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‘My Friend Anne Frank’ tells the incredible story of how Anne’s best friend survived the Holocaust
(JTA) — One spring morning in 1934, two little girls followed their mothers to a corner grocery store in Amsterdam. The mothers, hearing each other speak German to their daughters, discovered they were both Jewish refugees who had recently fled Nazi Germany. The two girls peeked shyly at each other from behind their mothers’ skirts, one of them slight with dark, glossy hair, the other taller and fairer.
Those two girls were Anne Frank and Hannah Pick-Goslar. One was to become the most famous victim of the Holocaust, whose diary documented two years in hiding before the Nazis found her family and she perished at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15. The other narrowly survived and made her way to pre-state Israel, eventually enjoying a new life that grew to include three children, 11 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren.
The day after their grocery store encounter, the girls recognized each other at the Sixth Montessori School in Amsterdam and became instant best friends. They could not predict that their final encounter would come 11 years later, against all odds, at Bergen-Belsen.
Pick-Goslar spent decades telling her story through interviews and lectures, but her recollections have only just been published for the first time in a memoir, “My Friend Anne Frank,” written with the help of journalist Dina Kraft. She did not live to see its publication on June 6: Pick-Goslar died in October, six months into writing the book and two weeks short of her 94th birthday, leaving Kraft to finish her account.
Kraft spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the life of Pick-Goslar, who lived out the future stolen from her dear friend.
The conversation with Kraft, a onetime JTA reporter, has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
JTA: What was it like to tell Pick-Goslar’s story together with her?
Kraft: It was a remarkable experience being able to work with her. We had these very intense interviews where I was asking her to really dig back into her memory. A lot of Holocaust survivors, a lot of survivors of trauma, tend to tell their story — not on autopilot, exactly — but they have a script. It’s perfectly understandable, it’s a tool of self-preservation.
So I was asking her to dive deeper and look more intensely within, and that was not always easy. There were times we would finish the interview after a couple of hours and she would say, “I’m just exhausted, I need to lie down.” And I would say, “Me too,” because it was just exhausting — we were recounting very hard moments.
It got to the point where she would come in the morning and say, “I’m having bad dreams again,” and I would say, “Yeah, me too, I’m having bad dreams also.” Because it was so much of trying to step into her shoes and step into her mindset, and also reading very intensely — it was very much a research project too.
How did Pick-Goslar remember her childhood and friendship with Frank before the war?
She remembers life before the war as incredibly warm and loving. They were wrapped up in a supportive familial environment. Although both she and Anne were refugees from Germany, they came over very young — Anne was 4 and Hannah was 5.
Their parents had a hard time adapting, especially the mothers. Hannah’s mother was born and bred in Berlin, very much a creature of German culture. Her father was a high-ranking official in the Weimar government, so they lived very close to the Reichstag. On top of being horrified that they had just been kicked out of this country they viewed as home, Hannah’s family went back 1,000 years in Germany. So they were heartbroken about their country taking this terrible turn into darkness.
But for Hannah and Anne, it was a very nice life.
What kind of person was Frank, according to her friend?
She was very spunky. She had lots to say and she exhausted the adults around her. She was always challenging them, asking difficult questions, prodding, restless and impatient. The girls loved to play Monopoly, but Anne would get restless and walk off, which is frustrating for a friend! They would push back furniture in the house and do gymnastics together. Later on, when the Germans invaded and they only had other Jewish girlfriends to play with, they formed a club to play ping pong and go for ice cream.
Anne was such a know-it-all that Hannah’s mother had a phrase about her. She said, “God knows all, but Anne Frank knows better!”
But Hannah really saw her as a regular kid — she was just her friend, Anne Frank. She was not an icon of any kind, and she seemed more ordinary than she seemed extraordinary.
In July 1942, Pick-Goslar found her friend’s apartment empty. Like everyone else, she was told that the Franks escaped to Switzerland — not knowing they had actually gone into hiding nearby. What happened to Pick-Goslar while Frank went into hiding?
Hannah was deported a year after Anne went into hiding. In that year, she went back to school. The anti-Jewish laws meant that you couldn’t sit on benches, go to swimming pools, be on a tram, ride your bicycle — and you couldn’t go to school with non-Jewish children.
