The most important thing is not to fear at all

No apologies necessary. 

I’ll make a list of reasons.  Really, though, it might be easier to answer why it wouldn’t be offensive.  Also note that when I use the second person pronoun in the answer, I am not speaking to you specifically, but to anyone who might read this.

1. Israel is the home of Israeli Jews in the most literal and immediate sense.  It is never all right to speak to any immigrant and tell them to go to back to where they came from, and so it is not acceptable to say that to an Israeli Jew, whether they themselves immigrated from Russia, whether their parents immigrated from Morocco, their grandparents from Poland, or whether (and this is true of many Israeli Jews) their family has lived in what is now called Israel for many, many generations - even some whose families never left!  There is no other home for them to go back to.  Their lives, livelihood, hopes, dreams, houses, families, schools, places of worship - it’s all in Israel.
2. Israel is the homeland of Jews in a greater, more longterm sense. Jews, as an ethno-religious group are indigenous to the Levant, an area that includes Israel/Palestine and parts of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, otherwise known as the Eastern Mediterranean.  We were forcibly expelled from our homes during the Roman occupation of the land and have, for the past two thousand years, yearning and praying for a return to the land.  There is no other region to which we are indigenous and certainly no other reason to which we have those sort of ties.  Certainly not a region in Northeast Asia picked by Soviet gentiles to be a pseudo-autonomous region for Soviet Jews so that Stalin wouldn’t have to deal with their cries for freedom of religion and movement. 
3. The majority of Israeli Jews are not from Europe.  The majority of Israeli Jews are either Mizrahi or of mixed Mizrahi and Ashkenazi descent.  That means their families did not live in Europe since the Roman exile, but rather in the Middle East and North Africa, or, for the Sephardim, lived in the Iberian Peninsula during Muslim rule and before and mostly left to live in the Muslim world during the Reconquista or when they were expelled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition. Which brings me to:
4. European Jews left Europe for Israel/Palestine not merely as immigrants but as refugees.  Would you tell a survivor of the Camps whose neighbors, after she was first sent to a ghetto than sent to Auschwitz, took her home as their own, to return to Poland after she arrived in Palestine as a refugee?  Would you tell her children?  A grandparent who fled Kiev after bloody pogroms and massacres that destroyed Jewish communities there?  Europe never was truly home to the millions of Jews who lived there.  Not just because Jews yearned for a return to Zion, but because white, Christian Europeans never saw Jews as European themselves and our two thousand year stay there was fearful and constantly interrupted by massacres and expulsions, not to mention the baseline of discrimination and persecution.  Of course, most of the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews who immigrated to Israel after its establishment as a state came as refugees as well, fleeing an increase in persecution of Jews in Arab and Muslim countries.
5. Lastly, no one who is not Jewish can tell Jews where their ancestral homeland is.  As I said, we have been waiting to return for two thousand years and dna testing confirms our yearning: we are indigenous to our homeland.  No gentile can decide we are not from that area because it is politically convenient for them to do so.  Just as there is no excuse for anyone to decide for the Palestinians that Palestine is not their home, that their struggle for self determination is a false one, or that their nationality is forged, so there is no excuse for any gentile to tell Jews that Israel is not our home, that our struggle for self determination is a false one, or that our nationality is forged.

made rebloggable by request

this-is-not-jewish:

theshewomanboyhatersclub:

And the really fucked-up thing is that until very recently most of the ethnic European blood in Ashkenazi Jewish and Sephardic Jewish communities was from rape. The rape of Jewish women is why the religion passes matrilineally. So to say that there are Jews who look white because they’re descended from converts is to shit on the memory of our ancestral women who were easy targets for rape because they were societal outcasts. My great-grandmother was 100% Jewish but she was fair and had blue eyes. GUESS WHY.

Man, fuck whoever this Sami person is.

this-is-not-jewish:

Dearest tumblr, it is now the time of year when the majority of Americans engage in their time-honored holiday traditions: decorating trees, buying presents, and questioning Jews about Hanukkah.  In the interests of efficiency, I have gathered the most common questions Jews hear about Hanukkah to answer them all at once.

Here goes.

Is Hanukkah the Jewish Christmas?

No.  The first Hanukkah was celebrated in 165 B.C.E., well before the birth of Christ.  If anything, Christmas is the Christian Hanukkah.  (Except it isn’t, because that’s a really silly and insulting way to think of different faiths’ holidays.)

Aren’t all winter holidays really about the same thing, though?

On a really, really simplistic level, you could say that all winter holidays involve light in some way.  Beyond that, nope, not at all. 

