Mijal: Hi everyone. Mijal here. Welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam. It’s going to be just me this week and without Noam, he’s in Israel celebrating a very special family simcha, a family celebration. More on that when he’s back in the studio with me very soon. Until then, I’m incredibly excited to have an amazing guest join me for a second time, a dear friend, real inspiration, an intellectual, a writer, a leader, Sarah Hurwitz. Sarah was a speechwriter for Michelle Obama, and she is the author of two remarkable books. I think at this point I should get some royalty percentage because I have recommended them to hundreds and hundreds of people. Sarah’s first book called Here All Along was about rediscovering Judaism as an adult. And I’ll just say here, when I meet individuals who are looking to learn seriously what it means to be a Jew for the first time, Sarah, that book, I’m like, run and get it. And your second book, which came out very recently and which was on the New York Times bestsellers list in September of this year is called As a Jew, Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame and Try to Erase Us. Absolutely fantastic books, both of them. We’re going to delve into them. But Sarah, first of all, welcome. Really good to have you.
Sarah: It’s great to be here Mijal, I’m so glad to be back. And I also should get royalties from you because I talk about you all the time because you are brilliant.
Mijal: But I have no books out yet, so no royalties!
Sarah: Whatever, can find some way to monetize it but I really talk a lot about you and your ideas because you are utterly brilliant.
Mijal: Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah. And what I want to do today is we are releasing this episode as a special two-part series around Hanukkah. And I want to explore the holiday with you. I want to explore it actually through your two books, because I think the way that I understand them as a reader, and of course, you as the author, you’ll come and correct me. But your first book is really like an introduction to just like the world of Jewish ideas and civilization, holidays that you might not know about. And your second book is a little bit more contemporary. It’s about Jewish identity, about what it means to live in a world that might not understand us or want us to tell our story a certain way and how to react based on that. And both of those through lines in your books are absolutely fundamental when we try to understand what it means to celebrate Hanukkah for us today in 2025.
Sarah: Let’s do it. I’m excited to have this conversation.
Mijal: Awesome. So let’s start with Hanukkah. And I’ll just start by asking you, Sarah, because you’ve written about your books, like growing up, you know, in a reform community with, you know, what you’ve described as like thin literacy. So what was Hanukkah like for you growing up?
Sarah: So Hanukkah was dreidels and &Ms and a party at a friend’s house and it was…
Mijal: Well, M&Ms, I hadn’t heard that one before.
Sarah: What? Mijal, that’s what you put in the pot when you play dreidel. Those are the prizes. my goodness, girl.
Mijal: Really? Okay, not the gelt, just like little M&Ms? Okay.
Sarah: M&Ms. Gelt too. You get half of it if it were hay and the whole thing. It was something something the light lasted for eight days something something menorah something something and that was Hanukkah.
Mijal: Okay, all right, was gifts, gifts all eight nights, all this.
Sarah: Yeah. Yo gifts. Absolutely gifts every night. Light the candles. Something about the light lasted for eight days. Miracle.
Mijal: Was your family the kind of family that also had like, I don’t know, were there like Christmas trees nearby together with Hanukkah?
Sarah: No, we did not have a Christmas tree. Though as a child I actually took this like horrible prickly tree that my mom had that would like hurt you when you touched it and I remember as a little kid insisting on making it my Christmas tree and hanging up ornaments on it which just like makes me very sad that that was what I was thinking as a kid but no no tree no Christmas. Yeah.
Mijal: Right. But I think that’s like really natural, right? Like my kids right now, we go out into Manhattan or anywhere and they just see all the lights and everything.
Sarah: Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Mijal: And it’s hard to not feel a little bit of that, you know, Christmas envy here in America. What was the first time that you had an inkling that there was more to the Hanukkah story?
Sarah: Yeah, you it was when at the age of 36, I actually started engaging with Judaism as an adult, actually studying Jewish texts, actually kind of reading about the parts of Judaism, which was most of it that I didn’t see growing up, you know, when your Judaism is two services at the high holy days that are kind of boring, plus a Seder that’s fine and a Hanukkah party and then a few universalistic values of like don’t lie, cheat, steal, help those who are vulnerable. You just think that’s the Judaism. But when I started re-engaging in my mid-30s, was like, whoa, that’s not the Judaism. There’s 4,000 years of wisdom about the human condition. And that’s when I first started actually digging into the real adult stories behind our holidays and Hanukkah was one of them.
