This first night of Hanukkah falls on Christmas Eve this year, a collision of holidays that — for me, at least — inevitably brings to mind all the classic Christmas songs that have been written by Jews. Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” is the big blini, of course, having been covered more than 500 times since…
The city of Bath, England is a quiet and small one. In fact, I’m not entirely sure how it constitutes a city; with a population of barely 100,000 and no buildings exceeding ten stories in height, it’s hardly the teeming metropolis of Manhattan that I grew up in. Nevertheless, it is a city that I…
In 1949 my father first began to play Santa Claus for the kindergarten class at Mason School in St. Louis. My dad, Paul Blumenthal, owned a nearby neighborhood pharmacy, Paul’s Drug Store, and he soon became well-known in South St. Louis for his animated Santa portrayals. Perhaps part of the allure was the fact that…
If you drive around my neighborhood in the Northern suburbs of Chicago, you can probably count on your two hands the number of homes with Christmas lights. I guess that’s my way of admitting I’m raising my kids in a bubble. My oldest son even acknowledged to me that he doesn’t have any Christian friends,…
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. pic.twitter.com/iLjpDQmDvA — Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) December 12, 2016 The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, tweeted its holiday well-wishes, and by “holiday well-wishes” I mean Christmastime message of exclusion. “We’re going to start saying ‘Merry Christmas again,’” the message reads, with a photo of a camouflage MAGA-hat-wearing…
Natalie Portman made headlines this month when she told the host of “The Tonight Show,” Jimmy Fallon, that she would be decorating her home with a Christmas tree for the first time this year, thus fulfilling “every Jew’s secret wish.” But Portman is far from the first high-profile Jew to deck the halls. In fact,…
(JTA) — All I want for Hanukkah is Christmas. I grew up in suburban Chicago surrounded by my fellow Jews — at school, at camp, on the weekends, at my parents’ friends’ houses, in the streets and parks of my neighborhood. Even then, I knew that Jews made up less than 2 percent of America’s…
East Asian civilizations identify themselves through their use of chopsticks, European ones have universally adopted the knife and fork, but not one significant civilization has ever embraced the spork. The reason that this highly practical spoon-shaped eating utensil with short tines at the tip has not become a favorite is because it’s a compromise. Neither…
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