Attention Jews: Resist the tree

     I'm generally live-and-let-live when it comes to faith.  All religions are airy nonsense and only familiarity combined with personal bias permit us to view some doctrines as strange and laughable and others as normal and respected. Thus, to me, it doesn't matter what habits and ceremonies your faith demands: wear a special hat, bow to an idol, burn incense, decorate a tree, believe some 2,000-year-old fairy tale is literally true. It's all the same and no skin off my nose.
    Generally. 
    Only two situations prompt me to object. The first is when groups enlist the government to enforce their own dogma. That isn't playing fair. If you believe God is on your side, why do you need Uncle Sam too? The government is supposed to be the neutral arbitrator between equally ridiculous sects. That is a fine distinction, perhaps, one that is lost on many—they feel oppressed when the governmental stick is pried out of the hands. Some people are so used to having their asses kissed it feels like a birthright to them. Tough. Times change. 
     The second aspect of faith I can't abide by is when Jews have Christmas trees. Oh, I suppose there are exceptions: if you're in an inter-faith marriage, well, maybe your Christian spouse wants a tree. Then it isn't your tree, it's your wife's, or husband's. The reason I feel so strongly ... well, here's a column from the vault where I try to explain. Note that Friday is not Christmas this year; it's Thursday. I'd hate to mess up your entire holiday, and probably should just change the day in the lede, but then some wiesenheimer would point out that Christmas fell on a Friday in 1998 and attack me for altering the historical record. 

     Friday is Christmas. I will, as is my practice, work at the newspaper so a colleague who observes the holiday can be with his or her family. 

      This isn't selfless of me—the paper pays double time for working on Christmas, and it's a quiet day if nothing burns down. I'm not missing anything except a day at home. My family doesn't eat a special dinner. We don't sing songs, we don't give gifts, we don't have a tree.

     We're Jewish. This sounds simple enough, but a lot of people don't get it. First, there are the Christians for whom Christmas is an event of such monumental proportions—one they start preparing for in July—that they can't understand that there are people who voluntarily give it up. The exchange, which I've had a dozen times, always begins breezily. "What are you doing this year for Christmas?" they'll say. "Nothing," I reply. Their features darken and they struggle to get their arms around the concept. They think I've perhaps misunderstood. "Yes, yes," they say, "but what are you doing Dec. 25?" 

      The second group is a little more surprising. Certain Reform Jews—many, if my social circle is any indication—are not satisfied with paring away the strictures of their own religion, but also must embrace the festivities of another. They put up a tree. They visit Santa. They embrace Christmas because not doing so feels like denial, and they can't imagine denying themselves anything. 

      I find it a particularly repellent form of intellectual dishonesty. Holidays are the fun part of a religion, but religions are not all fun. There are commandments, rules, serious parts as well. To latch onto the frills of somebody else's faith just because they're fun seems disrespectful of both your own faith and theirs.

     It's like crashing a party. You don't know these people, haven't put in the effort that being friends requires. Yet you're lining up for the buffet anyway. It's crass. When I think of Jews celebrating Christmas, for the first time I understand the sort of contempt that some Orthodox Jews have for us lesser Semitic breeds who have shucked the demands of keeping kosher and praying and kept the parts that are easy and enjoyable. There's a sense of expropriation, like teens wearing battle ribbons we didn't earn as fashion. 

     Christmas is a wonderful holiday. Wonderful music. A Christmas tree is a beautiful thing. A high school friend once asked me over to help trim hers, and I had a blast. Hot buttered rum. Great food. Afterward we went from house to house, singing in the crisp night. (Well, I didn't sing, but only because I don't know the words.) How could you not love it? 

