Should “Happy Hanukkah” be used as weapon against those who assault us with hostile holiday greetings?

Whenever I encounter one of those types of people who insists on using “Merry Christmas!” as a form of cultural intimidation, there’s a part of me that is tempted to turn to my step-mother for a retort.

Chicago's public menorah from five years ago can create split reactions, regardless of its actual intent. Photos by Gregory Tejeda

As in every “Merry Christmas” I hear coming from someone who is inclined to take Donald Trump’s “War on Christmas” rants seriously, I’d respond with a fake cheery “Happy Hanukkah!”

I DON’T ACTUALLY do that in part because it strikes me as tacky to use my step-mother’s religious faith to score political partisan points against the nitwits of our society. It would make me no better than those who want to use “Merry Christmas” as a weapon.

I bring this up because the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah actually began Tuesday night and will continue into next week.

And with my step-mother being Jewish (my father is a late-life convert), it means the time of year to recall the survival of the Maccabees in the face of elements of society that would just as soon have seen them exterminated is once again upon us.

Now in my own family, the little kids are growing up. So there’s not as much pressure any more to indulge my nieces and nephews with lots of presents so that they don’t feel cheated compared to their school friends for whom Christmas is the thing!

Do people notice holiday decorations when passing through the airport en route to a sunnier locale?

IN FACT, IN my parents’ household, most of the eight days will be marked with the lighting of the candles, a prayer in Hebrew, and little else.

There will be one night of various relatives coming over to the household for something of a party – whose primary purpose it will seem like is consuming the potato pancakes referred to as latkes.

Gary, Ind., govt. brightens their chambers

Much of this, I’ll admit, is lost on me. I was baptized many decades ago by a Catholic priest and personally haven’t felt any need to change.

But that isn’t held against me. I’m likely to be included in any celebration as we recall the old story of how a Godly miracle enabled the Maccabees’ oil intended to last one night actually kept their lamps lit for eight nights.

THE REASON WHY the menorahs include eight branches in their candelabrums – and why a fully-lit menorah has the potential to be a fire hazard if the celebrants get too clumsy.

All of which has just enough of a solemn effect on me to refuse to use “Happy Hanukkah” as a retort to the less-than-solemn “Merry Christmas” talk I have heard in recent days. I’d like to think I’m better than those people who want to turn the Christmas holiday and the birth of Christ that it celebrates into a weapon touting the omnipresent existence of Trump that they’d like to impose on our society.

Because I know it would be the perfect retort in that it would force those ideologues whose use of religious symbolism to tout their beliefs borders on being as offensive as the Ku Klux Klan’s uses of the cross to tout their own racist rants to have to acknowledge that theirs is NOT the only holiday in this winter season.

While I’ll be the first to admit that some of the efforts to equate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa (don’t forget the “aa” at the end) and whatever other festival one can dream up do become absurd, I’ve never felt the need to tout my own thoughts over everybody else’s.

LARGELY BECAUSE I have viewed much of religious-inspired thought as a personal one. It is something we ought to be celebrating internally.

There’s nothing wrong with sharing. But feeling the need to force one’s thoughts or celebration on others just seems wrong.

Just as it can be confusing at times when someone feels the need to say “Merry Christmas” to every single person they encounter. Are they just overly cheerful? Or are they making a politically-partisan statement that requires a retort?

Quite honestly, I resent having to try to interpret every holiday greeting to figure out if the call for sharing and celebration is more intended as an excuse to act as society’s religious-motivated bullies.

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Are we overreacting? Or do we really need to quit living with past hostilities?

There’s a site on Facebook I enjoy checking out from time to time called Original Chicago. Basically, it’s a place where long-time city residents (and others who no longer live here) can reminisce about the way things used to be.

The Maxwell Street of old, as memorialized in this pre-World War II postcard. Image provided by Chuckman's Chicago Nostalgia

Favorite roller rink? Is the novel, “The Devil in the White City” (set during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1892) accurate? Things like that.

