what I mean? There’s nothing new, nothing fresh.
— What about Iran? It’s very timely. You could do your whole “Iran/ I ran” thing, about running from God, running from punishment. I really liked that one the last time you did it.
— That wasn’t me.
— It wasn’t?
— No.
— Who was that?
— Silverberg.
— Oh.
— You always like Silverberg’s sermons.
— That’s not true.
— It is true.
— Don’t make this about me, Dear.
— “I ran from Hashem, so Hashem is using Iran to punish me.” Jesus Christ. Do you remember his Yom Kippur sermon last year? “If we learn from it, we can turn it from a Hollow-caust to a fuller-caust.”
— I liked that.
— I need a drink.
— Don’t start that again.
— Just get me a goddamn drink.

Later.

— “… and by looking at ourselves and admitting our sins, we can find inner joy, and find true happiness, and then we can turn Yom Kippur into Yom Chipper.” What do you think?
— Chipper?
— Chipper. You know—happy, upbeat.
— Oh.
— It’s crap.
— It’s not.
— Of course it is. “Yom Chipper.”
— You remember what Maimonides said: Writer’s block is just high expectations.
— I thought that was William Stafford.
— I like Yom Stripper.
— Yom Stripper?
— Isn’t that what you said?
— I said Yom Chipper. What the hell is Yom Stripper?
— Yom Chipper, then.
— What the hell is Yom Stripper? Do you even listen to me anymore? Maybe if I was Rabbi Silverberg you would listen.
— Don’t make this about me, Dear.
(awkward silence)
— You really like Yom Stripper?
— It’s cute.
— … “And so this Yom Kippur, if we bare our souls, and remove our …” Oh, for God’s sake.

Later.

— So?
— I think it’s good, Dear.
— Do you really?
— It’s different.
— I wanted it to be different. I wanted to do something totally new and unexpected, you know?
— I think it’s really good.
— Who’s the shul president these days? I’m going to call him. Is it still Dr. Hammer?
— No, it’s Dr. Pleeter.
— Hand me the phone. (dials) Dr. Pleeter? Rabbi Rosen here. Ha ha, yes, it certainly is. Listen, I want to run this past you. It’s my sermon for Yom Kippur. I’m going with “Don’t repent.” Hear me out. Everyone does “you’re sinners, you’re at fault, feel bad,” well, I’m going the other way. I’m saying no more fear, no more living in terror. If anyone’s been punished enough, it’s us Jews, am I right? So, to hell with this—go home! Have a big meal and a glass of wine. No more fasting, no more chest-beating—if anyone should ask for forgiveness, it’s God. This should be God’s Day of Atonement, not ours. Stop feeling so bad, stop beating yourself up. I have this whole thing about fasting—about how the only thing you shouldn’t eat today is your heart out. (pause) Uh huh. (pause) Right. (pause) Well, I think that … (pause). I think you’re making a bit much of the whole … no, no, I was really, I mean what I meant was that, sort of a feel—good kind of a … (pause) of course, yes, I … well, I had this whole “Yom Chipper” thing … no, I mean, if you feel that strongly … yes, of course … yes, I like that … sure, yes, yes, of course … no, I think you have a point … sure, OK … right … yes … see you then. Bye.
— What’d he say?
— He wants something about the Holocaust.
— What about it?
— He liked Silverberg’s whole Hollow-caust thing.
— I liked that, too.
— Thought I could throw in a line or two about Iran.
— It’s very timely.
— How about: If we’re not in a God mood, we’ll get Mach—mood.
— Mach—mood?
— Ahmadinejad.
— I like that.
— Yeah?
— Yeah, that’s good.
— Yeah, it is. I think it can work.
— Of course it can.
— You think?
— I really like it.
— Me, too.
— Phew.
— Right?
— That was a close one.
— I knew you’d get it.

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But in contrast, we tend to know less about average Jews, whose lives didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. That began to change in the late 19th century, when the Yiddish press hit the streets, for the first time recounting the lives of the unwashed masses of Jews in the public record. Tablet Magazine offers some of their stories, reconstructed from century-old newspaper accounts.

Newspaper readers don’t often consider what kind of behind-the-scenes insanity goes into the articles they peruse. I’m not referring here to either the intrepid news-gathering or the hysterical keyboard pounding of writers on deadline. The insanity I’m curious about has to do with the tension-filled relationship between writers and editors.

Is it true, as some writers contend for example, that editors wantonly destroy perfect copy? Or do they artfully reshape a writer’s prose into a more cogent text? The editor-journalist relationship is as fraught as that between a mohel and baby. The mohel has no choice but to snip; the baby has no choice but to cry, but he drinks a little wine and he gets over it.

Renowned for its minor and major disputes, the Yiddish press was a place where editors ruled inky fiefdoms, cracking the whip over writers who served as bitter and often disloyal subjects. Editors controlled the fates and livelihoods of writers and journalists, many of whom felt the press functioned as a kind of commercial department of Yiddish literature—something over which they felt they should have more control.

Most of the battles within the Yiddish journalistic world never left the perimeter of the editor’s desks. But on occasion, these spats leapt out of the editorial offices and onto the pages of the papers, making for some of the juiciest Yiddish snark this side of Pinsk.

When, for instance, famed columnist Hillel Zeitlin jumped ship in late 1910 from Warsaw’s daily Haynt to a new competitor, Moment, his editor, Shmuel Yatskan, was furious but temporarily held his tongue.

Zeitlin had been one of Haynt’s most popular columnists. Born into a family of Lubavitcher Hasidim, he strayed from his yeshiva studies after discovering Spinoza, Nietszche, and a slew of other Western thinkers. Like any shtetl kid in the process of ridding himself of tradition, he moved to the city—Warsaw, in this case—and involved himself in Jewish political matters and journalism. But Zeitlin never completely gave up his traditional ways, and an interest in Kabbalah eventually brought him back, not only to full religious observance, but to a promotion of Jewish tradition in his newspaper columns.

Zeitlin’s former editor, Yatskan, was also a Litvak plying journalism in Warsaw. An ordained rabbi from the highly regarded Ponevezh Yeshiva, Yatskan was a major figure in the Yiddish press, having founded some of Warsaw’s early Jewish dailies, including Haynt, which became the best-selling Yiddish paper in Poland.

With an understanding that a popular newspaper should have a broad mandate, Yatskan printed a lot of sensationalistic trash along with high-quality literature, as well as excellent cultural and political criticism. His papers always appealed to the widest possible audience.

That’s where Zeitlin fit in. Able to synthesize abstract philosophical ideas about Jewish culture, religion, and modern society into a readable article, Zeitlin was one of the paper’s major assets. In particular, his columns appealed to religious readers. So, when he decided to abandon Yatskan’s Haynt it was a devastating blow.

Yatskan and Zeitlin sniped at each other for a while, printing what in Yiddish is called “secrets from kheyder.” Words like hypocrite, trash, liar, and provocateur were bandied about briefly, but then things seemed to settle down. The appearance of tranquility was deceptive, however, and by September in 1913, Yatskan could no longer control his anger at Zeitlin’s departure and rekindled the fight by printing a blurb in Haynt by an unnamed “correspondent” from Pinsk:

Seeing how Hillel Zeitlin is still around and unashamedly screams before the public in regard to his holiness and complains about the “lies” that are being spread about him, that he, tragically, is a “holy man” who is being hounded for his religiosity, and also has the audacity to compare the accusation against the victim of the Kiev blood-libel with himself, it is my duty to remind him of the fact that when he was here, in Pinsk giving a lecture, I, along with numerous others who can verify it, saw with my own eyes, as the others saw with theirs, how in the train station buffet he ate a pork chop, with a roll, followed by a cutlet.

Although this rambling sentence (21 lines of one newspaper column) was a grammatical mess, it was also a finely crafted accusation, attacking Zeitlin for his hypocrisy, arrogance, and trangression: the eating of trayf.

The accusation was the last straw. Zeitlin and the Moment staff responded in the paper by saying that Yatskan and Haynt were rank liars attacking a former colleague who had left for good reason. In printed testimonials supporting their besmirched colleague, dozens of journalists sided with Zeitlin.

Haynt, as well the daily Der fraynd, pounded away at Zeitlin, attacking him for all manner of sin, ranging from writing on Shabbos to violating Yom Kippur. Moment shot back, asserting that Yatskan wrote a fake Torah, printed pornography, and promoted conversion among Jews, claims Yatskan said were “a product of unscrupulous swindlers and a gang of Sodomites who created a horror story comparable to some of the worst crimes ever committed.” No one ever accused Yatskan of subtlety.

To Zeitlin’s readers the attacks were devastating. How could their beloved writer, a frumer yid, stand accused of such heinous transgressions? Thousands signed petitions of support and wrote letters, dozens of which Moment published. Haynt claimed that it was all a ploy: The letters and the names were fakes.

Yiddish cartoonists had a field day: Zeitlin’s bushy beard and shock of long hair made for great caricatures. With the battle coming to a head just before Yom Kippur, Yosef Tunkel, the brightest satirical light of 20th century Yiddish, found the perfect analogy for this tempest—the kapores slaughter ritual, a custom in which Jews on the eve of Yom Kippur wave a chicken over their heads three times and then kill it in order to expiate their sins (the Jew’s, not the chicken’s).

Tunkel drew Zeitlin’s bushy head onto the chicken with which Yatskan performs kapores, while chicken Zeitlin defecates. The image perfectly captured their unhappy relationship. By the time this cartoon appeared on the cover of Tunkel’s special Yom Kippur humor magazine, the organized Jewish community had begun to freak out over the fact that the mudslinging had gotten so out of hand, that the Polish press had begun to report on it in a series of “look at these crazy Jews” articles.

At that point a number of communal leaders decided to create an arbitration panel to put an end to the ugly public dispute. There was probably no need; by early October, 1913, the Mendel Beilis blood libel trial was underway, a huge story that dominated the Yiddish press through the fall as the Zeitlin-Yatskan episode fizzled into another forgotten incident in Jewish journalism, though it remains an exemplar of the way editors and journalists, Yiddish or otherwise, feel about each other.

Mockingjay is the final book in a trilogy. The first two books, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, introduced readers to a dystopian society in which children are selected as contestants in a terrible reality show, thrown into a giant arena, and forced to battle to the death before zillions of hidden and not-so-hidden cameras. Those cameras are controlled by the Capitol, a dictatorship that rules what once was North America. The series’ heroine, Katniss, volunteers for the Hunger Games to save her little sister, whose name has been drawn as one of the two “tributes” from their district. Katniss is groomed, costumed, given a backstory for the audience to follow, and then set loose to kill or be killed. It’s 1984-meets-Survivor-meets-Project Runway-meets-Spartacus.

While Eat Pray Love was the story of one person’s entirely inward-looking quest for happiness, The Hunger Games trilogy is about how one person, under the grimmest circumstances imaginable, can help others. Throughout the trilogy, but especially in Mockingjay, Katniss has to face the fact that people have died because of her, both directly—killed in the arena—and indirectly—killed because she slowly becomes a symbol of rebellion against the Capitol’s tyranny. Her knowledge of her own culpability and responsibility weighs heavily on her. You don’t have to be a revolutionary teen symbol in a flame-covered suit holding a bow and arrow to understand those feelings, especially at this time of year. This time of year is here to remind us that we’re all connected (kol yisrael areivim zeh la-zeh—all of us are responsible for one another) and that we’re all guilty of something.

And we couldn’t have asked for a better heroine than Katniss to help us realize that. She is a flawed heroine, clearly damaged after her experiences in the Games. To the dismay of some readers, in Mockingjay she isn’t a butt-kicking superhero. She’s a person—sometimes passive, sometimes fearful, sometimes full of self-doubt—like all of us. She opts to face the most unsavory aspects of herself. She accepts the introspection, responsibility, and regret we ourselves try to face on Yom Kippur. She takes off her costume, as we, too, must strip away the layers of defensiveness and guardedness that keep us from being the people we should be.

Another constant theme in all three books is how hard it is to retain our humanity in challenging situations. What sins are permissible for the greater good? In Katniss’ world, as in our own, there’s no bright line between good and evil. People do good things for bad reasons and bad things for good reasons. We’ve all sinned; the question is what we do thereafter.

The answer both Judaism and Mockingjay offer is introspection. No one is as hard on Katniss as she is on herself. Unlike Liz in Eat Pray Love, who’s all too eager to forgive herself, Katniss doesn’t let herself off easily. But being too self-flagellating can also be paralyzing. We need to be people of action, not just reflection. Self-loathing can keep us from the important work of tikkun olam. Katniss needs to come to terms with her own sins and take responsibility for them without letting them consume her. (As I pointed out last week, the Hebrew word for sin is literally “a missing of the mark”—how ironic that Katniss is an archer.)

But being forgiving, of oneself and of others, doesn’t mean having no standards. Like Katniss, we need to listen for a still, small voice amid the din. That tiny voice could be our own courage, or it could be the awareness of someone else’s humanity. We need to have the presence of mind to forgive and the strength of character to trust again.

And, like Katniss, we need to learn how to be at peace with the past. As parents, we fall down a lot, we miss the mark, we lose our tempers, we lie to our children, we aren’t fully present when they tell us their stories. None of us is perfect. But we try to do better, and to do better we must first overcome the burdens of our past failings.

Thank God we have a heroine like Katniss, then, who, like parents everywhere, walks a path that is often lonely, a path that acknowledges nuance and realizes that what’s right doesn’t always bring applause and congratulations. But that’s what true heroism is: doing something just because it’s right. Let us keep that in mind as we sit in services this year.

Gmar chatima tova—may you be sealed in the book of life.

I was sitting with a rabbinic friend swapping stories about our lives and our work. He started talking about an encounter he had recently had: “A Jewish man, probably in his early thirties, and his non-Jewish girlfriend came to speak with me. They want to marry, but his parents are dead-set against their only son marrying a Gentile. I asked the woman what she thought about the parents’ attitude, and she was honest. She said it seemed primitive and ridiculous. But she also said that, if necessary, she’d be willing to convert. After all, she wants to be a good person, and Judaism, she assumes, wants people to be good and might well have something to teach her about goodness. That’s how she put it, ‘might well have something to teach her about goodness.’ ”

“And what did you tell her?” I asked.