Christmas is about the birth of Jesus, the Christian messiah.  Hanukkah is about a miraculous Jewish military victory in ancient Israel.  Hardly the same thing!

So, what IS the story behind Hanukkah, then?

The story of Hanukkah was originally retold in the First Book of Maccabees, an apocryphal Jewish text.  (Apocryphal means that the text was not included in the Tanakh, the Jewish scriptures.)

In 200 B.C.E., Judea (now Israel) became part of the Seleucid Empire of Syria.  King Antiochus III, then the king of Syria, granted the Jews of Judea the right In 167 B.C.E., however, his son King Antiochus IV sent his army to invade Jerusalem and steal all the gold and silver from the Temple.  Many of the Jews in Jerusalem were killed, and the rest were forced to leave to leave.  Afterwards, Antiochus passed a law ordering the Jews of Judea to worship and behave like the Syrian-Greeks and forbidding the Jews to make sacrifices to God, celebrate Shabbat, pray in the Temple, or circumcise their children.  Some of the Jews, known as the Hellenists, agreed to follow these laws, but others refused and were killed by Antiochus’s soldiers.  On the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev, 167 B.C.E., Antiochus put up a statue of Zeus on the altar in the Temple and sacrificed pigs to it—a calculated insult, as pigs are not kosher.

One of the kohanim (the priests of the Temple), a man named Mattathais, lived in the town of Modin with his five sons: John, Judah, Simon, Eleazar, and Jonathan.  When messengers of Antiochus came to Modin, they ordered Mattathais to sacrifice to a Greek idol.  Mattathais refused, but another Jew came forward to sacrifice to the idol.  Mattathais killed both the Jew and the messengers of Antiochus, then he and his sons fled the town to hide in the mountains. 

Many other Jews who opposed Antiochus came to join them, while others formed their own resistance camp in the desert.  Antiochus’s army attacked the group living in the desert on Shabbat (the Jewish day of rest), when Jews are forbidden to use weapons.  The Jews in the desert refused to break Jewish law even to save their own lives, so the Syrian-Greeks massacred them all. 

Mattathais and his followers formed an army and began reconquering the towns of Judea.  Unlike the Jews of the desert, they deemed it permissible to fight in self-defense on Shabbat, and thus couldn’t be slaughtered as easily.  They were very successful in fighting off the Syrian-Greeks and the Hellenist Jews who allied with them, but Mattathais died of old age before they could reconquer Jerusalem.  Mattathais’s son Judah, known as the Maccabee, became the leader of the Jewish army. 

Under Judah’s leadership, the army retook Jerusalem and the Temple in 165 C.E.  They tore down and rebuilt the defiled altar, crafted new candlesticks and oil vessels to replace the ones Antiochus had stolen, and cleaned and purified the Temple.  On the 25th of Kislev, they rededicated the Temple with sacrifices to God (the word hanukkah means “dedication”) and an eight day celebration, which Judah Maccabee established as an annual holiday for Jews.

The Jews’ miraculous victory over the far more powerful Syrian-Greek army is the focal point of Hanukkah. 

What about the miracle of the oil, though?  Isn’t that in the story?

Another story commonly retold about Hanukkah is that when the Maccabean army recaptured the Temple, they only had enough consecrated olive oil to fuel the menorah (the seven-branched, sacred Temple lamp, which was supposed to never be allowed to go out but had gone unlit for two years at this point) for a single day.  According to this story, that one day supply miraculously burned for eight days, long enough for the Jews to make more oil.

That story doesn’t appear anywhere in the Books of Maccabees.  In fact, it doesn’t appear anywhere in writing until the Babylonian Gemara was finalized in around 500 C.E.—more than 650 years after the events of the Hanukkah story.  So why did that story become the miracle people remember about Hanukkah?

To understand that, you need a little background in Judean political history.

After the war, Judah Maccabee’s brother Simon became both the kohein gadol (the High Priest) and the king of Judea, essentially amassing absolute power.  He and his descendants were known as the Hasmonean Dynasty—and they really, really sucked at governing.  Among other things, the Hasmonean kings involved themselves heavy-handedly in the sectarian squabbles between the Saducees (mostly upper-class Jews who believed in following the Torah alone) and the Pharisees (mostly lower-class Jews who emphasized scholarship and rabbinic interpretation of Torah), openly siding with the Saducees.  When the Pharisees protested the Hasmonean practice of holding both the kingship and the position of kohein gadol, Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus clamped down on them brutally and bloodily.  Surprisingly, Alexander Jannaeus’s widow, Queen Salome Alexandra, proved to be the only decent ruler of the bunch, reconciling with the remaining Pharisees and re-establishing the Sanhedrin (which under her re-organization became a judicial court where the common man could bring their grievances rather than the more “House of Lords”-like body it had been in its earlier incarnation).