      But it wasn't my tree. It wasn't my holiday. I have my own holidays. My boys lit candles at Hanukkah. I got to see their faces illuminated by the candles, happy, singing. My oldest, Ross, is just 3 but has picked up on Christmas. He closely watches the Christmas specials on TV. He saw the Santa on a Christmas card on our mantel and asked why it was there, since we don't celebrate Christmas. I explained that somebody had sent it to us. He had a sort of pout. I asked him how he felt about not celebrating Christmas. He said one word: "Sad." I weighed my response for a long time. "That's OK," I said at last. "It is a little sad not to celebrate Christmas. But we have our own holidays we celebrate." He didn't seem to understand. But he will.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 2, 1998

Pro sports and racial politics have a long history

     Sometimes two seemingly separate news stories can shed unexpected light on each other.
     A week ago Saturday, Bulls point guard Derrick Rose wore a black “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt during warm-ups before a game against the Golden State Warriors.
     And three days later, former heavyweight boxing champion Ernie Terrell died.
     What’s the connection?
     Rose and other pro athletes took flak for joining protests against police violence in the wake of killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York. (Doesn’t that topic seem like old history already, pushed aside by North Korea and Cuba? A reminder that, for all the self-drama of protests, bending the status quo into something new is really hard, and society keeps sproinging back into its old shape).
     I admired Rose for making his silent statement, remembering Michael Jordan and his deep reluctance to take any kind of stand on any issue that might divert even a few drops of the mighty Jordan River of money flowing over him. We know who’s the greater athlete, but who’s the better man?
     Other commentators sneered at Rose.
     "I just wish @drose could talk, or really understands what he's doing," CBS sports radio host Dan Bernstein scoffed in a tweet. "I don't think he does."
     Despite such criticism, protests spread, mostly among black athletes, while some whites expressed white-guy befuddlement.
     "You know there's a time and place to make your statements," sniffed New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning. "I don't know if it's always during a game."
     That's timid sportspeak for: "I believe it's never during a game."
     Which is where Terrell comes in.
     When he died, both the obituary in the Sun-Times by our own Maureen O'Donnell, and the Tribune's obit, detailed Terrell's main claim to fame: the 1967 championship match at the Houston Astrodome where Ali pummeled him, demanding, "What's my name?" Before the bout, Terrell had refused to call him by his Muslim name, "Muhammad Ali," and instead used "Cassius Clay," the name given at birth in Kentucky in 1942.
     The obituaries quote Terrell saying he did so as the usual pre-bout taunting, sidestepping the huge controversy about Ali's name.
     The day after Ali first won his championship, defeating mob thug Sonny Liston in 1964, he announced that he was now a member of the Nation of Islam and that his name was Cassius X. Two months later he changed it again to Muhammad Ali.
     "I don't have to be what you want me to be," Ali said. "I'm free to be who I want."
     As with Rose, the press jeered him.
     But that was nothing compared to what came two years later when, on March 17, 1966, Ali appeared before his draft board to request exemption from the draft.
     "My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America," Ali explained after the hearing. "And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me."
     He was denounced in Congress ("a complete and total disgrace," said a representative from Pennsylvania). He was scheduled to face Terrell at the International Amphitheater in less than two weeks: March 29, 1966. Press releases had been sent out.
     Richard J. Daley was aghast. Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner asked the commission to cancel the Chicago fight in view of Ali's "unpatriotic" and "disgusting" statements. The Tribune editorial board demanded that the Illinois State Athletic Commission revoke its sanction of the fight. Illinois Attorney General William Clark claimed the match violated state law because by signing "Muhammad Ali," one contestant had not signed his correct name. They didn't meet in the ring until a year later in Houston.
     I'm not putting Rose's fashion choice on the same level as Ali's impact. Both are situated on the same continuum, where pro sports and race relations nudge each other forward, a process that goes back at least to Jack Johnson knocking out Jim Jeffries, "The Great White Hope," in 1910. With its huge popularity and emphasis on performance, sports showed the lie of bigotry long before the country was ready to see it. Rather than racial politics not belonging, pro sports have been an engine of racial progress. Major league baseball integrated in 1947. Truman's order abolishing racial discrimination in the Army was signed in 1948. Those two events are also not unrelated. Whites who insist sports are distinct from racial politics are really saying they aren't comfortable with the racial politics sports are expressing. They never are.

Please stand by....

