Essay: A Merry Jewish Christmas?

A Merry Jewish Christmas?

By Avraham Azrieli*

Christmas as a Jewish holiday? This proposition usually earns mockery or a stern lecture accompanied by clenched fists. Christmas is the birthday of Jesus Christ, the Christian messiah whose crucifixion unleashed a perpetual blood libel against the Jewish people.

For many centuries, “Jesus killers!” was a rallying cry for attacking Jewish communities, for robbing, raping, knifing, spearing, axing, burning, drawing, quartering, hanging, drowning, shooting, and torturing innocent Jews, or at least expelling them en mass from their homes in Germany, England, France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy. As the Reverend James Carroll concludes in Constantine’s Sword: The Church and Jews (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), the Nazi mindset “had its foundation in Christianity,” and the Holocaust was the natural culmination of the “Church's modus operandi down the centuries.”

So how could Jews partake in Christ’s birthday celebration?

The answer, perhaps, starts with another question: Do millions of Christians, who sing the Christmas hymn “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” know that its composer, Felix Mendelssohn, was the grandson of the great Jewish rabbi and philosopher Moses Mendelssohn?

And how about “City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style, in the air there’s a feeling of Christmas,” written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, Jewish kids from Pittsburgh and Buffalo?

Or this: “He sings a love song, as we go along, walking in a winter wonderland,” by Felix Bernard, born in Brooklyn as Felix Bernhardt to Russian-German Jewish immigrants. And “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow,” by Sammy Cahn-Cohen and Jule Styne, who also wrote ‘The Christmas Waltz.’

Then there’s the heartfelt promise that “I’ll be Home for Christmas…you can count on me…,” the lyrics that touched millions of listeners during hard times, written by Walter Kent, born to a Yiddish-speaking Kauffman family in New York. He wrote with Samuel Buck Ram, a Jewish partnership that also gave us “Only you…can make this world…seem right…”

To really get going at Christmastime, we sing: “Giddy up, giddy up, giddy up, let’s go, let’s look at the snow…” This urging came from Mitchell Parrish, a good Christian name if there ever was one, only that he was born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky in Lithuania and ended up also writing lyrics for the all-American Jazz immortal ‘Stardust’ with Hoagy Carmichael.

And who wouldn’t agree that “There’s no place like home for the holidays…” by Al Stillman, another Jew, just like Joan Ellen Javits, who co-wrote ‘Santa Baby.’

Arguably the biggest contribution to Christmas came from the man who wrote these hits (sing with me!):

“Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer…”

“I heard the bells on Christmas Day…”

“Rockin’ around the Christmas tree…”

“A holly jolly Christmas…”

“Run, Rudolph, run…”

These five songs, so instrumental to the Christmas spirit, were written by the Jewish virtuoso Johnny Marks, a Bronze Star recipient for his battlefield courage during World War II.

But no one did more for American songwriting and for Christmas than the Jewish songwriter who gave us “God bless America…” and “I’ve got my love to keep me warm…,” when he wrote “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know…”

I’ve always wondered about this genius, this tireless (despite confessing “Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning…”) fountain of immortal songs, this Irving Berlin, born Israel Baline, son of an unemployed immigrant cantor from Belarus. What Christmases had he “used to know” while growing up dirt poor on the Jewish lower east side of Manhattan? How could he describe so aptly the longing for a white Christmas, the sadness of every GI who had to spend Christmas in the balmy trenches of the South Pacific, the swampy rivers of Vietnam, or the scorching sands of the Arabian Gulf? How did he know what they felt at Christmas so far away from home?

I can’t answer for him, but my guess is that he knew because we all experience Christmas no matter what our faith is, or what language our parents spoke. He knew because old Christmas had begotten an alter ego that surpassed Christ and exceeded religion and evolved into a universal holiday that’s rich with Christian traditions and Jewish creativity.

Without detracting from Christmas services held by the faithful in various denominations, all of us outside the Church walls experience an inclusive, embracing Christmas that infuses civilization every December. We experience it while going to work, walking down the street, shopping at the mall, or watching TV with the kids.

And we experience it through music, because songs are the common language of all people, Jews and Christians alike, as we wish each other, in the words of Irving Berlin: “May your days be merry and bright…and may all your Christmases be white.”