So Hannah and Anne were both fortunate to be accepted to the Jewish Lyceum, considered one of the more prestigious Jewish schools in Amsterdam under German occupation. But in the fall of 1942, the deportations had already begun. So every day there was a different student and friend missing from class, and different teachers and administrators missing. They never knew whether it was because somebody went into hiding or because they had been deported.
Another thing happened at this time. In October, when Hannah was 14 years old, her mother Ruth was pregnant. She was determined not to go to a hospital because there were rumors of people being deported directly from hospitals, so she gave birth at home with a Jewish doctor and Jewish midwife. The baby ended up being stillborn and Hannah’s mother died the next day.
As more and more Jews were deported, Hannah was protected for a while. Her family secured a pair of South American passports, and they were also on the so-called “Palestine list.” The idea was that eventually they would be part of a prisoner swap between the British and the Germans — German soldiers for “exchange Jews” who would be sent to Palestine, which was under the British mandate.
Pick-Goslar survived to have three children, 11 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren. (Eric Sultan/The Lonka Project)
So for a while, Pick-Goslar’s family believed they might be spared. How did she end up at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany?
By the end, the Germans rounded up all the remaining Jews from Amsterdam, including those who had special stamps in their passports. By June 1943, Hannah’s family was in one of the final roundups of Jews in Amsterdam.
First they went to Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland on the border with Germany. It was basically a holding purgatory, and from there people were deported either to Auschwitz or Sobibor — in which they were almost certainly killed — or if they were luckier, to Theresienstadt or Bergen-Belsen, which were concentration camps but not death camps. Eventually, after several months in Westerbork, Hannah’s family was deported to Bergen-Belsen.
It was bearable in the first few months and they were still fed, though not much. But by February of 1945, the Russians were approaching in the east and the Germans were trying to move people from outer concentration camps into Germany. So Bergen-Belsen swelled to many times its size and became incredibly overcrowded. There was less and less food and water, and typhus started raging through the camp.
How did Pick-Goslar and Frank find each other again at Bergen-Belsen?
Around this time, a tent camp was erected across from Hannah’s part of the camp. People saw other women speaking different languages — Hungarian, Polish, Greek, and eventually Dutch as well. They were emaciated and skeletal.
The Germans forbade going out to talk at the fence and filled it with straw, so that people wouldn’t see each other anymore. But the women found a way to communicate, and word got to Hannah that Anne Frank was on the other side of the fence. Of course, she didn’t believe it, because the Frank family had left the impression that they were in Switzerland. But she decided to go find out for herself, even though it was extremely dangerous — you’d be shot if you went to the fence.
She crept up quietly and said, “Hallo, anybody there?” Then she heard a voice from across the fence, and by chance it was Auguste van Pels, one of the people who was in hiding with Anne’s family. She said almost casually, “Oh, you must be here for Anne,” and she brought Anne from the tent.
What were their last memories together?
Anne was coming from Auschwitz, so she was a broken shadow of her former self. She was freezing, starving and wailing that she was all alone in the world. She assumed that both of her parents were dead at this point. She didn’t know that just a week or two before, her father had been liberated from Auschwitz.
Imagine two girls on opposite sides of this fence — two very loved, coddled girls, who did not know deprivation, but now were completely in the throes of the worst days of the war, completely dehumanized and mistreated. There they were on opposite sides of this fence, best friends, sobbing.
Anne begged Hannah to bring her some food and Hannah said yes immediately, without knowing how she would get it. She said that she would come back in a couple of nights. And there was this amazing moment of female solidarity: The women in her barrack were so moved by the story of this reunion, they wanted to help — so from under a pillow here, hidden in a suitcase there, they gathered the little they had to give and put everything into a sock.
Out went Hannah again, a night or two later, to the fence. When she threw the sock over, she suddenly heard footsteps and then a scream — Anne had just lost the package to a fellow prisoner who took it out of her hands. She was distraught and couldn’t stop crying, but Hannah said, “Just stop crying, I’ll come back again with food.”
So she went back a few days later again with more food collected from her barrack. This time they triangulated better and Anne caught the package. That turned out to be the last time they ever met.
How did Hannah remember the end of the war?
At the very end of the war, the Germans forced everybody who could still walk at Bergen-Belsen onto a couple of different trains. These trains were meant to go to Theresienstadt, where they would be killed.
