Category Archives: Politics

Have a Kosher Christmas

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© 2007 by H.B. Koplowitz

Since first writing this Christmas story in 2007, I have re-posted it several times. But this year is probably the last because it has become woefully outdated. With recent events in Israel and Gaza, the idea that placing menorahs in holiday displays could symbolize inclusion has run its course. Either the menorahs will disappear or crescent stars will be added, as well they should be. As my outdated story notes, things change.

Sitting in the food court at the Target Center in West Hollywood, playing “Where’s Waldo?” with the holiday display. But it wasn’t hard to find the menorah, because the only other decorations were a quintet of festive wreathes and a single broadleaf tree strung with lights. When we asked a security guard where the Christmas tree was, he referred us to another shopping center. The transformation is complete, I thought. How did it come to pass that instead of putting Christ back into Christmas, they put in Jews?

Even as a Jewish atheist, I have mixed emotions about the menorahs, or more precisely, Hanukiahs, that have become ubiquitous in what used to be called Christmas decorations in public places. Like the letter “K” with a circle around it on certain products in the grocery store, the candelabra has become like a seal of approval that a Christmas decoration is kosher — if not blessed by a rabbi, politically (and legally) correct.

Although it’s not, unless you believe a menorah also represents Muslims, Buddhists and secularists. And Christians, because even if the mall had a Christmas tree, it’s no more a symbol of Christianity than Santa Claus. While crosses and creches are verboten, menorahs are the only overtly religious symbols seen at many public holiday displays that at their core commemorate one of the most significant events in the history of Christianity. “Merry Christmas” has been displaced by the generic “happy holidays,” and it’s become inappropriate to sing “Silent Night” at a public school madrigal, yet de rigueur to toss in “The Dreidle Song,” hardly a fair trade-off. Let’s face it, the Jews have stolen Christmas.

Not that we meant to. I imagine that every time a Christian sees a menorah in a holiday display, the first thing they think is “what’s that?” and then, “oh yeah, it’s a Jewish thing, they must have complained.” It’s as if the religious right, beset by atheists challenging religious displays on public property, decided to use the time-honored tactic of blaming the Jews. Like admitting a token black or female to an all-white men’s club, maybe they figured putting menorahs in Christmas decorations and taking out crosses would placate their critics while motivating their followers — and everyone else not Jewish and not represented in the holiday displays — to hold a good old-fashioned pogrom.

Fundamentalists and right-wing talk show hosts aren’t the only ones to notice that as Christian symbols disappear, those of other faiths and cultures are being added, especially those of “the other white religion.” But why should the Jews take all the heat? How about replacing the star on top of the Christmas tree with a crescent and star and let Muslims be “included” as well.

To get away from menorahs, a few nights later we took a ride through upscale Hancock Park to look at yard and home decorations, which were beautiful as usual. Hancock Park is hardly representative of Los Angeles, just as Los Angeles is hardly representative of America. But after cruising around for awhile, we realized that amongst the reindeer, Santas and Mrs. Clauses, the Christmas trees, snowflakes, gingerbread houses and elegantly lighted trees and shrubs, not only were there no menorahs, but no J.C.s. No crosses, no mangers, no stars of Bethlehem, nothing of a remotely religious nature.

Weird. It’s as if some Christians in America have become like Marranos — Spanish Jews who pretended to be Christians during the Inquisition to avoid torture. Perhaps feeling under siege by secularists, they have become crypto-Christians. But if there’s one time of the year Christians should be unabashedly proud of their religion, you’d think it would be Christmas, which celebrates the birth of the baby Jesus and all the warm and fuzzy Bible stores that go with it, as opposed to Easter, another neat Christian holiday, except for those prickly questions about who did what to whom.

Even as a Jewish atheist, it saddens me to see changes in the traditional American Christmas of my childhood. Say what you will about the Crusades, Inquisition and horny priests, Christians have the best holidays. So much so that my Jewish parents felt that denying my brother and me Christmas was tantamount to child abuse. Despite the religious overtones, as children we had Christmas trees at home, sang Christmas carols at school, sat on Santa’s lap at the mall, opened presents Christmas morning and had Christmas dinner with relatives.

