Niels Truman loves Christmas. He spends it in Palm Springs with his extended family in a Danish style, and has never questioned his relationship to it.
Nina McGranahan visits her grandparents for Christmas, but is careful to say that she doesn’t celebrate it herself and that it’s not a big part of her life.
Lila Templin also celebrates Christmas with their grandparents, and feels ambivalent about it. They most likely won’t celebrate it when they are older.
As for me, it’s no secret that I love the Christmas season. I love the excitement, I love the songs, and I love giving gifts. I celebrate it with my family in a secular context, and associate it with warmth and comfort. But Christmas has also become a source of guilt for me because, like Niels, Nina, and Lila, I am Jewish.
I began to understand the implications of me, a Jew, celebrating Christmas for the first time in ninth grade Hebrew school, when my rabbi sat us down to talk about assimilation. We discussed Hanukkah and how to some it represents American assimilation by imitating the capitalist enterprise of the holiday season. We also discussed interfaith marriage and why some Jews disapproved.
Many people in my class came from interfaith families and grew upset and defensive at the notion that they were less connected to their Judaism, less dedicated to it, because of their family’s traditions; most notably, celebrating Christmas. I recall feeling threatened by the claim that Jews shouldn’t celebrate Christmas, but I couldn’t wholeheartedly defend myself; I knew this was something Jewish people weren’t supposed to do. And even more so, I knew how important it was for us to hold onto our culture and maintain our traditions, and how afraid Jews were of us losing these things. I had never thought about that before.
I began writing this article intending to interview other Jewish people who celebrated Christmas and see what they thought about it, or if they shared my complex feelings. Quickly, however, I began to realize that the issue ran deeper than Christmas itself. What’s worth exploring is what Christmas has come to symbolize for me and many others: the feeling of shame that I have when I think about it, the feeling of having to prove that I am Jewish enough despite it, and the feeling that I am assimilating because I celebrate it. Several of my interviewees shared this complicated navigation of identity, and many Christmas-celebrating Jews, Jews who come from interfaith families, and Jews who come from other “nontraditional” backgrounds share it as well: this internal struggle combined with the fear of betraying our heritage.
The Jewish world is obsessed with continuity. This is not surprising or new. We have a long and painful history of persecution and genocide, and there are not a lot of Jewish people in the world to begin with. The topic of assimilation often goes hand in hand with “continuity” discourse; when we live in environments that are not primarily Jewish, where other cultures are dominant, Jews worry about letting our own culture slip away.
For a long time, intermarriage has been seen as a primary cause of Jewish assimilation. The Conservative movement does not allow its rabbis to officiate interfaith weddings or, until recently, even attend them. The Reform movement allows interfaith marriages, but Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical school, does not allow applicants to be in relationships with non-Jews. When researching for this article, I encountered several Jewish college students who themselves believed that intermarriage leads to the decline of Judaism. Sometimes, the concern finds a national platform: in the recent New York Times article “Inside the Unraveling of American Zionism,” Marc Tracy describes Jewish continuity as “future Jewish babies who will grow up to have more Jewish babies,” and lists some questions surrounding the issue: “Will Jews intermarry out of existence? ….Has the median American Jew — Ashkenazic, native-born, lightly religious — become a white person who knows a potato pancake is called a latke?”
Both Jewish and non-Jewish organizations put large amounts of resources into studying rates of intermarriage. The Pew Research Center’s “Jewish Americans in 2020” study, for example, charts rates of Jewish intermarriage by age and denomination, as well as likelihood to raise Jewish children. Interestingly, the study concludes that children of interfaith marriages are increasingly identifying as Jewish— but that doesn’t stop rhetoric around interfaith marriage from permeating Jewish environments. Often, it feels inescapable.
Because of this – and in part because of our fear of assimilation — there is an open hostility to people who have interfaith or non-traditional Jewish backgrounds embedded in both individuals and Jewish institutions. As a result, these institutions alienate interfaith Jews and those from non-traditional backgrounds, making it harder for them to engage with Judaism and ultimately driving them away. Jews losing touch with their identity is as much a Jewish institutional problem as an outside cultural one. In order to further explore this issue, we should listen directly to those Jews who have struggled with their communities and who larger Jewish institutions have deemed “assimilated.”
Assimilation as an American Cultural Problem
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz grew up just as Melanie Kaye. In her essay “To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century,” she writes that her father’s last name was originally Kantrowitz but he later changed it— everyone thought Kantrowitz was too long, too hard to say. Growing up, Kaye/Kantrowitz took Judaism for granted because of the large Jewish community around her. She writes that her family connected to Judaism through their commitment to politics and not ritual observance, and saw breaking religious practice as progressive.