Hannah was put on a train with her little sister Gabi, whom she was trying to keep alive. It was a harrowing 13-day ride throughout the eastern German countryside. The people were very sick and starving, with no food or water for the journey. There was one especially awful moment when the man next to Hannah tried to spill his bowl of diarrhea outside the door of the train, but instead it splashed all over her.
She was so ill with typhus that she eventually passed out around day 13. When she woke up, people were already off the train. She asked what was going on, and someone said, “Don’t you know? We were liberated by the Russians.”
What did Pick-Goslar make of the tremendous legacy left by Frank’s diary? Did she feel that her friend was correctly understood?
For her, reading the diary was a revelation. She felt like she was sort of reunited with this old friend, which was a very powerful feeling, but also very sad. She saw a girl developing into a young woman whom she would still like to know. She was very grateful that Anne’s diary had been recovered, that so many people got to know her story, and that her diary became a gateway to learning more about the Holocaust.
I think she was a little upset by the sanitized version of Anne Frank. She spoke often about the famous passage in her diary, which is repeated and painted on walls and put on postcards: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Hannah said that if Anne had survived the hell of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, she did not think she would stand by that statement anymore. I think she was concerned about some level of oversimplification.
She was very gratified that Anne’s voice never died and still lives on through her words, but she also wanted people to have a richer and more contextual understanding of the slaughter of millions of people that was the Holocaust.
—
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The 7 political stories Jews will be watching in 2026
This year brought sweeping change in national politics, in the U.S.-Israel relationship and in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population.
At the Forward, we closely tracked the transition to President Trump’s second term and profiled his cabinet selections and controversial nominees and appointees who trafficked in antisemitism or had ties to white nationalists and expressed admiration for Nazis. We covered the president’s crackdown on the pro-Palestinian campus protests that defined 2024 and the weaponization of antisemitism that led to multimillion dollar settlements with Ivy League universities, including Columbia and Cornell.
We provided exclusive, on-the-ground reporting on the battle for the Jewish vote in the competitive New York City mayoral race. We conducted the first Jewish-media interview with Zohran Mamdani as his campaign began gaining traction, even while he was still polling a distant second in the Democratic primary. We also had inside access to the outgoing Eric Adams administration and its effort to counter rising antisemitism, and had the only local reporter accompanying Adams on his farewell trip to Israel.
Here are the seven political stories we’ll be watching most closely in 2026 that will shape American politics and the Jewish community in the U.S. and abroad.
Zohran Mamdani’s New York City
Mamdani will be sworn into office at midnight on Jan. 1, 2026 as the city’s first Muslim mayor. The swearing-in will be followed by an inauguration ceremony that day at a yet-undisclosed location.
He will immediately face a series of tests on the promises and priorities that carried him through the historic campaign at a moment when the city’s Jewish community remains divided over his stance on Israel. Mamdani’s mixed response to the protest outside the Park East Synagogue, which featured anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans last month, is likely to come under fresh scrutiny as his term begins. Mamdani has remained mum on whether he’d support new legislation that would create a buffer zone outside houses of worship to protect congregants from targeted protests.
Mamdani will also have to decide whether to rescind a recent executive order by Adams barring city agencies from participating in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions efforts. He will also determine the fate of the recently-created mayor’s office to combat antisemitism, which has pursued a measure adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. And he will need to decide whether to continue the New York City–Israel Economic Council, an initiative to strengthen economic ties with the Jewish state.
He will file top City Hall and government positions, including the potential appointments of his senior Jewish advisers.
Last month, Mamdani announced he’ll reappoint Jessica Tisch, the Jewish NYC police commissioner, as head of the police department he promised to reform.
The battle for the Jewish vote in the governor’s race
Mamdani’s first months in office and his legislative agenda will also shape the New York governor’s race.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, running for reelection for another full term, endorsed Mamdani in the general election after remaining neutral during the primary. She has signaled reservations about several key Mamdani priorities, like universal free buses, which will need the state’s approval, and has also distanced herself from Mamdani on Israel.
Hochul’s embrace of Mamdani could bolster her standing in the Democratic primary, where she faces a left-wing challenge from her lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, who is married to a Jewish woman.
But it could also complicate her outreach to Jewish voters in the general election. Bruce Blakeman, the first Jewish executive of Nassau County on Long Island, and Rep. Elise Stefanik, an upstate congresswoman who has made the fight against antisemitism on college campuses central to her congressional brand, are competing in a GOP primary to challenge Hochul. In 2022, former Rep. Lee Zeldin came within five percentage points of winning the governor’s race, powered by strong Jewish support.