Mijal: Yeah, it’s funny, Sarah, Hanukkah is an interesting holiday in that I would say both Jews who didn’t have so much of an education and also Jews who were raised in like very what I’m going to call frum, Orthodox spaces have actually been given a little bit of like an incomplete story or maybe like a story of the holiday that doesn’t take into account the historical complexity.
Sarah: Yes.
Mijal: Like when I was growing up, so, you know, it was all about the miracle of the oil, right? The oil that was supposed to last for one night and last for eight days. And we lit candles and we had Sufganiyot donuts and we called them sevivons. We didn’t do dreidels because we are Sephardic still. My parents were very against presents, by the way. Growing up, they were like, that’s not what we do. Of course, today I do presents. So there’s been an evolution there. And I knew there was some sort of like battle that happened between the Maccabees and the Greeks. But I think that was like basically what I knew. And basically what I think a lot of traditional Orthodox, whatever, like Jewish day school kind of education ends up giving kids and often adults when thinking about Hanukkah.
I’ll tell you, by the way, every year when it comes to Hanukkah, I’ve literally written down for myself, like notes and notes and notes from articles and podcasts and books about the history of Hanukkah because it’s a history that’s really complicated.
Sarah: It’s so complicated. I was actually looking at this last night. I was like, oh, I’ll just, you know, freshen my memory. Obviously I know the basics. And then I was digging and I’m like, oh God, this is not just the basics. The history is very complex and nuanced and it has a lot of moving parts. And I was like, oh boy. Okay. I’d forgotten.
Mijal: Yeah. Yeah. And I would also say part of the reason it’s complex and we’ll give a short summary, but part of the reason is that the historical record, it’s not like we have like historians who are like impartial observers who like documented everything. And we also don’t have books that are part of what I’m going to call like the Jewish canon, right? That the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, that give you like a traditional text to anchor yourself in.
It’s much more like like a puzzle of what exists and how to understand it. And then there’s like a whole history of interpretation and how we’ve learned it.
So let me try to do a very quick summary of what I’m going to call like the grownup story of Hanukkah. But basically, there was Greek rule over Jews over Judea for quite some time without any issues. But in the second century BCE, we have a Seleucid Greek ruler, Antiochus IV, who doesn’t just become ruler over Judea, but he decides to pass a bunch of what I’m going to call anti-Jewish decrees that are meant to really go against key identity markers of Judaism.
These are documented in the books Maccabees 1 and Maccabees 2, which are not part of the Hebrew Bible, but they are books that we kind of look at for some record of what happened then. So for example, no Jewish sacrifices in the temple, instead using the temple for what we’re going to call pagan sacrifices. No Brit Mila, no circumcision on pain of death to child parent and the circumciser. Torah wasn’t allowed to be taught. Shabbat couldn’t be observed. it was actually like this concerted effort to basically say, we are going to forcibly Hellenize you to this particular way of practicing, you know, Greek culture. So that was like, you know, what began Hanukkah.
And then it gets really complicated because you basically have a group of Jews led by the Maccabees who engage in guerrilla warfare, not only against their Greek rulers, but against Hellenized Jews who were kind of like allies of those Greek rulers. Yeah. So all of that is like the background to the story. So eventually the Jews are able to conquer back the temple, and to eventually reestablish Jewish self-determination and rule in Judea. What’s interesting, Sarah, is that it’s only centuries and centuries later when the Talmud is written that the rabbis talk about the miracle of the oil. They acknowledge the military political story, but they really focus on this tiny little flask of oil that was meant to last for one night and ends up lasting for eight nights, basically. What do we make of this grownup Hanukkah story?
Sarah: Right, right, that is just so traditionally Jewish, right? It’s like as we evolve, we tend to emphasize or de-emphasize different aspects of our tradition, right? Like these are ancient rabbis, we’re kind of like, not so keen about the kind of intra-Jewish debate, that kind of zealotry of the Maccabees, the kind of intra-Jewish fighting. Let’s emphasize this miracle from God. Today, you and I are looking at this story, and we see the complexity of it, the nuance, and maybe we take away something different that we want to emphasize. That is sort of the beauty of Jewish tradition, that it is an interpretive tradition, that people in each era are engaging with these texts and drawing wisdom from them.