After the death of Queen Salome Alexandra, however, her two sons started a civil war for the throne. Each son tried to convince the Romans to join the war on his side, but General Pompey—who had no patience for their bullshit—instead entered the war on his own side and conquered Judea for Rome in 63 B.C.E., after barely a century of Hasmonean rule.  Later, the Romans destroyed the Temple and forced most of the Jews into exile.

Why does all this matter?  Because the rabbis who wrote the Babylonian Gemara were adherents of Rabbinic Judaism, which grew out of the Pharisaic traditions.  (The Saducees mostly vanished after the destruction of the Temple, since their traditions were much more Temple-centric than the Pharisees’.)  Those rabbis despised the Hasmoneans for their Saducean sympathies, for their brutal crackdown on the Pharisees, and for being the direct cause of the Roman conquest of Judea (which, again, resulted in the destruction of the Temple and the exile of nearly all of the Jews), and thus deeply resented the existence of a holiday celebrating the founding of the Hasmonean dynasty. 

For centuries after the exile, rabbis actually tried to stamp out the celebration of Hanukkah entirely, but the common Jews wouldn’t stand for it.  So the writers of the Gemara instead tried to redefine the holiday, altering the story so that the Hasmoneans were bit players, their victories were incidental, and the REAL story was God doing miracles in the Temple.

Jewish politics, ladies and gentlemen.

This story is really male-centric.  Aren’t there any women?

Actually, yes.  Another story which Jews commemorate on Hanukkah is the story of the Judith, which the Book of Judith (another apocryphal Jewish text) claims took place during the war with Antiochus.

According to the story, King Nebuchadnezzar of Assyria sent his main general, Holofernes, to attack Judea through a mountain pass.  The Jews blocked the pass, however, on the advice of a kohein named Eliachim.  Holofernes, miffed, asked one of his captains, Achior, about the Jews.  Achior told him that the Jews were a mighty and righteous people and insisted that so long as God was with the Jews, Holofernes could not defeat them.  Holofernes, now even more miffed, ordered that Achior be sent to the nearby Jewish city of Bethulia to die with the Jews. 

The Jews of Bethulia welcomed Achior and took care of him, but Holofernes’ army laid siege to the city.  Soon, the Jews ran out of water.  At this point, a young Jewish widow named Judith asked permission to leave the city with her maid to negotiate a surrender with the Assyrians, and the leaders of Bethulia agreed.  The two women left the city (taking a supply of kosher food with them) and went to the camp of Holofernes’ army.  When some of the scouts stopped her, Judith lied to them that she had come to betray the Jews’ plans. 

The scouts brought her to Holofernes, who thought with his dick was dazzled by Judith’s beauty, welcomed her, gave her her own tent, and invited her to dine with him.  Judith agreed, but refused to eat any food but her own.  Once Holofernes blacked out from drinking too much, Judith cut off his head with his own sword, hid the head in a sack, and gave it to her maid.  Judith and her maid then left the camp, pretending that they were going to pray.  Instead, they went back to Bethulia and gave Holofernes’ head to Achior (who fainted).  Judith led the Jews in prayer and ordered them to put the head on top of the city wall, so Holofernes’ army could see it.

The next morning, the Jews attacked Holofernes’ army, who fled in panic once they realized their leader was dead.  The Jews gave everything that belonged to Holofernes to Judith and celebrated for thirty days.  After the celebration, Judith freed her maid, Achior converted to Judaism, and Judith lived to the ripe age of 105.  Despite many offers, she never remarried.

Did any of this actually happen?  Almost certainly not—the Book of Judith is rife with anachronisms, and is considered by some scholars to be the world’s first historical novel.  Nonetheless, the legend is pretty badass.

(Also, the only decent Hasmonean ruler, Salome Alexandra, was also the only ruling queen of the bunch.  So there’s that, too!)

How do you celebrate Hanukkah?

The answer to this really depends on who you ask, as there are several ethnic divisions within Jewry with different traditions.  Jewish holiday customs can also vary from country to country, just as Christian holiday traditions do. 

