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At this time of year, between Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, I feel especially American. The Jewish holidays, lovely and uplifting occasions that grind the country to a halt, are over at last. Projects that have been blithely put on hold for weeks, in a pleasant extension of summer sloth, leap from screen and cell phone and thrust Israelis into an accelerated work ethic that feels very Protestant.
The remainder of the fall holidays are American ones, not celebrated here. We don’t do Columbus Day, though maybe we should. Oct. 12 marks the day in 1492 when a sailor on the Pinta first sighted land in the Bahamas, following a transatlantic voyage that began on the 3rd of August. In a fascinating essay called “Who Was Columbus?” published in 1940, the eminent Anglo-Jewish historian Cecil Roth noted that the great explorer was all set to sail on Aug. 2, but postponed his departure till the next morning. Why? Perhaps, wondered Roth, because the 2nd fell on Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of historical mourning, on which “no Jew would begin an enterprise.”
Various Jews have undertaken to prove Columbus was Jewish. The famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal speculated in his 1973 book Sails of Hope that Columbus the Jew was in search of the Lost Tribes of Israel, who would provide a haven for the Jews expelled from Spain in that same momentous year. (The deadline for departure was July 31, but some left a few days later, and tradition thus pins the expulsion to the Ninth of Av.) Personally, I think Columbus wasn’t one of the tribe; but a good number of his bankrollers and mapmakers were, constituting a feather in our collective cap.
The expulsion of 1492 is one of the three central disasters in the history of the Diaspora, figuratively situated midway between the destruction of the Second Temple in the 1st century and the Holocaust in the 20th. The acceleration of Jewish destiny reached its zenith three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, with the establishment of the State of Israel.
The landing of Columbus marks the beginning of the colonization of the New World by Europeans, which caused the death and dispossession of millions of natives of the Americas. It also led to the founding of the greatest and most prosperous refuge that we wandering Jews have ever enjoyed. Israelis should celebrate Columbus Day every Oct. 12, because without a strong American Jewish community, Israeli could not exist and flourish.
Next, on Oct. 24, comes United Nations Day, also not celebrated in Israel. I don’t know how this day is marked in the U.S. nowadays, but when I was a schoolboy in Brooklyn, it still served as an occasion for ceremonies and special curricula that emphasized the recent founding of that glorious multinational organization, the world’s pride and joy following the horrors of the century’s wars. In a strange sense, the U.N. is to the world what Israel is to the Jews: its new political baby, a totemic remedy for the ravages of history.
The big question is: Has the admirable, ethical internationalism of Dag Hammarsjköld, and Ralph Bunche, and other forgotten heroes, died out in our own time, giving way to the tyranny of post-colonial ideologues—or will the U.N. reclaim its moral authority? To put it in blunt Brooklynese: Is the U.N. anti-Semitic, or just anti-Israel? In a strange sense, does the U.N. perceive Israel as a rival?
Another ordinary day in Israel is Nov. 11, which at some point in my childhood went from Armistice Day, marking the end of World War One, to the more inclusive Veterans Day, saluting the GIs who made it home alive in all wars. In Israel, we don’t have such a day. Here, every day is veterans’ day, just as every day is Mother’s Day.
In America, the group known as the Jewish War Veterans, founded in 1896, has 37,000 members, according to Wikipedia. It’s a safe guess that these patriotic folks are older on average, and fewer in number, than they were a generation ago. In my time, most Jewish boys avoided the Vietnam War. Today, few American Jews volunteer to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq. In Jerusalem, everybody I know has a kid in the IDF, often more than one. All else, as Rabbi Hillel says, is commentary.
One such commentary is the new Israeli movie Lebanon, which recently won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Lion. The whole devastating, brilliant film takes place inside a tank, at the very start of the first Lebanon War in 1982. The outside world is viewed through the tank’s periscope, creating an eerie, claustrophobic sensation. The film is based on the traumatic experience of its director, Shmuel Maoz, who was a 20-year-old tank soldier in that war. If you appreciated Waltz With Bashir, which was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year, you must see Lebanon. If you didn’t, all the more reason to try again with Lebanon – a truly iconic Israeli film.
The favorite non-Jewish holiday of American Jews is, of course, Thanksgiving. It has all the gemütlichkeit of Christmas, the cozy sense of belonging to the great American family, but without you-know-who. This day, too, does not appear on the Israeli calendar; our equivalent, more or less, is Sukkot. Unofficially, though, all my Anglo friends celebrate Thanksgiving, including Brits, Canadians, and other alumni of the Commonwealth. Each year, on the appointed Thursday, a group of us immigrants feasts on turkey at the home of an olah from South Africa. The following night, a different group is hosted for an annual Thanksgiving-Shabbat dinner by an American couple who met as kibbutz volunteers more than 30 years ago, and stayed in Israel. It’s like the two seders in the Diaspora, but less redundant.
We have much to be thankful for. The American couple who met on kibbutz just married off one of their daughters, to a young Israeli of Moroccan extraction. The traditional henna ceremony, a lively and colorful event a few nights before the wedding, underscored one of Israel’s greatest triumphs: the reunification of the global Jewish family.
Actually, Israel ought to establish an official Thanksgiving Day in November—on the 29th, to be precise. This is the historic date on which, in 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine that led to the establishment of Israel the following May. The date is familiar to Israelis. Very near my house, there is a street called Kaf-Tet B’November, the letters “kaf” and “tet” forming 29 in Hebrew numerology.
Giving this day official emphasis in schools and the public square would be a healthy reminder for Israelis, and our supporters everywhere, that it is no small achievement for the Jewish people to have been welcomed, after two millennia of exile, into the family of nations. The U.N. ain’t what it used to be, this is true. And yet, be it ever so fraught with complications, the respect and approval of other nations still matters—a very great deal.