* Avraham Azrieli is the author of “Christmas for Joshua,” a new novel about a family confronting a painful crisis at Christmas.  Azrieli writes novels and screenplays. www.AzrieliBooks.com

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Essay: JFK and Rabin – Assassinated in Common

JFK and Rabin – Assassinated in Common

By Avraham Azrieli*

An Israeli flag unfurled from a pole, and the exulted gates swung open. A circular driveway led to a stately manor that wasn’t white, as Yitzhak Rabin had expected, but red brick overgrown with ivy.

“Welcome!” A man in a tennis outfit emerged from the front door. “You finally made it!”

“Mr. President.” Yitzhak Rabin shook the offered hand. “It’s an honor.”

JFK gestured in dismissal. “Call me Jack. A drink?”

“Whiskey, if you have. Dry.”

“Of course.” He showed Rabin through a foyer to a veranda in the rear, overlooking a vast garden. Among the hedges and flower beds were wooden benches and wrought-iron gazebos. Men strolled about or sat in small groups, chatting or playing games. They were dressed in dark suits, uniforms adorned with medals, or robes in various colors. Two women stood by a fountain, one in riding boots, the other in a red sari. It was dead quiet though, no birds chirping in the bushes, no branches rustling in the wind, no jetliners roaring through the clouds.

Rabin raised his glass. “Le’hayim!”

“To life!”

They drank.

JFK refilled. “We’ve been expecting you since…”

“November fourth, nineteen ninety-five.”

“What’s kept you for sixteen years?”

“I refused to pass over until the truth came out.”

“The truth?”

“About my assassination. Who was behind it.”

“Waste of time.” JFK scratched the back of his head. “It’s been five decades for me, and the truth isn’t out yet. Was it the mob? The Soviet Union? The labor union? The loony Nixon or my lackey Johnson? Everyone’s got a conspiracy theory about who sent that shooter.”

“I thought there were two.”

“One or two, library or grassy knoll – why should I care? Would the truth put my brains back into my head?” JFK smoothed down his hair. “My new motto is very simple: Ask not what your enemies did to you yesterday, but what you can do to be happy today!”

“Catchy.” Rabin looked around. “What is this place?”

“Heaven.”

“Really?”

JFK chuckled. “I also expected to reach hell, considering my vices. But apparently the Pope has no say upstairs.”

“Nor do the rabbis.” Rabin took another sip. “Are you in charge here?”

“We take turns greeting at the front door. I was hoping for that Ukrainian blonde with the farm-girl braids. I guess they stuck her in prison instead.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Not at all. Glad to have you. We sometimes go months without a fresh face.”

“So few reach heaven?”

“This is a special section—reserved for assassinated leaders. To be eligible, you must be the country’s top honcho at the time of your violent death. They’re very strict about it.”

“They?”

JFK pointed upward.

“Ah.” Rabin noticed a small man with a goatee, standing at a writing desk, scribbling intensely. “Vladimir Lenin? I thought he died of an illness.”

“An illness called Comrade Stalin.” JFK pantomimed an injection. “Medicinal sedatives.”

Leaning against the railing, Rabin peered at a foursome playing backgammon. “Is this Sadat?”

“Anwar is a charming man. The other three are pompous asses, or maybe it’s my American allergy to kings.” JFK pointed. “The fat one is Farouk of Egypt, the sad fellow is Faisal of Iraq, and the one who’s always winning is Abdullah of Jordan.”

Rabin scanned the other figures in the garden. “How long has this place existed?”

“Way back. We got pharaohs, shoguns, a couple of emperors and an Inca chief. Colorful folks. You should have seen me teach Julius Caesar to play tennis. He kept breaking the racket.”

“There’re courts here?”

“You bet.” JFK patted his shoulder. “I’m playing doubles later with the Gandhis—we have three of them. You can switch with Indira. In my experience, she prefers to watch. Only a handful of ladies here, each one more prudish than the next. Hopeless!”

“I’m faithful to my wife.”

“No wives here.” JFK glanced over his shoulder. “They can’t get in.”

“You don’t know my Leah.”

            Descending the steps into the garden, they crossed paths with a tall man in a black coat, who nodded and said, “Hello, John.”

            “President Lincoln.” JFK saluted playfully. “Please meet our new arrival, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister.”

            “Welcome, son.” His hand was slim, with long fingers and a firm grip. “Call me Abraham, will you?” He departed with a polite bow.

            Rabin gazed after him. “What a voice!”

            “Wait until you hear him recite the Gettysburg Address. Even I get jealous.”

“Incredible. I should have come up sooner.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“At first I waited for the public trials. The shooter, his brother and his ex-girlfriend went to jail. A special commission recommended dismissal of the head of the secret service, who had a mole among the plotters. The mole stood trial for failing to report to his handlers, but was acquitted after years of delays. And I kept watching for the big fish to surface.”