Who will win Jerry Nadler’s seat?
After serving 17 terms in Congress, Rep. Jerry Nadler, co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, is set to retire to pave the way for generational change, a race that will be closely watched locally and across the nation.
The Manhattan district has one of the largest Jewish electorates in the nation. Jews in the 12th Congressional District account for about 30% of the vote in the Democratic primary. Nadler has, in recent years, campaigned on the need to preserve New York City’s Jewish representation in Congress.
The Jewish candidates vying for the seat include Micah Lasher, Jack Schlossberg, and Cameron Kasky. Assemblymember Alex Bores, whose wife, Darya Moldavskaya, is Jewish, and Councilmember Erik Bottcher are also considered viable candidates. Lasher, a protege of Nadler, has the longtime Jewish congressman’s support. Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy, has made funding for security measures at synagogues and Jewish institutions a central pillar of his campaign.
Other New York congressional races
There are a few other House races in New York where pro-Israel incumbents are facing challenges from the left. Those primary contests are a crucial test of whether support for Israel and an alliance with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has become a political liability.
Rep. Dan Goldman, the Jewish congressman representing the north of Brooklyn and the Lower Manhattan district since 2023, is being challenged in the primary by Brad Lander, the outgoing city comptroller and former mayoral candidate, who has the backing of Mamdani and other progressive firebrands. For his campaign, Lander hired Morris Katz, a Jewish strategist and ad maker who was behind Mamdani’s successful working-class appeal and inspiring TV commercials. Katz produced Lander’s Mr. Rogers-themed launch video.
Lander, who is also Jewish, has become more vocal about Palestinian rights in recent years. He supported Ben & Jerry’s decision to end sales in the occupied West Bank in 2021 and has regularly attended a weekly rally against the Israeli government’s handling of the war in Gaza. Recently, he acknowledged that he divested from Israel Bonds in 2023, ending the city’s decades-long practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities. In his candidacy announcement, Lander slammed Goldman’s support for the war in Gaza and accused him of “doing AIPAC’s bidding,” though the incumbent had early on called for humanitarian pauses and criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, a three-term pro-Israel progressive from the Bronx, is facing three primary challengers, a crowded field that could ultimately make it easier for him to win reelection. Michael Blake, a former state legislator who ran for mayor in the Democratic primary and later endorsed Mamdani, is making attacks on AIPAC central to his campaign, and Dalourny Nemorin, an organizer for the Democratic Socialists of America’s local chapter, is testing the momentum behind newcomer and socialist candidates. Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo, who joined an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2016 and visited Israel again following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, also announced her candidacy. Septimo is considered a member of Mamdani’s inner circle.
Rep. Michael Lawler, a Republican who has been a strong pro-Israel voice since his election in 2022, is expected to face the winner of an eight-person Democratic primary in a tough election cycle for Republicans. Lawler has the support of the growing Hasidic population in Rockland County. The leading candidates in the Democratic primary are Rockland County Legislator Beth Davidson, who is Jewish, and Army veteran Cait Conley.
Michigan Senate race a test for Democrats’ positions on Israel
The Michigan Senate race is shaping up to be one of the clearest tests of the Democratic coalition and of how the party navigates Israel.
The leading candidates in the Democratic primary are Abdul El-Sayed, an Egyptian-American who is seeking to channel the energy of the 2024 Uncommitted movement and build on Mamdani’s surprise success in New York, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel Democrat who defeated progressive Jewish Rep. Andy Levin in 2022 with significant help from AIPAC.
The outcome of the contest will offer an early read on whether the left’s anti-establishment momentum can break through in a battleground state, and how much pro-Israel groups retain their influence in Democratic primaries.
The Jewish governors running for reelection
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are widely expected to win reelection. Their margins, messages and national profile will position both as major figures in the early mix for the 2028 presidential race. Each is navigating the same balancing act that will challenge Democrats with national ambitions: trying to appeal to a base that is growing more critical of Israel while still keeping the trust of Jewish voters and pro-Israel allies.
Shapiro, who was viewed as a potential first Jewish president in 2024, remains on the narrow path he has carved out for himself. He highlights his Jewish identity, support for Israel and bipartisan appeal in all of his public appearances.