The main tradition of Hanukkah (a religious commandment, actually), is to light a nine-branched menorah called a chanukiyah.  One of the branches holds the shamash, the helper light, which is lit first and then used to light all other candles.  As Hanukkah proceeds, the number of other branches which are lit increases—one candle is lit the first night, two the second night, and so on.  On the last night, the entire chanukiyah is lit.  Lights are added to the chanukiyah from right to left, but kindled from left to right. 

Although actually using an oil lamp chanukiyah is considered the “preferred” method, most Jews use candles, which are a heck of a lot easier and cheaper.  (Electric chanukiyot are frowned on except in situations where open flame is forbidden.)  Ideally, the chanukiyah should be lit and displayed outside so others can see it, but if that isn’t feasible, it can be displayed in an exterior window instead.  (In areas where publicly displaying one’s Jewishness could be life-endangering, Jews are still obligated to light the chanukiyah but allowed to refrain from displaying it.)

The following blessings are recited in Hebrew over the kindling of the chanukiyah:

Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, Ruler of the universe, who commanded us to light the Hanukkah lights.

Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, Ruler of the universe, who performed miracles for our ancestors in ancient days at this season.

(On the very first night, an additional blessing is added at the end: Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, Ruler of the universe, who has given us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.)

After the chanukiyah blessings, many Jews sing “Ma’oz Tzur” (“Rock of Ages”), a hymn praising God for allowing us to rededicate the Temple in Maccabean times.  A special prayer, “Al Hanisim” (“Regarding the Miracles”), is added to the regular Jewish daily prayer service during Hanukkah, as well.

Due to the story of the miracle of the oil, it is traditional on Hanukkah to eat foods fried in oil.  Exactly what fried foods are traditional varies between Jewish ethnic or national groups, but the most common in America are latkes (potato pancakes) and sufganiyot (jelly donuts).  There’s also a lesser-known tradition to eat cheese on Hanukkah in memory of Judith, because tradition says she tricked Holofernes into drinking too much by feeding him extra-salty cheese.

Another tradition, originally Ashkenazi but now more widespread, is the dreidl game.  A dreidl is a four-sided top with a Hebrew letter on each side.  What the letters are depends on whether it is an Israeli dreidl or a dreidl from outside Israel.  In Israel, the letters are nun, gimmel, hay, and peh, an acronym for neis gadol haya po (a great miracle happened here).  Outside Israel, the letters are nun, gimmel, hay, and shin, an acronym for neis gadol haya sham (a great miracle happened there).  The exact rules of dreidl vary, but it’s essentially a rudimentary gambling game.

In many Christian-dominated countries, Jews exchange presents on Hanukkah.  This is not historically a Hanukkah tradition, but came about because Jewish children felt left out hearing their classmates brag about their Christmas presents.  There IS an Ashkenazi tradition of giving children money (known as gelt) on Hanukkah, which was used as a justification for adding presents to the holiday.  (Nowadays, many parents give their children chocolate coin gelt instead of real money.)

Why does the date of Hanukkah keep changing?

It doesn’t.  Hanukkah always begins on the 25th of the Jewish month of Kislev.  Since the Jewish calendar is lunar-based rather than solar-based, however, where the 25th of Kislev falls on the secular, solar-based calendar changes from year to year.  The Jewish calendar uses a complex cycle of leap years (in which an entire month is added to the calendar) to prevent holidays from falling in entirely the wrong seasons.

Is Hanukkah a major holiday?

No.  It’s one of the most minor Jewish holidays.  The only reason it attracts so much attention is because it falls in the same general timeframe as Christmas, which IS a major holiday.  The major Jewish holidays occur in autumn and spring, not winter.

Why do some people spell it Hanukkah and others Chanukah?

Because Hebrew isn’t written using the Latin alphabet that English uses, but rather in an Aramaic alphabet.  Thus, any spelling of Hanukkah in English is a transliteration.  The Hebrew spelling of Hanukkah doesn’t change.

Also adding to the confusion is the fact that the initial sound used to pronounce the word Hanukkah isn’t a sound used in English.  It’s a gutteral h, pronounced at the back of the throat, and sounds like someone trying to hock a looey.  (Arabic and German both contain a similar sound, among other languages.)

Do Jewish children really get a present every night?

Very few of them.  As mentioned before, not all families even have a gift-giving tradition on Hanukkah, and those who do have the tradition vary in how many presents they give each child.

Is there such a thing as a “Hanukkah bush?”

No.  See “Hanukkah is not Jewish Christmas,” above.

Is there a Jewish Santa/”Hanukkah Harry?”

No.  Again, see “Hanukkah is not Jewish Christmas.”

Why are public schools allowed to sing Hanukkah songs, but not religious Christmas songs?