Mijal: Yeah, some of it, by the way, would say has to do with the limitations that the environment placed on them. The rabbis who are writing this in the Talmudic times are a minority living in the Roman Empire. And I don’t think they thought it would be too safe or too popular to kind of highlight a military victory. And also they wanted to distance themselves from the Hasmonean dynasty, which ends up at the end kind of like being a little bit corrupt. So it’s, yeah, it’s messy.
Sarah: It’s messy and I love that you injected that because like you know we can say like oh the rabbis were trying to clean things up a little bit but actually I think we need to have some real compassion for these folks because they were in you know they didn’t have the kind of privilege of safety that modern Jews well used to have in America have had in some places, they actually really, they had to think about their own safety. They had to think about the majorities around them. And there’s something, having some real compassion and understanding for how they interpreted things based on their circumstances and not superimposing our own circumstances, 1700 years later back on them, I think that’s really important.
Mijal: Yeah, yeah, it’s funny. think, Sarah, the word I’ve been thinking about is that the original story is kind of unpalatable to modern eyes to think about religious fundamentalism or intra-Jewish warfare. So part of what I want to ask you is right now, 2025, Living in the eye of like culture wars about what it means to be a Jew, what it means to be connected to Israel. What’s Hanukkah talking, like what would you be writing about and emphasizing?
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I think what really strikes me is this kind of intra-Jewish debate, I guess, is a polite way of putting it, right, where you have…
Mijal: What’s the non-polite way?
Sarah: I don’t know, fight or toxic clashes. You have these Jews who are very captivated by the majorities around them. And the majority around them did have interesting philosophy. It had ideas about arts and beauty. It had a real culture of athleticism in the body, and they were kind of captivated by that. And then you have the Maccabees and others who are saying, that’s so, opposition to our tradition, like that’s terrible. And you kind of have these two poles and it’s sort of like the two poles are yelling at each other.
And I don’t know, that kind of breaks my heart because I actually don’t think that’s how Jewish tradition operates. I actually think traditionally we do engage with two opposing truths but not such that half of us embrace one and half embrace the other and we scream at each other. What we actually try to do is hear the truth and the wisdom in each and really try to understand where somewhere between them is the most wisdom, is the most truth. Like, hey, you know what? The culture around us might have something interesting to say about the human condition. It might actually help us to better, better understand our own tradition. And we also have some really extraordinary aspects of it. Our tradition is extraordinary, right? It’s holding both of those things.
And I don’t love the idea of people on one extreme and the other fighting it out. I think that like, probably the majority of Jews are somewhere in kind of the middle where they’re kind of in the gray, they’re kind of wrestling, they’re not totally sure. But those voices that are kind of nuanced, kind of gray, kind of heterodox, they get so much less airtime than the extremes, than the poles themselves. But clinging to one poll and screaming its truth from the skyscrapers and saying that everyone else is evil and wrong, I don’t find that to be particularly Jewish.
Mijal: Interesting. it’s almost like you’re saying that the polarization that we might find today, that that kind of polarization that led to an intra Jewish, what I’m going to call civil war in the times of Hanukkah, uh, that you’re saying it’s not very Jewish.
Let me give a provocative counterpoint. I have been finding like weird bitter comfort in the story of Hanukkah because I think that right now when I think about American Jewry specifically, I do think that we are becoming really polarized and I’m going to very sloppily and simplistically say we’re going to have a Zionist kind of like ecosystem and community and a non-Zionist or anti-Zionist ecosystem and community. And I think there’s going to be places of irreconcilable dialogue and values between them. And the bitter comfort that I find, again, I’m saying this in a not too perfectly thought out way, it’s not that I want to have a civil war again like in Hanukkah, but I want to say this has happened before.
Sarah: Right?
Mijal: Like we have actually had splits within our people and sometimes large, significant parts of our community fought for something that was wrong. And there’s times that you need to include absolutely everybody. And there’s times where you have to say, actually, I need to be principled and stand for certain things. And I’m going to have to fight for Judaism and not only for all Jews to be part of this. And in their context, they have the hegemony of the Greek empire kind of threatening them. again, just to be super clear, not advocating for civil war or violence or any of that.
Sarah: Yeah. No, of course not. Right.
Mijal: But I don’t know, I find weird, bitter comfort in having a precedent.