My friend, a rather traditional rabbi, answered: “I told her that we’re in no rush to bring people in, that conversion to Judaism is a not a quick business: ‘Presto, you’re a Jew.’ There’s a lot to study, a lot of rituals to learn, and I certainly can’t convert you before you do all that studying, and commit yourself to practicing all that you study.”

“And what did she say to that?”

“It was the boyfriend who spoke up. He seemed really annoyed. ‘I told you this was pointless,’ he said to the girl, and then he turned to me. ‘We’re getting married in six weeks, rabbi. With or without your help.’”

My friend shrugged. “I told them that even if the two of them had come in with a more open attitude, six weeks was way too quick to do a conversion. Six months would be a stretch. They walked out with a book I gave them, but they’re not coming back, I can tell.” My friend shook his head back and forth a few times, his expression a mixture of sadness and annoyance. “What I was really thinking was that they’d be better off going to City Hall, and just getting their license. We don’t need converts like that. One day, if she’s interested in becoming a real Jew, she can come see me.” He shrugged his shoulders, and regarded my skeptical face. “I know, I know, that day’s never going to come.”

I was quiet a minute, thinking about, of all things, a 2,000-year-old talmudic sage named Hillel, and about an American-Jewish community that’s been getting smaller and smaller and whose members have now been intermarrying at rates of 40 percent for over 30 years.

“What about that comment she made to you?” I finally asked him.

He looked puzzled. “Which comment?”

“That Judaism might well have something to teach her about being a good person.”

“Nice words,” he conceded. “But I would have been a little more encouraged if she had actually said something about religion. Like maybe she had read about Shabbat and wanted to observe it. Or was willing to keep kosher. At least then I would have felt that I had something to work with. But this couple gave me nothing to work with.”

Nothing to work with. His words reverberated in my head.

At the time, I had already begun thinking that I would like to write a book about Hillel, and this encounter only stiffened my resolve. For Hillel, I am convinced, would have found absolutely wrong-headed my friend’s all-too-common and reflexively discouraging approach to conversion. Just as I find it hard to imagine Hillel approving of the strange limbo in which 300,000 Russians of dubious Jewish—and sometimes non-Jewish—parentage are presently living in Israel, many of whom want to become Jews. I thought of Hillel because he is not only, arguably, Judaism’s greatest rabbinic sage, but also its most fearlessly inclusive.

He is also the rabbinic figure most willing to give ethical behavior equal—even greater—weight, along with strict adherence to the ritual laws. The story for which Hillel is best known involves a non-Jew who is open to converting to Judaism but who wishes to learn about Judaism not in six weeks, but while “standing on one foot”—that is, in a single sound bite. Having literally been driven away with a stick by another rabbi who is affronted by his request, the non-Jew comes to Hillel, who is open to converting him, and who offers the man a single precept which mentions only the decent treatment of one’s fellow man—“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow” —along with the admonition to keep studying. If there is an essence of Hillel, it is in this story in which he himself dares to offer an essence of Judaism.

Hillel, perhaps the greatest rabbi of the Talmud, lived some 1,200 years after Moses and about 900 after David, and presumably we should possess considerably more biographical information about him and his background than about theirs. But we don’t. A talmudic passage refers to him as “Hillel the Babylonian,” from which we deduce that he was born in Babylon and subsequently came to Israel. The Talmud informs us that he went on to serve as Nasi, the foremost religious leader of the community. Elsewhere, the Talmud traces his descent to King David, a touch of royalty that befits a man whose descendants would hold positions of religious leadership within the Jewish community for more than 400 years. However, we don’t know the names of his father or mother or, for that matter, his wife (though the rabbis tell a story that reveals her to have been a highly sensitive practitioner of charity). We know the name of one son, Shimon—we don’t know whether or not he had other children—and of his brother Shebna, who is identified as a merchant. And because of the leadership roles many of Hillel’s descendants assume, we know their names, among them, four Gamliels, two additional Shimons, three Yehudahs, and the final leader, known as Hillel the Second. We also know of the contemporaneous rabbi, Shammai, founder of his own school—and the man who drove the would-be convert away—with whom Hillel and his disciples had numerous legal disputes; surprisingly, however, there is only one story in which the two men actually appear together. Nevertheless, they are a famous emblematic pair of adversaries who each uphold principles essential to Jewish tradition.

We also know that Hillel was a disciple of two rabbis, Shmaya and Avtalion, who were the religious leaders of their age, and who were both descended from converts to Judaism. We know that Hillel assumed his position of leadership during a period of great instability and ignorance in Jewish life, in all likelihood related to the megomaniacal kingship of Herod, who persecuted many of the era’s religious teachers. While the Talmud ascribes to Hillel a lifespan of 120 years (as was the case with Moses), it would seem that his years of religious leadership ranged from approximately 30 BCE to 10 CE, which would mean this book is being published, coincidentally, on what is possibly the 2,000th anniversary of his passing.

What we do possess about Hillel are stories, many many stories. Stories scattered throughout the Talmud and Midrash, along with numerous legal rulings of his and of his disciples (Beit Hillel, the School of Hillel) that are recorded in the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and both the Jerusalem and Babylonian editions of the Talmud. It is from these stories and rulings that Hillel enters the Jewish mind as so great a rabbinic sage, a man beloved for his legal daring, passion for learning, remarkable openness to converts, and imaginative acts of kindness.

It is both in stories and in legal discussions that we encounter Hillel’s willingness to define—in one extended sentence, no less—Judaism’s essence, his openness to determining Jewish law not only on the basis of tradition but also on the basis of his keen understanding of the Torah’s intention, and his loving confidence in the instincts of the common man.

Yet, as much as Hillel’s teachings are familiar in the Jewish world and were repeatedly affirmed (by a heavenly voice no less) as valid and fundamental, many of his most important ideas have been ignored, sometimes profoundly so. Who was this man who can feel as radical today as he must have felt in his own time, and yet who sits, or ought to sit, squarely at the center of normative Judaism? And how have we moved so far from his vision?

Joseph Telushkin, rabbi at the Synagogue for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles, is the author of 16 books, including Jewish Literacy, The Book of Jewish Values, and A Code of Jewish Ethics This excerpt is taken from his book Hillel: If Not Now, When? out this month in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series, published with Schocken Books.

In a new memoir, Half a Life, Strauss writes about the crash and its aftermath. He joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about how this tragedy has shaped his life, about guilt and doubt, and about his fears for his children.

When I arrived at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the flagship campus of the Reform movement’s seminary, in June 1968, cheeseburgers were still served in the dining room—a vivid expression of classical Reform Judaism’s disregard for kashrut and other Talmudic customs. Months before, a rabbinical student who had dared to stand up to lead services wearing a kippah and a tallit had been forced off the bimah by school authorities. His act served notice that a generation of emerging Reform leaders was fascinated by traditions that earlier leaders had categorically rejected.

At the time, Reform Judaism—a movement that in 19th-century Germany had characterized Judaism as exclusively a matter of faith and so had abandoned the notion of Jewish peoplehood and the authority of rabbinic law—was absorbing the implications of the Holocaust and the rebirth of a Jewish polity in Israel. The pride and wonderment of the Six Day War were palpable; within a few years, Hebrew Union would lead all Jewish seminaries in establishing a mandatory one-year program in Israel for its rabbinical students.

I remember the perplexity I felt the first time I heard fellow students discuss the notion that tradition might command us, that the religious norms of the past might become existentially alive to us. I did not know it at the time, but we were in effect entering a conversation that had been conducted 45 years earlier in Germany, between Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, concerning the nature of Jewish law and the renewal of Judaism. Buber had utterly rejected rabbinic law, or halachah, as having anything to do with God or revelation, and he claimed that the forms of traditional Judaism had ossified and served only to stifle authentic religious encounter. Rosenzweig, on the other hand, asserted that spontaneity and freedom were intrinsic to the experience of being commanded, that “Law [Gesetz, in German] must again become commandment [Gebot] which seeks to be transformed into deed at the very moment it is heard.”

I would soon learn that the Talmudic sages had taught 1,700 years prior that true freedom, cherut in Hebrew, could only be found in compliance with the Torah. But doctrine is one thing and experience another. The Reform Judaism that I was drawn to was God-centered and freedom-based. While the Hebrew Union curriculum included a fair amount of Jewish history—ancient Israel, medieval Diaspora, modern Europe, American Judaism, birth of Israel—my keenest interest was theology, an area that I found insufficiently addressed.

Perhaps that interest led me to Israel in 1969—this was before the Israel year was formally built into the Hebrew Union curriculum—to spend my second year of rabbinical training in Jerusalem. I left an America in which my generation lived in the shadow of the Vietnam War, immersed in the social, political, and cultural struggles that shook American democracy. In Jerusalem, I came to realize how fortunate I was to witness the rebirth of a people, a language, and a land-based culture. I came to understand in the depths of my soul what a privilege it is to live one’s life as a member of the Jewish people, to participate in the shaping of this ancient-new civilization. The possibility of the emergence of a “new Jew” became critical to my sense of our people as ever-evolving. And I glimpsed the possibility of the emergence of a new me when Elana Rockower, who had come to Israel on her own religious quest, agreed to become my wife. I have been blessed to share my journey with her ever since.

Because I had never planned to serve as a congregational rabbi but rather had been drawn to rabbinical school as a way to fill in some of the gaps in my Jewish education, I was thrilled when Elana and I were hired, during the last year of seminary, to teach in the pilot year of the Miami High School in Israel, the brainchild of the late Rabbi Morris Kipper. A pioneer in the field of Jewish immersion education in Israel, long before Birthright/Taglit, Kipper had understood the transformative educational potential of bringing young American Jews to Israel to study the history of their people. Under intense, camp-like conditions, we purveyed an exciting overview of 3,000 years of Jewish history, on and off the land, and augmented classroom time with regular trips to the field.

In that context, during a field trip, Elana and I first visited Kfar Chabad, the Chabad village in central Israel. We came to love the totality of experience Chabad offered, the sense that on Friday afternoon as the gates to the village closed, you left the 20th century behind and found yourself back a century or two inside a Polish or Ukrainian shtetl. Here I felt one could live a God-centered life. I began covering my head, and Elana and I took up thrice-daily prayer using the siddur T’hilat HaShem.

We were in the Old City of Jerusalem davening at the Chabad shul on Yom Kippur 1973 when we first heard the sirens that signaled the onset of the war. All of our students remained in Israel during the war, and together we spent much time picking vegetables and pruning roses on various collective farms, called moshavim, and visiting the wounded, some of whom we had just met on our campus at Beit Berl. The war changed everything for everybody. For Elana and me, it hastened our path to parenthood and deepened our attachment to Israel.

After a year at the Miami High School in Beit Berl, we moved to Jerusalem, planning to spend a year during which I wanted to study Talmud at a yeshiva. In 1974 we became parents, joined a community of young Anglo-American, modern Orthodox Jews, and met a visionary teacher who became our “rebbe,” Rabbi David Hartman. A recent immigrant from Montreal, a disciple of the leading light of modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Hartman deployed his charismatic intellect to reveal the vital wisdom of Jewish law and to demonstrate how the State of Israel was the testing ground where the true value of halachah would be determined.

We felt that we had finally come home. I studied with Hartman at Hebrew University, worked with him in establishing the Shalom Hartman Institute, taught at Pardes Institute and Young Judaea Year Program, and worked with American students in Reform and Conservative youth programs and Israeli high-school students. During that time I also went through boot camp and artillery training in the IDF, during a peaceful interbellum season. I loved it.

But when in 1981 I received a phone call from Rabbi Richard Israel, who had been my Hillel rabbi when I was an undergraduate at Yale, inviting me to consider becoming Jewish chaplain there, I leaped at the opportunity. Almost all of my teaching in Israel had involved American Jews. I remembered the decisive impact Rabbi Israel had exerted in my life, and I felt ready to offer that kind of energy to the next generation of American Jews. So, Elana and I began the process of wrenching ourselves away from a life that was precious to us. We believed we would return to Jerusalem after three years. It has now been almost 30.

When asked by Yale students and faculty in 1981 what kind of Jew I was, the best answer I could muster was that I was a Jew from Jerusalem, that I had begun my Jewish life in the Reform tradition but understood myself as trans-denominational, connected to all forms of Jewish religious expression and not an advocate of any particular one.

In the course of my study in Jerusalem inside the Shalom Hartman Institute, I had come to understand that halachah reflects not so much the truth of God as the pragmatics of attempting to live in the world connected to divine norms whose claim, by definition, eludes one’s ability fully to realize. This understanding has guided me as a practicing rabbi as I have been called upon to make practical decisions, especially in areas where there is no precedent. Like intermarriage.

For many years when couples of differing religions presented themselves to me at Yale, I told them that I would gladly help them design a wedding ceremony that gave expression to their different religious traditions, but I explained that I could not myself preside. Jewish law, I said, simply does not recognize the possibility of a Jew contracting a marriage with a non-Jew. And further, since the presence of a rabbi evokes the generations of Jews who came before us, one needs to ask whether the prior generations belong at this wedding.

About five years ago, however, I began to acknowledge that my legal scruple about officiating or co-officiating at such a wedding was not consistent with my willingness to discount many other traditional norms. The halachah’s non-recognition of a particular action had never restrained me from praying in an egalitarian minyan where a woman might serve as cantor, for example, or joining in a service at which instruments were played on Shabbat.