Because except for “Ma’oz Tzur” and “Al Hanisim” (which schools never sing), all other Hanukkah songs have no religious content.  They’re about as theological as “Jingle Bells”—which is to say, not theological at all.

Is it offensive to wish a Jew “Merry Christmas?”

That depends on the Jew and on the situation.  Wishing “Merry Christmas” to someone you know is a Jew is a bit obnoxious and a bad idea (unless the person in question has already told you they don’t mind), but wishing “Merry Christmas” to a stranger is unlikely to be taken amiss.

If you want to use the appropriate holiday greeting to a Jew, you can either go with “Happy Holidays,” “Happy Hanukkah,” or “Chag Sameyach” (Hebrew for “A Happy Holiday”—both “ch” sounds are that gutteral h discussed previously).

Did Jesus celebrate Hanukkah?

Probably.  But the traditions he followed would have been very, very different than the traditions practiced by Jews today.  He would not have played dreidl, eaten latkes, or given gelt or presents, for certain, and his practice of Hanukkah would have involved celebrations at the Temple itself.

Is it offensive for Gentiles to celebrate Hanukkah?

It depends.  Bear in mind that the entire central idea of this holiday is resistance to assimilation into Gentile practices, which is hardly a “universal theme” that Gentiles can also appreciate.  The rule of thumb here, as with all potential cultural appropriation, is that if you’re invited by a member of the culture to whom the holiday belongs, it’s fine; if you decide to celebrate it on your own, with no input or participation from any members of the culture to whom the holiday belongs, it’s offensive.  (Also, note that appropriating the chanukiyah ritual is far more offensive than appropriating the non-religiously-mandated traditions.)

So…

If a Gentile married to/dating a Jew celebrates with the family?  Not offensive.

If a Gentile is invited over to celebrate by a Jewish friend or family member? Not offensive.

If a Gentile decides to light a chanukiyah in their own home without any Jewish involvement, just because it’s pretty? Definitely offensive.  (It’s misuse of a sacred object, and also strips the holiday of its meaning and nuance.)

If a Gentile decides to light a chanukiyah in their own home without any Jewish involvement because they think it will bring them closer to Jesus?   Get.  The.  Fuck.  Out.  (Judaism is a full-fledged religion, not a “context” for understanding Christianity.  Also, worshiping Jesus is all-but-idolatrous in the eyes of Judaism, so using one of our sacred objects for that purpose is a lot like Antiochus putting that statue of Zeus in the Temple—exactly what the Maccabees fought to oppose.)

Christmas is basically secular, so why don’t you celebrate it? Aren’t you depriving your children?

Christmas is not “basically secular”—it is a Christian holiday.  If atheists raised in Christian homes choose to continue celebrating Christmas, that’s their culture and their call.  But Christmas is at heart a celebration of Jesus, and worship of Jesus is a BIG no-no in Judaism.  We believe in a single, unified G-d.  (And before you claim that Christmas is “really a pagan celebration,” reread that last sentence.  Celebrating the holidays of pagan polytheists is also a Jewish no-no.) 

Furthermore, historically Christmas was frequently the date of anti-Semitic pogroms or massacres, as frenzied Christian worshipers set out to avenge the baby Jesus on “his murderers.”  For that reason also, participating in Christmas is very uncomfortable for Jews.

Now, do some Jews celebrate Christmas?  Yes, some do—and that’s their call.  But pressuring or harassing Jews who don’t is deeply disrespectful.  My son isn’t deprived because he doesn’t decorate a Christmas tree, any more than your children are deprived because they don’t get to decorate a whole backyard fort for Sukkot, or dress up in costumes and chow down on sweets on Purim. You celebrate your holidays, we’ll celebrate ours…and if you’re considerate, we may even invite you over to join us.

And…that’s really about it.  If you have any other questions, feel free to bring them to me!

And now you know!

I actually wrote an essay about the Jewish politics that led to a shift in meaning of the holiday of Chanukah for Hum 110 last year.  Good times.

docloudscomeinpurple:

Well, that just solves everything! Thousands of years of violent oppression of Jewish people? How’s that worth talking about anymore, now that you have so brilliantly explained to us that anti-semitism happens to ALL Middle Eastern people? It’s not like we have any of our own struggles or our own identity or anything, nope! It’s not like that word has acquired meaning through the political and social realities that Jews have faced throughout their history or anything like that…. 

It is very possible to talk about oppression of Middle Eastern peoples without erasing the unique nature of oppression of Jews.  

Seriously.  Try it sometime.