Sarah: You know, it’s really interesting because I think there is this tension in Jewish institutions all across the spectrum of both left, right, Zionist, anti-Zionist, non-Zionist, where they’re grappling with who do we let in our tent. And there’s an argument of like, no, let everyone in the tent. I hear that, that inclusion. It’s like, no, we’re going to make room for everyone. We don’t want to exclude anyone.
But then how much of your values are you sacrificing? Does the tent then become meaningless? Are you then kind of watering down what you actually think to the point where it is meaningless? And there’s a difference obviously between including and platforming, but if you include and include and include, at some point it becomes a platform. Do you know what I mean? So I think that’s kind of the thing that I think so many organizations of all kinds are actually really grappling with right now. Like what do you do about that?
And it’s also tough because look, every Jew is my family. I would never say to a Jew, you’re not a real Jew. mean, oh my god, that’s disgusting, right? You’re a Jew. I disagree with you on some things. Every Jew is my family, but you know, it’s like at some point, like how do you grapple with those complexities of family? Right, it’s like, know, Uncle Bernie who has some, you know, says some things we really don’t like, well, he still gets to come to the Seder and we’re gonna fight with him and argue with him about his ideas about women or whatever. But know, Uncle Bernie the serial killer, okay, have to draw a line, right? Like where is that line and how do you do that? It’s like such a messy, nuanced thing and so painful to struggle with, you know?
Mijal: Yes. And I don’t know if you remember, Sarah, I think I was like WhatsApping with you a few weeks ago. was in Israel. Yeah, we’re friends in real life. And I was in Israel engaged in like a beautiful celebration with some Israeli Jews who on the one hand, I knew that their ideology or their view was totally outside, kind of like my own and my tent and my everything. On the other hand, was very aware that many of the men in that space had spent the last two years risking their lives to preserve a state that would protect me and my children if need be. And I felt so conflicted. And you were like, family’s messy, Mijal. So I was like, okay, thank you.
Sarah: You know, I think a lot about a story you told me about how, you know, you are a spiritual leader of a community in Manhattan. And a young person emailed you and said, I am an anti-Zionist. Am I welcome in your community? And you wrote back and you said, like, let me be clear, like, every Jew is welcome in my community. We have no litmus test. We don’t demand that anyone subscribe to any ideology. And in our community, we do do solidarity with our family in Israel. So we will be saying the prayer for Israel. We will be saying the prayer for our hostages and our soldiers. And that’s really about solidarity. So whatever ideology you have, Zionists, anti-Zionists, that’s welcome within these doors. And just know we do solidarity. We do family. And I just thought that is exquisite. I think about that all the time. The categories of family versus ideology.
Mijal: Yeah, I think that that is for me, think of it as a far as one classical Sephardic model of community where you have a very, very clear understanding of what a community stands for and what the values are and what the flavor is. And, you know, it’s a come to my Shabbat table. And I’m not asking you, what do you believe when I invite you to my Shabbat table? But I’m also not going to change the words of the prayer for the wine if you don’t like them. So I think that we often think of binaries in terms of who’s in and who’s out. But I do think, again, just going back to Hanukkah, I do think that in the American Jewish community, we almost went to one extreme of just saying every view belongs and everything is Judaism. You know what I mean?
And there’s something there that I think is provocative for us to grapple with. What does it mean to be celebrating this holiday by a group of Jews who did not have that kind of worldview?
So Sarah, in your book as a Jew, you wrote, I’ll just say again, it’s such an exquisite and systemic description of the modern Jewish condition. And you really talk very clearly about antisemitism, internalized antisemitism, Zionism. You go into all these topics and you also speak a little bit, and I believe here you base yourself on the works of another friend of ours, Dara Horn. You compare a little bit different forms of antisemitism, Hanukkah antisemitism and Purim antisemitism.
Could you flesh that out for us a little bit?
Sarah: Sure. So this is Dara Horne’s absolutely brilliant idea where she talks about there is a kind of antisemitism that is Purim antisemitism that we don’t have to go into the story of Purim. The key thing to remember is that that type of antisemitism is essentially eliminationist. It is, the Jews are bad. There is nothing they can do to be acceptable or saved. We must kill them. That’s the Holocaust and pogroms.
Mijal: It’s like a racial almost, if you have Jewish blood, Jewish genes, Jewish, whatever, you’re bad, irredeemable.
Sarah: Exactly. Like, period.