I also found myself rethinking the nature, function, and meaning of conversion. For a good number of years I had felt obliged to preface my work with a conversion candidate with a disclaimer. “You realize,” I would say, “that regardless of your effort and sincerity in this process, a large number of Jews will never recognize you as a Jew. You will not be able to get married or be buried in Israel, because the court that I convene does not have universal jurisdiction among Jews. If you choose to become an Orthodox Jew and work to that end with an Orthodox rabbi, you will come closer to achieving full recognition.” The vast majority of the people I worked with, however, were clear that they did not want to become Orthodox Jews. One young man said to me, “I want you to help me become a Jew like my fiancée and the majority of our friends: a secular, cultural Jew.” I found a way.

Conversion, I came to realize, is a highly personal decision that should be presented as an option, never as a precondition. I always explore the possibility of conversion with a couple of mixed religions, for it is one of the glories of Jewish law that it long ago codified the gesture of solidarity enacted spontaneously by biblical Ruth into the formula of giyyur, a mode not only of marrying into the Jewish people but also of marrying the Jewish people itself directly. But I have begun to meet serious young couples of differing backgrounds to whose wedding I would not hesitate to invite the ancestors even if the non-Jew declines the conversion option.

My problem with intermarriage, I now realize, is based on legitimate fears about the survival of our people, period. But what if our people is in fact evolving into new forms of identity and observance? What if we are indeed generating new models of Jewish commitment and engagement with the world? What if Rabbi Donniel Hartman is right when he observes in his book The Boundaries of Judaism that “when the intermarriage act is in fact only … an expression of one’s choice as to partner and not of one’s personal religious and collective identity, the classification of intolerability is not warranted” and that “modernity and the choices it has engendered have created complex realities which we must take into account in our boundary policies”?

I submit that it is time for Judaism to formulate a thoughtful, traditionally connected ceremony through which a Jew may enter into marriage with a non-Jew, a prescribed way or ways by which a rabbi may officiate or co-officiate at such a wedding. I believe we are the ever-evolving people and that there will always be among us those who are rigorously attached to ancient forms. I believe it is critical that there will also always be among us those who vigorously dream and search for new vessels into which to decant the sam chayyim, the living elixir of Torah. If we only look backward as we move into the future, we will surely stumble. We need scouts, envoys, chalutzim, pioneers to blaze new ways into the ancient-newness of Judaism.

Perhaps for example we might note that there may be stages of entrance into and levels of engagement with the Jewish people, which might find liturgical expression both in the wedding ceremony and at other lifecycle events going forward. After all, becoming a Jew, like becoming a person, takes a lifetime. And just as we want to be able to invite our ancestors to the weddings and brisses and bat mitvahs of the present generation, we want our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to feel drawn to the love and joy of being connected to the Jewish people. We want them to know that we have not forgotten that the Jewish people is “a covenant people, a light of nations.”

Rabbi James Ponet, the Jewish chaplain of Yale University and the director of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, officiated the wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky together with Rev. William Shillady, a Methodist minister.

This sort of ill-intentioned generalizing is terrible, as nearly all sentient people—Jew and non-Jew alike—would agree. But disturbingly, a not-dissimilar tactic is employed by some Jews against a subset of their own: haredim, a non-judgmental term for those the mainstream media tend to call “ultra-Orthodox.” In a sense, the haredim have become the Jews’ Jews.

***

This has been a problem in the media for as long as I can remember. A decade ago, I wrote a lengthy article on this subject for Moment magazine titled “Open Season on the Orthodox.” It turned into a cover story, for which the editors created ingeniously hilarious art: It showed a stack of “Weekly World Inquirer” tabloids with covers trumpeting the imaginary weekly’s latest revelations, among them “Orthodox Rabbi’s Two-Headed Alien Love Child!” (with the subheadline “Offspring ‘Not Jewish’ Rabbinical Court Rules”) and “El Niño: Orthodox Plot!”

The article was of course more serious. It presented a crowded rogue’s gallery of what I believed to be biased reportage—examples of egregious suspension of journalistic norms, subtle media misrepresentations, and outright fabrications—about haredi Jews. Like any writer, I fantasized that my words might actually effect meaningful change. And like most fantasies, mine didn’t much penetrate reality. Haredim as a group continue to be unfairly maligned—and pilloried for their principles.

By defending halachic standards regarding conversion in Israel, we are portrayed as small-minded; for seeking to preserve traditional Jewish norms for public prayer services at the Western Wall, we are condemned as mullahs and women-haters; for taking Jewish law and custom seriously, we are sneered at as backward. When a group of haredim in an Israeli town try to preserve their particular style of education, they find themselves branded racists. A New York Times op-ed declares, without basis, that haredi rabbis in Israel have decided that “almost no one” is Jewish and calls unnamed haredi rabbis “demonstrably corrupt.” A respected Jewish columnist characterizes Israel’s religious courts as a “rabble of rabbis … a counterfeit product, pretenders to a piety they daily demean.”

There is nothing wrong with making a case for multiple conversion standards in Israel, for a variety of public prayer service styles at the Western Wall, for denying a particular community the right to mold a government-supported school in its own image, or for the separation of religion and state in Israel. Differences of opinion are fine. But vilification isn’t. Name-calling is not an argument.

The hardy weed of anti-haredi animus easily spreads to even more mundane reportage. When a social activist claims, without producing a shred of evidence or a single witness, that she was assaulted in a public place in broad daylight by a haredi man because of tefillin marks on her arm, the alleged assault was widely reported as established fact. When a group of Israeli teens on a school outing accidentally caused a forest fire, a well-known blog implied that the blaze had something to do with the fact that the school was haredi. A national Jewish newspaper publishes a comic strip featuring wild-eyed, grotesque depictions of religious Jews, cynically disparaging their desire to share Torah with other Jews.

I don’t believe that such things—well, the comic strip excluded—are done with conscious intent to demonize. The writers and editors who allow anti-haredi sentiment to inform reportage do not consider themselves prejudiced, even subconsciously. But, as Slate’s William Saletan has insightfully written, “There’s a word for bias you can’t see: yours.”

***

But, perhaps even more sadly, the media’s bias against haredim dovetails with—and encourages—individuals’ personal prejudices.

Truly objective observers of the haredi world—the fairest ones are, not incidentally, more often non-Jews—are often struck not only by haredi insularity and ritual observances but by the community’s refinement of spirit, generosity, and good will. If the previous sentence elicited a cynical smirk, that only testifies to the power of the misconception-mongering.

But cynicism cannot obscure facts. Whether judged by objective criteria or by simply observing life at street level, the haredi community is very different from the image of it that exists in many media and minds. Even a quick perusal of the pages of any haredi newspaper or magazine, of which there are several these days, should be enough to open minds. They cater to their readers, of course, ignoring most of contemporary popular culture that imbues the contemporary American scene. And they are empty of the sort of gossip and scandals that titillate readers of more mainstream media. But the window on the haredi world they provide opens on a scene very different from, in some ways diametrically opposed to, many people’s preconceived notions.

The percentage of haredi income donated to charity is formidable, particularly impressive in light of the many observance-related expenses (educational and otherwise) that Orthodox Jews shoulder as a matter of course. The number and scale of haredi efforts aimed at comforting the sick and bereaved, feeding the hungry, or providing other social services to Jews in need—haredi or not—is astonishing. No small number of non-observant Jewish New Yorkers have been introduced to the Satmar community, the large and influential Hasidic sect, when visited in the hospital by its ladies, bearing good wishes and hot kosher food.

Are there then no haredim who are miserly, insufficiently sensitive to the needs of others, or even—how shall we put it?—ethically or morally challenged? Of course there are. And we hear and read about them regularly. We have witnessed truly abhorrent behavior by members of the haredi community over recent years, from what law texts call “moral turpitude” to child molestation to financial shenanigans to outright thievery. And innocent, truly religious haredim are deeply shamed by the hypocrites and criminals among their population. Although not every ugly story turns out to be true, enough have passed the smell—and even the legal—test to convince us haredim that we have much work to do to impress on every member of the community the import of the fact that the Torah governs every aspect of a Jew’s life.

And we haredim can even understand, in light of the scandalous behavior of some, why other Jews view us all with suspicion, or even worse. But, as with Jews in general, the difference between prejudice and perceptiveness lies in whether one chooses to focus on a selected ugly sample or on the overwhelming majority of a group’s members, those we don’t get to read about.

I don’t believe that anti-haredi bias is truly analogous to anti-Semitism. The latter is visceral and evil; the former just misguided. Most Jews who assume the worst about haredim may be puzzled, frustrated, discomfited, annoyed, rattled, or embarrassed by us (or some of us). But they don’t really hate us. I believe that every Jew, in his or her heart of hearts, loves every other Jew. It’s just that—well, to reference a contemporary poet: Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you like them all of the time.

It would be nice if all Jews were always both lovable and likable. But in this imperfect world, that may not come to pass. What we can all do, though—and this applies to us haredim as well as others—is to resist, as best we can, the evil inclination to indulge in generalizations, assume the worst, or vilify our fellow Jews.

It’s a tall order but a timely, urgent one.

Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, a national Orthodox organization.

Our New Year is about reflection and reassessment. Even those two words tell us we’re supposed to look back as much as we look forward—look at the “re,” telling us to turn around, to stop charging full speed ahead. And in another example of the way language informs what we do, we spend the holiday hoping to be inscribed in the book of life: two words—book, inscription—that speak of permanence. Inscribed books are weighty and lasting—they have historicity. They do not yell “whoo!”

On Rosh Hashanah, lots of us—even people who don’t spend a lot of time in shul or hunched over Jewish texts—make the effort to get to a synagogue. The tunes and prayer-poems are familiar; they’re the same every year. We sing Avinu Malkeynu, asking God to forgive our sins. The refrain is repeated so frequently that it’s easy to sing along. It’s repetitive and dirge-like, and you don’t need to know Hebrew to fall into its rhythm. We await the blowing of the shofar: The sound and the visuals couldn’t be more primal and ancient. Rosh Hashanah’s liturgy is full of descriptions of humans as meaningless little nothings cowering before the Almighty. Even if you don’t subscribe to the old-school version of the smiting Heavenly Father, the king on a throne of judgment, the text is consistent and almost reassuring. Here we are, standing with our community, sniveling in one voice. There’s no narcissism involved.

We do this every year.

But on a secular New Year, repetitiveness is the last thing we want. New Year’s Eve is when we’re supposed to go out, make the scene—and if the scene is somewhere hot and new and exclusive, so much the better. Our resolutions, too, are all about the new. They’re about hurling ourselves forward, full of superhero-like determination to become new. We swear to lose weight, to quit smoking, to find a new job, to get organized. We throw ourselves into our new, new, new lives, only to sputter out by February.

A key difference between the secular and sacred New Years is in the way each looks at time. The secular year is linear; it’s about shooting forward, like an arrow. Looking back only slows you down. That’s part of the American psyche, too. No regrets. Onward and upward. Excelsior.

But Jewish time isn’t linear. It’s circular. The same rituals, melodies, and objects scroll by again and again. They’re like a Torah being rewound or a Viewmaster clicking through familiar, tiny images over and over again. It’s not our tradition to swear to change our external selves on Rosh Hashanah; we look in rather than out. And we look back, thinking of the ways we’ve missed the mark over the past year and resolving to try to be more moral people. We don’t steamroll over our feelings of regret and embarrassment—which is what American culture generally wants us to do. Don’t dwell, our day-to-day world says. Move on. But we Jews don’t play that. We dwell. We examine our flaws as if they were scabs, and then we pick at them. We know we have to apologize to other people. We know we have to think about how to be better people. And we know that better people doesn’t mean shinier, glossier people, but rather more thoughtful people.

On New Year’s Eve, we see ourselves as failures for making the same resolution every year; once again I failed to become a size 6, I failed to learn Spanish, I failed to find love. But on Rosh Hashanah, our samenesses aren’t regarded as failings. We know everything is cyclical. Wanting to be inscribed in the book of life and thinking about what we have to apologize for are what we do every year. Every year we know we’ll have to apologize and take stock. It’s almost a relief. We’re not expected to reinvent ourselves; we’re just supposed to try to be our best selves.

This is a good lesson for parents. The secular New Year’s model really doesn’t work for parenting. It isn’t useful to vow to go fully organic, enroll the kids in violin classes, eliminate white flour, and help with homework every single night. We can’t sustain this fervor of “I will be an entirely different parent.” But the cyclic nature of Rosh Hashanah, the familiarity of the texts and sounds and the soothing childhood taste of apples and honey and the familiar, alarming spongy texture of honeycake and the kind of self-examination this holiday encourages—those are more useful models for parents to emulate. Can we do a little better? Can we remember what it felt like to be a kid? Can we appreciate who our children actually are, right here and right now, while we think about how to be the best parents to them—not some idealized version of our children, but our actual children?

My Rosh Hashanah won’t be all that different from last year’s. My husband and I will negotiate who watches the kids when, how we’ll juggle the family service and adult prayer and reflection time. We’ll spend time with my family. My kids will make construction-paper daisy chains, writing on each link the qualities they hope to encourage in themselves in the coming year. We’ll throw bread into the Hudson River. We’ll read New Year at the Pier, How the Rosh Hashanah Challah Became Round, and Sammy Spider’s First Rosh Hashanah.

But our Sammy Spider years are coming to an end; I figure we have only one or two more holiday cycles to go through with the inquisitive arachnid. The books will be passed on to another, younger family. But not just yet. This year, we’ll be stringing Apple Jacks and Honey Nut Cheerios onto cords, making edible “apple and honey” necklaces—my mom’s idea, something new. Little, thoughtful, incremental changes are doable, and more sustainable than unrealistic vows to tear everything up and launch ourselves headlong into an all-new world.

Have a good, sweet year.

Those questions may appear nebulous, simultaneously too elusive and too deep for anyone to attempt to answer seriously. But look at the landscape of Jewish life and two broad currents suggest themselves, two divergent agendas that address much more than the question of conversion alone. On the one hand, those who imagine Judaism as an exclusive enterprise advocate that the religion and its followers alike should move in ever-diminishing circles, orbiting around a small nucleus of rabbis entrusted with parsing the halachic laws. This approach is not without its merits; trying to make sense of an ancient faith in a modern world is a mighty and baffling task, and the drive inward, toward purity and certainty, is both instinctive and immensely reassuring.