BUT THINGS GOT a little more serious Thursday when the site’s administrator felt the need to post a critical note about people who referred to the old Maxwell Street district as “Jew Town.”

It’s a sign of “racial disrespect” that “will not be tolerated” at the site, the administrator wrote.

Which is an attitude I can respect because I often think it cowardly for website operators who refuse to control the content of their own sites – trying to claim that letting people randomly post their often stupid and ridiculous comments encourages free expression of thought.

Actually, it just encourages the idiots of our society to engage in bullying behavior. My own thought to people who want to make such rants is they ought to create their own sites (I’ll gladly offer them technical advice on how to do so). Although I suspect what they really want to do is undermine other peoples’ activity online.

BUT BACK TO “Jew Town,” which triggered an extensive series of responses from people who want to think the phrase has significant historic character to Chicago. Of course, most of them will go on to tell tales of all the stolen goods that wound up being resold there.

How dare we want to think it is wrong to use the phrase to describe a part of Chicago that once upon a time contained a heavy presence of people who were Jewish in religion and were the operators of the original businesses that existed in the area (which now is an upscale area by the University of Illinois at Chicago campus).

Some people literally are claiming that “Jew Town” is no different than “China Town” or any of the nicknames given in the past to enclaves of Polish immigrants (don’t forget Chicago used to brag there were more Poles, not Polacks, living here than in any city on Earth except Warsaw – the capital of Poland).

I don’t doubt that people in the past used “Jew” freely when referring to Jewish people, the same way that “Jap” used to be openly used when referring to Japanese.

THE LATTER ALSO is a slur that was meant to make those from the Asian island nation sound less than human – which I’m sure seemed right to those who came of age during the Second World War and wanted to forevermore think that Japanese people were worthy of derision.

But just as now we think it ridiculous whenever some old coot complains that we need to “Remember Pearl Harbor!” because they’re not willing to let go a war our government ended many decades ago (and rebuilt Japan in our own capitalist image), somehow, the idea of somebody thinking that “Jew Town” isn’t absurd is the real ridiculous notion.

The notion is that we need to let go our old obsessions and terminology that we used to justify them. It’s called advancing as a society. Even though some are going to complain it’s “political correctness run amok.”

The latter concept always struck me as being the thought process of old bigots who don’t want to be called out for the stupidity of their thoughts.

Is Chinatown similar to Maxwell Street in history, meaning?

SERIOUSLY, WHEN WAS the last time you ever heard anybody call a police squadrol a “Paddy wagon?” Even though I can recall that once was a commonly accepted term for the vehicle used to haul large loads of arrestees (a batch of drunken Irish?) from a crime scene – or take corpses to the morgue.

It’s time for some people to get with the program. Jewish people are “Jewish,” and “Jew” is only used by people who feel the need to think derogatory thoughts. Consider the dictionaries that give an alternate definition for “Jew” as “someone tight with their money or not very generous.”

Who still uses the old slur?

That certainly doesn’t sound like somebody trying to think seriously about an issue. It sounds like pure religious-motivated bile to me, which ought to be further reason to dump “Jew Town” from our city’s lingo. It’s embarrassing to our civic memory, and it’s not like people using the term now are trying to illustrate how absurd we used to be.

Better to get back to debates such as the man who asked Original Chicago readers what to do about the girlfriend who persists in putting ketchup on her hot dogs. Largely because I don’t put ketchup on anything, I say, “Dump her!”

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“Socialist Jew?!?” Are you sure we’re in the correct political party gathering?

It’s scary to think that our presidential election cycle this year is now beginning to bear resemblance to one of the uglier aspects of the 2008 cycle – the fact that some people are prepared to back Hillary Clinton solely because she’s white!

CLINTON: Race all that matters to some

Remember how after a few primaries in the 2008 election cycle, Barack Obama had built up a lead and some momentum? Yet the reality is he didn’t actually clinch the Democratic Party’s nomination until the very end when all the primaries and caucuses were complete.

THAT’S BECAUSE THINGS reached a stalemate of sorts about half-way through the process. Many of those states who came up later in the election cycle and usually are irrelevant (because the nomination has been all but clinched by then) were suddenly very relevant.

