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Beliefs

Jewish Parents’ Other December Tradition: Explaining Hanukkah at School

Danny Glusman and his wife, Florie, of Atlanta, said one of their daughters was told put away her menorah at school.Credit...Kevin Liles for The New York Times

When Seth Gitter was a boy, his father owned a special kitchen implement that got taken out every December or so. “He had a special skillet just to make latkes on the go, one of those electric plug-in skillets,” Mr. Gitter recalled.

The Gitters lived in the small town of Delaware, Ohio, and most years he was the only Jewish student in his elementary school class. And every year, when the holiday season rolled around, his well-meaning teachers would invite his father to explain Hanukkah to the Christian children of suburban Ohio.

“Even though I went to a public school, they would still sing carols and do other Christmas stuff, so it was a good balance,” recalled Mr. Gitter, now an economics professor at Towson University, in Maryland. “Every year my dad would come into my class and teach the kids to make latkes, and he would bring gelt” — the traditional chocolate coins.

Similar memories reside in the kops, or heads, of many Jews, especially those who grew up without many other Jews around. It is pretty much impossible to keep Christmas out of preholiday classrooms, so where Jewish students are a tiny minority, teachers compensate by inviting their mother or father in for a little multicultural flavor. The classroom visit, toting a menorah and some plastic dreidels, is an annual ritual for many Jewish parents.

Call it — as one Jewish mother from Austin, Tex., who declined to be named, did — “Hanukkah-splaining,” playing off the neologism “mansplaining,” which denotes a man condescendingly explaining something to a woman.

Of course, the Jewish parent’s Hanukkah-time invitation to share his or her culture comes with the best of intentions. And it probably began as part of a midcentury urge to assimilate Jews, Christians’ older siblings in the Judeo-Christian tradition, into the American mainstream. Hanukkah, as a holiday that fell around Christmastime and involved gift giving, albeit on a lesser scale, was useful for that pluralist project.

“Hanukkah was an acceptable site for Jews to translate themselves into American civic space,” said Lila Corwin Berman, who teaches Jewish history at Temple University, in Philadelphia. “In the 1930s and 1940s, Jews exploited new media to explain themselves to non-Jews. On radio programs, such as ‘The Eternal Light,’ Jewish leaders told the Hanukkah story and tailored it to fit American expectations: It became a story of underdog heroism and a celebration of light, themes that fit well with an American ethos and Christmas practices.”

This exaltation of Hanukkah, historically a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, “as much about edifying non-Jews as it was about educating Jews about how to be Jewish in America,” Professor Berman said. “Later, when Jewish parents entered public school classrooms with menorahs and electric frying pans in hand, this same dual purpose — inward and outward education — was served.”

When we spoke last week, Keith Weber, who lives in Morgantown, W.Va., had just visited his sons’ elementary school. The teachers had invited him or his wife to come to the regular read-aloud period, when parents visit to read to the children.

“They had asked us to do a Hanukkah-themed book, because we are Jewish,” Mr. Weber said. “So I went in today and read a book illustrated by Syd Hoff, ‘A Chanukah Fable for Christmas,’ and it’s all about a kid who grows up in the Bronx, but all his friends celebrate Christmas, so he’s sad. And so he learns how everyone has holidays around this time.”

Mr. Weber used the visit as a chance to share stories of being a Jewish child among Gentiles.

“I started by saying that when I was a kid, growing up in Brooklyn, most of my friends were Catholic,” Mr. Weber recalled. “I was sad because I didn’t get to celebrate Christmas.” But as he got older, he told the children, he realized that Hanukkah was a special time, too. “The conversation I started with kids was it’s a holiday time of year, whatever holiday we are celebrating, and the importance is to spend time with family and friends.”

In general, public schools may teach about religion, but are not to preach or encourage religious practice. But what does that mean in a country where Christmas has become so much a part of secular American practice, where its songs are part of the American songbook, where it is a shopping season as much as a sacramental one?

Inviting Jewish parents to Hanukkah-splain can be a hedge against charges of Christian favoritism. Rather than eliminate “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” from the holiday pageant — which, let’s face it, would be no fun at all, and would displease plenty of Jewish children, too — one compromise is to raise high the menorah.

“At the school assembly, where they sing holiday songs, last year they asked us to be part of it and light the candles,” said Danny Glusman, a Jewish father of four from Atlanta. However, he said, the teachers at his children’s charter school are not of one mind about religion. This year, when one of his daughters brought a Hanukkah menorah to her classroom, the teacher asked her to put it away because it was a “religious item.”

“I think they are confused,” Mr. Glusman said. “There are Muslims, Jews, some Hindus, and many of the teachers are just nervous about doing the wrong thing. Our kids are learning not necessarily Christmas songs, but holiday songs, not ‘First Noel’ or ‘Silent Night,’ more ‘Jingle Bells’ or ‘Winter Wonderland.’ But they see it as we don’t get to sing our Hanukkah songs. So this year, the music teacher asked me to send over some Hanukkah songs to teach everybody.”

Hanukkah-splaining can, however, provoke kvetching from Jews, Gentiles or atheists. Purists about the separation of church and state would prefer less religion in the classroom, so adding a religion to the mix is not considered progress. Jews may feel, rightly, that focusing on Hanukkah conveys the misimpression that Hanukkah is as important, religiously, as Passover or Purim.

But for Mr. Gitter, whose own interfaith children — their mother grew up Methodist — are growing up around many other Jews and those of multiple faiths in Maryland, his father’s visits made a big difference.

“By the time you are in fourth grade, everyone is looking forward to your dad coming in and making latkes and bringing gelt and playing dreidel,” Mr. Gitter said. “I even started winning debates about whether Hanukkah was better than Christmas.”

Mark.e.oppenheimer@gmail .com; Twitter/markopp1

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Jewish Parents’ Other December Tradition: Explaining Hanukkah. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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