But those of us who believe that Judaism’s survival also depends on its ability to adapt to the spiritual and practical challenges imposed by modernity must reject the urge to narrow our common horizons. Instead, we must examine our boundaries and beliefs and work to welcome new people, new traditions, and new ideas into the fold. To some, such talk may have the airy, hollow ring of universalist New Age spirituality. But that is not the case—as we think will be clear from the collection of essays by rabbis and writers, scholars and cooks, comedians and community leaders in Tablet Magazine’s High Holiday package. Some of these articles and essays are personal, others historical. In them, we hope each reader will find his or her own path toward answering Judaism’s essential questions, impossible and beautiful and all-encompassing—the only questions worth asking.

Judaism’s greatest sages have always plunged into the depths of doubt in an effort to find morsels of wisdom. This holiday season, two of our contributors evoke the memories of such men: Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in an essay coming tomorrow, writes about Hillel the Elder, who defined Jewish peoplehood in radically inclusive terms, and Rodger Kamenetz recalls his journey to commune with the spirit of the late Nachman of Bratslav, a 19th-century rabbi who made his home among the non-believers in the hope of showing them the merits of faith.

These rabbis—and other, less illustrious but no less righteous men and women throughout history—embody Judaism’s finest qualities. As their respective communities sought solace and comfort in closed doors and closed minds, they ventured out and struggled to expand the boundaries of peoplehood, occasionally disregarding the letter in service of the spirit. It is doubt, they realized, that makes the believer’s faith more meaningful, and it is compassion for others that makes one’s understanding of oneself more complete. Armed with these convictions, they engaged with the world; more than any enforcer of strict rules or arbiter of stern edicts, they taught us what it means to be Jewish.

As we approach Rosh Hashanah, we would do well to abandon the pointless fights that have embroiled so many of us for so long, and to insist instead that there are other, better, more urgent questions for us to be asking. We must ask how we can invite as many newcomers to partake in Judaism—as those interviewed by Joan Nathan for her food column have done—without eroding the religion’s core tenets. We must ask what forms of innovative communal structures we might erect to serve the needs of those whom consequences placed just outside the reach of tradition’s grasp, as Rabbi Andy Bachman does in a Vox Tablet podcast about, of all things, burial customs.

Most important, we must ask which of our beliefs guide us forward and which are merely vantage points to the past. And we must do so without turning denominational divides into weapons of divisiveness. In the course of recent American Jewish history, Reform and Conservative rabbis have sometimes preferred strict interpretations of Jewish law, while Orthodox rabbis have allowed room for ambiguity. Indeed, it is the Orthodox rabbi Avi Shafran who here reminds us of the inherent dangers of generalizations and collective judgments, a shortcoming from which Jews of all stripes are not immune.

Unlike Passover or Purim, Rosh Hashanah has no haggadah or megillah, no seminal text that invites us to ponder the meaning of the holiday. It is up to us to stir up debate, to ask what traditions still matter and what should be reconsidered. We hope you’ll find kindling for conversation in the articles and other content we’re publishing this week. And even if not, at the very least try the pomegranate martini.

Shanah tova, from everyone at Tablet Magazine.

Bartenura Prosecco Brut NV (Italy, $18)
You will start your Rosh Hashanah feast on a high note if you opt for Prosecco, which delivers bubbles and fun at half the price of Champagne. It may be not be as elegant as its French cousin, but this zesty Prosecco makes a fine aperitif or cuts through the richness of any tsimmes it encounters.

Goose Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2008 (New Zealand, $17)
I like to say New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc’s grassy, citrusy personality is so distinctive that it’s almost flourescent. Goose Bay’s refreshingly crisp rendition is no exception, and it harmonizes well with fish, including a forkful of gefilte with horseradish.

Daltôn Galilee Chardonnay Unoaked 2009 (Israel, $17)
Have you ever tried Chardonnay freed from its oaky, vanilla-shake shackles? Insiders have been enjoying this style for years, and Daltôn’s crisp and subtly peachy version makes their lips smack with satisfaction. Savor it with everything from seafood to salads to matzo ball soup.

Recanati Galilee Rosé (Israel, $15)
Summer may be waning, but your passion for pink needn’t. Clean and zesty, this dry, cherry-scented wine pivots between the world of white- and red-wine foods, equally at home with fish dishes as it is with more substantial fare like barbecue, lamb, or kasha varnishkes.

Tabor Merlot “Adama” Chalk Soil 2006 (Israel, $21)
The famous rant in Sideways notwithstanding, this selection proves that Merlot doesn’t have to be a wine for the wounded. Its soft, generous blackberry character and hints of coffee bean and sweet spice flatter a range of rich meals, from stuffed cabbage to stews.

Bodega Flecha de los Andes Gran Malbec 2008 (Argentina, $20)
It seems like everyone I interviewed for my new book—including John Lithgow and John Leguizamo—waxed rhapsodic for the pleasures of Malbec, and this version makes it easy to see why. Lush and ripe, it offers plenty of blackberry and blueberry fruit, joined by whiffs of coca powder and licorice, with a smooth, enduring finish. It is perfect with brisket and other richer, meaty creations.

If you have a kosher wine question you want me to answer, maybe you need a suggestion of a particular wine to pair with specific dishes, post a comment below and I’ll see what I can do to help you out

Mark Oldman is a wine expert whose new book is Oldman’s Brave New World of Wine.

Learning about food traditions is a major challenge in every mixed marriage, but perhaps more so when one partner is Jewish and the other must learn from scratch how to navigate both kashrut and the culinary customs that characterize the cycle of holidays that kicks off anew next week, with Rosh Hashanah.

“When you grow up outside the tradition you don’t know the holidays,” said Colleen Fain, 63, a community volunteer in Coral Gables, Florida, who converted to Judaism when she got married more than 40 years ago. “You have to learn the rituals, and it’s hard to pass that down when you are not familiar or comfortable with them. The convert has to work really hard to understand the customs so they unify the family.”

For Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, 54, who converted when she married writer Tony Horwitz, Judaism was a natural progression. “I didn’t know any Jews growing up,” Brooks said over a glass of wine on the porch of her Victorian home on Martha’s Vineyard, far from Australia, where she was born and raised. “For some reason my father was a lefty Zionist Socialist who got caught up with the Zionist movement, even though we were not Jewish. It rubbed off on me.” As a teenager, Brooks started wearing a star of David because “of my rabid history reading, especially about the Shoah to express identification with the Jewish people.” Conversion seemed “like the natural thing to do,” she said. It was a move “much more about history than faith, I wasn’t going to be the end of the line of a faith that survived so many years.”

Brooks knew Jewish deli food in New York and Ashkenazic cooking from Tony’s family, but she likes the Middle Eastern cuisine of Israel best. “When I lived in Cairo as a writer, I kept visiting Israel and loved the Levantine-inspired food,” she said. For breaking the fast after Yom Kippur, she goes Sephardic, sometimes serving Poopa Dweck’s Syrian brisket with fruit from her cookbook Aromas of Aleppo and other times harira, a rich Moroccan lamb-based vegetable soup often used to break the fast during Ramadan, which she first tasted when she was in Morocco in the late 1980s. “It was the only thing that got me up in the morning,” she said. “You feel like you have been fed with that.”

Brooks speaks passionately about cooking. When she doesn’t get challah from her son’s class at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, where the students make it, she bakes it herself. “I like to get my hands in the dough, and I get some of my best novelistic ideas when making challah,” she said. “I chew over the issues from my morning’s writing and sometimes gnarly plot points resolve themselves. Turning the compost works well too.”

Tom Ashe similarly follows the Jewish rituals of his spouse, Joanne. The son of a police officer from Queens, Ashe converted when he married Joanne 33 years ago. The couple cooks together (during the holidays he plays the role of assistant; the rest of the time he’s in charge) and rarely host fewer than 10 family members on weekends in their home in Placitas, New Mexico. “Since I am a convert, each holiday brings back memories of when I was in my mid-20s and chose Judaism,” said Ashe, 58, a real estate developer. “They are definitely my holidays too, and I look forward to the foods, the smells, and the traditions. The Jewish palate is more eclectic than what I grew up with as a young Protestant boy in Queens. Jews have the whole world, from Middle Eastern to Asian foods.”

Although the Ashes still pull out Joanne’s mother’s recipes for the holidays, they occasionally tweak dishes, as in a delicious smoked brisket holiday recipe more reminiscent of the far West than Eastern Europe.

Veronica Goode knew nothing about Jewish customs growing up in Venezuela and had to learn everything—from Shabbat candle-lighting rules to what ingredients to include in a holiday meal. “Cooking Jewish is a real shock,” said Goode, 36, a social work student in Washington, D.C. “When I got married, I didn’t know how to cook anything Jewish, even brisket, so I called my step mother-in-law.” Veronica now makes her recipes with lots of onions, tomato paste, and long cooking. Her one complaint: “I haven’t learned to make matzoh balls yet.”

Goode underlined a lament I have heard from many converts I meet at book signings and other events. Judaism is intimidating, and they need a gentle soul to mentor them through the traditions.

“The best thing to do is to ask friends and relatives for recipes and don’t be afraid to try them,” said Fain. When she first wanted to make kugel, for example, she asked her sister-in-law, Sally Ann Epstein, who had a family recipe from a cousin for help. Fain was not afraid to ask, Epstein was flattered, and now making that kugel—a dairy version more appropriate for a break-fast—is a family tradition. “If I had married someone else, I wouldn’t know how to make kugel or brisket,” she said.

Imagine life without that!

HARIRA (MOROCCAN VEGETABLE SOUP)
Adapted from Geraldine Brooks

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 large onions, diced (about 4 cups)
3 cloves garlic, crushed
2-inch knob of ginger, peeled and grated
3 celery stalks, diced
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut in rounds
2 zucchini, diced
8 cups good lamb, beef, or vegetable stock
12-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 19-ounce can chick peas,
1 cup barley
1 cup chopped fresh mint
2 cups chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon cardamom or to taste
1 teaspoon cumin or to taste
Pinch of saffron
Salt to taste
¼ teaspoon white pepper or to taste
1 teaspoon hot red pepper or to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper or to taste
½ cup vermicelli noodles, broken up

1. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pot and sauté the onions, garlic, ginger, celery, carrots, and zucchini for a few minutes.

2. Add the broth and the tomatoes and bring to a boil. Then continue to simmer for another 20 minutes.

3. Add the chick peas and the barley, half the mint and half the cilantro, the cardamom, cumin, saffron, salt, and the three kinds of pepper. Continue to simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes, adding 1 to 2 cups water or as needed.

4. Add the vermicelli and continue simmering about 5 minutes or until the pasta is cooked. Stir in the remaining mint and cilantro. Adjust the seasonings to taste and serve.

Yield: 10 to 12 Servings

BARBECUED SMOKED BRISKET
Adapted from Tom and Joanne Ashe

5- to 6-pound Grade-A choice brisket
6 sliced garlic cloves
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 sliced onions
¼ cup liquid smoke
1 bottle Heinz Chili Sauce
1 16-ounce can tomatoes
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 cup of wine or enough to nearly cover the brisket

1. Wash and dry the brisket and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Pierce holes in the brisket and insert the garlic cloves. Sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Heat the oil and sear on both sides.

3. Put the onions on the bottom of a heavy casserole, just large enough to hold the brisket. Put the brisket on top and then add the liquid smoke, chili sauce, tomatoes, and tomato sauce and pour over the brisket. Cover with the red wine.

4. Cover with tin foil or a top and bake in the oven for 4 hours.

5. Chill overnight, remove fat that has accumulated, slice, reheat and serve.

Yield: about 10 servings

Fain family noodle kugel, as prepared by Joan Nathan.
Gabriela Herman

FAIN FAMILY NOODLE KUGEL
Adapted from Colleen Fain, Sally Ann Epstein, and Bobbi Mayer Joslin

8 ounces broad, flat, egg noodles
½ cup sugar
12 ounces whole milk cottage cheese
1/2 cup milk or a little more
1/2 cup salted butter, melted, but not hot
1/2 cup golden raisins
2 large eggs, slightly beaten 1 cup sour cream
½ teaspoon cinnamon or to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 350-degrees and grease an 8-cup casserole.

2. Cook the noodles in a large pot of salted water and drain, then rinse to cool down a little.

3. Mix the sugar, cottage cheese, milk, melted butter, raisins, eggs, and sour cream in a large bowl. Stir in the noodles, transfer to casserole dish and liberally sprinkle the cinnamon on top.

4. Bake for 40 minutes until browned on top. If you use a flat casserole you will need slightly less time for cooking.

Yield: about 8 servings

Joan Nathan’s forthcoming book, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, is due out this fall.

I was an extremely phobic young child—bees, fire, elevators, lawnmowers, forklifts. My most incapacitating fears, though, and the ones that took the longest to get over, involved dozens of books, videos, and songs, ones that, according to the logic of a symbolic universe I can no longer really explain, included elements of horror. So, for example, Volume 8 in the Sesame Street Library, with its two-page spread on Old King Cole and its introduction to the letter Q, may seem innocuous to the average reader, but its tale of Hansel and Gretel absolutely terrified me.

That’s not actually the weird part—as Bruno Bettelheim could tell you, the whole point of fairy tales is to help children process their fears in abstract terms—but my particular mechanism for dealing with such situations was to a) hide the offending book in some distant corner of the house and b) from that safe distance, reclaim any symbols associated with it as my “favorite things.” So in this case, 8 (as in Volume) became my favorite number (it still is); purple (as in the color of the Count, who appears on the book’s cover) became my favorite color; and so on. I’m sure there’s a proper name for this coping strategy somewhere in the psychoanalytic literature, and I would love to know what it is.

