Word: jewish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most pervasive, if not the most pernicious, effect of Christmas is the identity crisis it can cause among kids who are not white or Anglo-Saxon or Protestant. Little black kids find themselves on the knee of a big fat white man with a bushy white beard. And little Jewish kids mut live with the suspicion, even while they are trimming a tree or opening a Christmas present, that somewhere in this story of brotherly love there's a villain, and it appears to be themselves...
...Jewish kid growing up in a heavily WASP milieu, I always had a stormy love-hate relationship with Christmas. I had a passion for all the romantic trappings--the wreaths and the holly and the trees and the tinsel--but somehow I could never let myself go completely. When I was seven or so, I fixated on the idea of a tree, tall and green and smelling of pine forests. I nagged my mother about it so much that she finally went out and bought me something that was two feet high and silver and smelled of plastic. Somehow that...
...other hand, I wasn't Jewish enough to be able to give up Christmas altogether, like some kids knew. There was one girl at the private school I went to who came from a fairly religious Jewish family. She had a special dispensation to skip the Christmas pageant, and while the rest of the school rehearsed Christmas carols she would sit there silently, looking solemn and self-righteous. In a way, I suppose, her aloofness was a tacit accusation against the rest of us for participating--the school was about 10 per cent Jewish. But she never made me feel...
...tried the Chanukah route for a while, but I always knew it was a made-up holiday, invented by anxious Jewish parents to mollify their Christmas-hungry offspring. "Look," they were saying, "you don't need any stockings hung by the chimney with care, or presents under the tree. We're gonna give you eight--yes, count'em, eight--different gifts, one for each day of our holiday." It didn't help, of course, that my parents were not big gift-givers. The only thing I remember getting for Chanukah was a picture book about the Feast of Lights...
...than 25,000. Jews may work for the government, but they cannot hold senior jobs. They must have written permission to travel within the country. Curiously, their identification cards, which all Syrians carry, list their religious affiliation as Musawi (follower of Moses) rather than Yahudi, the Arabic word for Jewish...