     This being my own personal blog, I've tried to tread lightly and be respectful when it comes to matters involving the mothership, the Chicago Sun-Times. They pay my salary, and so I try to be dutiful about not simply posting my entire columns here, but instead sharing only a portion, then linking back to the paper's website for the rest. Clicks are important, in setting advertising rates and such, and I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me.
     Which has worked fine, up to now. I feel bad asking readers to click on a new site 1/4 way into a post, but nobody has ever complained, which I take as an endorsement. 
      The first glitch occurred yesterday when the paper, which is in the midst of jazzing up its computer site, somehow cut many of the links that I've inserted to columns on the Sun-Times web site. Some work, but if you click on others, you are routed to the Sun-Times home page but not the article you're trying to finish. 
      My apologies to all readers who have been frustrated—were this problem in my own hands, I'd be moving heaven and earth to fix it. But it's not, so all I can do is wait, like you. My bosses at the paper assure me it's going to be remedied soon, and I am passing that assurance on to you. Both the Sun-Times and I value our readers—that's why the paper is trying to build a better on-line experience, and why I'm pushing to have those links back up as soon as possible—and appreciate your bearing with us during these awkward moments. Thanks again for patronizing my blog, and everything should be back to normal shortly.  

                                                                                  The management

"Will you be taking bread service with us today?"

Bread service at Shaw's Crab House

     
    "Will you be taking bread service with us today?" asked the maitre d', a young lady I had never seen before.
     My immediate reaction was to burst out laughing, but I manfully suppressed that.
     My college pal Cate and I were in Shaw's Crab House last week, sitting at a small table in the bar, where we have met for lunch for the past ... gee ... several decades. Since the woman offering us "bread service" (where's that term derived from? Table service? Funeral service?) was doodling on her desktop in kindergarten. 
     Shaw's is off my usual round of restaurants. A few blocks too far from the office, and I'd have to walk past Harry Caray's to get there, and why would I do that? Harry's is cheaper, and the food is better, and they somehow manage to retain their staff, thus it's possible to get to know them. I've been going to Shaw's since it opened, but still don't know anybody there and never did, nor do they know me, which takes the blush off a place.
    "Will you be taking bread service with us today?" 
    Maybe its the carbs, Cate suggested, during our immediate post-query analysis of this puff of pomposity. Maybe so many diners are now leaving their bread untouched that it seems a waste to just bring it out then throw it a way. 
     Pretty to think so. I suspected economy. Bread costs money, money not spent if you don't bring it, just as some restaurants have stopped automatically bringing water, to save themselves the expense of washing the glass. 
     Still. A salad at Shaw's is nineteen bucks. They should just bring the damn bread. "Will you be taking bread service with us today?" while pinning the needle on the orchid-sniffing feyness meter, is only the polite form of "We're withholding your bread basket unless you specifically request it," which is just wrong. What's next? The napkin menu? "Could I interest you in a fine bleached white 300 thread count Egyptian cotton?" 
     I think that's what makes the phrase so noxious. A strange marriage of thrift and pretense. Usually, elegance involves luxury. "Would you care for some caviar?" To try to nudge something that heretofore standard into that camp—"And will you be purchasing full restroom access this evening?"—it becomes a ludicrous insult. 
     What I actually said was, "I was thinking about that bread this morning." Which is true. Always really good bread at Shaw's, though we never had to beg for it before. They brought us a pair of fresh cheese-topped rolls and few flats of crackers topped with some pungent seed, anise or fennel or some such thing, that were quite good.
     Somebody ought to rate downtown restaurants by their bread. Petterino's has the best: a warm glazed Parker House roll, with a slice or two of complicated black Russian bread thrown in. Gene & Georgetti bread is your basic French bread baked that morning at D'Amato's. Cold, a little dry on the outside, which is just as well because you don't want to waste your appetite on bread there anyway. Harry's has an Italian bread, warm, worth the indulgence. They never ask you if you want it. Of course you want it. The challenge is not to order seconds.
     "Will you be taking bread service with us today?" The right answer, I see now, is "I don't know, will you be giving it?"   