One item in my pantheon of fear was an illustrated guide to the Jewish holidays. I’ve long forgotten the name of the book and nearly everything else about it, but the scary part still sticks in my mind: A full-page abstract image, in the section on Tisha B’Av, of gray smokestacks against a dark orange sky. I must have been about five when I came upon this picture, but while I was too young to make the explicit connection with the Holocaust, I knew a Shoah when I saw one. The book was hidden. And, as my puzzled kindergarten teacher eventually found out, Tisha B’Av became my “favorite holiday.” My mom still calls me every year to remind me.

That Tisha B’Av illustration is still one of the first things I picture when I picture the Holocaust, which in itself later became—well, I don’t want to call it my “favorite genocide,” but it was a historical event I assiduously avoided and just as assiduously obsessed over. In retrospect, it’s almost like my entire psychological mechanism was designed specifically for that purpose. It makes me wonder if the proper psychoanalytic term isn’t, simply, Judaism.

At the beginning of every June, my sister, brother, and I would walk with our parents to the central square in Ramat Gan where dozens of tables covered in books were set up. Each of us would choose five books. Sometimes the writer of one of those books would be at the table and would write a dedication in it. My sister really liked that. I personally found it a little annoying. Even if someone writes a book, it doesn’t give him the right to scribble in my own private copy—especially if his handwriting is ugly, like a pharmacist’s, and he insists on using hard words you have to look up in the dictionary only to discover that all they really meant was “enjoy.”

Years have passed, and even though I’m not a kid anymore, I still get just as excited during Book Week. But now the experience is a little different and lot more stressful, because today I’m the one on the other side of the table scribbling in other people’s new books. And yet, even after 18 straight years of sitting on the other side of the table, I feel really uncomfortable about writing a dedication in a stranger’s copy of my book.

Before I started publishing books, I wrote dedications only in the ones I bought to give as gifts to people I knew. Then one day I suddenly found myself signing books for people who’d bought them themselves, people I’d never met before. What can you write in the book of a total stranger who might be anything from a serial killer to a Righteous Gentile? “In Friendship,” borders on falsehood; “With Admiration,” doesn’t hold water; “Best Wishes” sounds too avuncular; and “Hope you enjoy my book!” oozes smarm from the capital H to the final exclamation point. So, exactly 18 years ago, on the last night of my first Book Week, I created my own genre: fictitious book dedications. If the books themselves are pure fiction, why should the dedications be true?

“To Danny, who saved my life in the Litani. If you hadn’t tied that tourniquet, there’d be no me and no book.”

“To Mickey. Your mother called. I hung up on her. Don’t you dare show your face around here anymore.”

“To Sinai. I’ll be home late tonight, but I left some cholent in the fridge.”

“To Feige. Where’s that tenner I lent you? You said two days and it’s a month already. I’m still waiting.”

“To Tziki. I admit that I acted like a shit. But if your sister can forgive me, so can you.”

“To Avram. I don’t care what the lab tests show. For me, you’ll always be my dad.”

In retrospect, and after the slap in the face I got for writing that last one, I suppose I shouldn’t have written what I did for that tall guy with the Marine buzz cut who bought a book for his girlfriend.

“Bosmat, though you’re with another guy now, we both know you’ll come back to me in the end.”

The tall guy could have made a civil remark instead of getting physical. In any case, I learned my lesson, however painfully, and since then, during every Book Week, no matter how much my hand itches to write in the books bought by some Dudi or Shlomi that the next time he sees anything from me on paper it’ll be a lawyer’s letter, I take a deep breath and scribble “Best Wishes” instead. Boring maybe, but much easier on the face.

So, if that tall guy and Bosmat are reading this, I want them to know that I am truly repentant and would like to offer my belated apologies. And if by chance you’re reading this, Feige, I’m still waiting for the tenner.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

Shavuot FAQ: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Festival of Weeks, by the Editors

Field Study: Why the holiday of Shavuot is all but ignored across America, by Marissa Brostoff

At Sinai: A recent convert to Judaism discusses why Shavuot is her favorite holiday, by Siân Gibby

Food

Got Milk?: The complicated history of Jews and dairy, by Liel Leibovitz

Blintz Binge: One woman’s search for the perfect cheese-filled pancake, by Katie Robbins

Dairy Heirs: Shavuot and cheese, past and present, by Joan Nathan

Light and Sweet: Shavuot provides the perfect excuse for a cheesecake pilgrimage, by Blake Eskin

DAWN 2010

Sandra Bernhard Discusses Shavuot

Dawn 2010: The Mixtape

Davy Rothbart Tells Some Stories

Rodger Kamenetz Scans The Universe

Tiffany Shlain Premieres Her Film

Josh Kun Makes a Mix Tape

Eddy Portnoy Explains Nasalogy

Gary Shteyngart Answers Questions

Daniel Handler Mixes a Drink

It’s the day the Israelites got the Torah. As you may recall, they left Egypt in a bit of a hurry, and therefore it took some weeks until they were ready to attend to the business of receiving the word of God and become the official Chosen People. How many weeks? Seven, the Hebrew word for which, sheva, shares a root with the word Shavuot, which means weeks. To mark the occasion of having received the divine laws, we do what Jewish mothers everywhere would have us do year-round: study all night long.

Together with Passover and Sukkot, the holiday is also one of the Three Pilgrimages (or shalosh regalim, if you want to rock the Hebrew), annual occasions for the ancient Israelites to bring their harvest and livestock over to the Temple in Jerusalem for festivities and ritualistic slaughter. And while the pilgrimage part was abandoned—you know, exile and all—we still mark these three major holidays with special recitations of the joyous Hallel prayer.

ANY BAD GUYS?

Surprisingly, none. It’s one of those Jewish holidays without an awesome villain. Which is also why it’s one of those Jewish holidays not yet turned into a major Hollywood motion picture.

WHAT DO WE EAT?

Delicious dairy products. Cheesecakes are big. If your ancestors hail from the Tri-State area—Poland, Russia, Ukraine—so are blintzes.

WHY?

The rational explanation is that the Torah was given on the Sabbath, and as no animals could be slaughtered to celebrate the happy occasion, the Israelites likely shrugged their shoulders and collectively agreed to nosh on some brie. More mystical Jews—you know, Madonna—believe that the numbers speak for themselves: Dairy in Hebrew is chalav, and if you sum up the numerical value of the three Hebrew letters that make up that word you get 40. Which is a number you’d remember if you had to wander in the desert for as many years.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

First up, be happy. Why? It says so in Deuteronomy: “And you shall rejoice in your festival … and you shall only be happy.” Done rejoicing? Get ready for Yom Tov, which is a kind of Holiday Lite: You’re not allowed to work, use electrical appliances, handle money, or do any of the other stuff you can’t do on the Sabbath, but you are allowed to cook and bake, provided you use a pre-existing flame for lighting your fire and avoid that Kitchenaid. You can also carry stuff in public, another Sabbath no-no.

But Yom Tov’s less about the nays and more about the yays. Because we have to be happy, we’re obligated to prepare obscene amounts of food and invite the less fortunate to partake. Men are also expected to buy new clothes or jewelry for their wives, candy or toys for the wee ones, and flowers for the home, as Shavuot, celebrated in the spring, is also known as the Festival of Harvest.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

You bet. Traditionally, we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot. It’s like the Desperate Housewives of Canaan—Dead husbands! Levirate marriages! Sexy harvest scenes!—whose heroine is a Moabite who converts to Judaism and becomes the great-great-grandmother of King David (symbolism alert: Just as the Israelites accept the Torah and become Jews, Ruth embraces the Torah and becomes a Jew herself). King David, by the way, is said to have been born and died on Shavuot, which makes the book apropos, as do said harvest scenes.

And then, of course, there’s the matter of all-night learning. We weren’t kidding about that: It’s called a tikkun, Hebrew for correction, and tradition has it that since the Jews didn’t rise early enough to receive the Torah in Sinai—some accounts have God himself nudging them from their sleep, in what must have been the most terrifying wake-up call ever—they have resolved to stay up all night and study the Torah, commemorate the day it was given, and make up for the drowsiness of their ancestors. While religious Jews still adhere to Torah study, many less observant ones choose to spend the night studying anything from Jewish history, poetry, and art to contemporary Israeli television shows.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Watch Mel Brooks’s interpretation of Moses on the mount.
• Check out Alma’s awesome NYC Shavuot all-nighter.
• Go to DAWN, an all-night Shavuot celebration brought to you by Tablet Magazine.
• Read Slate’s take on the Book of Ruth.
• Listen to our Shavuot-themed podcasts here and here.

Here are lyrics to four songs.

“Some Hebrews”

MOSES
[Spoken.] You just don’t get it, do you, Aaron? Anyone who stays in Egypt is dead! If I die, it won’t be from slaving. It’ll be from fighting, to get up and get out!

Some Hebrews can get a thrill
Hauling stones up a sandy hill
That’s OK for some Hebrews
Who don’t know they’re alive

Some Hebrews can thrive and bloom
Digging pits for some Pharaoh’s tomb
That’s perfect for some Hebrews
For four centuries or five

But I at least gotta try
When I think of all the sights that I gotta see
And all the prayers that I gotta pray
All the tables I gotta eat at
Come on, Aaron, whatta you say?

Some Hebrews can get their kicks
Cutting straw and then making bricks
That’s peachy for some Hebrews
For some weak, dumb Hebrews to be
But some Hebrews ain’t me!

I had a dream
A wonderful dream, Aaron
All about God in a bush that was burning
That’s all that it took for the wheels to start turning

I had a dream
Just as real as can be, Aaron
There I was in Mr. Almighty’s office
And he was saying to me, “Mose,
Turn your old staff into a serpent
Plagues of frogs and blood in the river
Send a cloud of locusts to Egypt
Boils and hail and death to the firstborn
Go to Pharaoh, if he’s in pain then
You’ll be on your way back to Canaan!”

Oh, what a dream!
A wonderful dream, Aaron
And all that I need is 88 bucks, Aaron
That’s what he said, Aaron
Only 88 bucks

AARON
[Spoken.] You ain’t getting 88 cents from me, Moses

MOSES
[Spoken.] Well, I’ll get it some place else! But I’ll get it! And I’ll get my people out!

Goodbye to the Desert Sinai!
Good riddance to all the rocks that I had to carry
All the bricks that I had to cart
All the mummies I had to bury
Hey, Red Sea, get ready to part!

Some Hebrews sit on their butts
Hope for freedom, but got no nuts
That’s living for some Hebrews
For some dumb bum Hebrews I suppose
Well they can stay and rot!
But not Mose!

“Little Pascal Lamb”

YOUNG FIRSTBORN EGYPTIAN CHILD
Little blood, river blood
You left us with nasty mud
Little frog, little frog
Your croaking freaked out my dog
Little louse, little louse
Infected our whole damn house
Little cow, little cow
You’re no longer with us now
Little boil! Little boil!
You’re giving us all the blues
We look in the mirror and recoil
The dermatologists all are Jews
Little hail, burning hail
The firewall did not prevail
Little night, endless night
Will we ever again see light?
Will we ever again see—
[The Young Egyptian Firstborn Child falls down dead.]

“Everything’s Coming Up Moses”

MOSES
[Spoken.] It’s time we show them what Moses is really made of, what I really got inside me. Finished? Ha! This is only the beginning!

I had a dream, a dream about you, Aaron
It’s gonna come true, Aaron
You think that we’re through, but Aaron—

Lift the staff! Part the sea!
We got nothin’ to do but be free
Manna falls from the sky
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses

No more fights, no more fuss!
It’s the number we call Exodus!
Gotta rush, gotta fly
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses!

On to freedom, build your own pyramids
Jews don’t need ’em, they got a prophet to lead ’em!

Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead
We’ll be fine, we’ll be great
We’ll kvell, just you wait
That burning bush will never fade from view!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

We can do it, get to the old Promised Land
We can do it, Moses is gonna see to it!
Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead!
Lift the staff, part the sea
I can tell, we’ll be free
And no one’s gonna stop the freaking Jews!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses and Miriam
Everything’s coming up farfel and matza brei
Everything’s coming up brisket and seder plates
Everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

“You Gotta Make a Living”

WISE SON
You can sing Aleinu
Til they say Dayenu
Bench at the bench til you’re bent
But you gotta make a living
If you wanna make your rent
You can sacrifice a heifer
Ostracize a leper
Spend Yom Kippur on your feet
But you gotta make a living
If you want your kids to eat

You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It ain’t such a draw
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
In my practice of the law
My arguments are thrilling
And I ain’t even billing
I was first in my class at the bar
Make yourself a living
Israelites, and you’ll go far

WICKED SON
You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It won’t make you well
Me I oy’d, and I oy’d
And oy’d, oy’d, oy’d
But I did it at Cornell
Tell me it’s farkakte
I’m still a fancy doctor
And clearing half a million a year
Make yourself a living
You can say goodbye to fear

SIMPLE SON
They can oy, they can oy
They can oy oy oy
That ain’t the golden goose
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
Yep, you guessed it—I produce!
Once I was a failure
Now I’m L.B. Mayer
For everything from films to Broadway
Make yourself a living
If you wanna win the day

ALL
Be a professional
Any old profession’ll
Earn you a house and a car
It’s easy to be giving
When you make a living
Can’t you see how happy we are
Make yourself a living
And you, Jew, can be a star!

But she was no ghost. The organizers of my appearance had decided to surprise me by hiring Civil War reenactors to entertain the crowd. In addition to the woman from the restroom, I was introduced to two uniformed men “from the 7th South Carolina Infantry,” along with a 14-year old drummer boy. They had constructed an officers’ tent in the synagogue’s social hall to display their pigs’-hair toothbrushes and period weaponry, including gunpowder packs, revolvers, and muskets.

Like anyone with a passionate interest in something beyond daily life, Civil War reenactors strike many people as obsessive-compulsives, motivated by some obscure commitment that the rest of us know we ought to humor in public—even if we privately believe that they’re nuts. I laughed at their get-ups when I saw them in Harrisburg—then I went home and built a sukkah in my backyard. Maybe such passions ought not seem so strange to me, I realized, given that Jews practically invented historical reenactment.