After not engaging with Judaism much in college, Kaye/Kantrowitz moved to Santa Fe, where she had no Jewish community. For the first time, she became unsatisfied with her Jewish background and describes having a “hunger” for Jewish culture and people that confused her family and friends. She also describes a rising awareness that she was Jewish, while those around her were definitively not.
At this time assimilation became a key issue for Kaye/Kantrowitz, as it is for many North American Jews. Kaye/Katrowitz writes that some see assimilation as a privilege and way out of oppression, but she sees it as a “source of pain [and] loss…a seepage of Jewishness out of diaspora Jewry, the blurring or erasure of identity and culture,” and in this case, “disappear[ing] into the vague flesh of America, famous for gobbling up cultures.” She reflects that she now recognizes Jewish identity and culture as vulnerable and not a given, and because of this she must maintain Jewish culture, traditions, and history. At this time she added Kantrowitz back to her last name as a way of “resisting the great American white-wash.” Although Kaye/Kantrowitz’s essay was published in 1992, many still share this question of how to navigate one’s Jewish identity in a non-Jewish environment.
Lila Templin, a junior at Oberlin College, told me about several friends of theirs who, similarly, don’t want to fall into the “great American white-wash”; people who have Jewish parents but, while growing up, didn’t engage with their Jewish identities. “These are people who celebrate Christmas despite not having any Christian family members, and just generally [were raised] in an assimilated, classically American identity, even though it wasn’t intentional,” said Templin. “They’ve all had a weird, complicated relationship to Judaism later on…a lot of trying to backtrack and relearn things. I know someone who just had her Bat Mitzvah at age twenty.”
Templin takes this to mean that the blanket identity of “American” has been unfulfilling for people who have been raised this way, and that these Jews want to be in touch with their heritage and culture, even if they don’t know how.
Rebecca Katz, Director of Communication, Events, and Strategic Partnership at Lilith Magazine, grew up in Brooklyn, where Judaism always seemed like the default. “It was very, very important to my parents to bring me up deeply enmeshed in a Jewish community,” she said. “It was my whole world. I now know how much work must have gone into that.”
Katz’s mother was also adamant about not celebrating Christmas. She recounts watching an episode of The O.C. entitled “Chrismukkah,” where a character celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas. “My mother thought it was wonderful to see a Jewish character on TV celebrating Hanukkah, but was upset about how the show uplifted the ways in which Jews are often forced to assimilate to Christian mainstream culture,” she said.
Katz’s husband, however, has a Christian family — and Christmas is their biggest event of the year. As a result, she has celebrated Christmas with them for the past decade. Like me, Katz loves the joy of Christmas, of receiving gifts and of being around loved ones. Also like me, she has mixed feelings about celebrating it.
Katz noted that her discomfort with Christmas is rooted in her feelings about whiteness and assimilation; observing the holiday accentuates how she feels she can, if she chooses, completely assimilate as a white American. Part of this is related to the context in which Katz celebrates Christmas: with a white, suburban, Southern family, making the holiday feel “deeply interconnected with whiteness.” In this environment, Katz asks herself if she is feeling erased as a Jew or if she is reckoning with the fact that she can slip into white Christian American culture so easily. Speaking with Katz, I realized how I too had always seen Christmas: the great American white-wash, a representation of assimilation in America.
Assimilation as a Jewish Institutional Problem
When Nina McGranahan, a junior at the University of Maryland, began her freshman year of college she was excited to be a part of a large Jewish community. She grew up going to a Reconstructionist synagogue, but wasn’t used to being around the huge number of Jewish students at UMD. Almost immediately, McGranahan felt out of place. “I got here, and it was hard,” she told me. “I didn’t feel Jewish enough. I went to events and everyone was talking about the Torah, and other things that weren’t stressed in my Hebrew school. My Jewish education was just different. I felt like I didn’t know enough, even though being Jewish was a huge part of my identity. I had an identity crisis where I thought, ‘if I’m not Jewish enough, then what am I?’”
McGranahan began to question her connection to Judaism, and decided that she didn’t want to interact with these Jewish communities—they weren’t for her. This past summer, however, she met other Jews who came from similar backgrounds but also felt strong in their identities. This helped McGranahan feel like it was okay to be Jewish in the specific way she was Jewish. “Even as my relationship with Judaism changes, I’m still Jewish no matter what,” she said. Jewish groups and institutions at McGranahan’s college had failed her; it was only by stepping outside of them and finding different communities, ones that did not make her feel alienated, that she began to connect more with her Jewish identity.
Niels Truman, a senior at Lewis and Clark College, had similar experiences during his freshman year; he was suddenly around more Jews than he’d ever been before. Truman grew up going to a nondenominational center for Humanistic Judaism, and Judaism was a large part of his life when he was young. In high school, however, Truman says that he let Judaism “slip away” from his identity. Though in college Truman realized the importance of engaging with his Jewish heritage again, he also had to renegotiate what it meant to him. This was partially due to Truman encountering people who were, as he puts it, “Jewish in ways I was definitely not.”