And many voters in those states, realizing that their political party could wind up nominating a black man (I don’t want to hear from those who will argue that Obama technically is bi-racial with a white mother), suddenly started giving Hillary Clinton a second look.

She started winning more votes. She slowed the process by which Obama ultimately was nominated. There was the sense that some people who want to use the label of Democrat and think of themselves in progressive terms just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a black man.

Are we going to see something similar happen in this election cycle?

ADMITTEDLY, CLINTON’S OPPONENT this time around isn’t a black man. But as a precinct captain in Clark County, Nev., told a gathering of would-be voters prior to the weekend’s caucuses, the reason not to vote for Bernie Sanders is because he’s a “socialist Jew.”

OBAMA: He won, despite issue

As in, he ain’t a real person, which is defined by some as being white, and possibly even Protestant (although others think they’re being big and generous by including Catholics).

Could it be that such a sentiment could spread to other states – including our very own Illinois where our primaries are scheduled for three weeks from Tuesday? Could this wind up influencing the political party whose members like to think they’re above such thought?

It has me remembering a person who speculated to me about a month ago who said the only chance Donald Trump truly has to become president is if the Democrats nominate the senator from Vermont because this country isn’t ready to accept someone who does not think of the label of “socialist” as something to renounce

UNLIKE SANDERS, WHO in his Senate service has wound up being part of the Democratic caucus only because otherwise he’d be all alone if he tried to have a Socialist caucus within Congress.

WASHINGTON: Experienced similar reaction

Is this going to be the reason many people will wind up convincing themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president? So that they don’t have to learn to make the distinction between Socialism and Communism?

I accept that the kind of people who these days identify themselves as Republicans aren’t the least bit interested in making that distinction, or really understanding what socialism is.

Which is why I would expect the idea of attacks based on Sanders being a “socialist Jew” to step up once the primary cycle is over and we have to start seeing the Democratic and Republican nominees take each other on.

THERE IS ONE positive aspect to this issue – the Jewish Week newspaper reported on the incident in Nevada, and said that the caucus-goers actually voted to stop the precinct captain in question from speaking the moment he uttered his Sanders attack.

SANDERS: An educational moment for society

It seems some people were appalled enough by the utterance (or perhaps scared by what it represents about themselves) that they put a stop to it. Yet let’s not forget that Clinton won those Nevada caucuses – which supposedly put a halt to any electoral momentum Sanders might be gaining.

This kind of reminds me of the Chicago mayoral elections of the 1980s when Harold Washington was on the ballot and could never seem to gain as many votes in white parts of Chicago as he might sense he’d get on the campaign trail. He said he suspected many white voters said the right things, but then walked into the voter booth and just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a black face.

Is the thought of a president wearing a yarmulke going to create the same resistance? We’ll have to see just how much hostility we still have in our 21^st Century society.

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Election Day was an ethnic collage

This election cycle is giving us so many “firsts” when it comes to ethnic politics that it is a perfect display of the mish-mash of ethnicities that comprise our city.

PAWAR: The 1st Asian-American alderman



Being “ethnic” in Chicago no longer is limited to identifying oneself as “Irish” or “Polish,” although I’m not saying those groups have withered away in the city.

SOME ARE MAKING much of the fact that Chicago has its first mayor of the Jewish religious persuasion, while we not only got the first female elected to be city clerk, she’s a Latina.

Among the aldermen, there are those political observers who are amazed that Ameya Pawar got himself elected to represent the 47^th Ward in the City Council. Many people seemed to think that the retirement of Eugene Schulter from the council would result in nobody getting a majority – and the top two guns going at it in an April 5 run-off election.

Yet Pawar, an Indian-American who is only 30 (and expects to complete work on a second master’s degree from the University of Chicago later this spring), managed to get 51 percent of the vote on Tuesday in that Northwest Side ward that includes the Ravenswood and Lincoln Square neighborhoods.