“Was there a big fish?”

“Must be!” Rabin counted on his fingers. “First, who financed the whole thing? Second, who let an armed civilian into the secure area? Who told my bodyguards to leave my back unprotected? Who yelled ‘blanks, blanks’ as if the bullets were not live? Who ordered to drive around while I bled to death, rather than rush me to the hospital? Who pushed one of my bodyguards to commit suicide the next day? Who order a cover up and altered all the forensic and pathology reports? These questions begged for the truth to come out.”

            “But you finally gave up. As I said: Ask not what your enemies did—”

            “Gave up?” Prime Minister Rabin raised his voice. “I never give up!”

            JFK’s eyes widened. “Has the big fish surfaced?”

            “Not yet, but the truth was finally exposed.”

            “By the police?

“No.”

“The secret service?”

“No.”

“The Mossad?”

Rabin shook his head. “Some writer in Maryland.”

“Damn!” JFK emptied his drink. “A Washington Post reporter?”

“A novelist. Got it right, the whole thing, every piece of the assassination puzzle fit in perfectly, every loose thread of the plot tied up neatly. Finally, I’m at peace.” Rabin patted his pockets. “Do they sell cigarettes here?”

*   Avraham Azrieli is the author of “The Jerusalem Assassin,” a novel about the Rabin assassination.  He writes novels and screenplays. www.AzrieliBooks.com

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Masada Complex to U.N. Complex

Masada Complex to U.N. Complex

By Avraham Azrieli*

“It’s true that we have the Masada Complex,” Golda Meir famously told President Nixon.  “We also have a Pogrom Complex.  We have a Hitler Complex too.”

The Masada Complex is defined as “the conviction that it’s better to die than to lose political independence.”  It originates with the mass suicide of the last free Jewish rebels on the last night of the Roman siege on the mountainous fortress by the Dead Sea.

Today’s siege on Jewish independence is perpetrated not by warriors in togas riding on giant ramming machines, but by men in suits and ties who utilize lies and U.N. resolutions.

The deadly civility cloaking this modern siege is embodied in a mantra-like message:  “The return to the 1967 borders and the repatriation of the refugees will solve the Arab-Israeli conflict.”  Incessant repetition has turned this proclamation into an article of diplomatic faith, but every component of it is a clever lie.

The “1967 borders” to which Israel is pressured to withdraw are actually the 1949 armistice lines that left it nine miles wide after the Arabs attacked the Jewish state at its birth.  But this demand is so unreasonable, unjust and illogical that everyone says “the 1967 borders” and winks.

The repatriation of the refugees is not about the nearly million Jewish refugees expelled in 1948 from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, losing their homes, businesses and assets.  Those refugees have built new lives in Israel through hard work and determination.  The repatriation demand applies to the Arab refugees who left their homes voluntarily in 1948 to make way for the Arab armies that came to kill the Jews—in rejection of the very same two-state partition they’re supposedly ready to take now, having spent six decades drinking coffee and playing backgammon in UNRWA’s camp-cities.

Ending human suffering is a noble goal, and the abundant Mideast land and petrodollars could easily provide permanent homes for the remaining career refugees.  But “repatriation” is not about a peaceful solution, but about a final solution:  Ending Israel’s Jewish majority and killing the Zionist dream.

Most revealing is the Arabs’ refusal to negotiate peace unless Jews stop building homes in settlements in the West Bank.  Every lawyer and diplomat know that setting preconditions to negotiations is a way to avoid negotiations altogether.  It seems that the Arabs’ biggest fear is that another Israeli prime minister would agree, as Ben Gurion, Rabin, Barak and Ulmert had agreed, to practically all of the Palestinians’ demands.

The settlements precondition implies that the future “State of Palestine” will be Judenfrei like all other Arab countries.  At the same time, in the sliver of land left for Israel, nearly two-million Arab-Israeli citizens will continue to live and build homes, vote in elections, and serve in the Knesset, the government and the Supreme Court.  But Jews will be banned from the other half of their ancestral land, including the holy cities of Hebron, where my family’s roots are centuries’ deep, Beth El, Bethlehem and most of Old Jerusalem.  Where else would the U.N. bless such ethnic cleansing?

And what are the chances of success for this new Palestine?  Unlike any other people demanding independence—Kurds, Basques, or Tibetans—the Palestinians share no distinct language, faith, folklore, customs, ideology or national history.  Building a new society requires unique national identity, yet it appears that the only distinct “Palestinian” trait is hate for Jews.