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Well, this is an inviting bed, scattered with pillows. 
     Only it's not a bed, technically.
     A bit busy, perhaps, just right to catch a brief nap.
     But don't, because ... well that would give it away. You'd get into trouble. 
     Where is this place? It isn't my bedroom—my taste is better than that. It isn't a bedroom at all. It's ... where?
      The correct guess—and heck, it'll probably be King Dale, he's won it three times already—will get a bag of very tasty Bridgeport Bubbly Creek Coffee (I'm going to have to stop giving it away, to make sure there's plenty left for me).
      Oh wait, I said I'd tell you about its unusual name. Kinda late to open that can of, er, coffee. Next week. Good luck. 

      Clark St. nailed it below. If you want to know the gory details:

Japan bows to North Korea

     Where does one begin?
     On the plus side, it isn’t America groveling at the feet of a tin-pot North Korean dictator, afraid that somebody is going to ... do what? Scramble the Fandango website? Set off a stink bomb at a multiplex? Does anybody really fear that North Korean agents are going to mow us down if we buy tubs of buttered popcorn and go to see Seth Rogen and James Franco’s “The Interview,” the now-shelved bromance comedy depicting the assassination of Kim Jong-Un? Heck, after the slaughter at Aurora, Colorado, we worry about that risk already, when we see any movie, tempting fate that our matinee will be the one where some deranged gunman or al-Qaida wannabe decides to go out in a blaze of glory. How can we then cower in front of hypothetical North Korean henchmen? Heck guys, get in line. Fear is a big tent, there’s plenty of room for you.
     My bet is whatever information Sony hackers dug up is so embarrassing that all they had to do was dangle it and the studio began inviting theater chains to drop the film. Although I can’t imagine what: The terabytes of emails already leaked suggest Hollywood studio executives are vain, insecure backbiters complaining bitterly about stars and each other. Stop the presses.
     No, this isn’t the American people who failed. We’d have formed block-long lines to see the film, whooping and grinning at the cameras, delighted to waggle our middle fingers at this third-generation madman.
     Rather, it was Sony, the Japanese conglomerate, that quailed, pulling the plug on the film’s Christmas Day release. Which in a selfish sense, I was glad about, because given the pressure from North Korea, suddenly seeing a Seth Rogen movie shifted from a lapse in taste to a patriotic duty. I would have been obligated to attend, only wishing the North Koreans would also command all Americans not to drink Jack Daniels.
     I should add that I’ve never seen Seth Rogen movies. They could be sublime. They could be “La Dolce Vita.” But I doubt it.

     There is a delicious irony to Sony spiking the film. Because the Japanese have a long history of hating the Koreans. One enters a fraught zone when making sweeping generalizations. But I feel on firm ground, with enough experience to safely say that, as much as Americans like to castigate ourselves as perennial bigots, and rightly so, as Native American killers and black enslavers, the Japanese are our equals, also world-class haters, but unlike us, they can't come to grips with their history of brutal prejudice and gut-churning atrocity. 

     Whatever bad you have to say about America — and some seem to vomit forth a geyser of condemnation on command — our faults are no big secret. Whenever I wish we could go back to the heroic George Washington chopping down the cherry tree version of American history I was taught in first grade by Mrs. Farmer, I think of the Japanese frantically trying to sanitize their history, an effort that intensified since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took the leash off ultranationalists, now going after journalists and historians for daring suggest that the Japanese did horrible things during World War II which — spoiler alert! — they did.
     I have only room for one story.
     My parents hosted a Japanese college student to fill the hole that we kids left by skipping off to college. The teen was supposed to join other Japanese students taking a trip to Niagara Falls, which became a weepy crisis for her - though born in Japan, her great-grandparents were ethnic Korean, so she had a special passport. She was afraid her classmates would see it while crossing into Canada, afraid of the undying shame it would cause her. She never went.
     Pause to think about that. Her great-grandparents. It's as if some Chicagoans had "shanty Irish" stamped on their passports.
     'The Interview" is one lost battle in a long war, a war we'll win, because the truth will out, eventually. This is what makes Kim Jong-Un such a wonderful, transgressive object of ridicule, because we absolutely shouldn't laugh at him. The horror he, and his father and grandfather before him, inflicted on North Korea and the world is real, even if we'll never see it, never grasp the millions of Koreans who starved to death. No black and white newsreels to carve the horrors into memory. Not to forget the 36,000 Americans killed in the war his grandfather started.
     I like to think Sony has a plan, to stream the movie on Netflix, or whatever. Do it on the 4th of July. Because capitulation is the gift that keeps on giving, and every nut with a grudge will be inspired by this.