In short, he will be Rahm Emanuel’s alderman – presuming that the tenant who has leased Emanuel’s house for nearly a year actually leaves when the lease expires (he’s been throwing out some hints lately that he’d like to stay).

I’D SAY THE chances of that happening are extremely fat, except there probably are people who never would have expected a person with India ethnic origins (or anything Asian) to ever get elected to the City Council.

MENDOZA: The 1st city-wide Latina



So the City Council now has its first Asian-American, and he came from a neighborhood that doesn’t have a large ethnic enclave that would be expected to cater to him. But that is an area where many people who can’t quite afford Lincoln Park or Lakeview proper choose to live.

I’m sure for many, the thought of having an “Indian” alderman seemed exotic – although I also understand that some people living in that ward (in a moment of disclosure, I lived there for one summer of my life some 27 years ago) resented Schulter’s efforts to designate a successor to himself.

But if the end result is that the City Council will provide a greater diversity than it did in the days when political people thought ballot diversity consisted of nominating candidates from each of the “three I’s” (Ireland, Italy and Israel) and no one else, then we’re all better off. Although I couldn't help but notice that in the far Southeast corner 10th Ward that has the city's original Spanish-speaking enclave, non-Latino Alderman John Pope got a solid 59 percent of the vote; even though some activists had thought this might be the year that the ward would get a Latino as alderman.

THOSE PEOPLE WITH an interest in Latino political empowerment instead will have to get a kick out of seeing Susana Mendoza rise from the ranks of being a legislative aide to then-state Rep. (later Alderman) Ray Frias (which is what she was when I first met her while covering the Illinois Statehouse scene just over a decade ago) to the post of city Clerk.

I’m not sure what I think of her campaign idea to raise more money for the city by selling advertising space on city stickers to businesses. I can fully appreciate why people would not want to have their personal automobiles turned into billboards for a company that gave the city – and not themselves – some money.

But her youth (she’s not even 40 yet) and energy will make her a worthwhile public servant, while also providing proof that the city’s Latino population (officially, 29 percent, compared to 32 percent white and 33 percent black) does have the ability to provide significant numbers of votes. Her victory may even have been a factor in the resignation of state Sen. Rickey Hendon, D-Chicago, from his post, as some have reported that Hendon (who backed Mendoza's African-American female opponent) was "embarrassed" by how much she won by.

It was her domination of the Latino voter bloc that gave Mendoza a base of votes that combined with other people to give her that 60 percent victory on Tuesday, and the chance to say that she is the highest-ranking Latina in city government.

FOR THE TIME being, that is.

For any serious look at the maps being published this week about which wards and precincts voted for whom would show that the few areas that did not get on board the Rahm Emanuel bandwagon were the areas that have predominant Latino populations. Many of those wards went for former Chicago Public Schools/City Colleges of Chicago/Chicago Park District boss Gery Chico.

Although when one looks at the Latino voter bloc, it seems the majority wanted either Chico or former city Clerk Miguel del Valle as mayor, with Emanuel taking the votes of the roughly one-third of Latinos who were more interested in having an “in” with the expected mayoral winner, rather than trying to elect “one of our own” on Election Day.

EMANUEL: NOT Illinois' 1st Jewish official



Not that I’m ranting about Rahm, even though I haven’t forgotten his apathy toward immigration reform during his two years as chief of staff to President Barack Obama and will be watching to see if he takes a similar apathetic attitude toward the Latino population. For his own sake, he’d better not.

AS FOR EMANUEL himself, we now have a mayor who is Jewish (although Chico, had he won, had an ex-wife and daughters who also are Jewish). That is a “first.”

But it is one I am less inclined to be impressed by, mainly because Illinois had its first Jewish governor during the 1930s – the honorable Henry Horner, who served until his death in 1940.

It’s about time Chicago caught up to the rest of the state in this regard. Here’s hoping that Emanuel gets a better-lasting legacy than Horner – whom I’d suspect is remembered (if at all) by most Chicagoans these days as being the namesake for the public housing development that used to exist near the United Center arena.

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