PrintDecember 24, 2006
Jewish in a Winter Wonderland
The legion of liberal loyalists will call it Times-bashing, but they are merely in their usual state of denial about what the Gray Lady has become under its present management, and the various agendas it so relentlessly pursues.
It is a refusal to recognize the paper's determined efforts to slant its reporting in ways designed to turn its readers against the war on terror, to provoke sympathy for the Palestinians and animus toward Israel, to legitimize and normalize homosexual lifestyles, to denigrate the Bush administration's domestic policies with constant denials of how well our economy is doing, to set people against people by the "class warfare" tactic of claims that the income gap between groups of Americans -- and even that between the rich and richer -- is growing ever wider.
Religion, too, has come under attack and ridicule; and perhaps the acme of such efforts is reached in today's edition. The Times's editors found some shtunk named Chupak -- a Jewess -- to write the cover article for its "Sunday Styles Section" in which the proposition is made that Jews really ought to celebrate Christmas with all its trees and trimmings because the holiday is so much more fun than dull old Hanukkah. Not a word about the meanings of either holidays, nor their inherent religious significance. After all, the secular moral relativists mock all that anyway. Instead, a complaint by Chupak that, "Jews have yet to make Hanukkah decorations beautiful," and a long description of how she, with her husband of one year, could, "sit back and enjoy my first Christmas in all its kitschy splendor."
Is celebrating Christmas somehow wrong? Not, in my opinion, for Christians, although many of them will voice well-founded objections to the commercialization that has drowned out the message of a serious and important religious observance. Yes, in my opinion, for Jews, who in so doing, mock not only the religion of their Christian brethren by co-opting its kitsch and all that opposes its religious significance, but by turning their backs toward a precious religion of their own.
It's another step in undermining religion altogether -- the force that provides us with guideposts of morality, an understanding of right and wrong, good and evil. Another step in the rise of the amorality of the "anything goes" philosophy. Small wonder that Ms. Chupak, whose cover article is entitled "Jewish in a Winter Wonderland," also happens to be executive producer of "Sex and the City," the TV series that reduces what used to be known as love and intimacy to little more than genital games.