When I learned that Civil War reenactors sometimes adopt an ancestor’s name and rank, I was reminded of the duchening, the high priests’ blessing, at my family’s synagogue—when my husband, a Levite, washes the hands of the Kohanim before they bless the congregation. The same physical reliving of events occurs when worshippers prostrate themselves on the floor during the recitation of the Temple service on Yom Kippur, or when celebrants light Hanukkah candles. The Passover haggadah tells us that we each must see ourselves as if we personally had come out of Egypt. While the words “as if” animate most text-based Jewish rituals, there is no “as if” in eating matzo any more than there is in eating hardtack. These rituals are not mere commemorations of the past. They are physical reenactments of it.

More fascinating still is the immediacy of the reenactment tradition. Far from being costume dramas of the distant past, historical reenactments in both Jewish culture and among Civil War devotees were already taking place during the lifetimes of people who had lived through the events being reenacted—people, that is, who ought not to have needed to be reminded of these events. In the Torah, the Israelites are commanded to reenact the night before the exodus from Egypt—not the joyous experience of the exodus itself, but rather the “night of watching” before the exodus, the terrifying experience of waiting for the angel of death to pass over their homes—beginning in the year after it occurred. Likewise, Civil War battle reenactments began with the Confederate veterans, who started congregating annually around the end of the 19th century to relive the most traumatic moments of their lives. And while Civil War reenactment may lack the spiritual complexity and purpose of Jewish ritual, it is nonetheless more than a hobby for many. It is, often, a way for participants to honor families, moved by a visceral connection to fathers and grandfathers for whom the reality behind the theater was that much closer to the lives they lived.

This parallel between Jewish ritual and Civil War reenactment reveals a deep, unexpected similarity in Jewish and Southern culture that distinguishes both from mainstream American public life. Jewish and Southern cultures are both post-traumatic civilizations—they are both built upon a sense of overwhelming obligation to the past.

For the South, the material devastation of a war that destroyed their economy and killed one out of every five white males was second only to the unbearable shame of losing their source of dignity and purpose—their belief in themselves as the true heirs to the American revolution, upholding the supreme American value of independence. For the Jews, the material loss of national sovereignty with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE was second only to the unbearable shame of losing their source of dignity and purpose—the Temple as the divine residence on earth. Both Jews and Southerners are people whose ancestors knew what it meant to lose. Unlike the bright official optimism of American life, both Jews and Southerners have cultivated cultures in which even children must be taught to live on the losing side of history and in which a sense of cultural dignity must be drawn from something other than triumph and success. While Jews and Southerners today no longer live their daily lives with their ancestors’ overwhelming sense of shame and defeat, the memory of that shameful loss and the community’s responses to it (manifested as an outsized sense of group pride, defensiveness, or both) have become part of each group’s identity. And therein lies the disturbing element of the reenactment traditions: the awareness, however hidden, that this former grandeur was lost because of one’s sins.

In Judaism, the sense that the community’s losses are deserved is built into the theological understanding of tragedy. The book of Lamentations unambiguously insists that the Temple’s destruction was due to the sins of the people. This idea, while problematic, is the animating force of much of Jewish civilization: the understanding that Jewish suffering is ultimately the people’s responsibility and therefore preventable. This ancient view pervades even secular Jewish life today on all points of the political spectrum, whether Jews claim that the community is attacked for being too kind to its enemies or for not being kind enough.

In the South, too, reenactments of the past owe their energy to an uncomfortable if unmentioned awareness of the theological understandings of the past. Northern Christian rhetoric at the time of the Civil War interpreted the total destruction of the South as divine punishment for slavery. While racism long outlasted the war, the upending of the world as white Southerners knew it demanded at least a tacit acceptance of the Northern view, even if it took 100 years to take root.

This does not mean that Jews and Southerners have reached the same conclusions about their losses. The unease that many Americans feel when seeing a Confederate flag comes from the fair suspicion that Southern devotion to the past, far from being a sophisticated replaying of trauma, is more akin to fantasy fulfillment—or a deliberate ignoring of the fact that the antebellum South was built on a foundation that can only be described as evil. There is no Southern equivalent of Lamentations, no public grieving for past sins. Yet if Southern culture does not blame itself enough, Jewish culture blames itself too much. And the only reliable eyewitnesses are ghosts.

In a ladies’ room at a Jewish community center in Richmond, Virginia, I encountered another ghost. I had just given a reading from my novel, which opens at a Southern seder during which all the food is served by slaves. In the restroom, a very elderly woman was waiting for me by the sinks. “I have something I need to say to you,” she said in a shaky drawl, and took my hand in hers.

“I grew up here in Richmond, and when I was a little girl, the elderly Jews I knew were people who lived through that time,” she said. “They had owned slaves. Maybe you’ll never find this written in a book, but I remember their faces at the seder when I was a child. And this is all I want to say to you: They were aware of the irony.”

Before I could ask her any more, she left, her 21-century perfume lingering behind her.

The first mention of the holiday that kicks off with a seder appears in the book of Leviticus, where it is referred to as the Feast of Unleavened Bread, owing to the fact that when the ancient Israelites left Egypt they hadn’t enough time to let their dough rise before fleeing. Indeed, the holiday commemorates and celebrates the flight of the Israelites, led by Moses, from Pharoah’s tyranny to freedom. Its Hebrew name is Pesach, which comes from the word pasach, commonly translated as “passed over”—a reference to the Exodus passage that tells of God passing over the blood-marked door of Jewish homes while he undertook to kill the first born sons of the Egyptians. Some scholars, however, suggest that a more accurate translation of the passage is that God “hovered over” the homes in question, signifying the Lord’s eternal protection of his chosen people.

With Shavuot and Sukkot, Passover is also one of the three harvest festivals in which the Jews of Ancient Israel historically trekked to the Temple in Jerusalem to offer their sacrifices and first fruits. Since the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, we are no longer obliged to make the journey, but we still honor its memory by including a recitation of the Hallel prayer during the seder.

In the Diaspora, Passover is observed for eight days with two seders, while in Israel it lasts for seven with a single seder.

ANY DO’S AND DON’TS?

Passover’s two major observations have to do with chametz, or unleavened bread, and the celebration of a seder.

The avoidance of chametz, referring to all grain products that have either already been fermented (bread, cake, some alcoholic beverages) or can cause fermentation (yeast), is at the heart of numerous rituals. Weeks before Passover, Jews embark on a serious spring cleaning. Although the halacha states no obligation to rid the home of any bit of chametz smaller than an olive, it is customary to clean out every nook, and tradition calls for a candlelight search of the premises on the morning of the first seder, a ritual called bidekat chametz, using a feather to inspect and sweep out even the hardest-to-reach corners. But tradition won’t have us looking in vain (that would be a bracha le’batala, a blessing for naught), so the head of the family must hide 10 small packets of chametz in different rooms; once they’re found, they are burned, a proceeding known as biyur chametz, and the house is considered kosher for Passover. Alternatively, chametz can be symbolically sold to a non-Jewish neighbor for the duration of the holiday, either by an individual or by a rabbi acting on behalf of an entire community.

The seder, which means order, is rich in meaning and in its aspiration for a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. Through Torah readings, midrashim, songs, and discussion, seder participants relive, as commanded, the events of Exodus.

The seder is also a culinary celebration with foods symbolizing elements of the Israelites’ story. It originally revolved around the Paschal lamb, which was delivered to the Temple, sacrificed, roasted whole, and eaten. In the absence of a Temple, Jews are prohibited from animal sacrifice, removing from the seder its most prominent offering—though it endures on the seder plate symbolically in the form of a shank bone. There are plenty of other meaningful dishes: maror, bitter herbs, which symbolize the hardship of slavery in Egypt; the karpas, a root vegetable dipped in salt water to symbolize spring and the Israelites’ tears; charoset, a sweet paste made of fruits and nuts symbolizing the mortar with which our ancestors built the houses of Egypt; and, of course, the matzo. In addition to the fact that it hearkens to the haste with which the Israelites fled their oppressors—so fast they didn’t have time to wait for their bread to rise—it also is known as lechem oni, the bread of affliction, a reminder of humility.

Food aside, the seder’s other greatest hits include the recitation of the Four Questions, asked by children to encourage a discussion of the meal’s symbolism, and the search for the afikoman, a hidden piece of matzo which children look for after the meal and the consumption of which marks the end of the eating portion of the seder. Children often trade in their afikoman findings for a prize from their parents.

Another less-frequently-observed tradition is the fast of the firstborn: To commemorate God sparing the Israelites while the firstborn sons of Egypt were killed, males of bar mitzvah age and older are required to fast on the morning before Passover, traditionally until after the end of the morning prayers.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

The haggadah, which tells the story of the Exodus, is the holiday’s key text. According to tradition, the haggadah was compiled sometime between 200 and 500 CE. The oldest complete manuscript is included in a prayer book compiled by Saadia Gaon in the 10th century, and the oldest printed version dates back to 1486, commissioned by Italy’s Soncino family. While most of the haggadah’s texts have remained unchanged since they were originally compiled, some—like the Aramaic Chad Gadya, for example—are later additions and are said to be drinking songs, with their repetitive refrains and crescendoes. Also, as the haggadah is, at its core, a compilation, many communities or families add their own traditions, rituals, and texts to the original, often pertaining to social or political issues such as women’s rights or the plight of African refugees.

Five More Things You Can Do:

• Take an audio tour of a matzo factory.
• Celebrate the seder in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.
• Steep yourself in symbolism with a musical explanation of the seder plate.
• Dance to a Passoverized remake of a Miley Cyrus hit.
• Relive the Exodus through an extended Internet search.

Passovers spent away from home are a long-standing tradition. Instead of hauling boxes of dishes out of storage, performing bedikat chametz, and spending days—or weeks—preparing kosher-for-Passover meals, observant East Coast Jews who could afford it once spent Passover at resorts in the Catskills and the Poconos. Guests would spend up to 10 days there, enjoy two seders, eat three hearty kosher-for-Passover meals a day, and work in a few wet rounds of golf, or some pinochle, or both. Not incidentally, cooking and cleaning were covered in the price of admission.

Most of those storied resorts are now closed, but Passover getaways are more popular than ever. Some are still held at modest facilities in, say, suburban New Jersey, but well-to-do Jews are increasingly spending the holiday in high style, eating sophisticated food and engaging in exotic activities, in far-off, luxurious places. “The evolution of Passover is to really start creating more resort experiences—rather than just catering experiences,” said Jeff Klein, vice president for food and beverage at the Fontainebleau Resort in Miami Beach, which hosts one of South Florida’s premier Passover packages.

These resort experiences are offered everywhere you can think of, including Israel, Miami, Arizona, Costa Rica, the Caribbean, Mexico, even Turkey. The organizers—generally an outside company that teams up with a resort property—might provide day camp for the kids and evening entertainment like comedians and singers, as well as the know-how and equipment required for an all-around kosher-for-Passover experience. The program at Miami’s Fontainebleau, for example, is organized by Lasko Family Tours, said to run “the Cadillac of Pesach programs,” which also puts on Passover programs at the swanky Eden Roc next door and at the nearby Hyatt Regency Bonaventure. The hotels, meanwhile, generally provide most of the staffing and overlay their own exacting standards of hospitality. “Every detail is accounted for,” says the Fontainebleau’s Klein, whose chefs work alongside those from the kosher caterer hired by Lasko. “They may say we want it plated this way, and we say it doesn’t fit our brand so we do it our way.”

The food on those plates isn’t limited to Eastern European—and, some may say, tired— classics like brisket and gefilte fish. Menus are traditional for the seders, but then comes the American-style barbecue, the sushi (made with quinoa instead of rice), and the afternoon tea rooms overflowing with kosher-for-Passover biscotti and cakes. The range of entertainment has evolved as well. In Miami, the 20-somethings spend quality time with their grandparents by day and go clubbing at night, thanks to a New Yorker named Dave Shine. During the week of Passover, Shine teams up with fellow promoters to throw huge, kosher-for-Passover parties at the city’s top nightclubs. “One night there are celebs, models, and VIPs, and the next night we cover the bar with plastic and table cloths, take every item off the shelf, and put up potato vodka and kosher-for-Passover wine and champagne,” Shine says. The corkscrews, cutting boards, and pourers are all new for the occasion. The parties—happening this year at Louis (in the Gansevoort South) and Klutch (formerly Opium Garden)—often pull in 1,000 people, many looking for potential mates. “At 5 a.m. when the lights go on, we still have to ask 400 people to exit the premises,” he says.

One’s choice of hotels depends, in part, on level of observance. Sam Lasko, who heads his family-owned business, says more Orthodox guests tend to end up at the Bonaventure—where the pool, for example, has designated times for women and men to swim separately. (At Fontainebleau and Eden Roc everyone swims together.) At Eden Roc, the hotel is dedicated entirely to Passover vacationers, which many customers prefer. But ultimately every family has to find the right fit.

Here are some Passover vacation options in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Prices are based on a 10-day (nine night) stay from March 29 through April 7, double occupancy, and include taxes, tips, and service charges. Be sure to inquire about last-minute discounts, as well as about family and children’s rates, which vary depending on age and room occupancy.

MIAMI, FLORIDA:

Fontainebleau Resort Miami Beach
This Miami mainstay is more chic than ever after a $1 billion facelift in 2008; the gorgeous design spreads across 1,504 new rooms, nine pools, and a phenomenal spa.
Prices: Starts at $4,999 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

Eden Roc: A Renaissance Resort & Spa
A $200 million renovation in 2009 left this beachfront hotel looking stylish and hip but not flashy, with three infinity pools, a bustling boardwalk, and 631 comfortable rooms.
Prices: Starts at $4,624 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

Marriott Doral Golf Resort and Spa
Sitting on 650 acres in suburban Miami, this true resort is a city within a city: five golf courses, five pools, and a full-service spa with 52 treatment rooms means there’s something for everyone here. And it’s all graced with warm, friendly service in a scenic setting.
Prices: $3,714
To book or for more information, go here.

