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Happy Arrival Day!
Sep. 7th, 2004 06:07 pmToday marks the 350th anniversary of the arrival in New Amsterdam of its first Jews.
To quote The Head Heeb: Arrival Day is a holiday of the American Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion - a celebration of the Jewish community and its contributions to the United States. As such, non-Jews as well as Jews are welcome to join in the celebration. In the wise words of Ikram Saeed, everyone is Jewish today, just as everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day.
If you have any words on the subject, and especially if you have posted them, go put a link in at the THH's blogburst (first link in this entry).
For myself, I am no longer practicing Judaism as a religion, but I find myself more often reverting to the cultural referents I learned as a child. More sprinkling of my speech with Yiddish words (of course, that's rather natural when driving and living in New York City; both "putz" and "vantz" come easily to the tongue in situ), more acquisition of ethnic or pseudoethnic foods when shopping, and adding lots of the expressions and grammar ("he should only be happy and healthy!") that can be traced directly to my first-generation immigrant grandparents from Poland.
And, as Eszter says at Crooked Timber, [A]nti-Semitism is alive and well in Europe. I prefer to live in a country where I do not have to be on my guard all the time about being Jewish.
Me, too. Here in New York, and everywhere else I have been on the East Coast of the US, I haven't had to look over my shoulder, ever, for that reason. I haven't worried about my home being defaced, or destroyed, by people who didn't understand that my faith or my culture wasn't about to destroy theirs, or to hurt them in any way. I am beginning to be worried, because the inevitable expression of intolerance in Western culture is anti-Semitism, and this my country is becoming less and less tolerant, in much of its mainstream, of anything but token, and controlled, differences.
I say this in advance of that expression: Never to forget. Never to forgive.
To quote The Head Heeb: Arrival Day is a holiday of the American Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion - a celebration of the Jewish community and its contributions to the United States. As such, non-Jews as well as Jews are welcome to join in the celebration. In the wise words of Ikram Saeed, everyone is Jewish today, just as everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day.
If you have any words on the subject, and especially if you have posted them, go put a link in at the THH's blogburst (first link in this entry).
For myself, I am no longer practicing Judaism as a religion, but I find myself more often reverting to the cultural referents I learned as a child. More sprinkling of my speech with Yiddish words (of course, that's rather natural when driving and living in New York City; both "putz" and "vantz" come easily to the tongue in situ), more acquisition of ethnic or pseudoethnic foods when shopping, and adding lots of the expressions and grammar ("he should only be happy and healthy!") that can be traced directly to my first-generation immigrant grandparents from Poland.
And, as Eszter says at Crooked Timber, [A]nti-Semitism is alive and well in Europe. I prefer to live in a country where I do not have to be on my guard all the time about being Jewish.
Me, too. Here in New York, and everywhere else I have been on the East Coast of the US, I haven't had to look over my shoulder, ever, for that reason. I haven't worried about my home being defaced, or destroyed, by people who didn't understand that my faith or my culture wasn't about to destroy theirs, or to hurt them in any way. I am beginning to be worried, because the inevitable expression of intolerance in Western culture is anti-Semitism, and this my country is becoming less and less tolerant, in much of its mainstream, of anything but token, and controlled, differences.
I say this in advance of that expression: Never to forget. Never to forgive.