Merry Christmas, whoever you are.

     This is the season when Christmas cards flow in, often containing the square of folded paper that is the traditional Christmas form letter, detailing the doings of the card-sending family. It's amazing that such letters have survived into the Facebook era, which is basically one continual year-long Christmas letter.  Our family never sent such letters ourselves — too disorganized, too self-aware, too concerned about foisting the minutia of our lives upon uninterested others — but one Christmas I did decide to take a whack at what our letter might be like, if we wrote one, which we don't.

Dear Close Friend:

     Where has the year gone? Can it already be mid-December and time for my chatty-yet-impersonal, guarded-yet-revealing, folded-up-and-tucked-into-a-pre-printed, computer-addressed, won't-offend-anybody-of-any-faith "holiday" card? Yes, indeed it is.    
     So a great, big Steinberg family "hello" to you and your household, from me and my household and of course our cats here on Pine Grove Avenue.

     And what a "year" it has been! We were all shaken by the incident last March, but have adjusted ourselves very well to our new manner of living and will get by best we can.

     But enough of vaguely worded personal calamity. On to the thinly disguised bragging! Enclosed are photos, scanned through our color printer and cut out (actual photographs are so expensive, particularly when you send them to 160 close friends) from our trips to Tiki, Questamel, Rustania, Ishmaelia and Outer Borgundi. As you can see, we had a lot of fun! And went to many great places!! Places that you could never dream of going!!! Ever!!!!

     Before I forget, some news about people you've never met, don't know and couldn't care less about: Michael is fine; Clara learned to play the flute and hopes someday to do it well; Aunt Prang is recuperating since her accident; Tad and Mindy and Wendell and Steve also send their regards, as do Hap, Molly, The Big W, Po-Po and Mr. Hester.

     On the family front, everyone is fine in the Steinberg

household. My wife has taken up artwork, covering page after page with distinctive, tiny, intricate drawings made up of circles and squares and death's heads. I'm just so proud of her.

     Our "boys" are of course a year older and cuter than ever. Little Krandel turned 2 last June and has mastered the art of climbing to very high places, closing his eyes and pitching blindly forward, counting on good old "Daddy" to drop whatever he's doing and lunge across the room to catch him. What a little dickens! I haven't missed yet, though I once had to drop a tray of heirloom glassware and leap over an ottoman to grab him six inches from the hardwood floor.

     His brother, Rosensweig, is 4 but can already punch his dad hard enough to leave him doubled over, eyes tearing and gasping for breath. I call him "My Little Jack Dempsey," and he has the same fierce vigor and sense of adventure as the young Manassas Mauler.

     The cats, whose photo I am enclosing, dressed as Santa and Mrs. Claus, are as affectionate as ever. It seems the wife or I can't sit down, particularly when lightly dressed or holding a cup of hot coffee, without having one or both leap into our laps and dig their needle-like claws into us. We just love them, even when they scamper yowling across our faces at 5 a.m.

     Work is, as always, fun and stimulating, and I truly feel, as my boss is constantly reminding me, "lucky to have a job at all."

     And that's about it. I hope you don't mind the impersonality of a form letter, but I'm so very busy, doing so many important things, and have such a vast number of dear, close, personal friends such as yourself, well, I know that you understand. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or whatever it is you celebrate, whoever you are. I love you and miss you and would be thinking of you, if only I had the time.

                                                Yours in holiday cheer,

                                                The Steinbergs

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 14, 1999