About the time my brother and I figured out Santa Claus wasn’t real, our parents gently told us Jews don’t think Jesus is either, and we began to observe Hanukkah for a few years, although we still exchanged presents on Christmas Eve and visited family on Christmas Day. Because Hanukkah pales in comparison to Christmas. “The Dreidle Song” and most other Hanukkah songs suck, and the holiday drags on for eight days and jumps around from year to year because of the anachronistic Jewish lunar calendar. Except for the lighting of the candles, chanting of prayers and giving of gifts, there aren’t many rituals and traditions associated with the holiday.

Rather than celebrating the coming of a messiah, Hanukkah commemorates an ill-conceived revolt by a band of zealots whose reoccupation of the temple in Jerusalem ultimately resulted in Jewish banishment from the Holy Land for two-thousand years. The miracle of Christmas is the salvation of humankind. The miracle of the Festival of Lights is that when the zealots seized control of the temple, there was only enough olive oil to keep the eternal light lit for one day, but instead it burned for eight. Big whoop.

And while Hanukkah is a week, Christmas is a season, filled not just with Christmas decorations, Christmas trees, Christmas parades, Christmas sales, Christmas movies, Christmas carols, Christmas cards, Christmas parties and Christmas masses, but Christmas cheer and Christmas spirit — peace, charity, faith and family.

While the menorah in the holiday display on government property is about freedom of religion, the menorah on commercial property is about freedom of markets. Capitalists are de-Christianizing Christmas and turning it into what Richard Branson dubbed Chrismahanukwanzakah to spread its commercial appeal to China and developing nations where the religion is less popular and sometimes downright unpopular. Which is also why the menorah in the holiday display is mostly an American phenomenon.

Holidays are always evolving and turnabout is fair play. Big business is merely taking its cues from one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time, which is the spread of early Christianity. Capitalists are doing to Christians what Christians did to pagans when they turned their customs and traditions into “Christ Mass.” By blending Christmas with other cultures, capitalists convert others to their faith, which is commerce, and elevate their messiah, which is Mammon.

Then again, at most retail outlets, the Christmas spirit still prevails, even if they call it the holiday spirit. And maybe the menorah in the holiday display symbolizes more than tokenism and more than capitalism. Maybe it’s also a reflection of America’s growing recognition, if not complete acceptance, that we have become, indeed, have always been, a multicultural society. In that sense the menorah symbolizes ideals that are as American as they are Christian or Jewish — tolerance, diversity and inclusion. So maybe a kosher Christmas ain’t so bad after all.

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Where I was on 9/11

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From fall 1998 – spring 2002, I taught journalism and advised the student newspaper at a mainly Black and Hispanic community college in South-Central LA. I later turned my experiences into a book called Blackspanic College. This excerpt recalls where I was on 9/11:

Blackspanic College:

Chapter 8:

Fall semester, 2001

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I awoke to my clock radio, which was tuned to National Public Radio. Still in a dreamlike state, I heard somber voices saying something about an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center, a second plane smashing into the other tower, the Pentagon being struck by a third, and that every airplane over the entire country was being grounded. At first I thought it was an updated version of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio hoax. I rolled over and turned on the TV, where every channel was showing the Twin Towers crumbling, on a loop. My heart sank. This was real.

I checked my emotions and was relieved I wasn’t feeling a flicker of guilty glee that Wall Street yuppies and the military industrial complex had just taken a hit. We may not like to admit it, but sometimes we secretly root for the bad guys — Bonnie and Clyde, the Unibomber, O.J. — so toppling the dual symbols of capitalist America and poking a hole in the Pentagon could easily have stirred up some anti-American sentiments left over from Vietnam that were recently inflamed by the bizarro election in Florida, U.S. Supreme Court putsch and ascendancy of the right-lurching Bush II junta.

9/11 was one bodacious move. But as I lay there gaping at the TV, all I was feeling was dread. And it was with a sense of shame that I realized, at that moment at least, I was glad that Bush and the ruthless rattlesnakes around him, rather than wishy-washy Al Gore — whom I’d voted for — was in the White House. Suddenly, I didn’t want my mommy, I wanted my daddy.

I wondered what the students at Southwest College were feeling, and tore myself away from the TV to rush out to the campus for my afternoon classes and to rev up my students for the biggest story they would ever cover. I should have known better. By the time I got to the campus, it was nearly deserted.