While it’s all smoke and mirrors through the prism of pretend peacemaking, everything comes into sharp focus through recognition that there is no Arab-Israeli conflict, but rather a one-sided Muslim ambition to destroy Israel and drive all Jews (and Christians) from the region.

Fittingly, as huge outdoor TV screens showed the U.N. General Assembly giving Abbas a standing ovation, the crowd in Ramallah chanted:  “God is great!  With our souls and blood we will free you, Palestine!”  Does this sound like a cry for peace with Israel?

As a novelist, I am fascinated by evil because it is so often swathed in righteousness, because the most horrible acts are frequently committed by people who believe they are the good guys.  Hence the U.N.’s enthusiastic embrace of Palestine—a new country founded on hate.  As the cliché goes, it’s better than fiction.

And to paraphrase Golda Meir, we do have a Masada Complex.  We also have a Pogrom Complex, a Hitler Complex and, after decades of thinly veiled anti-Semitic resolutions, we now have a U.N. Complex.  Can you blame us?

* Avraham Azrieli is the author of The Masada Complex – A Novel.  www.AzrieliBooks.com

Copyright © 2011. This article may be shared, emailed, or reprinted without specific permission.

The Unanswered Question of 9/11

The Unanswered Question of 9/11

By Avraham Azrieli*

On the evening of Friday, February 28, 1993, I walked from Wall Street to my apartment in Battery Park, near the World Trade Center.  Smoke still petered out from broken windows in the lower floors of the North Tower, and a cluster of ambulances awaited hundreds of evacuees as they were being carried out, overcome by asphyxiation and anxiety.

Having grown up in Israel, the experience of passing by the site of a terror attack wasn’t new to me. But over there, the misguided messengers of Allah were more modest, attacking buses and nightclubs and pizzerias, aiming their explosives in direct intimacy to softer targets such as flesh and bones and hearts. In comparison, attempting to bring down the largest pair of buildings in the world with a rental Ryder van seems like a grandiose yet futile exercise in poor math.

Across the street from the tower, standing amidst the crowd on the sidewalk, I looked up, all the way to where the flat expanse of steel beams and thick glass reached the clouds.  How could anyone expect a pile of homemade explosives to topple this global symbol of human ingenuity, this massive structure that was as wide and long as a whole city block? Had they not realized that the foundations under our feet reached so deep into the island rock that Manhattan would have to crack open and break in half before the towers fell over?

A few nights later I glanced out of my living room window, and the lights were back on, burning brightly in the Twin Towers’ windows, illuminating all those thousands of offices. The lights broadcasted a concrete and reassuring message of continuity that was visible not only from my window in the dwarfish twenty-story building next door, but from the windows of hundreds of thousands of apartments all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx, from the windows of countless homes up and down the west bank of the Hudson River in New Jersey, and from rows of tiny windows in jetliners flying into Newark, JFK and La Guardia from every state, country and kingdom in the world—including the distant lands from which came the plotters, financers and executors of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

Within a week, as I walked by the towers on my way to work, there was no smoke coming out of broken windows, no glass shards on the sidewalk, no ambulances or spectators. The World Trade Center, lightly scarred, was back in business. And for me, as for many other Americans, this was a bright show of New York City’s resilience and an unshakable demonstration of American invincibility – we had been prickled by a nuisance enemy who was primitive and crude, an enemy who miscalculated, underestimated, and was ill-prepared to confront the mighty United States of America.

Alas, eight years later, the events of 9/11 proved that it wasn’t our enemy who miscalculated, underestimated, or was ill-prepared. Rather, it was us—the American people and the government agencies entrusted with the duty to protect this country. We had miscalculated, underestimated and were ill-prepared.

During the months leading to 9/11, our enormous defense forces and myriad spy agencies had failed at every opportunity—and there had been many opportunities—to expose and stop a group of known terrorists who, with painful ease, entered the United States, studied how to fly (but not how to land) airplanes, and used store-bought box cutters to launch the worst attack perpetrated on mainland American soil since the Spanish war, which happened so long ago that its traces are considered archeological sites.

And the Twin Towers, which stood high above my apartment building, are no longer there, no longer sending a nightly message of light to millions of windows in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut as well as to throngs of airline passengers peering down from their tiny windows at the island of Manhattan.