Pritzker, who governs a state with one of the largest Palestinian-American populations in the country, has become one of the most prominent voices of resistance to President Donald Trump. He has repeatedly invoked Nazi Germany in criticizing the administration’s policies and endorsed a Senate push to block U.S. arms sales to Israel to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israeli elections
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will continue to be in the headlines in America. He is expected to spend New Year’s Eve in the United States after yet another meeting with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort — the sixth meeting this year — underscoring the unusually close alignment between the two leaders.
Netanyahu is better known to Americans than most world leaders. He is now Israel’s longest-tenured prime minister, having served for more than 18 years as the country’s leader. He grew up in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, attended college and graduate school in Boston, served as Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. in the mid-1980s, and has delivered four speeches to a joint session of Congress.
Following three tumultuous years, Israeli voters are poised to head back to the ballot box sometime in 2026 — depending on how long the coalition government holds onto power amid legislative challenges — for what will effectively be another referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership. A January 2024 poll found that only 15% of Israelis, including 36% of those who had previously voted for his Likud Party, wanted to see Netanyahu stay on as prime minister following the failure to protect Israel on Oct. 7.
But the landscape has shifted dramatically since then.
All living hostages have been freed, and the remains of all those held by Hamas — but for one — have been returned. Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have been killed, and Iran’s nuclear program was set back after the 12-day war earlier this year, and the conflict in Gaza ended on terms jointly shaped by Washington and Jerusalem. Netanyahu, receiving the political backing from Trump, has also requested a pre-conviction pardon from Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Meanwhile, the opposition remains fractured among several would-be successors, complicating a unified challenge to Netanyahu’s rule.
A majority of American Jews hold an unfavorable view of Netanyahu and senior pro-Israel Democrats have called for a leadership change in Israel.
Netanyahu is also expected to visit New York City, at the latest next September when he comes to address the annual United Nations General Assembly, which will test Mamdani’s pledge to order his arrest if he visits Manhattan.
The post The 7 political stories Jews will be watching in 2026 appeared first on The Forward.
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How Eastern Europe’s Jews celebrated a merry ‘nitl’ Christmas
(JTA) — Call me a softie, but I love a traditional Christmas Eve. If you don’t find me eating Chinese food and watching a movie, I might be catching Gotham Comedy Club’s “A Very Jewish Christmas!” show or comedian Joel Chasnoff’s “Christmas for the Jews.” Or I may just stay home, light a fire and listen to “Oy to the World: A Klezmer Christmas” by The Klezmonauts.
If none of that is your idea of traditional, you might want to get a copy of Jordan Chad’s new book, “Christmas in the Yiddish Tradition.”
A multidisciplinary researcher affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Jewish Studies, Chad offers up the “untold story” of how Yiddish-speaking Jews “celebrated” Christmas — not as the birth of the baby Jesus, heaven forbid. On what they called “Nitl-nacht,” or just plain “Nitl,” Jews cut loose with games and drink and a vacation from Torah studies in ways that ran parallel with what their Christian neighbors were up to.
And if that sounds like a provocation, Chad agrees.
“When I use the term ‘Jews celebrated Christmas,’ what’s really important to understand is that Christmas wasn’t interpreted as a Christian holiday by the Jews,” he said.
The idea of Jews enjoying Christmas Eve also runs counter to the stories Jews told after they left their Yiddish roots behind and encountered the New World. There, memories were shaped and distorted, and nitl was remembered as a night of fear and superstition. The lore holds that Jews stayed inside, locked their doors, avoided Torah study and huddled against the threat of antisemitic violence.
But Chad, 31, a translator with a background in theoretical physics (which makes him a Yiddishist physicist, which is very fun to say), suspected there was more to the story of Jews and Christmas. That hunch led him deep into Yiddish memoirs and folklore.
What he found startled him. Again and again, memoirists writing about 19th- and early 20th-century Eastern Europe wrote of their favorite “holiday”: nitl, commonly understood as a contraction of a Yiddish term meaning “not learning.”
Chad says that the version of Christmas as a season of foreboding is less remembrance than reinvention. Contemporary Yiddish accounts suggest that the holiday was more benign and even playful.
