We didn’t exchange gifts on the first night of Hanukkah this year. Instead, we lit the hanukkiah and talked about the historical events that are known in the United States as a “Christmas-lite”: the commemoration of a military victory of a small band of Jewish rebels called the Maccabees who rose up against religious persecution. Against all odds, their small force defeated the Greek-Syrian army, regained Jerusalem, and rededicated the Second Temple in the year 164 B.C.
The history behind the most recognized Jewish holiday in America roots the presence of the Jewish people in the land of Israel 164 years before the birth of Jesus and 774 years before the first revelation of the prophet Muhammad. Another story, even more widely accepted, recounts the birth of a baby in Bethlehem to his Jewish parents a century and a half later. Since my kids, aged 13 and 16, are fluent in the parlance of our times, I reminded them that history points to our ancestors as the indigenous people of Israel.
We then lit a yahrzeit (remembrance) candle for my mother, who died two years ago on Dec. 7. On her birth certificate, her place of birth is listed as “Palestine.” My mother, child of Jewish Polish refugees who fled pre-war anti-Semitism in Europe, was Palestinian. So were thousands of other children born to parents with the luck to escape an all but certain death in the Holocaust.
The word “Palestine” did not originate in Middle Eastern or Arab culture; it first appears in texts in the fifth century B.C. as a derivation of the word “Philistia” in reference to the land of the Philistines, a people related to the ancient Greeks. The British empire resurrected the term after winning control of this desolate corner of the Middle East after the first World War.
My mother’s early life was marked by war. In 1947, when she was 5, the United Nations voted to fulfill a 1917 charter which called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. They approved the Partition Resolution, which proposed to divide the British mandate into Jewish and Arab states. This resolution was rejected by the Arabs, and the declaration of Israeli independence on May 14, 1948, was answered the next day with an invasion by the armies of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt.
My mother often recounted the story of going to get ice cream with her father in Tel Aviv during the War of Independence. On their walk back, air raid sirens sounded and they ran with strangers to a bomb shelter. When the all-clear sounded, my mom ran home with her father to find her mother and baby brother safe. The apartment building next door was rubble, my mom’s young friend among many victims that day. Around this same time, a family photo shows my grandmother, my mom and my uncle in Europe where they traveled to find news of relatives who might have survived the camps. There were none.
My mother took these traumas with her when she came to the United States following her mandatory military service in Israel. She met my Chicago-born father and raised her family in a comfortable Jewish enclave in the suburbs, where my sisters and I felt a strong Jewish identity despite our atheist father and eagerly-assimilating mother. I was the only daughter with any formal Jewish education, and also the only kid in my Hebrew school class to raise my hand when asked who felt more Jewish than American.
For most of our generation, being Jewish in America meant keeping cultural traditions while distancing ourselves from our black-clad, behatted great-grandparents. Girls who came back to high school after winter break with the characteristic splint and undereye bruising of a nose job were so common as to be unremarkable. Haunted by the numbers tattooed on the powdery skin of our grandparents’ forearms, we fought to blend in. We marched for Israel every May and for civil, gay and women’s rights every other month, and recounted the story of the Jewish Freedom Riders alongside the story of the Maccabees. Our assimilation, we believed, was our protection. So believed the Jews of Germany in the 1930s.
A week or so ago, a former student of mine posted the “from the river to the sea” slogan on her Instagram story. After much thought, I sent her a text explaining how threatening a call for the eradication of Israel feels to me and my family in an increasingly hostile country and city. I asked her to consider her words and public postings carefully so as not to feed the growing flames of anti-Semitism. I offered to sit down together over coffee to talk about the complexity of Arab-Israel politics. Silence.
Every few days my child shows me another post from classmates calling for protest and radical action against Israel; the teachers’ union of our district felt compelled to weigh in on this particular international conflict, voicing support for the BDS movement before later retracting their comments. I wrote the head of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, carefully not naming my child, to ask how they were going to protect the safety of all children after releasing a potentially incendiary statement. Silence. I warned my child not to identify as Jewish in social media or in school, where several Jewish students represent what is by far the smallest minority group. My child texted back, “I know.”
The progressive left that we helped build shows by their actions that there is no home for Jewish people. In my home in the Twin Cities, where the once-beloved populist and progressive hero Paul Wellstone served as a Jewish U.S. senator, there is increasingly no home for Jewish people. And in the chants and slogans of social media posters and marchers worldwide, the message is clear: Even in the land of Israel, there should be no home for Jewish people.
Tonight we light the last candle, a small flicker in a growing darkness.
Dr. Rena Kraut is a musician and nonprofit leader in the Twin Cities.
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