Whereas Hanukkah antisemitism, it’s a little bit different. Hanukkah antisemitism says, your Jewishness is a problem. We agree with the Purim folks about that. But there is something you can do to be acceptable, safe, and saved. And that thing is you can reject whatever elements of Jewish civilization we, the majority, believe are disgusting. So reject Shabbat, reject circumcision, reject your one God, then you’re cool, that’s essentially a conversionist kind of antisemitism, where if you convert, then you will be saved, acceptable, and safe. Maybe.
It often kind of winds up turning into Purim antisemitism. It’s sort of a temporary solution, but it is, you know, that’s, and I think that is, as Dara brilliantly points out, that’s kind of what’s going on in these ancient times, where the Greek overlords are saying, reject all of these aspects of Jewish civilization and then you’ll be okay. And the Maccabees said, yeah, no thanks.
Mijal: Right. Right. Right. How do you see this moment in America in terms of the different forms of antisemitism that we are facing as Jews? Because I’ll just say that every time that I think I’ve got a theoretical handle on it, then I’m like, I can distinguish this and explain it. Then new things come up and I’m like, it’s a mess. Purim, Hanukkah, both. How do you think about it?
Sarah: I know. Yeah. girl, I know. I know.
So I mean we’re definitely seeing this Purim antisemitism and I’m definitely seeing an increasing rise of like Jews killed Jesus like kind of old school like they are fundamentally corrupt and bad we need to kind of get rid of them but I’m also seeing you know the kind of Hanukkah antisemitism in other circles which says like okay, you know, we have a problem with Jews and that problem is their state. It’s Israel. So as long as you convert to anti-Zionism, then you’ll be accepted and saved.
You know, something I see on campus is that this often takes on the form of a Christian conversion narrative, which is like, you know, growing up, my rabbi and my Hebrew school teachers told me that Israel was this really wonderful country. Then I got to campus and I learned that it’s actually, you know, a settler colonial state. It’s racist and bad. I had an epiphany, I saw the light, I took anti-Zionism into my heart and now I’m saved. And their classmates will say, now you’re saved, you are a good Jew, we won’t exclude you from our club.
So I do think I’m seeing this play out. I also think it’s just important to understand that we often mistake antisemitism as simply a social or personal prejudice.
Mijal: What do you mean by that?
Sarah: Like we say, Jews are cheap, crass, dirty, greedy. I don’t want one in my club. I don’t want one to marry my daughter. They’re sort of gross. As opposed to this more political kind of antisemitism, and this is the work of a scholar named Bernard Harrison, which is something, it’s actually a conspiracy theory that says that the one thing stopping the redemption of the world is Jews. And so you see this throughout history, right? Like we the Christians 2000 years ago are Christianizing the Roman Empire, who is stopping us? Jews who won’t convert. Centuries later, we the communists are bringing about the revolution, the brotherhood of man who is stopping us, these capitalist Jews.
A couple centuries later, we the Germans are bringing about the great racially pure Aryan fatherland who is stopping us race-polluting Jews. And then today in America, have folks on the right saying, we white Christian Americans are bringing back white Christian civilization to America. Who is stopping us these quote globalists, quote for Jews, who are importing black and brown immigrants to take the place of white people? That is the absolutely bonkers–
Mijal: That’s a great replacement theory.
Sarah: Yeah, the great replacement. It’s racist, it’s antisemitic, it’s nonsense, but that is Tucker Carlson’s bread and butter. You have, you know, we the people who care deeply about social justice, we are doing the great work of anti-racism and anti-colonialism and the only thing stopping us are these Zionists, these racist colonialist Zionists. They are the problem. They are standing in the way of the redemption of the world.
And so once you understand antisemitism that way you realize like, a lot of folks who have Jewish friends hold this political antisemitism. And that’s so confusing because they actually don’t have personal animus towards Jews. They don’t say, you’re dirty, greedy, I won’t marry you. They have this political conspiracy theory that they sweep all Jews into and some people who hold this political antisemitism are Jews themselves.