The key, he argues, is that for Jews and Christians alike, Dec. 24 was not so much a specifically Christian observance as a midwinter festival layered with supernatural anxiety, drinking, feasting and folk rituals. Easter was the central Christian holiday — and the actual season when Christians attacked Jews. By contrast, Christmas fell in the darkest season of the year and was marked with topsy-turvy behavior rife with pagan hand-me-downs, including the Christmas tree. Celebrants would suspend ordinary routines, play cards, tell ghost stories and stay awake to ward off malevolent spirits.
“Christians were doing this, and so were Jews,” Chad said. “It was common European folk culture.”
Only later, in part as a reaction to the revelry and their own encounter with the New World, did church leaders put the Christ back in Christmas, emphasizing the birth of Jesus. “In Europe, nobody was going to forget about Christianity,” Chad explained. “But in the New World, Jesus’s birth really needed to be the part of Christmas that Christians promoted.”
Once Christmas became more explicitly Christian, Jews distanced themselves. In the process, they retrofitted their own memories.
The ominous folklore about Christmas that was also part of Jewish tradition — for example, that Jesus might visit Jewish homes on Christmas eve to poison their drink with blood — was newly emphasized by Jews, turning a night of fun into a warning about assimilation. Stories about the dangers of Christmas — even when exaggerated — helped reinforce a sense of Jewish distinctiveness in a Christian-majority culture.
“Jewish immigrants weren’t going to tell their children, ‘When we were kids, we had a blast on Christmas Eve,’” Chad said. Instead, they leaned on reinterpretations that cast nitl as a defensive measure — a night too dangerous to study Torah, a holiday marked only by negation.
Chad consistently argues that Yiddish-speaking Jews were not cut off from the wider Christian culture, even if they had different religious structures, calendars and social and material status.
“I’d call it common European folk culture,” he said. “There were enormous differences between Jews and Christians — but when it came to fear of midwinter demons, the love of drinking, or the topsy-turvy atmosphere of Christmas Eve, the folklore overlaps are undeniable.”
Chad also draws a direct line between the “Yiddish” Christmas and the various ways Jews to continue to mark the Yuletide season. In many Hasidic communities, nitl is still a night when Torah study is suspended. If these Orthodox Jews aren’t playing cards or chess, they might be catching up on chores. Meanwhile, those Jewish events on Christmas Eve have become a growth industry, from singles-only “Matzo Balls” to Jewish cabarets to Christmas classics sung in Yiddish.
And then there’s Chinese food and a movie. Chad suggests that only in the late 20th century did Jews begin to reclaim Christmas as a kind of unofficial holiday of their own. By the 1980s, eating at Chinese restaurants — traditionally among the few places open — became a way to distinguish the day without crossing into Christian ritual. (As Darlene Love sang on “Saturday Night Live”: “They can finally see ‘King Kong’ without waiting in line / They can eat in Chinatown and drink their sweet-ass wine.”) What once was avoidance evolved into a playful counter-tradition, a way to be present in the surrounding culture without being absorbed by it.
If the book has a deeper message, it is that Jews have always negotiated Christmas, just in different registers. Sometimes the day has been used to draw lines; sometimes to soften them. It is all part of the ongoing Jewish effort to live distinctly within a world shaped by someone else’s holiday.
What emerges in “Christmas in the Yiddish Tradition” is not a sentimental argument for reviving a lost holiday, nor a polemic against drawing firm boundaries between Us and Them. It’s a reminder that Jewish life in Eastern Europe was far richer, weirder and more porous than memory often allows.
“I hope people understand that Jews didn’t think they were celebrating a Christian holiday,” Chad said. “They were celebrating a midwinter holiday they considered their own.”
He paused, then added with a laugh: “And they had a pretty good time doing it.”
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Hanukkah shooting leaves at least 10 dead at Australia’s most popular beach
A Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach turned deadly on Sunday with reports of at least 10 dead, including a Chabad rabbi, amid rising antisemitism in Australia.
One suspect was killed at the scene and the other was arrested, in what local police are calling a “terror incident.”
“This is an attack on the Jewish community that deeply that pains us,” said Robert Gregory, the chief executive of the Australian Jewish Association.
Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who worked with Chabad of Bondi, was killed in the shooting, Chabad’s media director told The New York Times.
“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”
Earlier this month, a group of Jewish leaders from Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States met in Sydney to coordinate responses to rising antisemitism there and internationally.
In recent months, two synagogues have been attacked in Melbourne.
The post Hanukkah shooting leaves at least 10 dead at Australia’s most popular beach appeared first on The Forward.