A lot has happened in the decade since the 9/11 attacks, much of it in retaliation for, or as a consequence of, that terrorist attack on the United States.  Ten years later, we’re still fighting wars in faraway deserts, our soldiers still come home on stretchers or in coffins, and our out-of-office politicians still get paid the big bucks to write thick autobiographies to justify what they did in response to 9/11 and the damage their actions have caused to American moral, military and financial strengths. Ten years later, we’re still spending our tax dollars (and foreign debt) to feed the very homeland security apparatus that had failed us on 9/11. Ten years later, we’re still exhausting much of our social discourse on unconstitutional anti-immigrant laws, unpopular overseas military expeditions and inconsistent foreign diplomacy conundrums, all born of little more than veiled xenophobia. Ten years later, we’re still championing innovative new forms of airport security as if every little old lady from Kansas is a clandestine martyr in the service of the late Osama Bin Laden.

But despite the trillions of dollars spent on destroying our real and imagined enemies, the Twin Towers have not been rebuilt. In fact, it is now clear that the Twin Towers will never be rebuilt. And so, the question I am asking now, ten years later, might be criticized as purely philosophical, but is rather practical: When a message of light is turned off permanently, does its absence constitute a new message—a message of darkness?

* Avraham Azrieli’s latest novel is The Jerusalem Inception. www.AzrieliBooks.com

Copyright © 2011. This article may be shared, e-mailed, or reprinted without specific permission or payment as long as no changes are made and authorship is credited to Avraham Azrieli.

Ask Mubarak how Egypt planned to soak Israel in poison gas.

Ask Mubarak how Egypt planned to soak Israel in poison gas.

By Avraham Azrieli*

Writing a novel is a long process that begins with an idea, followed by research, which could be tedious until you hit gold—a nugget of historic fact that surprises, or even shocks you. That’s what happened to me while conducting research for my new novel, The Jerusalem Inception.

Even though I grew up in Israel and experienced several wars as a child, teenager and a soldier, my research led to a shocking discovery: Egypt’s preparations to rain poison gas on the young Jewish state on the eve of the Six Day War.

Apparently, Egyptian forces under President Gamal Abdul Nasser had used poison gas while fighting in Yemen in the sixties, exterminating whole villages as well as thousands of Saudi soldiers. In May 1967, Egypt transported the deadly stocks to the Sinai Peninsula and expelled all UN observers from the southern border in advance of a massive carpet bombing of Israeli towns and kibbutzim with shells containing poison gas, delivered by artillery and planes. At the time, the Jewish state was merely eighteen years old, its population of two million mostly confined to an eight-mile-wide strip along the Mediterranean coast as well as parts of the Galili, the Negev Desert and the western enclave of Jordanian-held Jerusalem.

In late May, despite detailed briefings by the head of Mossad and the CIA, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson refused to assist Israel in any way for fear of igniting a confrontation with the Soviets. The Israeli chief spy flew back home in a cargo plane filled with tens of thousands of gas masks, donated by the Americans. Meanwhile, public parks in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were dug up to serve as mass graves for the expected victims.

Especially revealing are the documents and testimonies included in Six days of war: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford Press 2002) by Dr. Michael Oren (currently the Israeli ambassador in Washington). The records show how Egypt’s genocidal plans terrified Israel’s leaders, who were Holocaust survivors, and triggered their decision to launch a preemptive strike. (See pages 40, 48, 63, 104, 133,136, 179, and sources cited there)

Why is this so important today?

I believe that the recent revolution in Egypt is an opportunity for that nation to come to terms with its past. Egyptians should learn how close their nation came to replicating Nazi crimes by gassing to death countless Jewish civilians, a horrendous catastrophe that was prevented only through Israel’s preemptive strike. Egypt can remove this stain from its national history by taking moral responsibility for inciting the 1967 war and for its lingering consequences.

It is fortuitous that ousted President Hosni Mubarak had served in 1967 as an air force officer. He likely took part in the planned mass poisoning of Israel’s population and should be questioned about this issue during his upcoming trial in Cairo for massacring many of his own people.

And most important of all, as Israelis and Palestinians struggle to resolve the territorial and demographic challenges created by the 1967 war, it is essential for all the historic facts—and causes!—to be known and acknowledged, thus facilitating a better understanding of the parties’ passionate feelings and their understandable fears of history repeating itself.

*Avraham Azrieli lives in Columbia, MD. He served in the IDF (Intelligence Corps) before graduating from Columbia Law School in NYC. His latest novel is The Jerusalem Inception. On the web at www.AzrieliBooks.com