Dear Colleagues and Friends,
When the slanting shadows of November appear, I’m immediately reminded of Thanksgiving, that American holiday that Jews adopted with gusto. I wondered what a search for “Thanksgiving” would yield on The Posen Digital Library (PDL), and it was quite a fascinating cornucopia of sources that play interestingly off one another.
First up came a selection from the writer Anne Roiphe’s memoir, Generation without Memory: A Jewish Journey in Christian America. Remembering the volume, I expected her to write in a celebratory mode. But her prose is a far more critical than I recalled.
“There are contradictions and ambivalences in our celebrating Thanksgiving,” she begins. “We are recent Americans. It wasn’t the Mayflower that brought our people over here,” she continues. And then she launches into a political statement that surprised me. Although written in 1981, and her use of the term Indian to refer to indigenous Americans reflects that, it otherwise reminds us of our current 2021 situation:
“We know too much about what the coming of the white men did to the Indian and therefore the sweet pictures that the children draw of Pilgrim and corn provoke other images of Indians dying of smallpox, of massacres at Wounded Knee and treaties broken and violated. We can hardly say the word ‘American’ itself without apologizing to the black slaves who didn’t ask to come here and the Japanese at Hiroshima who were burned beyond the necessities of war, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, certain members of the Chilean Left, some students in countries in the Third World; the inhabitants of the South Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Watts and on with a list of sorrows; . . . .”
How striking for this piece, from 20th-century Manhattan, to appear in my search on the PDL next to the biblical figure Nehemiah’s Jerusalem where in “The Dedication of the Wall of Jerusalem” he writes about the elaborate thanksgiving choirs he arranged outside the walls of the city. Where contemporary Roiphe is somber, ancient Nehemiah is celebratory:
“I had the officers of Judah go up onto the wall, and I appointed two large thanksgiving [choirs] and processions. [One marched] south on the wall, to the Dung Gate;” he writes. “The other thanksgiving [choir] marched on the wall in the opposite direction, with me and half the people behind it, above the Tower of Ovens to the Broad Wall;” he continues. “Both thanksgiving choirs halted at the House of God, and I and half the prefects with me, . . .”
Nehemiah’s account of the music and festivities also reads like a memoir, especially given his use of the first person. It reminds us not only of thematic connections of Jewish culture and civilization across centuries but also of literary genres.
A very different form of thanksgiving appears in 20th-century Algeria that blends elements of both Nehemiah and Roiphe. In “Victory Day in Tlemcen, Algeria,” Rabbi Joseph Messas, who was raised in Morocco, writes how the Jews of Tlemcen celebrated the news of the capture of Berlin in 1945, when the city “fell into the hands of the following four kingdoms: Russia, America, England, and France, and we celebrated it as a holiday, reciting the Hallel prayers of thanksgiving throughout the city, to the King of Honor, who destroyed the fortresses of the proud, and on the following Sabbath, 24 Iyyar, at two in the afternoon, trumpets were heard heralding the end of the war with cursed Germany, because it was completely captured by the aforementioned kingdoms, and it was disarmed, and its soul was pressed to the dust, so may it always be.”
Messas then describes the events that occurred: “First the chorus of singers sang, ‘I will exalt Thee, O Lord, for you have raised me up, etc.’ and afterward we stood in silence for two minutes, in honor of those killed in the war, as is the custom among the gentiles, . . . .” He goes on to include a prayer he wrote that is a powerful blend of the political and spiritual, bringing one back to Roiphe’s consciousness of the layered Jewish meanings of Thanksgiving, American-style.
I can’t include Saul Steinberg’s drawing, Peacock Thanksgiving, here but I can assure you that it’s worthwhile to log in or to register on the PDL to see it. Steinberg’s choice of characters to sit at his Thanksgiving table is a wonderful, funny, and insightful tribute from an immigrant American Jew to his adopted homeland.
Registering on the PDL is fast and free and enables you to view these and thousands more readings and images from Posen Library volumes.
| My fellow educators may find one new thing to be thankful for if they have a moment to review our just launched Posen Library Teaching Clips. These are 3- to 5-minute videos available free for use in lectures and classes. Each one features an esteemed scholar of Jewish studies speaking on topics ranging across gender studies, secular Jews, religious and spiritual culture, biblical literature, modern Jewish history, and Jewish visual cultures. The videos are all excerpts from recent Posen Library events. I’d be very interested in hearing what you think of them. |
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And since Hanukkah comes right on the heels of Thanksgiving this year, let me end with wishes for a happy holiday.
Deborah Dash Moore
Editor in Chief, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization
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