When Santa Claus crashed the Chanukah party

Amidst the Boston Jewish community’s largest annual Chanukah party, I brought my kids to hear Chanukah stories in American Sign Language, a combination of my two great passions in life: Judaism and disability inclusion. To the surprise of many in the room, the story in question – “Shmelf the Hannukah Elf” — begins in the North Pole, where “you’ll find Santa’s workshop, as most of you know.”

Well, no, my children don’t know that, I thought, because we’re raising them Jewish, something I would have thought would be expected given the setting. As the book went on, we learnt about Shmelf the Elf’s great sorrow for the good little Jewish boys and girls who don’t get to have Christmas. Moved by Shmelf’s concern for Jewish children, Santa tasks him with bringing magic and joy to Jews everywhere, gifting him a blue and white Santa suit and a flying sleigh pulled by “a Jewish reindeer by the name of Asher.” Thanks to Shmelf the Hannukah Elf, Santa’s magic is now ecumenical!

Quite a few of the parents in the room were less than thrilled by this programming choice. Minutes in, an argument broke out about the surprise Christmas content.

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“I didn’t bring my kid to a Chanukah party to have him hear about Santa Claus,” exclaimed one parent, joining several others demanding an explanation from a representative of the local disability nonprofit organizing the activity.

“I agree with you! But we only run the room — the museum picks the books!,” she countered, pointing in the direction of an accessibility staffer from the Museum of Fine Arts, our venue, who quickly took on an indignant tone in response to the complaints.

“The story was selected by our Jewish! Deaf! Educator!,” the museum employee insisted, repeating the list of identities several times as if they were an incantation that could make complaining parents disappear.

Another staffer hissed in a tone of disgust, “You need to respect other Jewish experiences — this is what mixed families want for their kids.”

Perhaps it’s because the people I know in mixed marriages are mostly from synagogue or the pickup line at Hebrew school, but I have never had the impression that the cultural invisibility of Santa Claus was high on their list of concerns. In a broader sense, the reliance on Santa to kasher Chanukah as legitimate is profoundly strange, given how long American Jews have worked to keep Christian religious iconography out of public schools.

I never found the claim of Christmas as a secular American holiday tremendously compelling as a child. I have a vivid recollection of threatening to call the ACLU on my 6th-grade principal after the end-of-day announcements featured a cameo from Santa.

Like many Jewish families, my wife and I struggle to decide whether we can afford day school, opting for public school while we see if we can make the finances work. But as part of that, it’s been important to us to hold the line against the kind of background Christianity that makes raising Jewish children outside of enclaves like Brookline and Newton so difficult. The idea that we might have to police that boundary at a Chanukah party put on by the Boston Jewish community’s leading communal organizations had genuinely never occurred to us.

As the story came to a close, I joined several other annoyed-looking parents in ushering our kids elsewhere — a shame, as I had been looking forward to explaining sign language to my children and perhaps learning signs for Jewish words together. As I brought my daughter to the face-painting station, I overheard another 5-year-old ask his father the question no Jewish parent wants to hear: “Dad, is Santa Claus real? Why is he only for Christians?” A conversation had with millions of Jewish children over the years — but perhaps never before in response to the Chanukah programming of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston.

There was something darkly comedic about the experience. Christian normativity is not in the top 10 things we have to worry about this year. Since the mass shooting at Bondi Beach, I had approached the holiday with a mix of fear and defiance, bringing my family to every public Chanukah gathering I could manage, even as the threat of violence hung over them all. American Jewish life increasingly takes place behind a wall of private security and police protection. But locked and loaded to secure ourselves from the partisans of a globalized intifada, who should sneak down the chimney but our old enemy, Santa Claus!

Obviously, this is a sideshow. But it also reflects a familiar failure of nerve within American Jewry with broader implications. Dara Horn, author of “People Love Dead Jews,” talks about the distinction between “Purim antisemitism,” which is explicitly genocidal against Jews, and “Chanukah antisemitism,” which merely tries to erase Judaism through assimilation.
Though American Jewish organizations mostly stand against both, a more subtle version of Chanukah antisemitism holds sway within our own house. For many, distinctive Jewish identity is only permissible if it can be justified in non-Jewish terms. After the Holocaust, American Jews sought to universalize it as a means of social acceptance, converting the specifically Jewish trauma of the Shoah into a general expression of the dangers of prejudice suitable to all audiences. The concentration camps were translated into a universal allegory rather than deeply particularistic recent history. As the Civil Rights Movement captured the moral imagination of America, understanding ourselves as “allies” became fundamental to American Jewish social identity.

In retrospect, both of these tactics were means of purchasing safety through assimilation into the majority culture. By first translating the mass murder of one-third of our people into a generic meditation on the value of tolerance, we placed ourselves on a more equal footing with our neighbors. Then, by loudly affirming our status as privileged champions of the less fortunate by virtue of past discrimination, we implicitly framed ourselves as outside of prejudice’s reach today.
We told ourselves a story in which antisemitism was a thing of the past, enabling our political engagement to be for others, never ourselves. Now, as post-war Jewish safety begins to unravel, these innovations leave us unprepared to assert ourselves on our own behalf. Raised in a worldview according to which solidarity is the highest Jewish value, many Jews feel a deep reluctance to claim moral authority in our own right. Deep down, some of us yearn for a Shmelf to sprinkle just enough thinly veiled Christmas magic to render our distinctiveness acceptable by analogy.

This tendency to assert legitimacy primarily by comparison to others implies a profound status anxiety — a social insecurity that is no longer tenable in an age when physical insecurity has returned to our communities to a greater degree than we’ve experienced in my lifetime. American Jewry must learn to feel comfortable in our own distinctiveness, moving away from our bad habit of seeking validation by defining ourselves in relation to other peoples. Now more than ever, we must rediscover our own resilience — and be prepared to teach it to our children. PJC

Ari Ne’eman is a faculty member at the Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to entering academia, he led a national disability advocacy organization and served as an adviser to the federal government on disability policy across multiple presidential administrations. This article was first published on The Times of Israel.