Mijal: Right. That’s what I was going to say. Part of the seduction here is that if you’re in a society or community where this view is in the ascendance and you are a Jew and you either want to fit in or you agree with the political inclinations of those who are furthering this, is incredibly seductive. Again, we can look at the Hellenist Jews in the Hanukkah story. It is incredibly seductive and very hard to resist socially and in terms of epistemology and psychologically the lure of just saying, yeah, let me join you and talk about those bad Jews. And it’s also a way to kind of like save myself. And I’m the righteous one. And I can become even more righteous if I join you in weeding out the real bad Jews. I mean, that’s a little bit, it’s not the same, but like the story of the Spanish Inquisition and exposure on Inquisition. And so much of it was just getting Jews to like turn on each other after they converted and the incentive structure and the danger is so high that unfortunately it’s just, it’s hard to resist.
Sarah: It’s hard to resist and I think one, you know, the pushback I often get when I talk about this is, oh, so you’re saying criticizing Israel is antisemitism. Of course it’s not. I criticize Israel all day long, but I criticize Israel all day long. I would be so thrilled if I went to a college campus and students were saying, you know what? I’m looking at this particular Israeli government action. I think it’s wrong for these reasons. I disagree with this policy. Here’s why. Let me tell you, I think it’s actually if you compare it to other countries, that’s criticism, right? have a real debate about that, but what’s different what’s happening is something else and I can only explain it in analogy because we’ve so imbibed it we’re so soaked in it that we think it’s normal. Here’s the analogy. If a bunch of students on campus were upset about the Chinese government’s policies, which I hope people are upset about them, some pretty awful stuff, and they went to their classmates who are Chinese American and said to them, you need to totally reject China. If you say a single nice thing about China, you are dead to us. You cannot speak Chinese.
Mijal: Right, or your family there.
Sarah: You cannot visit family there. You cannot study abroad there. If you say anything positive about Chinese culture, language, history, you’re toast to us because we have a no China lovers allowed policy in our club. And now we’re going to hold a big noisy protest where we scream we don’t want no China lovers here and Chinese equal Nazis.
Now I’m sorry I would never say that’s just criticism of the Chinese government’s policies, that’s racism, period. And I think that that is what I see going on on campus around Jewish students. There’s a difference between let me critique this Israeli government policy or that which please do I do it all the time and we don’t want no Zionists here. Those are two very different things that are going on.
Mijal: Right. So what’s your advice, Sarah? Because the stakes are high. The seduction is powerful. It’s hard to be different. I’ll say, by the way, I often think about the fact that I come from a family where everyone’s a Zionist and everyone is in a similar place in terms of that commitment. So I always think that I have got a safety net, I always think, that if I’m in one space where if bridges are burned because of my views, part of me is always like, okay, I’ve got my people to go back home to and my friends and my, you know, and I meet a lot of students who don’t have that. And then the incentive structure is so stacked up against them. So whether in your conversations with students or in your book as a Jew, what do you think is the remedy, maybe not the remedy, but the response?
Sarah: Yeah, so I think the reality is that for most of my life until my mid-30s, my Jewish identity was a big empty void with a few ethnic jokes rattling around in it. Like, ha ha, I like bagels, I like Seinfeld, here’s a Jewish mother joke, which by the way is so misogynistic, like gross. But that was my identity. like, look, in the 80s and 90s, when what was around me, what filled that void was just kind of secular culture, wasn’t particularly antisemitic. But today, when your identity is that big empty void, what will fill it is antisemitism. If you have no actual Jewish story, that gaping void will be filled with the stories others tell about Jews and they’re quite negative. So I think my first piece of advice is like you have to know the Jewish story. You have to know Jewish history and content and wisdom and not to be some expert or PhD level at all, right? This can be like taking an intro to Judaism class, reading a couple of intro to Judaism books, having some really beautiful Jewish experiences if that’s how you learn. Like however you listening to podcasts, like whatever it is, but just like really taking in some deep Jewish content so that you understand like, wait, I’m part of a really extraordinary people with an extraordinary tradition. Like, wait a second, there’s a beautiful story. In fact, like gazillions of beautiful stories here that are mine and that are part of my soul. I think that’s number one.
I think number two is like you’ve got to find a community, you’ve got to find communities that accept you for who you are and that can say like you know maybe and by the way maybe they don’t agree with you. You know I have friends who are anti-zionists. We really disagree but they understand who I am. There’s no question about that. We still love each other very much.
But like, they’re not gonna abuse me, shame me, shun me, right? We can be in community and that’s okay. So I think it’s those two things. It is both content and it is community of people who really will accept you as a full human being. I mean, I just would say, you know, we would never tolerate what is happening to our young people with any other group.