Biltmore Coral Gables Florida
Built in 1926, this iconic hotel in Coral Gables (a national landmark) exudes timeless luxury and, although it’s far from any beaches, offers doting service, a pool, a prestigious golf course, and a catalog of amenities. Unfortunately, its residential neighborhood can get boring.
Prices: Starts at $4,350 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

Fairmont Turnberry Isle Resort & Club
The Fairmont is a true luxury retreat set on 300 acres in suburban Miami. Although it’s just minutes from the Aventura Mall, it offers an award-winning golf course, beautiful pools, elegant rooms, and a spa which means there’s no reason to leave the premises.
Prices: Starts at $5,000 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

ORLANDO, FLORIDA:

Regal Sun Resort in Walt Disney World
Kids will love staying across the street from Downtown Disney, where families will find shops, Cirque du Soleil, and DisneyQuest’s virtual rides. The hotel has a pool playground and game rooms for kids and runs a free shuttle to the parks.
Prices: Starts at $3,218 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

Waldorf-Astoria Orlando
Just opened in October 2009, this pristine luxury resort on 482 acres is the first hotel to bear the flagship name outside New York. There’s a golf course, the Spa by Guerlain, and a free shuttle to the Disney parks (all of which are 10 to 20 minutes away).
Prices: Starts at $3,749 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

LAS VEGAS:

Ritz-Carlton Resort & Spa, Lake Las Vegas
With the hotel set to close in early May, this Passover is one last hurrah for the Tuscany-inspired property overlooking manmade Lake Las Vegas. Thirty minutes from the glam of The Strip, this relaxing respite has luxurious rooms with comfortable beds and flat-screen TVs, a spa, impeccable service, nearby shopping, and even a small beach.
Prices: Starts at $4,774 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

MEXICO:

Fairmont Mayakoba
Nestled in a gated community 42 miles south of Cancún, this hotel offers a luxurious return to nature and serenity. The beach sits along one of the world’s largest reefs, the Willow Stream offers massages among the treetops, and guests are transported around the property in lancha (covered boats).
Prices: Starts at $5,000 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

ARIZONA:

Arizona Biltmore
A Phoenix landmark opened in 1929, the Biltmore caters to a sophisticated set and has played host to its fair share of celebrities and presidents over the years. In addition to having 36 holes of golf, eight pools, and a spa, the hotel is close to Camelback Mountain and the art scene in Scottsdale and Phoenix.
Prices: Starts at $5,186 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort & Spa
Classy but family-friendly, this Phoenix hotel offers a lazy river, an 89-foot waterslide, and poolside entertainment for kids, not to mention family activities like bike rentals and stargazing. For “bigger” kids, the hotel has all the usual features: tennis courts, a 28,000-square-foot spa, and two golf courses.
Prices: Starts at $4,774 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

Fairmont Scottsdale Princess
A stately white lobby and beautifully manicured grounds greet guests at this upscale resort set against scenic mountains. By day, guests have seven tennis courts, five pools, two golf courses, and a top-notch spa. Rooms all have terraces and oversized bathrooms.
Prices: Starts at $5,000 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

ARUBA:

Westin Resort
The Westin lacks the glitzy decor and elaborate frills found at other Aruban resorts, which for most people is a good thing. A clean, modern beachside hotel, the Westin impresses with prompt services, a curvy pool, and the supremely comfortable Westin Heavenly beds.
Prices: Starts $3,749 per adult
To book or for more information, go here.

Jennifer Garfinkel is an editor at Oyster Hotel Reviews.

Purim is the Hebrew word for “lots,” and the lots in question were drawn by Haman, an evil advisor to the Persian king Ahasuerus in the 4th century BCE, in order to decide on which day the kingdom’s Jews would be put to death. The plan was foiled thanks to Esther, the king’s Jewish wife; the Jews, saved from the gallows Haman constructed, then used those same gallows to execute him, his descendants, and thousands of other enemies. To commemorate this story of slyness and survival, we get rowdy each year on the 14th day of Adar.

Although the traditional account of the holiday’s narrative, the Book of Esther, became the last of the biblical volumes to be canonized by the sages of the Great Assembly before the destruction of the Second Temple, it lacks even a single mention of God. This has been the subject of countless debates among Jewish scholars, some of whom believe that its heroine’s name, Esther, is meant to evoke the Hebrew word hester, or “hiding,” signifying that God, even when out of view, is always directing the affairs of his people.

God, of course, isn’t the only one hiding on Purim. Esther herself spends much of the story concealing her Jewish identity, and Mordechai, her uncle, learns of Haman’s plot when he secretly eavesdrops on two royal guards. Over the past five centuries, a tradition has evolved permitting ordinary Jews, too, to masquerade themselves on Purim, a feature of the holiday that’s become among its most popular.

ANY DOS and DON’TS?

Purim being a big party, there are only dos. The first obligation is mishloach manot, “delivery of portions.” This custom—deriving directly from the Book of Esther—calls for the exchange of intricately composed baskets of prepared foods, mostly candy and pastries and wine. Traditionally, the baskets are delivered by children, who then receive a nice portion of the candy within. One perennial favorite is the hamentash, a triangular cookie that recalls either Haman’s hat or his ear, and which is typically filled with jams and fruit spreads.

With one’s friends and relatives well-fed and happy, Purim stipulates that one must also take care of the poor. The holiday’s second obligation is giving to charity, which is why some communities auction off their mishloach manot, with the resulting earnings going to tzedakah.

But Purim is as much about the text as it is about anything else. The Talmud demands that we congregate in synagogue and read the Book of Esther aloud. The book, also known as a megillah, or scroll, is read with its own traditional chant, and each time the evil Haman’s name is mentioned, congregants rattle groggers and other types of noisemakers to drown out his name. Readers are also encouraged to tell jokes, do tricks, and entertain their listeners any way they see fit. Such merrymaking led to the birth of the Purimspiel, or the Purim play, a lively bit of community theater that puts an irreverent spin on the events depicted in the Book of Esther.

And as such spiritedness is hard to come by when one is sober, drinking is not only permitted but encouraged. The Talmud tells us that one should drink on Purim until one can no longer distinguish between the blessed Mordechai and the cursed Haman. The Hebrew phrase for “no longer tell the difference”—ad lo yada—has become the name for drunken Purim carnivals celebrated annually across Israel, in which Haman (or Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, or any other enemy of the Jews) is traditionally hanged or burned in effigy.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

As far as coherent, suspenseful holiday narratives go, the Book of Esther is hard to match. The primary source itself, dating back to the 4th century BCE, is the traditional text, but the Septuagint has its own version, known as the Greek Book of Esther, written 200 years later and including additional historical tidbits: for one, it identifies the Ahasuerus of legend with the historical Persian King Artaxerxes. Over the centuries, several Aramaic retellings—erroneously referred to as targums, or translations—appeared as well, retelling the good old story and adding their own flourishes. The book remains a highly appealing text today, with various Jewish scholars exploring its relevance to feminism, queer theory, drama, and other fields.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Get jiggy with this Purim rap.
• Get all misty-eyed with Mariah Carey’s theme song from the Purim-themed film One Night with the King.
• Get your hankering for illustrated takes on Esther satisfied with Vanessa Davis’s “Purimpalooza.”
• Get serious about grogger apps for your iPhone.
• Join Tablet Magazine and JDub Records for Hamanbashin, a Purim party in New York City.

It was hardly an obvious costume choice for an Orthodox girl in Brooklyn. Rollerblading around the synagogue while brandishing a baseball bat, I wore a bright purple leotard over black leggings and rouged my cheeks to beauty-pageant standards. Though my collarbone, knees, and elbows were supposed to be covered (and not in clingy spandex) in keeping with Jewish law, I got around this restriction because I was still under 12 and had yet to enter formal Jewish womanhood, when dress guidelines went from suggestion to requirement. After my Tonya night, I thought, I would go quietly into adulthood, not minding the high necks and low hemlines I would have to wear.

But when I watched television or read my sister’s People magazine, which arrived every Sabbath afternoon, I would stare at the photos of celebrities and long to wear the same low-cut dresses and short skirts. I tried but failed to imagine what I would look like in those outfits. All I could see was my uniform—a long sleeved blouse paired with a plaid skirt that fell below the knees. It was tough to envision myself as an Olympic figure skating champion in such modest attire.

I had discovered figure skating and Harding simultaneously in 1991, while watching the National Championships, having stumbled on the broadcast on a Sunday afternoon. Back then she was known for hitting jumps, not kneecaps—sort of like Yevgeny Plushenko, but marginally more artistic. Specifically, she was famous for being the first American woman to successfully land a triple axel, the Everest of women’s figure skating, in competition. I was amazed by her raw speed and power and immediately converted to Harding fandom.

Frizzy hair aside, Tonya and I had little in common. I had never been to an ice rink or even roller skating before I watched those 1991 Nationals, but I was captivated by her. I started attempting what I thought were toe loops, salchows, and axels in the middle of the living room, despite having neither blades on my feet nor ice beneath them. I became so infatuated with the sport and Tonya that I threw a tantrum on the eve of the 1992 Winter Olympics because the ladies’ short program was to be broadcast on a Friday night, Shabbat, which meant I wouldn’t be able to watch the competition. My mother preferred the possibility of divine wrath to the certainty of a preteen meltdown and decided to set the black-and-white TV in her bedroom on a timer. We agreed not to tell anyone at school or synagogue about our indiscretion.

That night, my sister, mother, and I watched the short program huddled together on my mother’s bed. In our jingoistic fervor, we chanted “fall, fall, fall” as the Japanese Midori Ito attempted a jump, hoping to clear the path for the Americans: Kristi Yamaguchi, Nancy Kerrigan, and my beloved Harding. We burst into wild applause when Ito seemingly complied, not realizing we were watching a taped broadcast.

Unfortunately, my witchy powers were of no use to Tonya, who also fell at those games and ended up in fourth place. In my carpeted indoor rink, I recreated the competition, pretending that my 360-degree jumps had actually revolved three–and-a-half times. I landed them cleanly and awarded myself and Tonya the gold medal, which I had borrowed from my small collection of gymnastics awards. I considered sending one to her, but then figured she could order it from the Oriental Trading catalogue just as my gym did.

My older sister couldn’t understand why I preferred Harding to Yamaguchi, the gold medalist and world champion, or the elegant Nancy Kerrigan, who wore her hair pulled back tightly into a neat bun. But I didn’t care about clean wardrobe lines—it was the early `90s, which is to say it was the `80s in terms of figure skating fashion. Almost everything was ruffled, bedazzled, and feathered—looks that have endured in the sport.

Having been raised in a community that rigidly enforced gender roles, I enjoyed someone like Harding. Though she wore a figure-skating dress in competition, she seemed devoid of femininity. She was a boon to the sport of figure skating. All that she had was sheer athleticism. Tonya was so rough around the edges, no one could ever call her a glorified dancer. She performed her programs with brute force.

Of course, I wanted the brute force to be only stylistic, not literal. I abandoned Harding when it became plain that she had been complicit in the physical attack on the rival Kerrigan. She had become a national laughingstock, and no one, least of all a self-conscious preadolescent, could admit to supporting her.

Everyone assumed I was mocking Harding when I glided around my Brooklyn shul in character, which I suppose I was, but only in part. Just a few months earlier, I had admired Harding and I felt guilty for turning on her so quickly and viciously. But I received my comeuppance—I didn’t even place during the Purim costume contest. The next year, I would dress as a Coke can, and then later as a pencil, and then later still as a chocolate bar. I earned a spot on the podium for each of those efforts, having learned that bulky, inanimate objects were the way to go if you wanted costume accolades from the rabbis.
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Purim will be here again on Saturday, days after tonight’s completion of the women’s Olympic figure skating competition. Once again, I’ll be looking to the ladies for costume inspiration. As an adult, I no longer subscribe to Orthodoxy’s feminine dress code—hemlines, necklines, and taste are no longer obstacles. I can go as low (or high) as I want to on all fronts.

Feathers anyone?

Dvora Meyers is a freelance writer in New York City. She blogs about the unholy union between Judaism and gymnastics.

In the Mishnah’s tractate Rosh Hashanah, the rabbis engage in their trademark Talmudic discussions and determine that we must celebrate the beginning of the new year not one time but four. The first celebration, in the month of Nissan, is dedicated to the reigns of Israel’s kings. The second, in Elul, to animal tithes. The third is the one we all know, Rosh Hashanah, which falls on the first of Tishrei, when the Hebrew calendar starts anew. Finally, there’s Tu B’Shevat, the 15th day of Shevat (a one-day holiday which begins at sundown this evening), when we are to calculate the agricultural cycle and all biblical tithes involving trees and fruit.

Though a minor light in the holiday constellation, Tu B’Shevat nonetheless was of great importance when the people of Israel made a living working the land. In those ancient days, a host of prohibitions and demands—many still observed—guided Jewish life. Among those restrictions is orlah, the biblical prohibition against eating fruit produced during the first three years of the tree’s life, and ma’aser oni, the obligation to set aside a certain portion of crops for the poor. A calendar was necessary to help insure that all these rules were observed on time. That calendar started in the middle of Shevat. And since the 15th day is marked by the Hebrew letters yud and heh—which, combined, spell out the direct name of God—the adjacent letters tet and vav were selected to signify the date instead.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

While the sacred texts don’t decree specific behaviors associated with the holiday, its deep connection to nature could not be ignored by Jewish mystics. In the 1600s, Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, the renowned Kabbalist, created a Tu B’Shevat seder, a festive meal with special, mystical blessings and symbolic foods—specifically fruits and nuts—in the belief that such a ritualistic approach to nature would bring the world nearer to spiritual harmony. Since the Torah is often referred to as the Tree of Life, went the reasoning, any celebration of trees should, by association, become a celebration of life’s meanings and mysteries. To that end, the rabbi and his disciples drank four cups of wine, roughly representing the four seasons, and the seder focused on the kabbalistic ideas of repairing the world as one would a tree, focusing on everything from roots to leaves.
Few people today follow Luria’s intricate design, but the idea of a Tu B’Shevat seder is still practiced in many communities. Popular foods to eat include samplings from the seven species—olives, grapes, wheat, barley, dates, pomegranate, and figs—which the Bible marks as the quintessential crops of the land of Israel.