Finally, one of my new students arrived. I’d assigned Lakita to cover a Black Student Union meeting previously scheduled for that morning. At the time it seemed like a fairly simple meeting story,although I didn’t understand why a school that was 80 percent black needed a BSU (except as a place for former student body presidents to go, as June had become the head of the BSU after losing the rescheduled ASO election to Willie). But Lakita had tears in her eyes and said she couldn’t write the story.

“Why not?” I asked, thinking she was probably upset by the terrorist attacks.

“Because the meeting was all about you.”

“Me?” I said, incredulously. “What are you talking about?” 

“They called you a racist.”

The whole world had changed, and so had mine. 

—

More on Blackspanic College: hbkoplowitz.com/blackspanic-college/ 

Dick Gregory at 84: Feisty to the end

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The writer and date having photo taken with Dick Gregory for $10. Gregory’s nephew, comedian Mark Gregory, is at top right.

Dick Gregory died Aug. 19, 2017, in Washington, D.C.

Before Richard Pryor, before Eddie Murphy, and before Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg and Dave Chappelle, there was Dick Gregory, who in the 1950s and ’60s smashed through the color barrier separating black comedians from white audiences. Once dubbed the black Mort Sahl for his political humor, he is one of the lesser-known pioneer black comedians — or, as he would say, comedians who happened to be black — in large part because he put activism ahead of show business.

On March 26, 2017, the 84-year-old comic, civil rights activist, author and holistic health advocate performed for one of the last times before his death, at a nearly full house at the Improv in West Palm Beach. It was kind of like going to see Bob Dylan, or back in the day, Lenny Bruce. You go to pay your respects, hope they do their best, but prepare for something less, which is what happened at the Improv.

Not that the audience was disappointed. We got to see vintage Gregory. Feisty, contrary, racial, cosmological and conspiratorial. Lots of MFs, b- and n-words. (His nephew, rising comedian Mark Gregory, who served as Gregory’s warmup act, chose to go with the anachronistic “Negro” instead.)

Black, or what in the 1950s were called Negro comedians, took two new paths to break into the mainstream  — the old path was self-denigration, as epitomized by Stepin Fetchit. Some of Gregory’s peers, like Bill Cosby, avoided controversial subjects and kept things folksy, similar to Will Rogers, Bob Hope or Jerry Seinfeld. Others, like Godfrey Cambridge and Gregory, took the riskier route of social satire, tapping into a strain of American humor that runs through Mark Twain, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Actually, it’s more a matter of degree. To some extent, all comedians combine what might be called silly and serious humor. Like most people, entertainers try to find a combination of representing and assimilating that works for them, professionally and personally.

Richard Claxton Gregory was born into poverty on Oct. 12, 1932, in St. Louis, Missouri. He  became a track standout at Sumner High School, and in 1951 he got an athletic scholarship to attend Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, before and after being drafted into the Korean War. (This writer was born and went to college in Carbondale, and local lore has it that Gregory was the first black person to integrate the town’s Varsity Theater, by refusing to sit in the balcony.)

ABC Close Up Report – Walk in My Shoes (1961). Nicholas Webster’s documentary explores the state of urban black America, featuring what may be Dick Gregory’s first TV appearance. His segment begins at (15:16), but there’s also footage of Malcolm X, CORE founder James Farmer, and regular people discussing race and sex, among other issues.

Gregory left school before graduating and moved to Chicago, where he worked at $5-a-night comedy gigs and met his wife, Lil. They had 11 children, including one who died shortly after birth. Because of his busy schedule, he admits to having been an absent father. His stock line is, “Jack the Ripper had a father. Hitler had a father. Don’t talk to me about family.”

He got his big break in 1961, when Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner took a liking to his sardonic takes on race and current events, and hired him for an extended stay at the Playboy Club. Gregory’s disarming sense of humor enabled whites to laugh, sometimes at themselves, while being confronted with inconvenient truths. An example of one of his early jokes is on his website: “Segregation is not all bad. Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?”

From the Playboy Club, he began playing better venues, like San Francisco’s hungry i, and got on Jack Parr and other TV shows. In 1963, his first autobiography, “Nigger,” was published and became a best seller. (In the book, he says he chose the title so that whenever his mother heard the word in the future, she’d “know they are advertising my book.”)


