It’s Christmas, so it’s time for a NYT op-ed on the Christian perspective of Christmas, right?
Wrong. It’s time for yet another op-ed conveying Jewish alienation from the gentile holiday of Christmas.
In “It’s the Most Unknowable Time of the Year”, Gary Shteyngart first discusses a jarring childhood experience in Soviet Leningrad witnessing “Grandfather Frost”, where a man in a bear costume donning a red hat and a white beard is a “secular, socialist-friendly Russian equivalent of Santa Claus.” He then continues:
In three years our family will leave for the United States. The nondenominational New Year’s Tree and equally secular Grandfather Frost will be gone — the local Jews of Kew Gardens, Queens, will tell us both traditions smack of a certain Christian holiday, making them verboten. No more pine smells at the end of December, rather a seven-fisted candelabra that someone at the local synagogue is kind enough to throw our way…
We can’t do Christmas because we’re Jewish, and we never really get the full gist of Hanukkah beyond the candle lighting and the spiel about Jews conquering Greeks.
Are you starting to see a pattern in these Jewish perspectives on Christmas?