In modern times, an alternative tradition has taken hold: planting trees. To celebrate Tu B’Shevat in 1890, Rabbi Ze’ev Yavetz, one of the founders of the religious Zionist movement Mizrachi, took his students to plant saplings in Zikhron Yaakov, an agricultural settlement outside Tel Aviv. As more immigrants flocked to the Promised Land, the custom took root, symbolizing the renewal of both the soil and the people. The tradition has since become routine for Israelis, more than a million of whom plant trees each year on Tu B’Shevat.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

Alas. With the exception of the aforementioned Mishnaic tractate, there’s little in writing about the holiday.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Ponder Tu B’Shevat on Pandora.
• Get down with some Tu B’Shevat rap.
• Take sides in the Tu B’Shevat battle of the sexes.
• Cook a holiday dish with Tablet’s Top Chef.
• Travel in time to a future, dystopic Tu B’Shevat.

In his cartoons, Gross, born in 1895 to a couple from Russia who’d moved to the Bronx, created a cast of tenement dwellers who spoke a heavily accented English, full of malapropisms and Yiddish grammatical constructions, which Gross rendered in inimitable, and sometimes almost indecipherable, phonetic spelling. His work, which included large helpings of the ethnic caricature and vaudeville-style slapstick popular in the 1920s and ’30s, had a popular following, and he ultimately published several collections of his comics and book-length cartoons. The journalist H.L. Mencken was a fan, and The New York Times ran glowing reviews of his work.

Some Yiddish-speakers who wanted to present their community in a more respectable light—including Gertrude Berg, creator of the radio show The Goldbergs—found Gross’s hapless greenhorns offensive. It’s easy to see why. Here’s a recurring character, Mrs. Feitlebaum, complaining about a quarrelsome couple in her building: “By dem is going on a lengwidge?? I tut wot dey lookin to be sotch a idill copple!” The Feitlebaums aren’t so perfect either; in the next scene, her husband, Mr. Mow-riss Feitlebaum is beating their son Isadore again.

Gross also parodied a number of American classics, including Poe’s poem “The Raven” and Longfellow’s poem “Hiawatha,” in the diction of the Feitelbaums. (The Yiddish-accented Native Americans in his “Hiawatta” predate Mel Brooks’ version of the same joke by almost 50 years.) Much of his work has now been reissued in Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Reader edited by Gross enthusiast Ari Y. Kelman, who wrote the book’s introduction. Here, we present Gross’s take on “The Night Before Christmas”—“De Night in de Front from Chreesmas” (1927)—narrated by the New Yiddish Repertory’s Allen Lewis Rickman.

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.

Sources:

1. American Resarch Group

2. Penn Current

3. Ynet

4. Slate

5. Interfaith Family Magazine

Know that bittersweet feeling you get when you finish a really great book? This is what Simchat Torah is all about: having read through the five books of Moses, congregants read the Torah’s last portion and then jump right back to the beginning and read the first, creating a never-ending cycle.

The festivities begin on the holiday’s eve, a day often called—although some denominational and geographical differences apply—Shmini Atzeret, or the eighth day of gathering following Sukkot’s weeklong festival. The synagogue’s Torah scrolls, usually confined to the ark, are removed, and members of the entire congregation (in some communities, only the men) pass the scrolls from hand to hand, dancing and chanting liturgy while circling the synagogue seven times. This is known as hakafot, or rounds. (Interestingly enough, hakafot is also the proper Hebrew word for the game of baseball.) While tradition only requires the revelers to remain inside the synagogue, many communities take the party to the streets, and children are customarily given colorful flags and candy.

Also, given the holiday’s proximity to Sukkot and its ancient, agricultural import, Shmini Atzeret is also an occasion for Jews to pray for rain, a plea recited regularly until Passover.

In recent decades, Simchat Torah has become the occasion for political gatherings. In the 1970s and ’80s, there were frequent, massive demonstrations across America in support of Jewish refusniks in the Soviet Union.

WHAT DO WE EAT?

While there is no echt dish, it is traditional to give children sweets to better emphasize the joyous nature of the holiday. Torah-shaped cookies and candied apples are perennial favorites.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

The Priestly Blessing, usually recited during the Musaf prayer, is bumped up to Shacharit, the early morning prayer. One plausible explanation for that is that Kohanim, or the priestly line of Aaron’s descendants, are prohibited from performing the blessing while intoxicated, and the change of schedule allows them to perform their duties early on Simchat Torah morning and partake in the holiday’s festivities for the rest of the day.

Another tradition has to do with the congregation’s youngest members, who are honored with a collective aliyah during which they are all covered with a large talit as Jacob’s blessing to his children is read out loud. “May the angel who redeems me from all evil bless the children,” it reads, “and may my name be declared among them, and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac, and may they teem like fish for multitude within the land.”

Some congregations also invite all eligible members for an aliyah, often repeating portions several times over to give everyone an opportunity to read from the Torah.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Go round and round on hakafot with the Viznitz Hasids.

• Sweeten things with some Torah-shaped cookies.

• Brush up on some of the celebration’s social aspects.

• Read our commentary on the Torah’s first parasha…

• …Or contemplate the last.

Have an apology of your own waiting to get out? It’s not too late to repent. Call Tablet Magazine’s Sorry Hotline at 718-360-4836, and tell us all about it.

To commemorate this ancient ritual of love, then, we at Tablet Magazine—not the most sentimental bunch—are celebrating with a tribute to love’s darker side.  Here are the top ten greatest break-up songs ever written by Jews. Get out that photograph of your ex, let self-pity flow, and listen to what the heartbroken have to say…

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover: How do I leave thee? Let Paul Simon count the ways.

Famous Blue Raincoat: “You treated my woman to a flake of your life,” Leonard Cohen laments, “and when she came back she was nobody’s wife.”

Idiot Wind: Bob Dylan, the poet laureate of loneliness, was never more cruel than this.

“You’re an idiot babe,” he croons, “It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.”

Somebody Kill Me: Adam Sandler is the most unromantic wedding singer out there.

Baby Bitch: Gene Ween, otherwise known as Aaron Freeman, has some choice words (cover up the kids’ ears!) for a former lover.

Love on the Rocks: Pour Neil Diamond a drink, and he’ll tell you some lies: love on the rocks ain’t no surprise.

Baby Get Lost: Leonard Feather wrote this hit for Billie Holiday (though this version is performed by Franco Tenelli). Rage was never quite so elegant.

(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame: It was Elvis’s voice that made this treacherous lover famous, but we have Doc Pomus, born Jerome Felder, to thank for the green-eyed, monstrous Marie.

Through With You: When it comes to breakup song titles, Maroon 5’s Adam Levine prefers the straightforward approach.

Every Man Has a Molly: Say Anything’s Max Bemis wrote candid songs about his personal life, which is why Molly dumped him, which is why he’s asking fans to purchase the band’s merchandise. Isn’t this, really, the story of every relationship?

If we Jews, never a well-liked bunch, were to mark each and every injustice that had befallen our people over time, we would spend most of our days commemorating catastrophes.

Conveniently, then, there’s the Seventeenth of Tammuz, a catchall day during which, according to tradition, some of the most gruesome chapters in Jewish history unfolded. It began with Moses, strolling down the mountain after conferring with God and seeing that his impatient people had meanwhile found other, more glittering idols to worship. Furious, Moses smashed the tablets, the first of many no-good things to happen on the Seventeenth of Tammuz. The Babylonians crashing the gates of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E.? The Romans burning the Torah in 50 C.E.? The Libyans confiscating Jewish property in 1970? It’s all here, on one grim day.

The Seventeenth of Tammuz also marks the beginning of a period known as the Three Weeks, or Bein Ha’Meitzarim (“between the straits”), which ends with Tisha B’Av. It’s a period of general mourning in which weddings and celebrations are forbidden and life takes on a generally somber tone.

Together with three other occasions on the Jewish calendar—the Third of Tishrei, the Tenth of Tevet, and the Thirteenth of Adar—the Seventeenth of Tammuz is more of a historical reminder than a religious ritual. This is why the fast is faster and the restrictions not so strict.

ANY BAD GUYS?

Nothing but: Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian, besieger of Jerusalem and destroyer of the First Temple; Pope Gregory IX, confiscator of all known copies of the Talmud in 1239; even King Menashe, a malicious Biblical Jewish monarch who, on this date, placed an idol in the Holy Sanctuary of the Temple.

WHAT DO WE EAT?

This being a day of fast, not much. But take heart: fasting on the Seventeenth of Tammuz begins at dawn and ends with nightfall, so rumbling stomachs don’t have very long to wait before breaking bread.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

Again, as fasting days go, this one is more casual. Keep on these leather shoes, for example: unlike on Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av, they’re not forbidden. Neither is bathing, which, given the fact that the Seventeenth of Tammuz falls in the height of the summer heat, is a blessing. Also, special recitations—Vayechal, the very prayer that Moses offered the Lord immediately after seeing the Golden Calf, and Anenu, a traditional prayer of distress—are added to the morning and afternoon prayers.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

Alas, no. With the exception of the prayers mentioned above, this is a day of reflection on sorrow and misfortune, on the destruction of the Temple and other historical horrors.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Get Scholarly with Yale University’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism.

• Admire Rembrandt’s depiction of Moses smashing the tablets.

• Watch as scientists struggle to authenticate a tablet pertaining to King Solomon’s Temple.

• Read the book of Zechariah, in which the fast of Seventeenth of Tammuz is mentioned.

• Prepare for fasting with some ecumenical dietary advice.

Oh, come off it. Yours isn’t any better: Most likely, you too sat around the Thanksgiving table, gawking at your inane and insane relatives, shuddering as they lassoed every imaginable, potentially interesting topic of conversation into a corral of shouts and murmurs, and secretly entertained elaborate fantasies involving the electric carving knife and Uncle Seymour’s neck.

Luckily for you, the good men and women in Hollywood feel your pain. As is their custom every year, our brethren out west began this week the slow and controlled release of holiday-themed, family-centric films, which is to say films in which actors considerably more attractive than yourself deliver much wittier lines that mock, deride and otherwise torment fictitious relatives far more beastly than your folks back home.

For the past few years, the genre’s brightest star has been Vince Vaughn: In last year’s Fred Clause, Vaughn portrayed Santa’s fast-talking, nervous, intermittently boyish and bloated brother, and helped deliver that film’s message, namely that family may be an awful, oppressive proposition but it’s the only proposition we’ve got. In Four Christmases, which opened last week, Mr. Vaughn portrays Brad, a fast-talking, nervous, intermittently boyish and bloated man who learns that while family may be an awful…

Don’t blame Hollywood, though; for the origins of this deep-seated, anti-family sentiment you mustn’t look any further than the Bible, and this week’s parasha in particular. Here it is, in a nutshell: having systematically betrayed his brother and screwed him out of their father’s inheritance, Jacob, fearing Esau’s murderous wrath, skips town and decides to hang out at Uncle Laban’s in good ol’ Charan. There, Jacob falls in love with the lovely Rachel and toils for her hand in marriage for seven years, only to discover that kindly Uncle Labe pulled off that most ancient of tricks, the switcheroo, marrying Jacob to the older and less-desirable Leah instead. Still into Rachel, Jacob commits to seven more years of labor, during which his now double-daddy-in-law repeatedly tries to swindle him, before having to flee Charan with the furious Laban giving chase and marrying both of his wives’ handmaids for a total of four women and twelve children. And you thought your family was nutty.

But herein lies the tasty bit: these 12 children are the founding fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel. We, then, are left with an uneasy question: What does it say about us that we’ve all emerged from history’s ultimate dysfunctional family?

Simple: It means, I think, that what the rest of the world needs reminding—often, alas, in the form of Christmas-time comedies—we Jews naturally and strongly recall, namely that as heinous and hateful as our enemies may be, it’s our kinsmen we must really watch out for.

Don’t believe me? Just ask Rashi. Interpreting this week’s parasha, the sage comes across a lovely sentiment that seems, amidst the general malarkey of the story, somewhat incredible: When he meets Jacob for the first time, Laban says to his weary nephew “indeed, you are my bone and flesh,” and puts the boy up for a full month. Why would a deceiving louse like Laban say and do such selfless things?

Rashi comes to the rescue: “In view of this,” he writes, explaining Laban’s motives and assuming his voice, “I have no reason to take you into the house, because you have nothing. Because of kinship, however, I will put up with you for a month’s time.” And even that, Rashi hastens to add, was no freebie: Jacob paid for his keep by pasturing Laban’s sheep. He might’ve gotten a better deal trying his luck with any of the Jevusites or Hittites than he did with his mother’s own brother.

But what does Jacob the Genius do? He adapts. He takes not one wife but four. And unlike his father and grandfather, he sires not two children—that, he must’ve realized, was a recipe for disaster, as had been the case with Isaac and Ishmael as well as himself and Esau—but 12. He knows that rivalries and resentments and violence are inevitable, so he creates a clan large enough to contain and sustain all the toxicities of a nuclear family. In other words, two millennia before Stephen Sondheim, Jacob grasped intuitively the same principle the celebrated maestro of musical theater would later express in “Company,” his brilliantly bitter show about relationships: It’s not talk of God and the decade ahead that allows you to get through the worst, but the neighbors you annoy together and the children you destroy together. Abraham may have been righteous, and Isaac holy, but Jacob, Jacob is our true Father, because only Jacob really understood what families are all about. Amen.

Let us not waste any time, then; somebody print out this week’s parasha and fax it over to whoever it is in Hollywood who’s in charge of greenlighting holiday fare. Vaughn, have we got a role for you.