You know, if white students, God forbid, said to black students, hey, it’s fine that you’re black, but you have to reject Black Lives Matter and you have to just say that, all lives matter. And if you don’t say that we’re gonna exclude you. Can you imagine that? Like it’s just like I’m sorry the majority telling the minority how they have permission to embody their identity. I just think like even just saying that it’s like wow that’s so racist. Like my god I think we’d be so shocked by that. But that’s what’s happening to Jews all the time and I think we have to see that clearly for what it is.
And so I just want young people to see clearly what is happening. I want them to understand Hanukkah versus Purim antisemitism. I want them to understand social versus political antisemitism. And I also just want them to understand that antisemitism gets upgrades. No one thought the medieval… I mean like no one thought the medieval Christian clergyman was a bigot. He had all of the sophisticated theology saying Jews killed Jesus. He was the elite. Centuries later no one thought the 19th century European gentleman was a bigot. He had science that said Jews were racially degraded. And so like yeah that was what thinking people thought.
But now when people are saying it’s the Jews nation that’s the problem, they’re a depraved nation, when you’re in the upgrade it’s hard to see clearly for what it is. That’s the problem. And I think that I just want them to have some compassion for themselves because I think with each upgrade it can be kind of confusing when you’re in it to see clearly what’s happening.
Mijal: Right. In terms of just like some messages or some ideas for Hanukkah, in light of everything you’re saying, I feel like Hanukkah is tricky because on the one hand, I think in the last century or so in America, it’s become, it’s one of the most popular Jewish holidays, but it’s also an incredibly assimilated, I would say, watered down holiday that like almost, it’s almost like the opposite of its original message, right? If the original message was like, fight imperial culture. Here it’s like, best buddies with imperial culture. We are just the same. You know, we fit in right in the same way, which I totally like understand all the reasons why it happened. Yeah. And I’m not even judging it right now because listen, like part of what Jews in America did was try to make Judaism feel as exciting and as beautiful to their kids in a Christian majority friendly country.
Sarah: It’s a Jewish Christmas is what you’re saying. It’s sort of like a, yeah. Right, of course.
Mijal: So like I totally get the assimilationist bargain, you know, but I do think we need to have our own upgrade of Hanukkah like in light of what we’re living through right now. So what would you say are like the most important lessons or ideas for us to take right now, you know, this Hanukkah?
And I’ll add one thing, Sarah, it’s funny because you and I have had conversations about texts. And I think that like, you you’ve emphasized how important textual learning is for Jewish life. Hanukkah’s tricky in that it’s one of the holidays that has the least textual tradition to study. I mean, most people aren’t reading Maccabees 1 and 2. so we don’t have like a scroll like in Purim, we don’t have the Exodus story like in Passover or the biblical narrative of Shavuot or all of that. so yeah I’m really curious to hear what you would say is our upgrade of Hanukkah right now.
Sarah: Yeah. So what I would want to just really lovingly and gently say is that like, know, with all the compassion that you have about the assimilation’s urge to make it fun and exciting, you don’t want kids left out. I would just want people to understand that this is actually a pretty minor holiday. It’s actually not the Jewish Christmas. And I wonder like, how can we make the actual major Jewish holidays as thrilling and exciting as Christmas? Right, like I kind of want us to not have like a Jewish Christmas. I want us to have a Jewish, whatever it is, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, people Pesach, Shavuot, like that. That’s think that would be my number one thing.
I think my number two thing is just to say like, okay this seems like this warm and fuzzy holiday about like the miracle of the light, which is great and appropriate for kids. But like as adults, I think we should grapple with the deeper stuff. Assimilationism versus resisting that. I think we have this is this holiday is one where we can have a really deep conversation just like at Passover. We have deep conversations about power and freedom and slavery, like what does that mean today? I wish on Hanukkah we could have a conversation about these issues of assimilationism versus you know staying different.
And finally I just hope that we would have make Hanukkah into a conversation about polarities right about like the importance of not just clinging to one pole assimilation or one pole defiance of assimilation but rather holding them as okay these are two opposing truths and how do we wrestle with them? How do we come out somewhere in between them? I think that’s I would want people to take from Hanukkah today.
