By Ishmael son of Nethaniah
The following content is satire. See here for the Daily Princetonian piece it parodies.
The first time that I ever received any serious reprimand for misbehavior in school was in the seventh grade. At the suburban midwestern Jewish Day School I attended from ages 8 to 14, we commemorated a wide variety of Jewish holidays. But as I came of age, I became increasingly skeptical about the “Jewish” content of many of the events that we celebrated.
Towards the end of an all-school assembly celebrating the non-Biblical holiday of Hanukkah in 2013, I refused to stand and sing “I Have a Little Dreidel” with the rest of my peers, and held a printed image of King Antiochus. I wish that I could say that my actions were wholly motivated by a selfless demonstration of solidarity with ruling Greeks who were subjected to what a litany of human rights groups has aptly described as a Jewish revolt. But truth be told, my conduct also reflected, at least in part, the antics of an attention-seeking teenager.
Retroactive analysis of my intentions aside, after I refused to participate in the singing of the anthem, a school administrative figure rushed to my side and insisted that I stand. I didn’t. Later that day, another school employee insulted me and compared my behavior to that of Haman. It was a deeply painful and formative experience.
The lesson I learned that day was clear: whenever young American Jews questioned their relationship to Rabbinic Judaism, others would question their Jewishness. Jews like me are branded by Jewish community leaders as “Un-Jews,” and regularly excluded from the institutional Jewish world, including at Princeton’s own Center for Jewish Life (CJL). (Take for example, the recent menorah lighting by CJL Executive Director Rabbi Gil Steinflauf ’91, which effectively equates the celebration of Hanukkah with Judaism, serving to brand many Jews critical of Hanukkah as either self-hating or not Jewish altogether.)
In a letter sent to the student body last week, Dean of the College Jill Dolan directed members of the Princeton community to a list of religious holidays compiled by the Office of Religious Life (ORL). Among the Jewish holidays on the ORL list: Hanukkah and Purim.
The ORL’s inventory and Dean Dolan’s email served as yet another example of the painful erasure of non-Rabbinic Jews from the Jewish community on this campus. To state the obvious: Hanukkah and Purim are not Biblical holidays; they are inventions of the Rabbis. (No other religion has holidays invented by Rabbis on the ORL list.)
Many non-Rabbinic Jews, such as myself, are uncomfortable with undiscriminating celebrations of Purim, which entailed the mass killing of more than 300 Persian men in Shushan alone, a process amounting to ethnic cleansing. And Hanukkah – an uncritical day of celebrating the rededication of the Temple – is similarly problematic, often ignoring the root causes of Greek resistance to Jewish revolution, to say nothing of the thousands of Greeks who suffered in war and received no such memorial.
Judaism is not Rabbinic. And when campus administrators imply that they are one and the same, it is inaccurate and offensive. The University should not be in the business of declaring new Jewish holidays, especially when such proclamations serve exclusionary and reactionary ends.
The above is a satirical opinion contribution and reflects the authors’ views alone.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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