But then he pulled a Dave Chappelle and withdrew from the spotlight. Inspired by leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he joined the Civil Rights Movement and used his celebrity status to address such issues as segregation and voter registration. While contemporaries like Cosby, Cambridge and Nipsy Russell were getting their shots at stardom, Gregory was protesting world hunger and other issues. He went on dozens of fasts, sometimes lasting more than 40 days, and for two-and-a-half years he ate no solid food to protest the Vietnam War.

He ran against Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1966, and as a write-in candidate for president in 1968. According to his website, “After the assassinations of King, President John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, Gregory became increasingly convinced of the existence of political conspiracies.” With JFK conspiracy theorist Mark Lane, in 1971 Gregory co-wrote “Code Name Zorro: The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr.”

In 1973, Gregory moved his family to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the once overweight smoker became a nutritional consultant. He says he first became a vegetarian after seeing his pregnant wife kicked by a cop, and not having the courage to fight back. He vowed that he would never “participate in the destruction of any animal that never harmed me.” In the 1980s, he founded a company that sold weight-loss products, and he drew media attention when he started a fat farm in Ft. Walton, Fla., for the morbidly obese.

In 1996, he returned to stand-up with a well-received one-man show, “Dick Gregory Live!” Also in 1996, he picketed CIA Headquarters to protest allegations that the agency had started the crack epidemic by smuggling cocaine into South-Central Los Angeles. He was arrested, as he has been many times over the years.

In 2000, Gregory was diagnosed with lymphoma, a deadly form of cancer. That same year, a three-and-a-half-hour tribute was held in his honor at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., hosted by Bill Cosby, with appearances by Coretta Scott King, Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes, Cicely Tyson, and Marion Barry, among others. Refusing chemotherapy, he used alternative medicine to beat the disease, and became a lecturer on diet and ethics.

Wikipedia lists 16 albums and 16 books on his resume, but according to the IMDB website, he has never been in a major motion picture, although he has appeared as himself in several documentaries. His film credits include Rev. Slocum in “Panther” (1995), a bathroom attendant in “The Hot Chick” (2002), and a blind panhandler in the TV show “Reno 911” (2004). Nevertheless, in 2015 he received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for Live Theatre/Performance.

To the end, he maintained a grueling schedule of up to 150 shows, lectures and interviews a year, many of which are on YouTube, and he had an active Twitter account. Before coming to West Palm Beach, he was at the Improv in Houston, and from Florida he headed to New York City, for two shows at Caroline’s on Broadway.

At the Improv at West Palm Beach, Gregory was, in a word, grouchy. When introduced to the mainly older and black audience, the comedy icon didn’t appear for several minutes, apparently because he was in the restroom. Once he doddered on stage and slumped into a chair, he began muttering. When a woman sitting about 10 rows back shouted that she couldn’t hear him, he snapped back, “you shoulda sat closer,” which got a laugh.

He acknowledged his age but bristled at the term “elderly.” “I’m just old,” he said.

He talked about race, religion, sex and politics, including Obama and Trump. He said he was disappointed that Obama hadn’t gotten more done when he was in the White House, but that comparing him to Trump forever destroys the myth of white superiority.

He made many other wry observations, but like Lenny Bruce, he was less funny the more he indulged his obsession — for Bruce, it was his legal woes, in Gregory’s case, the many conspiracy and dietary theories he has accumulated over the years. He still thinks “agents” are out to get him, and that Oswald didn’t kill JFK.

He had brought along numerous visual aids, including newspaper clippings, magazine covers and photos of himself with MLK and Muhammad Ali, which he used to tell vignettes. He kept saying, “and finally,” but then he would move on to more stories. In an odd reversal, it was as if the performer didn’t want the more than two-hour show to end more than the audience didn’t.

This half-hour clip from Gregory’s March 3 show in New Orleans is similar to the one in West Palm Beach.

Despite the unevenness of his performance, it was great to see a comedy legend still pushing the envelope, still as controversial and incisive as ever. Every comedian who traffics in ethnic humor today — black, white, brown, yellow or mixed — owes a debt to Gregory for paving the way. On the same day as his show, he posted a tweet that described how much the world has changed, and not changed, over the course of his life:

© 2017 by H.B. Koplowitz