Mijal: Yeah, I’ll say, by the way, as you were speaking, Sarah, I realized we’ve already become better at doing this with American stories, giving them a more. So as an example, I, you know, we recently had Thanksgiving and I had to my son had a lovely, beautiful play in his school that I loved. But but but it also told a story about America that I didn’t feel was complex enough. So so I had to like, I had to, you know, my poor kid just wanted to sing the songs of the play. And I’m like, let’s talk about what happened. You know, the Native Americans and the pilgrims. And how do we feel about this and how do we celebrate it? And and I’m like, we we’ve done this with Thanksgiving in America. And I think we can do this with Hanukkah as Jews. And I know for me, part of what I am taking away from Hanukkah and just thinking about it, you spoke about the dignity of difference.
Sarah: This is Jonathan, right by Jonathan Sacks, yeah.
Mijal: But I think Hanukkah, yeah, think Hanukkah, a lot of it is about courage. It’s about willing to just do the right thing, even when the odds are against you and kind of like trusting that history will take that into account. I think it’s about human battles and divine grace kind of like combining. So not being afraid to take on empires.
And there’s something just magnificent and resilient about the Jewish story that we, it’s like Sarah, it’s crazy. we are, like, I know we have like t-shirts on this and slogans, so we don’t think about this, but the Greek Empire is gone. And, and we still like candles on Hanukkah. And I think that that is just, that is stunning. And I’m so, with all the ways that things are complicated now, I am so proud to be part of that heritage, and to ask ourselves, what are we doing now to reclaim that kind of courage?
Sarah: You know what? That makes me think of, I read about there was a Supreme Court case a few years ago where a high school football coach was doing Christian prayer, Christian prayers with his football players on the field at a public high school, public American high school, you know, that was challenged and the Supreme Court actually sided with the coach. It said it was fine for him to do this. I remember reading that and just imagining a Jewish football player standing separately, you know, watching all of his teammates pray Christian prayers and he’s not. And I thought about how different he would feel. And I swear to God, Mijal, the first thing I thought was good. And then I thought like, no, no, no, no, not good. I’m sorry. Utterly unacceptable for that Jewish kid to be excluded or Hindu, Muslim, atheist kid. Right, we don’t do that. I think that the case is dead wrong. And there’s a part of me that just feels like good. You we’ve spent so long trying to make ourselves comfortable in America and I want us to be comfortable. I so do.
But like to be a Jew is to be different and to be different is to be uncomfortable and comfort is not the Jewish mission in the world. Right? Like creating a society that’s the exact opposite of ancient Egypt is the Jewish mission in the world. Rejecting oppressive power structures, rejecting any ideology that treats human beings as objects, as property. Like that’s the Jewish mission in the world and it’s uncomfortable.
Like introducing monotheism into a world of polytheism and paganism, like that was uncomfortable. Saying that like actually we don’t worship pharaohs and kings, like not popular among pharaohs and kings. Refusing to convert to Christianity, not comfortable. you know, insisting on a six-day work week, not comfortable. But that’s okay. Right?
Like I actually think maybe it’s okay for a Jewish kid to stand a little separately from his classmates and say, you know what, if they need to do that, okay, I get that. But I don’t, I don’t, I can stand here comfortable in my own story, knowing who I am, knowing that my story is different and theirs is also valuable. It’s not, it’s not better or worse, but I have the sturdiness and strength to sit here and maybe it’s a little uncomfortable, but I’ll be okay. My people have done this for a really long time. So when I think about that, that story about assimilation and comfort. like just to be a Jew is to be different. And it’s okay if that’s uncomfortable.
Mijal: Yeah, I think that’s Sarah. That’s a perfect takeaway. Maybe Hanukkah as reclaiming confidence of being uncool, right?
Sarah: Yes, this is Dara Horn’s idea. We should be uncool Jews. Yes.
Mijal: Yeah, we should be uncool Jews and feel really good about it actually. And I’m going to add M&Ms to our celebration this year. So if you don’t have Sarah’s books, just run and get them. Again, she’s written the book Here All Along and the book As a Jew, Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame and Try To Erase Us. And they make great Hanukkah gifts if you want to do that. Again, I don’t get any royalties, so I’m allowed to just like say anything. But thank you so much, Sarah, for joining us again and for all the work that you’re doing. For everyone listening, happy Hanukkah.
May we rededicate ourselves to being Jews without apology, visibly, proudly, and joyfully. Noam, mazal to you and your family. We’re so excited to hear about your simcha when you’re back. I’m Mijal Bitton and this has been Wondering Jews. Until next time.