Instead of feeling driven away like McGranahan, Truman felt like he had been cheated out of a Jewish upbringing. “I was actually very angry,” he said. “I wished I’d had a more observant childhood, and that I’d had the experiences of the people I was meeting. I wondered why [my parents] even bothered.” Eventually, Truman discussed his upbringing with his parents and realized how intentional they had been. He says that this is how he wants to raise his kids as well, even though it’s not the same as what his Jewish peers may expect of him.
This feeling of culture shock, guilt, and alienation is not uncommon for people with liberal or nondenominational Jewish backgrounds. With it also comes a feeling of shame around “not being Jewish enough” or not knowing enough about one’s Jewish heritage. Sometimes, we even blame ourselves for assimilation. McGranahan felt this shame when she came to college and couldn’t participate in Jewish organizations, and Truman felt it when he realized his Jewish upbringing differed from others’. I feel it when I have to prove I care about Judaism to people who are skeptical of my Reform background, or the fact that I celebrate Christmas.
It’s a paradox. The reason we have these “assimilated” backgrounds is because our families found that liberal or nondenominational congregations were the only ones that accepted them as interfaith couples. McGranahan’s family, for example, initially belonged to a different synagogue and left for a variety of reasons, including the rabbi making her father feel uncomfortable for not being Jewish. After switching to a Reconstructionist synagogue, McGranahan wasn’t the only person with interfaith parents in her Hebrew school class. The rabbi emphasized inclusion for community members who didn’t come from Jewish backgrounds. McGranahan’s father has since converted to Judaism, something he was able to do because his community was so welcoming.
Similarly, when I was born, my mother took a Jewish education class at a conservative synagogue. My parents also attended a few services there, and my mother describes them as being “not too inviting.” My parents eventually switched to my current synagogue because it was a welcoming community with other interfaith families. Since then, my mother has become very involved in my Jewish upbringing, as well as our synagogue in general. She speaks about Judaism with excitement and passion, and tells me how much she appreciates my synagogue’s commitment to celebrating non-Jewish members of the community.
These communities that accepted McGranahan and my interfaith parents and actively nurtured their connections to Judaism are the ones that, later in life, others have deemed un-Jewish or causes of our assimilation. Because of these attitudes, Jewish institutions and communities that frame Jews from nontraditional backgrounds as threats are themselves contributing to the problem of assimilation through causing people to disengage with Judaism.
Collectively Resisting Assimilation
Intracommunal policing of Jewish identity and the pervasive narrative of intermarriage as a threat are attitudes that dissuade so many Jews from involvement with the Jewish world. Often, fear of assimilation is what makes establishment Jewry believe that Jews with different backgrounds are threats who will make Judaism slip away. This thinking, however, is exactly what makes other Jews disengage.
If Jewish communities want to resist assimilation, they must create equitable, accessible spaces for those with a variety of different relationships to Judaism. They can uplift non-Jews who feel connected to Judaism because their friends or partners are Jewish. They can stop placing the weight of the Jewish people on individuals and start forming communities that help these individuals feel more connected, ones that collectively resist assimilation.
I recently hosted a luncheon for Jews with interfaith backgrounds at my college. At the luncheon, I told the group why I had created the space: so that students with interfaith families or nontraditional backgrounds, or students who have never explored their Jewish identities at all, knew that there was a place for them in campus Jewish life. There were people who not only shared their experiences but who they could talk to about what having these experiences in larger Jewish communities is like. We talked about our upbringings, and about the culture shock of coming into a new Jewish environment in college. Some people asked questions they’d been wanting to ask other people with interfaith parents. We talked about Christmas and about assimilation as well. I left after an hour feeling like I’d taken a small step in the right direction.
Although the attitudes that cause shame and alienation in so many Jews permeate Jewish institutions and communities in ways that feel hard to fully tackle, I wanted to build a space that could at least make my college community one that did not drive Jewish students away. Making environments that encourage Jewish students to discuss and even celebrate their various upbringings is something any college student (or professional) can do to help create a Jewish continuity that accounts for the vast diversity of 21st-century Judaism. Shifting the old continuity discourse seems daunting, especially since it is so ingrained in Jewish institutions, but Jewish college students have a unique power to create change on campus. This way, we can create a new generation of engaged Jews, ones who feel unashamed of who they are and encouraged to celebrate, explore, and preserve uniquely Jewish identities as they grow into the future. We can build a framework for resisting assimilation that does not buy into the shaming inherent to classical Jewish continuity arguments, but rather acknowledges the diversity and reality of being a Jew in the 21st century.
