Two friends have now sent me Jeffrey Goldberg's squib on why merchants should continue to say Merry Christmas, and Hannukah is a bogus holiday. I agree with Goldberg, but would just like to observe that Goldberg is one of the most protean writers around. A year ago in a fit of paranoia, he was attacking Walt and Mearsheimer for what he saw as their attack on Jewish power. A few years ago, serving as David Remnick's id at the New Yorker, he was combing caves in Kurdistan for missile parts so as to prove Saddam had chemical and biological weapons.
Last spring he smartly realized that the world was changing under his feet. He attacked the Israel lobby in the New York Times, thereby alienating his old friend Leon Wieseltier. He said his Walt and Mearsheimer stuff had emerged from a "defensive crouch." He did an important interview with Obama that sold Obama as a friend of Israel to conservative Jews. Now he's talking about pogroms in the West Bank (a word I have used for a long time here) and celebrating Christmas–this man who once moved to Israel because he thought the Diaspora was unsafe for Jews.
I have no essential problem with Goldberg's contradictions. Whitman's poetic principle is the highest: so, he contradicts himself/he contains multitudes. Myself I adore change. Still there is something faintly opportunistic about Goldberg's variations. As the realists come more and more inside, we can expect "Jimmy Carter's Fight for Jewish Hearts and Minds," from Goldberg. And: "Walt and Mearsheimer, Once You Get to Know Them They're Actually Nice Guys, and Philosemites." And, "Why the Jewish Day School Movement Is Bad for the Jews." Even more urgent for me to get out my book, "The Assimilationist," before Goldberg beats me to it.
Jeff Blankfort chimes in re Christmas/Hannukah:
is gradually being eliminated from the holiday lexicon has nothing to
do with Muslim, Pagan or Vegan objections but because a small, powerful
minority that shoves Channukah,
a phony holiday whose history has been distorted (it was a civil war
between fundamentalists and secularists) down everyone's throats, at
least those who live in America's major cities. When I was in high
school in LA, and the students were maybe 90% Jewish, I don't remember
Channukah being talked about. It was only when the stores, mostly
Jewish owned, realized there was a lot of money to be made from their
fellow Jews by selling them Channukah gifts that the holiday took off.
I used to love Christmas. It was my dad's birthday as well as that of
his friend, actor Joe Brommberg, and we used to have a big tree and and
open house where the liquor and good cheer flowed freely and the only
person who objected, while getting drunk was the sculptor Charles
Schlein who remembered the cossacks riding into his town in Russia when
he was a kid. But here we have no cosssacks, unless we include the ADL.
